For millions of people, during the election of 2008, Barack Hussein Obama emerged as the ‘peace candidate’ (if only in the imagination), the urbane, educated, cool alternative; indeed, the antidote to the bumbling bellicosity of George W. Bush.
A term and a half later and Bush looks surprisingly refreshing in the rear-view mirror.
For Obama, the 4th U.S. President to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (after Theodore Roosevelt in 1906; Woodrow Wilson, 1919, and Jimmy Carter, 2002), the lures of war have been almost impossible to resist.
For despite the coveted prize, peace, true peace, has been elusive during his tour of duty in the White House.
Technology, especially drone tech, has made war almost easy. Thus, U.S. drones have bombed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. According to an article on alternet.org, the U.S has launched some 94,000 drone airstrikes in the noted areas. 94,000!*
How many people have been killed, in collateral damage? We don’t know; and we don’t care.
A good round number? About a million. A million!
Let’s call them ‘collateral damage’, OK?
Some peace.
But presidents, once elected, are anxious to exercise their enormous imperial, martial power.
The latest is Obama’s war against a relatively small organization: ‘ISIS’.
ISIS: a group that is a close descendant of a group founded and formed by American, British, and Pakistani intelligence: al-Qaeda.
War–air power, over a ground-based organization.
The Obama administration, trying to finesse this question by promising ‘no boots on the ground’, by unleashing U.S. ferocious air-power, in involved in war — period.
There’s an old saying: ‘War is the sport of kings.’