President Obama’s September 10 speech on
Syria is being presented as a defence of
his policies and his latest diplomatic moves. But, underneath all that, the basis on which
everyone is supposed to think and act is as outrageous a collection of lies
as has ever been assembled in one speech, starting with Mr. Obama’s assertion
that “the world’s a better place” because for “nearly seven decades the United
States has been the anchor of global security.”
As is Mr. Obama’s claim that the U.S. mission in Syria is driven by
opposition to “the terrible nature of chemical weapons.”
As is his assertion that the motive of the U.S. is to “stop children
from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer over the
long run.”
Libraries full of books, decades of documentaries, and the testimony of
hundreds of millions of victims of what the U.S. has brought to the world would
hardly begin to reveal the extent to which these are all LIES:
Obama: “The world’s a better place” because for “nearly seven decades
the United States has been the anchor of global security.”
The detail of U.S. history from the beginning of the American colonization
contradicts Mr. Obama’s false version of history. The genocide of Native
Americans and the theft of their land, including the “Trail of Tears” where
tens of thousands were driven off their lands in the southeastern U.S. and
forced to march to Oklahoma—of 15,000 relocated Cherokees, 4,000 died on the
march; including many children. Slavery, where hundreds of thousands
of people, kidnapped from Africa, were worked from “can’t see” in the morning
to “can’t see” at night. And the legacy of children ripped from their parents,
sold to other slave masters. All to build the foundation for much of what made
America into the global empire it is today. A savage irony considering Mr.
Obama’s own background.
What actually happened in the “nearly seven decades” Mr.Obama claims that
the U.S. was making the world “a better place.”
Those decades were launched with, and in important ways
defined—militarily, politically, and morally—by the most concentrated mass
murder of civilians in human history. The U.S. atomic bomb attacks on the
Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945
killed 200,000 civilians, some burned to death on the spot, others dying
torturous deaths from radiation poisoning, with survivors and humanity as a
whole traumatised”
Eight years later, the U.S. was “making the world a better place”
through the Korean War. Of the U.S. invasion of Korea in 1950, U.S. Air Force
General Curtis LeMay boasted that U.S. planes “burned down every town in North
Korea.” The U.S. used more bombs and artillery shells in Korea than in all of World
War 2, and used napalm—a chemical weapon more terrifying and “effective”
against military and civilian targets than the older sarin gas the U.S. accuses
Syria’s Bashar al-Assad of using. An estimated five million people were killed
in the Korean War, three million of them civilians.
In the U.S. war of aggression against Vietnam, from 1965-1975, the U.S.
continued to make the world “a better place” and along the way demonstrated how
much it cares about children by dropping more than seven million tons of bombs
on Vietnam and the neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos before being
driven out in 1975, killing an estimated three million Vietnamese—again, many
of them children. Typical of the logic and morality of the U.S. military was
the infamous statement by one U.S. military commander who directed the burning
down of a whole peasant village and then said, “We had to destroy the village
in order to save it.” In massacres as at the village of My Lai, and in the
“cluster bombs” they dropped, the U.S. specifically aimed to kill
civilians—including children—at random.
And in response to the arguments of defenders of U.S. imperialism,
including liberal “critics” who insist “that was then, this is now,” the U.S. still
provides cluster bombs for use against civilians. In 2006, the U.S. Senate
voted, 70-30, to defeat an amendment to a Pentagon budget bill which would have
banned the use of cluster bombs near populated civilian areas. That enabled the
U.S. to continue to supply cluster bombs to Israel to use in an invasion of
Lebanon. In 2008-9 the U.S. delivered White Phosphorous to Israel, via Shannon Airport in Ireland, which was used on the civilian population of Gaza in Israel's latest attack on that imprisoned ghetto at the time. White Phosphorous is worse than poison gas, it burns human flesh right through to the bone with excruciating agony for the victims.
Mr.Obama rails against Assad as a “tyrant.” But over “nearly seven
decades” the United States installed many of the most brutal tyrants who
carried out some of the most massive crimes against their own people in
history. In 1965, the U.S. orchestrated a reactionary coup in Indonesia and the
slaughter of one million communists and others. The massacres were so wanton
that in parts of the country, the rivers were choked with bodies and blood. The
fascist gangs and Islamic fundamentalists enlisted along with regular military
and police to carry out these massacres used and reveled in the most depraved
and sadistic means of torturing and killing people to spread widespread terror,
including among children. The deaths of communists were then reported to
officials at the U.S. Embassy who crossed off the names of the dead from lists
they had provided to the Indonesian butchers.
In 1953 the Iranians changed
their Government and kicked out Pahlavi, the fake "Emperor" but the
"democratic" U.S. and Britain conspired to change it back again to what
became a ruthless dictatorship based on torture and secret police. In 1971 the Chileans changed
their Government but were rewarded two years later with a brutal Washington
organised military coup when brave President Salvador Allende was murdered in his Office and a U.S. sponsored Junta seized power which
slaughtered thousands.
The US has conspired to
change governments by coup or invasion in all 20 states of Latin America in the
last 150 years.
The fact that this history is not taught in schools, or acknowledged in
acceptable discourse, does not mean these things didn’t really happen. There is
one bit of actual truth that nearly everyone does know: The Iraq war was based
on LIES.
Mr.Obama claimed in his speech that he was determined not to repeat what
happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. As if simply avoiding U.S. “boots on the
ground” should be the measuring stick for whether or not the U.S. is again carrying
out the same kinds of crimes it carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan. Justified
with THE SAME BASIC SET OF LIES!
Set aside, for a moment, the fact that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was
justified by TOTAL LIES about Saddam Hussein’s supposed “weapons of mass
destruction.” Set aside, for a moment, the fact that the media, including the
liberal New York Times, chanelled these lies and gave them credibility.
