Zimpapers Logo

Reason Wafawarova
“WELL, the Russian plan is a godsend for Obama. It saves him from what would look like a very serious political defeat. He has not been able to obtain virtually any international support for this — the action he’s contemplating. Even Britain wouldn’t support it. And it looked as though Congress wasn’t going to support it either, which would leave him completely out on a limb. This leaves him a way out.”

These are words from renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky; and nothing could be further from the truth when one looks at how Barack Obama made a spectacular U-turn on his extremely unpopular threat of a military strike on Syria — a call that glaringly failed to impress any of America’s traditional allies, as it was also facing rejection by the US Congress.

To save face Obama has maintained the threat of force, and that is quite understandable. The United States cannot be humiliated, and so should not be anyone occupying the White House at any time.

It really does not matter that the UN Charter outlaws the use or threat of force. After all the US is a rogue state that barely cares that there are such things as international law or the United Nations. In John Bolton’s words, “There is no such thing as the United Nations.”

While Obama latched on to the purported Russian offer to put Syria’s chemical weapons under the control of the United Nations, presumably with the tacit intention to have such chemical weapons eventually destroyed, it is quite informing that Barack Obama did not take advantage of this great opportunity to advocate the banning of chemical weapons altogether, or to impose the chemical weapons convention not only on the Middle East but on many other countries that consider it civilised to stock pile mass-killing gases as weapons of war led by the United States itself.

Obama spoke so passionately against the use of chemical weapons, but it was quite conveniently erratic for him to imply that the chemical weapons convention is all about the use of such weapons. In fact, the convention specifically refers to the production, storage and use of chemical weapons — three activities the US is indisputably culpable of, indisputable more than any other country on this planet.

Obama does speak with so much passion against Syria’s chemical weapons, and one can be forgiven for thinking that the US president is unaware of Syria’s neighbour that has not only illegally annexed part of Syria but also has huge stockpiles of dangerous chemical weapons that it keeps in blatant violation of the chemical weapons convention, which the same country has stubbornly refused to ratify.

That country is Israel, and Obama would rather call for the international monitoring of Syria’s alleged chemical weapons than call for the ban of chemical weapons in the Middle East — purely because he fully supports Israel’s possession of worse gases than Syria can ever possess.
In trying to rump up emotional support from his American listeners, Obama bragged that for “seven decades” America has been “the anchor of global security.” That would be funny if it was not so stupid.

That proclaimed legacy includes the 1973 overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected government, replacing it with a US-chosen dictatorship. It includes the US’ overthrowing of the Iranian democratically elected government in 1953, the overthrowing of a popular leftist government in Guatemala a year later, the massacring of millions of people in Vietnam, bombing the people of Laos for taking back their land, imposing Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship in the Congo, sponsoring the murderous Jonas Savimbi in Angola, sponsoring the blood-thirsty Afonso Dhlakama in Mozambique, arming the murderous Contras in Nicaragua, and spreading meaningless civil wars throughout Central America in the 80s.

It is amazing that such a highly respected law academic like Obama can utter words praising a country with such a murderous history, as it is that his wildly misplaced adulations can be allowed to pass without any dissenting comment.

To sum up what was in the mind of Obama as he gave his threat withdrawal speech, Noam Chomsky had this to say:
“So what he said is I’m going to lie like a trooper about history; I’m going to suppress the US role, the actual US role, for the last seven decades; I’m going to maintain the threat of force, which is of course illegal; and I’m going to ensure that the chemical weapons convention is not imposed on the region, because our ally, Israel, would be subjected to it.”

It is quite unethical that Obama had to use gruesome images of suffocating children to spice up his pretentious sorrow over what happened in Syria. You cannot lie with the aid of dying children without making a monster of yourself.

It is as if there are no hospitals in South Vietnam still taking photos of deformed foetuses that are the aftermath of JF Kennedy’s murderous 1961 attack —when he doused the country with dioxin-laced Agent Orange.

