Stop Obama’s new ‘war on terrorism’!

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VOL. 33, NO. 3, MARCH 2015 WWW.SOCIALISTACTION.ORG U.S. / CANADA $1 In a short-lived but well-crafted move aimed at hyping President Obama’s cre­ dentials as a reasonable and democrat­ ic warmaker, the president submitted a resolution to Congress in mid-February requesting “authorization for use of force” to proceed full tilt with his ad­ ministration’s now worldwide “war on [Islamic] terrorism.”

At first glance, what struck his conten­ tious co-warrior Republican “adversar­ ies” as strange was that the president appeared to be exercising a bit of selfrestraint in limiting his request to three years. This was not to mention his ask­ ing permission from Congress itself to make yet another war, but this time on a global basis and not directly against any particular nation.

Obama sought to contrast his “demo­ cratic” (let Congress decide rather than the president) and time-limited ap­ proach to making war to the previous Bush administration’s request for blan­ ket or unlimited authority to pursue terrorists everywhere.

As expected, in the circus-like atmo­ sphere that characterizes congressio­ nal debate, Republicans beat the war drums even louder—attacking Obama for limiting his war, and thus future presidents’ war powers to just three years. But the media-promoted sound and fury attendant to the debate rap­ idly subsided when it was revealed that Obama’s purported self-imposed limi­ tations were a fraud.

The Feb. 26 New York Times noted, “Mr. Obama did not ask Congress to repeal a 2001 [Bush-era] measure au­ thorizing force against Al Qaeda and its affiliates, which would mean that he would still have wide discretion to wage war.”

Congressional approval of Obama’s legacy-burnishing gesture amounted to rubber stamping what he has been do­ ing for the past six months and longer, including bombing Islamic State forces (ISIS or ISIL), or any other organization that the administration deems terror­ ist, in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, across Africa, and far beyond.

With this in mind, the heated Capitol Hill debate faded into oblivion as the bipartisan warmakers fully understood that U.S. imperialism recognizes no lim­ its to its capacity to proceed with wars anywhere and everywhere in pursuit of power, profit, and global domination. Indeed, overt and covert wars, drone wars, privatized army wars, embargo, blockade and sanction wars, and U.S.engineered coups and assassinations are the norm among U.S. imperial­ ism’s top decision-making oligarchical elite—the .0001 percent.

Presidents, whether they be Obamabright or Bush-not-so-bright, as well as posturing politicians of all capitalist parties, are mere agents, coated with a democratic veneer but pledged far in advance to fealty to capitalism’s ex­ ploits everywhere.

The month of February featured al­ most daily front-page headlines re­ counting horrific terrorist attacks and the rapid growth of ISIS. On the heels of the terror bombing of France’s rac­ ist and Islamophobic Charlie Hebdo magazine, after which 50 heads of state marched through the streets of Paris with more than 1.5 million misled and enthralled people behind them, one af­ ter another of the world’s top leaders declared their allegiance to this new war against “Islamic terrorism.”

The scene was set for the U.S. to take the lead in this effort. But before bomb­ ing “terrorists” around the world with impunity, Obama, the outwardly re­ strained and cool-headed U.S. impe­ rial head of state, made sure that his planned warmaking was not perceived as directed at Arabs or Muslims or Is­ lam—at least in the U.S.

His high-profile, three-day White House meeting on “Countering Violent Extremism,” attended by representa­ tives of 60 nations in mid-February, heard the president state, “Labeling noxious beliefs and mass murder as ‘Is­ lamic’ would play right into the hands of terrorists who claim that the United States is at war with Islam itself.”

Nevertheless, a number of U.S.-based human right groups boycotted the meeting, including the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose spokesperson, “Samer Khalaf, noted, “This focus only on Arabs or Muslims reinforces the stereotype of Arab and Muslim Americans as security threats and thus perpetuates hatred of the re­ spective communities.”

Khalaf was undoubtedly referring to the 700,000 Muslim-Americans who had been subjected to FBI or NSA in­ terrogation, surveillance, or arrest, not to mention provocateur infiltration of mosques, frame-up trials, and ground­ less convictions based on secret testi­ mony of unnamed individuals or gov­ ernment institutions. As with the “great Tony Savino / Socialist Action deporter’s” million-plus immigrants thrown out of the country or impris­ oned in border detention camps, the president’s capacity to square words with deeds has not gone unnoticed by his victims, rhetoric notwithstanding.

The president’s disclaimers aside the screaming headlines recounting recent horrific attacks on Danish, Jordanian, Egyptian, and French citizens—as well as alleged terrorists ever mobilizing to join ISIS from England, the U.S., Egypt and elsewhere—consistently lack his­ torical or present-day context.

The Jordanian pilot shot down and be­ headed by ISIS, for example, was flying a U.S. aircraft to launch deadly missiles in Iraq to advance U.S. imperial inter­ ests. Denmark too, voted war credits to aid the U.S. slaughter. Its pilots fly U.S.made F-18 fighter jets that bring death and destruction to Iraq and Syria.

When a dozen Assyrian Christian la­ borers in Libya were murdered by ISIS forces, Egypt retaliated by indiscrimi­ nately bombing civilian neighborhoods in the western Libyan city of Derna. Need we recall that the U.S.-backed general and now president, Abdel Fat­ (continued on page 5, in “Connecticut organizes for $15”)

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(Photo) Tanya Brown-Dickerson speaks on Feb. 21 at scene of her son’s killing.

Real Justice Coalition / Tumblr.com quell public indignation over the killing

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