| | | The Nobel Peace Prize Is A Sick Joke
BARACK OBAMA
In 2009, Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people.” Before digging into Obama’s war crimes, I would like to add a few caveats. Obama is not exactly like Kissinger.
On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama did claim that he would meet with adversaries without preconditions. Furthermore, he followed through on this promise in two major ways. He successfully negotiated the Iran Deal and lifted the embargo on Cuba. These are not accomplishments that should be brushed aside. That being said, Obama’s diplomatic achievements are overshadowed by his imperialist failures. I also blame most of Obama’s failures on a lack of conviction in his values and not on any Machiavellian schemes. Most of Obama’s bad foreign policy decisions can be traced back to him getting rolled by people in the military industrial complex establishment like his CIA director John O. Brennan.
Barack Obama’s most reprehensible policy was his support of the Saudi Arabian-fueled genocide in Yemen. Obama authorized mid-air refueling to refuel Saudi bombers on average twice per day and he set up a Joint Planning Cell to give Saudi intelligence and logistical support to bomb Yemen.
Obama also approved 10s of billions in arms sales to Saudi Arabia that were used to devastate Yemen’s infrastructure and throw the country into a mass famine.
In 2016 alone, Obama’s policies led to the deaths of 63,000 Yemeni children. They died from preventable causes overwhelmingly linked to malnutrition. These deaths were caused by the Saudi bombing campaign and the de-facto blockade of humanitarian aid.
For example, Saudi Arabia, with US backing, bombed the cranes at the port of Hodeidah in August 2015. 70% of all humanitarian assistance to Yemen is channeled through Hodeidah. Bombing the cranes of the major port in this area is a war crime.
In fact, humanitarian aid groups warned that the US-backed August 2015 bombings would lead to mass child death in Yemen. The Obama administration’s support and aid of these siege warfare tactics was an abhorrent moral failure. It is highly unlikely that the war in Yemen would have even been possible without US support. Neither Saudi Arabia or the UAE had the ability to wage a sustained bombing campaign without outside support from a major imperialist power like the United States.
Barack Obama also authorized Operation Timber Sycamore, the CIA train-and-equip program in Syria. The multi-billion-dollar program armed and trained fighters to topple Assad. I personally believe that the Syrian conflict is not black and white. There is a lot of blame to go around. In my opinion, both pro-Assad and anti-Assad writers do not tell the entire complex story. Over half a dozen countries helped fuel the proxy war for different reasons, and Assad himself is not simply a victim of Western imperialism.
Those caveats aside, it is very clear that Timber Sycamore was a terrible idea that led to textbook mutual escalation that broke open the Syrian conflict further and might well be the reason that 100,000s more Syrians died. Billions of dollars were poured into “vetted” rebel groups. Many of these groups turned out to be Salafi jihadist groups and Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups that carried out ethnic murder and various other war crimes.
Among these groups that received either training or weapons were Ahrar al Sham, Jaysh al Islam, and Nour al-Din al-Zenki, all of whom have been accused of war crimes as per Amnesty International. The massive delivery of BGM-71 TOWs via Timber Sycamore is also sometimes cited (in my opinion correctly) as the policy that caused Russia to intervene in Syria. This is the aforementioned textbook case of mutual escalation.
Obama also set up a worldwide drone program that Noam Chomsky called “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times.” A study done in Afghanistan over a six-month period found that 90% of people killed in US drone strikes were not the intended targets. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is one resource that has documented the high civilian casualty rate that occurred under Obama’s drone program (and continued and oftentimes increased under Trump’s administration). |
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