by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
The U.S. is in a frenzy of regime-changing aggression, aimed at destabilizing or destroying sovereign states. Obama’s signature is written in blood around the world, as he pursues “full spectrum, no-holds-barred, war-without-boundaries against all potential resistance to U.S. imperial rule, anywhere on the planet.”
Obama’s War Against Civilization
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“National sovereignty has been replaced, in the Age of Obama, by an arbitrary “humanitarian” interventionist imperative that can only be exercised by the most powerful.”
The world is learning what U.S. senatorial candidate Barack Obama meant on October 2, 2002, when he told a Chicago crowd that he did not oppose all wars. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.” We now know that President Obama is committed to full spectrum, no-holds-barred, war-without-boundaries against all potential resistance to U.S. imperial rule, anywhere on the planet – a project he considers neither rash nor dumb. At stake is survival – not of the people and government of the United States, which face no existential threat from any quarter, but of an empire whose self-defined strategic interests encompass the entire globe. There is a terrifying logic to Washington’s frenzy: when the systemic structure is collapsing, it must be propped up everywhere.
President Obama’s contribution to the disintegration of the global order is awesome; he is a great innovator. Whereas other U.S. leaders were content to simply violate international law with regularity, Obama has rewritten the statutes. The very concept of national sovereignty has been discarded in favor of a kind of universal parole status overseen by a pyramidal “international community” with the United States at the top. National self-determination, the bedrock of international law – is now treated as a franchise, to be issued or withdrawn at the whim of any coalition the U.S. is able to assemble. For Haiti, a simple troika of the U.S., Canada and France constituted a quorum empowered to erase 200 years of independence. For Libya, the recognized government’s capital crime was its threat to quell a jihadist revolt in one of its cities. The Syrian state has been condemned for resisting tens of thousands of foreign-financed killers who recognize no earthly law whatsoever. The U.S. backs a coup against the lawfully elected government of Ukraine by the direct descendants of Nazis. Simultaneously, Obama threatens the democratically elected government of Venezuela with dire consequences if it harms a hair on the head of rioters bankrolled and directed by Washington.
“This is not law, but its opposite.”
It is almost moot to accuse the Obama administration of interfering with the internal affairs of other nations, since this president does not recognize the elementary rights of nation states. National sovereignty has been replaced, in the Age of Obama, by an arbitrary “humanitarian” interventionist imperative that can only be exercised by the most powerful. This is not law, but its opposite: “anti-law,” promulgated by a decaying, outlaw empire.
If nations have no sovereign rights, then their inhabitants have no right to self-determination – which is the point of Obama’s imperial project. Washington’s bid to render all the world’s peoples subject to its “humanitarian” veto of their self-determinationist rights represents a devolution of civilization.
In liquidating the fundamental tenets of international law, Obama normalizes the most diabolical crimes: crimes against peace. He has redefined war, for U.S. purposes, as limited to conflicts in which Americans are killed in action. Thus, he told Congress in 2011, the massive bombing of Libya did not constitute a war, or even “hostilities,” since no Americans were killed.
No rules of sovereignty, no rules of war, no individual or national rights that a superpower is bound to respect. The United States, under Obama’s leadership, is building an infrastructure for fascism on a planetary scale.
Now you know why the U.S. is spying on all the peoples of the Earth: it’s trying to put our species on lockdown. That’s Obama’s mode of war.
Jon Jeter joins us from Washington to talk about the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and the 2024 presidential campaign.
Rawan Masri of Decolonize Palestine joins us to talk about events in Palestine, on the West Bank, where the IDF sent troops into the occupied territory and engaged in mass arrests, shootings, and…
Black Agenda Report revisits this commentary from the late Bruce Dixon.
The debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump featured a rehash of neo-liberal and imperialist talking points. Both are committed to disastrous policies domestically and internationally.
Revisiting Paul Robeson’s prepared statement to the House Un-American Activities Committee–during a new era of repression.
