President Barack Obama, long seen as an antiwar foil to the lunacy of the belligerent George W. Bush administration, has now almost completed his morphing into Bush three. With his war talk calling for the bombing of Syria, he has relied upon international law as the rationale, at the same time deprecating the role of the United Nations. This, to say the least, is a contradiction.
With the old reliable Brit jumping ship, Obama has opted for congressional cover to share the glory or the blame of the latest imperial adventure, should it, like Iraq, result in disaster. In any event, international law being violated isn’t something that is new to the US. Torture is a violation of international law, yet Guantanamo Bay’s naval brig practices it daily, not to mention U.S. black sites run by the CIA around the world, yet this president, so exercised over international law violations, issued a clean slate to the CIA for its torture chambers, saying essentially let the past be past.
Similarly, the supreme war crime under international law, specifically the Nuremberg Tribunal, which tried and condemned Nazis, is aggression against a nation that did not attack the aggressor. For this is a violation of the UN Charter, which, like Nuremberg, considered the initiation of war “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes, in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Witness the Iraq war, not only a blunder, but a crime. Yet, the war criminals who waged an unjust and illegal war are immune, for they did so in support of empire. Why are they not on trial for violating international law? That treatment, it seems, is reserved for African or perhaps Asian leaders, not Europeans or Americans. International law is but a fig leaf, for it covers very little, especially if there is very little to cover.
Syria is embroiled in an ugly, vicious civil war, and fighting for its very survival, as presently constituted. The U.S., after Iraq, has no say in the matter, having reduced Iraq into a smoking cinder struggling to rise from an invasion that made it a charnel house of the region. This so-called humanitarian imperialism is but imperialism by other means. Meanwhile, the U.S. can’t educate its kids, it can’t provide health care to millions, and its Wall Street elite are the biggest thieves on the block, as immune as are the invaders of Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress, meanwhile, is about as popular as herpes. They are but the highly paid employees of Wall Street, and the nation embarks on a new war. From in prison nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
