No welcome for Obama – Godfather of drone warfare – in Ireland
Former US President Barack Obama shares much with Henry Kissinger. Before they received their Nobel Peace Prizes, they both bombed other, more deserving Nobel Peace Prize Laureates.
Kissinger bombed at least one Red Cross hospital in Cambodia in the 1970s and Obama bombed a Doctors without Borders (MSF) Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan in October 2015.
MSF’s own internal review of Obama’s bombing makes for bleak reading.
Six intensive care patients were burned to death in their beds while another patient died after staff had to leave the individual on the operating table. Twelve Afghan medical staff were killed. Some were decapitated and lost limbs to shrapnel while others were shot from the air as they tried to flee the burning building. At least 42 people, including 14 staff members, 24 patients and four relatives of patients were killed.
No independent investigation has ever been undertaken about this heinous war crime.
Obama’s foreign policy legacy
Obama was elected president in 2008 on a message of “hope”. He had spoken out against the folly of the Iraq war and is credited for removing most of the US troops from there, although this process was begun under Bush and took place along the same timeline that was outlined by the Bush administration. In 2015 he got the Iran Deal through and he loosened the US imposed Cuban blockade. At the end of his presidency, he commuted the sentence of whistleblower Chelsea Manning who, of course, should never have been incarcerated in the first place. These actions might be the sum of his positive achievements, however.
Rashid Khalidi, notes in his book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, that Obama tried to re-start the Israel-Palestine peace process appointing Senator George Mitchell as special envoy for the Middle East as early as January 2009. Mitchell wanted to include Hamas in any peace negotiations but was undermined by Dennis Ross, special advisor to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, who managed to scupper any initiatives of direct talks.
This is a classic example of what Khalidi terms “the tenacious power of the permanent bureaucracy, of the homogenous coterie of experts circulating in and out of government, of congress, and of other structural powers.”
Despite Obama’s supposedly noble ambitions, he ultimately followed US imperialist interests and deferred to the hawks around him. These were based on control of resources – oil in the middle east – and keeping the world in line with US market interests and providing the military power to back both up.
Drone Warfare – from Afghan to AfPak and beyond
Obama, along with another darling of the Irish elites – Hilary Clinton – escalated the use of drone warfare, expanding the imperialist US war on Afghanistan into Pakistan.
According to the US-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) he launched several attacks just three days into his presidency. Two of these killed at least 12 civilians, including four children. Newsweek reported that he was ‘not a happy man’ about these civilian deaths but the strikes continued unabated with the CIA launching “more covert strikes in the first year of Obama’s presidency than in all of Bush’s eight-year tenure”.
A single drone attack in Mir Ali in North Waziristan, Pakistan, killed many civilians including four women and five children on 21 April 2011.
In 2012, Pakistan’s US Ambassador, Sherry Rehman, warned that the drone war “radicalises foot soldiers, tribes and entire villages in our region” while deceased former US President Jimmy Carter described drone attacks as a “widespread abuse of human rights” which “abets our enemies and alienates our friends”.
These criticisms did not stop the killings which continued throughout Obama’s presidency. Further data from TBIJ shows that 1,600 people were killed in over 1,000 strikes ordered by Obama in Afghanistan in 2016.
The ratio of civilian deaths to militants due to drone attacks is reported to be 10-to-1. Obama also ordered extra-judicial assassinations that were against all due process and the rule of law, with any women and children killed in the operations simply passed off as collateral damage. The Pakistani Interior Ministry noted at the time that the “majority of victims are civilians”.
Obama also began an air campaign targeting Yemen where “his first strike was a catastrophe: commanders thought they were targeting al Qaeda but instead hit a tribe with cluster munitions, killing 55 people. Twenty-one were children – 10 of them under five. Twelve were women, five of them pregnant.”
The American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) describes the first known US cruise missile strike in Yemen, noting that in addition to 14 alleged militants being killed, 41 civilians including 21 children and nine women, five of whom were pregnant at the time, were also killed.
Obama was responsible for 563 drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen over his first two terms, compared to 57 in these countries under George Bush’s reign. The most shocking lamentable statistic of his legacy then is that he killed more women and children over a shorter period than his predecessor George Bush had over a longer period.
Obama reportedly boasted to senior aides in 2011 “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”
This was not the first bad joke he made about killing people. At the White House Correspondent’s Association Dinner in 2010 he said, in reference to the Jonas Brothers who were sitting in the audience, “Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming.” These were the predator drones that had already killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
If Obama is the “American Dream” as then Taoiseach Enda Kenny pronounced during the US President’s Irish visit in 2011, then the impact of his drone warfare was a horrific nightmare for many people in the Middle East and beyond. As Commander in Chief of the US Military, Obama ultimately seamlessly continued the Bush-era neocon warmongering and murderous rampage, without missing a beat, despite his stated good intentions.
Guantanamo Bay torture centre
For almost a quarter of a century approximately 780 detainees have been held in this notorious torture camp which according to Amnesty International, “stands as a symbol of the gross human rights abuses of the US Government”.
On his inauguration in 2009 President Barack Obama pledged to close it within a year of taking up office. While many detainees were released by Obama, two years after his inauguration there were still 172 prisoners held at Guantanamo with no prospect of trial or release. Among these prisoners were an 89-year-old Afghan villager with dementia and a 14-year-old kidnap victim. As of August this year, 15 prisoners remain, of which only 9 have been charged with crimes. That means 765 prisoners have either been released without charge or have committed suicide.
