The world is learning what U.S. senatorial candidate Barack Obama meant on October 2, 2002,
when he told a Chicago crowd that he did not oppose all wars. “What I
am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.” We now
know that President Obama is committed to full spectrum,
no-holds-barred, war-without-boundaries against all potential resistance
to U.S. imperial rule, anywhere on the planet – a project he considers
neither rash nor dumb. At stake is survival – not of the people and
government of the United States, which face no existential threat from
any quarter, but of an empire whose self-defined strategic interests
encompass the entire globe. There is a terrifying logic to Washington’s
frenzy: when the systemic structure is collapsing, it must be propped up
everywhere.
President Obama’s contribution to the disintegration of the global
order is awesome; he is a great innovator. Whereas other U.S. leaders
were content to simply violate international law with regularity, Obama
has rewritten the statutes. The very concept of national sovereignty has
been discarded in favor of a kind of universal parole status overseen
by a pyramidal “international community” with the United States at the
top. National self-determination, the bedrock of international law – is
now treated as a franchise, to be issued or withdrawn at the whim of any
coalition the U.S. is able to assemble. For Haiti, a simple troika of
the U.S., Canada and France constituted a quorum empowered to erase 200
years of independence. For Libya, the recognized government’s capital
crime was its threat to quell a jihadist revolt in one of its cities.
The Syrian state has been condemned for resisting tens of thousands of
foreign-financed killers who recognize no earthly law whatsoever. The
U.S. backs a coup against the lawfully elected government of Ukraine by
the direct descendants of Nazis. Simultaneously, Obama threatens the
democratically elected government of Venezuela with dire consequences if
it harms a hair on the head of rioters bankrolled and directed by
Washington.
-- Glen Ford, "Obama’s War Against Civilization" (Black Agenda Report).