The attack was just part of a wider murderous campaign that killed millions of civilians — apart from the devastating environmental destruction caused by Agent Orange, and of course the many deformed children that continue to be born in Vietnam.

More recently we have been seeing photos of deformed foetuses from Fallujah, thanks to the chemical attack carried by US marines in 2004. Whatever chemicals the marines used, epidemiologists have equated the radiation levels left by this brutal attack to those of Hiroshima — yet another atrocity by the “anchor of global security” as Obama would call his most murderous country.

People might want to look at Obama’s images of suffocating Syrian children in light of the after-effects of the US’ many chemical attacks in the past — the high cancer rates, the deformed foetuses in Japan and Vietnam, the children born with horrifying deformities in the two countries, and it makes better the understanding of Obama’s White House grandstanding as he gave this heart-rending speech on Syria — which plainly speaking could be hilariously funny if it did not involve the sad loses of innocent lives.

Another joke that is sad to laugh at is that Obama actually calls for the observing of principles of international law.
The United States is the only country that has ever vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for all countries to observe international law.

The Reagan administration vetoed a resolution supporting a World Court judgment that condemned the use of force by the US in Nicaragua in the 80s. The resolution itself did not name the US or any other country but simply called on all countries to abstain from arbitrary use of force.

The history of international law tells of one country that routinely violates international conventions, hardly ever accepting any conventions, exempting itself selfishly from the enforcement of the few interventions it accepts, and that country is the United States of America.

The few international conventions the US has accepted are conditioned to be inapplicable to the United States itself, and a good example is the Genocide Convention.

Charged with genocide in the case Yugoslavia vs Nato, the US appealed to the International Court of Justice simply arguing that by law, the US was immune to the crime of genocide, and the court granted the exemption.

Despite being instrumental in setting up the World Court in 1946, the US joined the court with a reservation that essentially said international law, conventions and agreements do not apply to the United States — the very same way the United States funds the International Criminal Court today — all despite it blatantly refusing to be party to the Rome Statute.

Not only does the US refuse to be party to the ICC but it has also arm-twisted more than 150 countries to sign bilateral agreements stating that they would never take a US citizen to the ICC for whatever reason at any given time.

It is most surprising that a whole Harvard-trained lawyer like Obama can stand and proclaim that the United States upholds the value of life, even daring to remind Americans that they are “exceptional” in their pursuit for justice.

The stark contradiction must not be pronounced from the lips of a trained lawyer; let alone a Harvard trained one.
As Russian president Putin says, it is extremely dangerous to encourage people to be exceptional, and the only exceptionalism attributable to the United States at the moment is its blatant violation of international law, its unpunished history of atrocities, its murderous legacy to which is credited trillions of gallons of the blood of innocent civilians from lesser countries.

Obama stands saying the opposite of what America really is, and he does so with a straight face. He takes that kind of arrogance for global leadership, and it is sad that he expects the world to take him seriously.

He has failed to explain how his threat of a military strike on Syria is supposed to save the lives of the children that Obama pretends to be so much in love with. History can only tell us that if attacked, Syria will join the sad list of ruined countries like Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, Libya, Grenada, and others too many to mention.

Obama’s feigned sorrows over what happened in Syria on August 21 was a gesture meant to create a picture of a United States so endowed with the values of humanity.

Sadly the pretensions have surpassed even the prospect of fairy tales, and the hypocrisy now stinks to high heavens.
It is not surprising that Obama has dismally failed to garner international support on his position on Syria.

His many eloquent presentations are simply less than impressive to a world that is becoming increasingly so sceptic of America’s foreign policy objectives.

The happenings in Syria are sad by every measure, and it is important that the insurrection in that country comes to an end on way or the other. The bloodshed is simply not worthy the cause from either side of the conflict, and Syrians should know better.

But one sure thing is that Syria has opened many eyes on the duplicity of the US, and as things stand countries like China and Russia have been forced to be more pro-active in scuppering the US sabre-rattling foreign policy.

It could get worse if the US pursues ill-thought directions like Obama was about to do a few weeks ago.

 Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in Sydney, Australia.