"The Obama administration is utilising the crisis in Iraq as an
opportunity to escalate the US war drive throughout the Middle East,
with Syria in the cross-hairs.."
Tichaona Zindoga
On May 28, US President Barack Obama gave a speech at the United States
Military Academy commencement ceremony at West Point. Many people
across the world appeared to interpret it as a climbdown by the US in
its global militarism, as part of a wider foreign policy thrust. That
may have been what Obama himself intended,
promising the graduands that they would be “the first class to graduate
since 9/11 who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.”
The
landscape has changed, said he, “We have removed our troops from Iraq.
We are winding down our war in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda’s leadership on the
border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan has been decimated, and
Osama bin Laden is no more.”
He claimed America had “refocused our investments” in growing the economy.
How so ironic!
Less than a month later, the US is beating the war drum again and ready
to return to Iraq. Reports in the past week indicate that the US is
sending personnel to Iraq, a modest figure of less than 300 staff of
non-combats. (The next logical step is anyone’s conjecture.)
But
here is one thing that may yet tell us that Obama and the US have some
worst points — forgive the pun — to prove: a CNN report on June 19
quoted Obama as saying he did not need new permission to intervene in
Iraq.
There is something unsettling in the way the CNN reported the matter.
“I’ll let you know what’s going on, but I don’t need new congressional
authority to act”, President Barack Obama told congressional leaders
Wednesday about his upcoming decision on possible military intervention
in Iraq,” was how the network reported.
If one could not perceive
some emperor, with all the fine airs of a demi-god in this, then the
next part of the CNN report should be enlightening.
“The White House
meeting sounded more like a listening session for the top Republicans
and Democrats in the House and Senate about options for helping Iraq’s
embattled Shi’ite government halt the lightning advance of Sunni
Islamist fighters toward Baghdad that Obama is considering,” adjoined
CNN. The emperor was planning a war.
He did not say it.
Perhaps because he is not accountable to anyone, not even the US Congress.
The world knows that the US is planning a war. This is why Iranian
supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over the weekend expressed strong
opposition to intervention in Iraq.
He said: “We are strongly
opposed to US and other (countries’) intervention in Iraq. We don’t
approve of it, as we believe the Iraqi government, nation and religious
authorities are capable of ending the sedition. And God willing, they
will do so.”
Elsewhere in the CNN article, it was revealed that
“170 US military personnel have been sent to Baghdad to assist in
securing embassy personnel inside Iraq, while another 100 moved into the
region to “provide airfield management security and logistic support,
if required”.
The report said: “A draft list of possible ISIS
targets in Iraq is being constantly reviewed and revised with the latest
intelligence, typical of any preliminary targeting operation, according
to US military officials who spoke on the condition of not being
identified. Compiling the draft list does not signal that Obama will
authorise such strikes, and several administration officials said the
President has yet to make a final decision.”
There is more.
There
are already manned and unmanned reconnaissance flights over Iraq to
collect up-to-the-minute intelligence on ISIS movements and positions,
all to ready the use of precision-guided weapons. Drones are also on
standby.
That sounds very scary and does not quite show the end of
military adventurism — or misadventurism — on the part of the US. So
it’s tough luck to the poor graduates at West Point who may have bought
the fat lie that they would be “the first class to graduate since 9/11
who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.”
Exceptionalism
One must admit that the megalomania of US leaders forces them to do things to prove their worth and power.
It is something they call American exceptionalism, couched in the
belief that, “America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t,
no one else will.” It should be noted that even in the West Point
speech, Obama appeared to be caught between a moralistic, anti-war
person and a war-mongering, archetypal American emperor.
It
takes you back to the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2009 where
he laboured over just war, etc, when he had been awarded a “peace”
prize.
Having told about the first group that would get into Iraq
or Afghanistan, he stated, repeating “a principle I put forward at the
outset of my presidency”:
“The United States will use military
force, unilaterally if necessary, when our core interests demand it —
when our people are threatened, when our livelihoods are at stake, when
the security of our allies is in danger . . .
“International
opinion matters, but America should never ask permission to protect our
people, our homeland, or our way of life.”
The latter statement resonates with the CNN report of June 19 cited above.
In
which case, the views of the likes of Khamenei and other anti-war
people do not matter. It may take a few weeks for the world to see the
war, with America in the thick of things, unravel.
This is because, in part, Iraq provides an entry into the Middle East and a go-get to Syria, and by extension, Russia.
“The Obama administration is utilising the crisis in Iraq as an
opportunity to escalate the US war drive throughout the Middle East,
with Syria in the cross-hairs,” wrote Patrick Martin and Joseph Kishore
on June 20.
The two postulate: “The war drive against Syria is
inextricably tied to the US and European-backed campaign against Russia,
a major Syrian ally. Opposition from Russia was a significant factor in
the decision by the Obama administration to temporarily pull back from
war against Syria last year. This was followed by the operation in
Ukraine to unseat a pro-Russian government and provoke a confrontation
with Russia itself.”
Olivier Knox, reporting on the announcement
to send troops to Iraq, said one reporter asked senior administration
officials whether “American strikes against ISIS be confined to Iraq or
could they reach into Syria”?
“The president is focused, again, on
a number of potential contingencies that may demand US direct military
action. One of those is the threat from ISIL and the threat that could
pose, again, not simply to Iraqi stability but to US personnel and to US
interests more broadly, certainly including our homeland,” one official
reportedly said.
“In that respect, we don’t restrict potential US action to a specific geographic space,” the official continued.
“The president has made clear time and again that we will take action
as necessary, including direct US military action if it’s necessary to
defend the United States against an imminent threat . . . the group
ISIL, again, operates broadly, and we would not restrict our ability to
take action that is necessary to protect the United States.”
Here is Knox’s own conclusion: “In other words: The United States might take its war against ISIS into Syria.”
Terrorism
Fighting terrorism — whether real, imagined or contrived — by the US
has almost given it the raison d’etre in the last 13 years.
At West
Point, Obama gave an indication of scaling down on senseless
bombardments on alleged terrorist targets and announced new strategy of
engagement, creation and training of proxies, which to him seem less
odious.
“For the foreseeable future, the most direct threat to
America, at home and abroad, remains terrorism, but a strategy that
involves invading every country that harbours terrorist networks is
naive and unsustainable,” he said.
Explaining further, he said:
“And the need for a new strategy reflects the fact that today’s
principal threat no longer comes from a centralised al-Qaeda leadership.
Instead, it comes from decentralised al-Qaeda affiliates and
extremists, many with agendas focused in the countries where they
operate.
“And this lessens the possibility of large-scale
9/11-style attacks against the homeland, but it heightens the danger of
US personnel overseas being attacked, as we saw in Benghazi.
“It
heightens the danger to less defensible targets, as we saw in a shopping
mall in Nairobi. So we have to develop a strategy that matches this
diffuse threat, one that expands our reach without sending forces that
stretch our military too thin or stir up local resentments.”
The strategy is already underway, with Africa the special frontier, and it would seem Obama has a point to prove here too.
No comments:
Post a Comment