Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

By Glen Ford
May 11, 2011 - blackagendareport.com (http://blackagendareport.com/content/obama%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Ckill-will%E2%80%9D-strategy)


In the space of a few days in May, the United States launched its bin Laden operation, NATO targeted Moammar Gaddafi’s residence while the Libyan leader was present, killing his youngest son and three grandchildren, and U.S. drones tried to obliterate American citizen (http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/05/07/awlaki) Anwar al-Awlaki, personally marked for death by President Obama.

It’s on. The United States, frightened out of its imperial wits by the sudden eruption of the Arab Reawakening, has embarked on a new version of Shock and Awe designed to terrorize both old and emerging forces into submission to Empire. President Barack Obama, whom deluded progressives continue to insist represents the lesser of U.S. major party evils, has activated, in ways that even George Bush never dared, the operational capacity of America’s Full-Spectrum Dominance machine, in the process discarding layers of international law and established norms of behavior among nations.

It was inevitable that, once the United States set out to develop a post-Soviet capacity “to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations” worldwide, acting alone if necessary, Full-Spectrum Dominance (http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289) would devolve into a policy of “kill-at-will.” Far from abandoning George Bush’s world-dictatorial ambitions in the wake of U.S. military and diplomatic defeat in Iraq, Barack Obama is attempting to impose a global regime similar to that inflicted on Latin America prior to 1976, when Operation Condor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor) sought regime change and wholesale elimination of Western Hemispheric “enemies” by terror and assassination. Operation Condor, which killed at least 60,000 people, was a collaborative Latin American anti-“communist” dirty war guided and financed by Washington. Building on George Bush’s War on Terror apparatus – a Full-Spectrum Dominance arsenal that includes bogus legal doctrines as well as awesome hi-tech weaponry and surveillance systems – Obama has enlisted European powers panicked by the prospect of political sea-change in the Arab world.


In a paroxysm of fear and rage at events unfolding across the Mediterranean Sea, French, British and Italian sub-imperial powers took the rhetorical lead in attempting to topple Moammar Gaddafi’s government in Libya. But Operation Odyssey Dawn was impossible from the start without full deployment of America’s unique logistical war infrastructure. It was, and remains, a United States operation, nominally under NATO and covered by the legalistic fig leaf of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973.

The U.S. and its allies instantly overran their dubious “humanitarian” mandate to “protect” civilians – a concept that never included sub-Saharan migrant workers (http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/libyan-%E2%80%9Chumanitarian), civilians in loyalist areas or loyalist civilians in “rebel” areas – to become the rebel’s close ground support air wing. Just this week, NATO ordered its Libyan underlings to vacate the outskirts of Brega (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/world/africa/10libya.html?adxnnl=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1305039606-kyFyOLzQE8uORWPLP0qFpQ), to create a free-fire zone in which to incinerate the oil town’s loyalist defenders. When NATO’s turkey-shoot was through, the rebels were given the all-clear to move in and slaughter the loyalist survivors – a feat that was only accomplished by force of Euro-American arms.

It is largely unimportant to the Americans that the trail mix of Libyan rebels can never claim to be legitimate heirs to power, having acted as enthusiastic indigenous surrogates for neocolonialism. The Americans reckoned that the proper response to the threat of a larger Arab rebellion against western domination must be a swift application of military force, a dramatic and irresistible re-entry into the Arab equation. President Obama indicated early on, in late March, that the end result will be an open-ended “international” occupation of the country. He said (http://blackagendareport.com/content/obama%E2%80%99s-north-african-war-face):

“…forty years of tyranny has left Libya fractured and without strong civil institutions. The transition to a legitimate government that is responsive to the Libyan people will be a difficult task. And while the United States will do our part to help, it will be a task for the international community, and – more importantly – a task for the Libyan people themselves.”

After a 41-year absence, U.S. power will be permanently re-implanted in Libya, under some flimsy international scheme such as the protectorate in which Haiti is encaged, nominally by the United Nations.


But first, Gaddafi must be physically removed. The Americans, thinly cloaked as NATO (as if a multinational neocolonial aggression is more legally legitimate than a solo crime), displayed their ability to “kill-at-will” with the attack on Gaddafi’s residence, the same weekend that bin Laden was erased. Whether the warhead “missed” Gaddafi by mistake or on purpose is open to dispute – that he can be taken out at will by American munitions, is not.

The White House confirmed its guilt by expressing no regrets for the murder of innocent children. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen acted as Mafia underboss, announcing (http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/time-running-out-for-libyas-gaddafi-nato-chief/) that Gaddafi’s “time is running out.”

The ultimatum is meant for anyone and everyone that threatens American empire. The First Black President has pressed forward the throttle on a full-spectrum, highly integrated system of calibrated aggression that is, in reality, a kind of doomsday weapon that shoots both ways. In the process of clumsily erecting a façade of jury-rigged international covers for overt military aggression, occupation and the theft of national sovereignty, the political-legal component of Full-Spectrum Dominance methodically ravages the very concept of international law, thus fouling the waters of international commerce and collaboration in which U.S. multinational corporations must operate. Obama, who won corporate backing as the white knight (!) who would reverse the international revulsion and backlash occasioned by Bush’s Iraq invasion, believes his legalistic ruses and selective multilateral alliances can mask a massive U.S. global offensive. He is fooling no one, but hopes to terrify everybody.

Obama’s global version of the 1970s Latin American Operation Condor has begun. But the condor is only a vulture that feeds on death. The rotting corpse is U.S. imperialism, itself.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Source: blackagendareport.com (http://blackagendareport.com/content/obama%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Ckill-will%E2%80%9D-strategy)