Consider instead the self-righteous claims by the likes of Dick Cheney
and George W. Bush that the U.S. was motivated by and driven to attack Iraq
because “Saddam Hussein is a man who is willing to gas his own people, willing
to use weapons of mass destruction against Iraq citizens.” (President Bush,
March 22, 2002)
Saddam Hussein did gas Kurdish people in Iraq in 1988—something the U.S.
facilitated, by the way, including through encouraging the Kurds to
rebel and then stabbing them in the back, and through making it
possible—including through allies—for Hussein to obtain poison gas. But the
U.S. invasion of Iraq, and, importantly, the “diplomatic” moves the U.S.
carried out against Hussein—namely sanctions, made things horribly worse
for the ordinary people of Iraq.
Operation Desert Storm, 1991, the first U.S. invasion of Iraq, killed or
injured hundreds of thousands—over 25,000 civilians and fleeing soldiers were
killed in 48 hours on the “Highway of Death.” Then, after the war, the U.S.
continued “making the world a better place” and demonstrating care for children
through sanctions that killed some 500,000 children in Iraq—killed because
of those U.S. sanctions that prevented them from getting needed medicine,
clean water, and nutrition. And this crime was justified by a future U.S.
Secretary of State as “a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is
worth it.” (US Television 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996)
In 2003, the U.S. and its allies again invaded Iraq—once again making
the world “a better place.” During and after the war, between 600,000 and one
million Iraqis were killed, and over four million were driven from their
homes. (See “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional
cluster survey” The Lancet, October 12, 2006 ). These deaths are almost never
mentioned in the mainstream media.
And the U.S. turned Abu Ghraib prison into their hellish torture chamber, with U.S. military
personnel bragging on social media and in emails of sadistic torture, murder,
sexual abuse, water boarding, beatings, sleep deprivation, humiliation, and dog
attacks. Today Iraq is wracked with terrible sectarian violence (different
religious and ethnic factions killing each other). During the U.S. occupation
much of that was directly orchestrated by the U.S. in the tradition of colonial
“divide and conquer” strategies, but all of it greatly exacerbated in one way
or another by the U.S. invasion and the legacy and present-day reality of
imperialist domination.
The same can be said about Afghanistan. And one can literally spin a
globe of the planet, point to a country, and find crimes carried out by the
U.S.
All this misery is a product of how their imperialist system works.
It is a system that, by its nature, is driven to exploit the people and
resources of the world, to contend and compete with rivals big and small,
global and regional, over their ability to do that, which is driven by its
nature to enforce all this with the most brutal violence.
Think about what kind of a system is actually represented by a
liar-in-chief who can look back on a record like this, look earnestly into the
cameras, and talk about nearly seven decades of “enforcing” what he calls
“international agreements” that he claims made the world “a better place.”
Far too many of those who Mr.Obama would refer to as “on the Left” are
breathing a sigh of relief that Mr.Obama is turning to “diplomacy” instead of
launching a military strike—at this moment. But thuggish threats and violent
crimes on the one hand and diplomacy on the other are two sides of the same
coin. Speaking to a world population that is much more aware than are people in
the U.S. of the legacy of U.S. violent crimes around the world, and speaking to
(and embracing) the “hawks” in the ruling class and good ole boys watching on
TV, Mr.Obama put on his stern face, looked into the cameras, and made this ominous
declaration and threat:
“Let me make something clear: The United States military doesn’t do
pinpricks.”
Don’t the families of the millions slaughtered know it!
U.S. diplomacy rests on
violence and threats of violence, and is aimed at the same ends
as violence of enforcing exploitation and oppression, fending off rivals, and
keeping people enslaved. And, again, in Iraq, where U.S. sanctions
(“diplomacy”) killed hundreds of thousands of children, and softened up Iraq
for the 2003 invasion and all the horrors that came with that. On the basis of
a world of lies, Mr.Obama proclaimed: “Our ideals and principles, as well as our
national security, are at stake in Syria, along with our leadership of a world
where we seek to ensure that the worst weapons will never be used.”
First of all, given that Mr.Obama is speaking for a ruling class of
imperialists who have carried out the greatest crimes against humanity in
history, who in their right mind would want to identify with the so-called “principles”
behind what Mr.Obama calls “our national security "?.They are the “ideals and
principles” of a murderous, sadistic, depraved imperialist ruling class driven
to subjugate, dominate, and terrorise the planet. So why would anyone want to
“debate” what the United States should do in Syria based on those interests?
Unless they identify with ensuring that the U.S. imperialist ruling class can
continue to dominate the planet, violently enforcing a system of sweatshops and
slums, environmental devastation, and a system whose culture and “traditions”
have produced an epidemic of rape.
The American public is being trained to think in these terms through
Mr.Obama’s speech, and through endless spinning and “debate” among media pundits
who are allowed access to the Whore Press owned by media barons like Rupert Murdoch
and his ilk. But, people who have the ability to think critically and have the
moral sense to look at things from the standpoint of the interests of humanity have
to loudly and clearly reject these terms in all kinds of ways, including
connecting that outlook with, and encouraging political protests against, any
U.S. moves against Syria.
The interests, objectives, and grand designs of the imperialists are not
our interests—they are not the interests of the great majority of people in the
U.S. nor of the overwhelming majority of people in the world as a whole. And
the difficulties the imperialists have gotten themselves into in pursuit of
these interests must be seen, and responded to, not from the point of view of
the imperialists and their interests, but from the point of view of the great
majority of humanity and the basic and urgent need of humanity for a different
and better world, for a different way of organising both economy and society in
the interests of the majority of the people not the 1% corrupt and genocidal
elite.
See also U.S. Peace Activist ,Joseph Gerson's speech at Stockholm, Sweden, here:
