by John Pilger
October 15, 2009Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning another war
to add to his impressive record. In Afghanistan, his agents routinely extinguish
wedding parties, farmers and construction workers with weapons such as the
innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of your lungs. According to
the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying under the Obama-led alliance, which
permits only $29 per head annually to be spent on medical care.
Within weeks of his inauguration, Obama started a new war in Pakistan, causing
more than a million people to flee their homes. In threatening Iran – which his
secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she was prepared to “obliterate” –
Obama lied that the Iranians were covering up a “secret nuclear facility”,
knowing that it had already been reported to the International Atomic Energy
Authority. In colluding with the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, he
bribed the Palestinian Authority to suppress a UN judgment that Israel had
committed crimes against humanity in its assault on Gaza – crimes made possible
with US weapons whose shipment Obama secretly approved before his inauguration.
At home, the man of peace has approved a military budget exceeding that of any
year since the end of the Second World War while presiding over a new kind of
domestic repression. During the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, hosted by
Obama, militarised police attacked peaceful protesters with something called the
Long-Range Acoustic Device, not seen before on US streets. Mounted in the turret
of a small tank, it blasted a piercing noise as tear gas and pepper gas were
fired indiscriminately. It is part of a new arsenal of “crowd-control munitions”
supplied by military contractors such as Raytheon. In Obama’s
Pentagon-controlled “national security state”, the concentration camp at
Guantanamo Bay, which he promised to close, remains open, and “rendition”,
secret assassinations and torture continue.
The Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s latest war is largely secret. On 15 July,
Washington finalised a deal with Colombia that gives the US seven giant military
bases. “The idea,” reported the Associated Press, “is to make Colombia a
regional hub for Pentagon operations... nearly half the continent can be covered
by a C-17 [military transport] without refuelling”, which “helps achieve the
regional engagement strategy”.
Translated, this means Obama is planning a “rollback” of the independence and
democracy that the people of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Paraguay have
achieved against the odds, along with a historic regional co-operation that
rejects the notion of a US “sphere of influence”. The Colombian regime, which
backs death squads and has the continent’s worst human rights record, has
received US military support second in scale only to Israel. Britain provides
military training. Guided by US military satellites, Colombian paramilitaries
now infiltrate Venezuela with the goal of overthrowing the democratic government
of Hugo Chávez, which George W Bush failed to do in 2002.
Obama’s war on peace and democracy in Latin America follows a style he has
demonstrated since the coup against the democratic president of Honduras, Manuel
Zelaya, in June. Zelaya had increased the minimum wage, granted subsidies to
small farmers, cut back interest rates and reduced poverty. He planned to break
a US pharmaceutical monopoly and manufacture cheap generic drugs. Although Obama
has called for Zelaya’s reinstatement, he refuses to condemn the coup-makers and
to recall the US ambassador or the US troops who train the Honduran forces
determined to crush a popular resistance. Zelaya has been repeatedly refused a
meeting with Obama, who has approved an IMF loan of $164m to the illegal regime.
The message is clear and familiar: thugs can act with impunity on behalf of the
US.
Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore
what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee’s
decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism that has beatified the man for no
reason other than he is a member of a minority and attractive to liberal
sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills. This is the Call of
Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the
besotted and boneheaded. “When Obama walks into a room,” gushed George Clooney,
“you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere.”
The great voice of black liberation Frantz Fanon understood this. In The
Wretched of the Earth, he described the “intermediary [whose] mission has
nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being
the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though
camouflaged”. Because political debate has become so debased in our media
monoculture – Blair or Brown; Brown or Cameron – race, gender and class can be
used as seductive tools of propaganda and diversion. In Obama’s case, what
matters, as Fanon pointed out in an earlier era, is not the intermediary’s
“historic” elevation, but the class he serves. After all, Bush’s inner circle
was probably the most multiracial in presidential history. There was Condoleezza
Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, all dutifully serving an extreme and
dangerous power.
Britain has seen its own Obama-like mysticism. The day after Blair was elected
in 1997, the Observer predicted that he would create “new worldwide rules on
human rights” while the Guardian rejoiced at the “breathless pace [as] the
floodgates of change burst open”. When Obama was elected last November, Denis
MacShane MP, a devotee of Blair’s bloodbaths, unwittingly warned us: “I shut my
eyes when I listen to this guy and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing
that we did in 1997.”