Amnesty International, and many of the released detainees, claim that none of the detainees has had a fair trial and that many of them have been tortured. Not only did Obama fail hopelessly in his promise to close this horrific torture camp, but he also continued George Bush’s policy of force-feeding hunger striking detainees.
The Arab Revolutions
Obama’s response to the millions of Arab citizens that rose up against mostly western-backed dictators from 2010, was either silently ambivalent or selectively interventionist. After the incredibly brave actions of the Egyptian masses, it took him and Hilary Clinton a week to acknowledge that the protesters had a point; that they were entitled to democracy as much as any other people.
Owen Jones, noted that: “even when the US-backed Mubarak dictatorship was on the ropes in Egypt, Obama’s administration remained a cheerleader, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arguing that the “Egyptian Government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people”. Her language and tone alone expose her complicity, and that of Obama.
Obama fully supported the despotic Arab dictatorships from 2010. That year he signed an arms deal with Saudi Arabia worth €60 billion, the biggest in US history, while this dictatorial regime murdered its own citizens and, in 2011, helped the Bahrain dictatorship to brutally crush pro-democracy protests. US supplied arms were used to eventually quell the Arab Revolutions.
NATO bombing of Libya
NATO’s so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’ fig leaf in Libya in 2011 under UN Resolution 1973 was little more than a cover for imperial domination. Western leaders, not least Obama, had been frightened by the Arab Revolutions and with the internal conflict in Libya they jumped at the opportunity to intervene in order to reassert their influence in the region and control the oil flow.
The initial proclaimed no-flight zone and arms embargo, to ostensibly protect the people of Benghazi, became a firestorm of imperial power as NATO flew 26,500 sorties over eight months, including 7,000 bombing sorties which killed thousands of Libyans and destabilised and destroyed the country thus contributing hugely to the anarchic mess that it became. One such bombing strike reportedly incinerated tens of civilians near Zlitan in August 2011.
NATO’s claim of ‘humanitarian intervention’ just rings hollow given the obvious mission creep towards regime change and the fact that Obama and his fellow NATO warlords were arming other tyrannical dictators at the same time.
‘Defence’ spending in general rose to €200 billion under Obama. This included in 2014 increased US military aid to Israel to a staggering $38 billion over ten years, i.e. $3.8 billion per year. He also oversaw Israel’s onslaught on Gaza in the summer of 2014, including accelerating deliveries of arms when requested by Israel. Obama’s last act was to provide Israel with its biggest ever allotment of annual arms funding.
Russia, Ukraine and US meddling
Obama played a key role in events which have resulted in the current Ukraine catastrophe. Continuing the Bush-era meddling in Ukraine (with a view to embroiling Russia in a conflict which U.S. planners hoped would repeat the Soviet failure in Afghanistan), his official for European affairs Victoria Nuland actively took part in the protests against the democratically elected president Yanukovych because he had refused an IMF/EU ‘bailout’ deal, which would have sold out Ukraine to western predatory capitalists.
When Russia responded to the forced removal of Yanukovych from office in February 2014 by invading Crimea, instead of trying to broker a deal between the two sides, Obama’s government massively armed the Ukraine government under the so-called ‘Ukraine Freedom Support Act’ of September that year. This fuelled the disastrous 8-year civil war to follow. Meanwhile the replacement to Yanukovych dutifully set about gutting Ukraine by passing Washington’s approved ‘reforms’, while failing to stand up to the far-right Ukrainian nationalists by passing the Minsk deal, which could have averted today’s ongoing bloodbath.
While the IAWM has always condemned Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which we still do, it must be recognised that western meddling, including that by Obama’s government, has contributed to this disastrous situation. Diplomacy and peace talks were and are the only way out of this dangerous morass.
The US backed Gaza genocide
Obama, like other senior Democrats, has long defended “Israel’s right to defend itself”, including presumably outside its UN-recognised territory, and has nothing to say about the genocide enabled by the US and other western imperial powers. This genocide is a logical conclusion of decades-long US support for the ethno-nationalist Zionist state, some of that during Obama’s terms as President.
Ultimately, the priority for Obama, like all US Presidents, is that Israel must remain America’s attack dog in the Middle East, thus ignoring the human rights of the Palestinians.
Freedom of the City of Dublin
Barack Obama was granted the freedom of the city of Dublin yesterday from Dublin City Council and was interviewed by prominent journalist Fintan O’Toole. It will not be the first time Dublin’s merchant class has fallen over itself to suck up to foreign imperialists by celebrating a notorious warmonger. In 1805 the aldermen set up a ‘Nelson Committee’ to celebrate their fallen hero who had helped secure the high seas for their business interests. The fact that he represented a plundering empire which was also feeding off the misery of Irish people did not seem to occur to these distinguished money-grubbers.
Barack Obama’s foreign policy legacy is ultimately soaked in blood, whatever his hollow words. This invitation represents nothing less than the Irish elites succumbing to the wilful forgetfulness with which the US government tries to imbue all other governments. The honour should be rescinded, even at this late stage. No former US President should be formally welcomed in Ireland, particularly one so blood-soaked and at this time of the US enabled Israeli genocide of the people of Palestine.
Jim Roche and Mark Price are members of the Steering Committee of the Irish Anti-War Movement, www.irishantiwar.org
