Posted by John, December 11th, 2009 - under Imperialism, Just war, Nobel peace prize, United States, US imperialism.

Tags: Barack Obama

US President Barack Obama has used the lie of a just war to justify his killing of Afghan and Pakistani kids for the US profit system.

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech the Commander in Chief of the most powerful killing machine by far in the world, the man who has just sent an extra 30,000 US troops to kill and maim in Afghanistan, said:

The concept of a “just war” emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the forced used is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.

A just war is a justification for war. In the hands of the powerful it becomes a tool for the subjugation and repression of others in order to retain and extend their positions of strength.

It is no accident that Augustine, a catholic thinker, developed the theory for the Roman Emperors when the Church became the dominant state power and as the Empire’s power declined.

The Empire needed a theological and ideological justification for its bloody repression and the responses of the oppressed to it, and Augustine provided it. A catholic website describes the justification for imperialist mass murder in the following terms:

The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time: the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

there must be serious prospects of success;

the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition. These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the “just war” doctrine. The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

Yet it is all lies. What drives the ‘just war’ is the need to protect and extend US economic influence around the world.

Islamic jihad of the sword is the equivalent of the Christian just war theory. In the case of Muslims it is a jihad of the oppressed (often the oppressed middle class) against the oppressor.

Saying that is not to justify the actions of 9/11 or other attacks but to recognise that the major warmonger in society today is US imperialism, an imperialism which subjugates the Middle East for its own economic and political interests and as a consequence produces a backlash.

Nevertheless there is a symmetry in the views of Osama bin Laden and Barack Obama about a just war which cannot be ignored.

The difference is that bin Laden commands few troops and has little economic power to back up his murderous strategies and plans. Obama has the most powerful military in the world, a military which currently has troops in over 100 nations around the globe and which is waging major wars in two countries right now.

The US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are wars of terror.

Israel (and friendly dictators) are the main weapons for the US to suppress the Middle East, although the American invasion of Iraq was a continuation of that strategy and an attempt to both control the future supply of oil to China and to cower other non-compliant nations.

In democratic societies the need to provide a range of justifications for war becomes important. As Vietnam shows, sometimes rabid nationalism and the creation of a false enemy is not enough. Patriotism wanes as the number of body bags increase.

In th US the catholic bishops used just war theory to support the invasion of Afghanistan. They characterised the war as eliminating evil.

And yet the resident evil viewed objectively is not Al-Qaeda. It is US imperialism, the use of American military and economic power to bend the rest of the world to the interests of US capital.

Let me quote again Thomas Friedman(one of the most influential journalists in the US). He wrote some years ago in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree:

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

That seems pretty clear to me.

The rest of the world is a cornucopia for US capitalism, ripe for the picking as they want.

To enforce this new world order US imperialism has a military which is equal to the combined might of the next 16 nations.

It spends $569 billion a year on its killing machine. To put this in context the UN estimates it would take $20 billion as a stop gap emergency measure to feed the 2 billion starving or malnourished in the world.

Obama uses the second world war as an example of a just war. Again, this is not the case.

German imperialism was attempting to break out of it restrictions. The second world war continued the first as a battle for world economic dominance. Both wars were imperialist disputes.

The President argues that America has been a force for good. He cites the establishment of the United Nations (the US was a driving force) and the Marshall Plan for Europe.

Both were creatures of US imperialism. The UN of course can do nothing without American say so on the big issues.

The Marshall Plan was about reconstructing Europe as a vassal of the United States.

Even a brief look at America’s foreign adventures after the second world war removes any doubt the US is a force for good.

Israel, the armed wing of US imperialism in the region, has terrorised the peoples there since its establishment in 1948.

In 1953 the CIA engineered a coup against the democratically elected Mossadeq Government in Iran.

In 1956 Eisenhower sat back and allowed the Russians to destroy the Hungarian revolution because he, like Stalin, feared the possible outcome – a successful workers’ revolution.

The criminal blockade of the state capitalist Castro regime in Cuba since 1962 is an act of war which has contributed greatly to the suffering and impoverishment of the nation.

From 1959 till its defeat in 1975 the United States, as part of the ongoing war with Russian imperialism, sent hundreds of thousands of troops to subdue Vietnam.

During that war fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger, along with Richard Nixon, bombed Cambodia and Laos, killing or dispossessing millions. In Vietnam alone the Democrat and Republican mass murderers killed possibly 2 million people.

The defeat of US imperialism in Vietnam kept the beast in its lair for a decade. Then Ronald Reagan sent troops to invade Grenada as a first step in re-asserting US might through military means.

Iraq and Afghanistan are but the latest instalments in a sorry history of invasion and killing in the name of freedom that US imperialism has undertaken.

Obama justifies these military adventures by saying that there has been no third world war. Actually, that misunderstands much of the period after the second world war.

Until the late 80s, the world witnessed a contest between two major imperialist blocs – the Americans and Russians.

Couple this with restraining knowledge in the respective leaderships that war directly between the two would result in nuclear conflagration and the result is that the direct wars were driven elsewhere.

The two fought proxy wars across the globe to establish and retain their strength and weaken the other.

Today the United States is the sole world power, but it needs to keep any possible challengers at bay.

This means China, whose rates of growth suggest that at least numerically it will have a bigger economy than the US in about about a decade or two.

The paradox for the US is that its own economic growth and maybe survival is dependent on Chinese growth. So the US is searching for ways to help expand China economically but at the same time contain it militarily. Afghanistan and Iraq are two aspects of this policy of contradiction.

Obama used his speech to threaten recalcitrants like Iran and Burma, dictatorships which do not bow before US domination. America’s troop build up in Columbia, and its support for the new right wing dictatorship in Honduras, show too that is has Venezuela and perhaps Bolivia in its sights.

Obama heads a system that is intrinsically warlike.

One way to stop the terror of Obama’s imperialism is to build mass war movements across the Western world to force our rulers to back down. This is especially true in the belly of the beast, the US.

The task is daunting, but as Vietnam shows, the Left has done it before. We can do it again, especially since the logic of US capitalism will drive it to invade other countries. The killer will strike again.