Obama's Seven Slaughters: It's a Disease, Not a Doctrine
By David Swanson,Telesur
Former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg's "The Obama Doctrine" in The Atlantic
presents President Barack Obama's view of his own foreign policy (with
input from a few of his close subordinates). Obama views himself as a
radical leader in military restraint, in brave resistance to war
mongers, and in scaling back excessive fear mongering in U.S. culture.
The Goldberg / Obama
portrait is shaped largely by the choice of what to include. The
primary focus is on Obama's 2013 reversal of his plan to bomb Syria,
with a minor emphasis on his negotiation of the Iran nuclear agreement.
Much of his more militaristic behavior is completely ignored or
brushed aside in passing reference. And even in those cases that come
into focus, myths go unquestioned -- even when they are debunked later
in this same book-length article.
Goldberg writes as
unquestioned fact that "Assad's army had murdered more than 1,400
civilians with Sarin gas" many paragraphs prior to stating that one of
Obama's reasons for reversing course on bombing Syria was the CIA's
warning that this claim was "not a slam dunk." Goldberg writes that
"the strong sentiment inside the Obama administration was that Assad
had earned dire punishment."
Thus a proposal to drop 500-pound bombs
all over Syria, killing countless people, is made respectable in
Washington by depicting it as revenge, and nowhere does Goldberg
mention oil pipelines, a Russian rivalry, the overthrow of Assad as a
step toward Iranian overthrow, or other factors actually at work for
which the dubious chemical weapons claims served as an excuse to bomb.
Of course, not bombing was
the right thing to do, and Obama deserves praise for it, while Hillary
Clinton's publicly stated belief that this was the wrong decision, and
John Kerry's continued private advocacy for bombing, are reprehensible.
It's also quite valuable that Obama does something rare in this
article when he admits that public and Congressional and British
opposition to bombing Syria helped prevent him from committing that
crime. This is clearly not a false claim but the admission of what is
generally denied by U.S. politicians whom even the public cheers for
their usual pretense of ignoring polls and protests.
But the public was even
more opposed in polls (if less engaged as activists) to arming proxies
in Syria. Obama commissioned a CIA report on the past success or
failure of such operations, and the CIA admitted there had been no
successes (except in 1980s Afghanistan, which involved a bit of
well-known blowback). So, Obama chose not, as he puts it, to "do stupid
s**t," opting instead to do halfway stupid s**t, which proved quite
predictably to make matters worse, and to make cries for even stupider
s**t shriller.
In a similar manner, though
it goes virtually unmentioned in Goldberg's tome, Obama has launched
wars with drones that he has viewed as the exercise of great restraint
in comparison to the launching of ground wars. But the drone wars kill
large numbers and do so just as indiscriminately, and they contribute
to the destabilization of nations just as disastrously. When Obama was
holding up Yemen as a model success, some of us were pointing out that
the drone war had not replaced some other kind of war but would
probably lead to one. Now, Obama, whose "doctrine" claims to have
discovered the unimportance of the Middle East (in comparison with the
supposed need to build up for wars in the Far East), is dealing
unprecedented levels of weapons to Middle Eastern nations, first and
foremost to Saudi Arabia. And Obama's military is collaborating in the
Saudi bombing of Yemen, which is killing thousands and fueling al
Qaeda. Obama, through Goldberg, blames his Saudi po
licy on "foreign-policy orthodoxy," which somehow "compels" him to do
this particular stupid shit -- if that's a sufficiently harsh term for
mass murder.
Obama's
Only-Do-Halfway-Stupid-S**t doctrine has proven most disastrous where
it has succeeded in overthrowing governments, as in Libya. Obama now
says that illegally overthrowing the Libyan government "didn't work."
But the President pretends, and Goldberg lets him, that the United
Nations authorized that action, that the best laid plans were made for
after the regime change (in fact, none were), and that Gadaffi was
threatening to slaughter civilians in Benghazi. Obama even seems to
claim that things would have been even worse somehow without his
criminal action. That he's resumed bombing Libya in an effort to fix
what he broke by bombing Libya gets the barest mention.
Obama's doctrine has also
included tripling down on the stupidest of stupid s**t. Through
Goldberg he blames the Pentagon for imposing an escalation of troops in
Afghanistan on him, though the escalation he has in mind is clearly
the second one he oversaw, not the first, the one that tripled the war
he'd inherited, not the one that doubled it and which he'd promised as a
candidate for the presidency. When military commanders publicly
insisted on that escalation, Obama said nothing.
When one of them made
some minor rude comments to Rolling Stone, in contrast, Obama fired him.
Obama laughably claims to
be an internationalist (in part, he brags, because he's forced other
countries to buy more weapons). This is the same Obama whose abuse of
the U.N. in attacking Libya finally moved China and Russia to block a
similar attempt on Syria. Obama even claims that he backed off bombing
Syria in 2013 because the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power of
war. This is the same Obama who has since been bombing Syria and who
told Congress in his final State of the Union speech that he'd wage
wars with or without them -- as he's done in Libya, Somalia, Pakistan,
Iraq, etc. Goldberg even quotes an "expert" characterizing the Obama
doctrine as "spending less" despite Obama's increases in military
spending.
Goldberg's Obama uses the
military primarily for human rights, supported the uprising of the Arab
Spring, and has developed a very sage and serious approach to ISIS
based on his analysis of a Batman movie. ISIS, in Goldberg's telling,
was created by the Saudis and Gulf states plus Assad, with no mention
of the U.S. role in destroying Iraq or arming Syrian rebels. In fact,
Obama, through Goldberg, restates the imperial view that backward
Middle Easterners suffer from millennia-old tribalism, while the United
States brings humanitarian services to all it touches. In
Obama-Goldberg history, Russia invaded Crimea, only the threat of war
made Syria give up its chemical weapons, and Rwanda was a missed
opportunity for war, not the result of U.S.-backed war and
assassination.
"Sometimes you have to take
a life to save even more lives," says Obama confidant John Brennan,
pushing the drone propaganda also found in the film, Eye in the Sky. Facts
are apparently irrelevant to a portrait of a president. Obama, who
signed an executive order last year ridiculously declaring Venezuela to
be a national security threat tells Goldberg that he wisely came into
office in 2009 and squashed any silly idea that Venezuela was any kind
of threat. Goldberg's Obama is a peacemaker with Russia whose weapons
build-up on Russia's border goes unmentioned, as does the coup in
Ukraine, even as Obama packs insults of Vladimir Putin into this
article.
The fact is that Barack
Obama has slaughtered human beings with missiles and bombs in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia -- and
every one of those places is worse off for it. He's passing his
successor greater war-making powers than ever possessed by any previous
member of the human species. The unquestioned assumptions of his
doctrine look more like a disease. There's little an American president
could do to make things better in the Middle East, he says, never
stopping to consider the possibility of halting arms shipments,
stopping the bombings, grounding the drones, ceasing the overthrows,
dropping support for dictators, withdrawing troops, paying reparations,
giving aid, shifting to green energy, and treating others with
respectful cooperation. Those sorts of things just don't qualify as a
doctrine in Washington, D.C.
--
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.
War Is A Lie: Second
Edition, published by Just World Books on April 5, 2016. Please buy it
online that day. I'll come anywhere in the world to speak about it.
Invite me!
