America has the Exclusive Right to Bomb the World

US Secretary of State John Kerry meeting Syrian rebels

The past few months since the Syrian chemical weapon incident have seen a sensational back and forth action in international politics. On the one hand, Obama had played a very safe but misleading role in the resolution of the conflict.

Obama cautious on the outcome of British Commons vote

There is no denying the American president played his Democrat-cards well. As the representative of the party supposedly-opposed to wars abroad (unlike the Republicans), he halfheartedly  rallied for an intervention on the Syrian conflict by waiting for the outcome of the British House of Commons on their vote against an attack on Syria.

The epic August 30 disavowal against David Cameron’s support for another British-and-American misadventure reassured the international community that a decade is not too distant to forget the humiliation and outcome of the Iraq and Afghan carnage wrought by the United States. Despite the UK's backing out of the Syria strike, Obama says the US will "continue to consult" its British ally.

Obama ‘consults’ Congress on Syria intervention

In a ‘true’ Democrat move, Obama, the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, played again a safe but misleading path to a ‘resolution’ on the Syria conflict by presenting Congress intelligence reports that apparently proved Bashar al-Assad’s hands on the most recent chemical attack. Certainly, on the back of Obama’s head, he knows he will be denied the vote he needs for authorization of another ‘coalition of the willing’ on Syria.

Now who could deny Obama’s heroism after the Congress turn-down? Undeniably in his Oval Office, the president is whispering he did what he could but that Congress was to blame for a failure to authorize the bombing of another Muslim country. At a lecture at the University of Michigan, David North described the US Syria policy as possibly a “carefully planned diplomatic masterstroke.”

American media’s disgusting propaganda  against Syria

Below the official Washington statements, the media, headed by CNN, has been skillfully playing their deception, including:

• The dropping of the word ‘alleged’ chemical weapons use from news

• That if it weren't for America’s threat, the Syrian government will not be willing to negotiate (from the beginning, Bashar Al-Assad and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed a peaceful resolution of the conflict, and so the willingness-to-negotiate trophy should go to Russia, not the US)

• That Syria’s possession of chemical weapons violates international rules, forgetting that this is the ‘best’ Syrian deterrent against Israel’s far more destructive and illegal possession of nuclear weapons

• That the Syrian rebels are being likened to the ‘freedom fighters’ supported by the West and Saudi Arabia against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan back in the 80s

• In lieu of the threat to use force, there is no mention on how extensive the West supports the rebels in Syria. In fact, the decision to use force is in large part dictated by the desperate situation of the Syrian rebels

Russia’s role in conflict resolution

If there is any other international leader who should be eulogized for brokering a deal on the removal of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, it should be Russian president Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin leader knows that a peace deal is the only path to Syria’s return to normalcy, and he knew this from the beginning. Record-wise, Putin was a staunch renouncer of Western interventionism in the past.

In a recent gathering with academics and research analysts in Russia, he felt comfortable in criticizing the West’s double standards (especially with Israel), hypocrisy, and moral decline. Vis-à-vis Israel, the Russian leader proposed to eliminate weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, which happens to include Israel’s secret nukes and Syria’s chemical weapons.

Also at the recent Shanghai Security Organization (SCO) meeting held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Putin insisted that “military interference from outside the country without a UN Security Council sanction is admissible” and that the summit jointly opposed “Western intervention in Syria, as well as the loosening of the internal and regional stability in the Middle East.”

As in the past, China, for its part, mostly favors Russia’s foreign policy. At the SCO meeting, Chinese president Xi Jinping expressed his country's opposition to a Western-led strike against Syria, which is a close ally of Iran,  a major energy supplier to China.

The Iran Response

Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani, perceived as a moderate statesman, attended the SCO meeting, where he agreed on keeping Syria’s chemical weapons under international control, adding that this has given “hope that we will be able to avoid a new war in the region.”

'Humanitarian' Killing Spree: The Case of Qaddafi

 

What a difference a decade makes, as they say. Qaddafi's death has spread euphoria across the Arab world, a celebration we can call as delayed. Why? The same euphoria was felt  elsewhere back in the early 2000s as diplomatic ties between Libya and the West gained new heights. In the years following Qaddafi's decision to abandon development of weapons of mass destruction, Libya saw a renaissance of close ties with the West: then British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Qaddafi in 2004, the first such visit since 1943; US lifts its trade embargo on the country; and the EU followed by lifting arms embargo.

The timing could not be more right for the West, the Iraq war has just begun and how to keep it going without hurting the economy too badly than inviting themselves to explore and exploit Libya's natural resources? Looking back from this year, we can only see how the West, for a decade now, is busy shopping for oil across the planet.

2008 for Libya and the West becomes more intimate as then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice meets Qaddafi in Tripoli, the first such visit since 1953.  Italy's leader Silvio Berlusconi then agrees to invest billions in Libya.

2009 brought Qaddafi closer to the leaders who will betray him in the future: he makes a controversial visit to Italy and there had to shake hands with Barack Obama while on a G8 summit.

But the West won't allow the world to see this renewed intimacy, so as the Arab Spring of 2011 arrived, a new policy on Libya was drafted. Thanks to the uprising, we can only imagine how some countries saw this as the most opportune time to act, and act fast. UN authorizes a no-fly zone in Libya basing the decision on false accusations that Qaddafi is bombing its own people. The resolution made it clear that: arms embargo applies, and that no ground troops and mercenaries are allowed to 'roam' Libya. All these were violated by NATO: the 'humanitarian' mission gave arms to the rebels while 'special ops' helped the rebels gain ground by secretly dropping mercenaries off Tripoli's shores. Today it is no secret; these secret forces are hailed for being strategic in helping pin down the unpopular leader.

So what now? I suspect there is power politics here as well, as hindsight; the Libyan humanitarian operation might be part of a larger agenda to isolate the Chinese from investing and having leverage in the African continent. Are we not tired of seeing Africans becoming under the boots of the West? Can we give the BRICs a chance to drive change and cultivate a wider policy of development for Africa? As far as history goes, Africa is nothing but the West's slave and resource exploitation waste land.

We can only speculate what happens to this energy-rich country. Qaddafi's death is an opportune time to rebuild Libya in the eyes of the West, as if anything, Afghanistan and Iraq serves a recent testament to the kind of 'democracy' Western interventions bring to these countries.