Obama uses UN speech to threaten war against Iran
By Bill Van Auken
26 September 2012
President
Barack Obama postured before the United Nations Tuesday as the champion
of peace and democracy, while threatening war against Iran and
demanding a crackdown against the wave of anti-US demonstrations that
have swept the Middle East.
This, Obama’s fourth address to an
opening session of the UN General Assembly since taking office in 2009,
was saturated with hypocritical invocations of “American values” and
lies about Washington’s actions on the world stage.
The US
president delivered an unmistakable threat that the US is preparing to
launch yet another war of aggression, this time against Iran, with
potentially far bloodier consequences than those it has carried out in
Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade.
“Make no mistake: a
nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained,” Obama
declared. “It would threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of
Gulf nations, and the stability of the global economy. It risks
triggering a nuclear arms race in the region and the unraveling of the
non-proliferation treaty. That is why… the United States will do what we
must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
Asserting
that there is “still time” for the US to force Iran to cede to its
demands by means of diplomacy, he added, “that time is not unlimited.”
The
facts are that international inspectors have found no evidence that
Iran has embarked on a nuclear weapons program or is doing anything
other than developing nuclear power for peaceful purposes. Israel, which
is supposedly threatened with “elimination,” has built some 400 atomic
weapons while refusing to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and
categorically rejecting any inspection of its secret nuclear program. If
there is a threat of an arms race in the region and a breakdown of the
non-proliferation agreement, this Israeli nuclear stockpile is its
source.
Obama’s speech came one day after the US Treasury
Department claimed to have uncovered links between Iran’s state oil
company and the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, providing a
pretext for escalating its unilateral sanctions against banks doing
business with the company.
Meanwhile, the US has assembled its
largest ever armada in the Persian Gulf, including two aircraft carrier
battle groups, a new “forward staging base” vessel, and half of the US
Navy’s mine-sweeping fleet, all of which are participating in joint
exercises with warships from over 30 countries.
Much of the US
president’s 30-minute speech was dedicated to the recent upheavals that
swept the Middle East and predominantly Muslim countries in South Asia
and Africa, with crowds attacking US embassies in over a dozen capitals.
Describing the protests as “mindless violence,” Obama lumped them
together with the September 11 attack by an Islamist militia on the US
consulate and a CIA headquarters in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi
that killed US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
Obama
declared these events “an assault on the very ideals upon which the
United Nations was founded—the notion that people can resolve their
differences peacefully; that diplomacy can take the place of war.”
What
insolence! After a decade of US wars that have claimed the lives of
over a million Iraqis and Afghans, the US president is the last person
to lecture the people of the Middle East on how to “resolve their
differences peacefully” and the advantages of diplomacy over war.
Obama
added, “If we are serious about these ideals, we must speak honestly
about the deeper causes of this crisis.” However, he did no such thing.
Instead, he treated the anger against the US as merely the product of
the crude anti-Islamic video “Innocence of the Muslims” and of those who
promote “hatred of America, or the West, or Israel.”
There was
nothing in the speech about Washington’s wars, its unconditional support
for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, or its reliance on
dictatorial regimes and absolute monarchs to secure semi-colonial
control over the region and its energy resources.
Obama went on
to present a potted history of US reaction to the so-called “Arab
Spring” that began with working class uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt
early last year. Washington, he claimed, had “supported the forces of
change,” had been “inspired by the Tunisian protests,” had “insisted on
change in Egypt,” and had “supported a transition in Yemen, because the
interests of the people were not being served by a corrupt status quo.”
Anyone
familiar with the recent history of the region knows that the American
president is lying. The US government was so “inspired” by the revolt in
Tunisia that it approved a $12 million military aid package to the
dictatorial regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to help it beat
and shoot the demonstrators into submission.
It pursued the same
policy in Egypt, seeking to the bitter end to prop up Hosni Mubarak,
whose regime had been kept in power with US military aid and political
support for three decades. Only after it was clear that the two
dictators could no longer cling to power did the US shift policy,
working to salvage as much as it could of the old regimes.
As for
Yemen, the US-backed “transition” has kept in power a regime that is
virtually identical to the old one, with the dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh
replaced by his vice president, and with the US carrying out far more
intense military intervention, with dozens of drone assassinations and
special forces raids.
Obama presented the US-NATO war for
regime-change in Libya as well as the attempt by Washington and its
allies to topple the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria as a
continuation of this “Arab Spring.”
In Libya, he claimed, the US
intervened under a UN mandate to protect civilians. In reality, it
brazenly violated this mandate, waging an aggressive war that led to the
deaths of tens of thousands of Libyans. The proxy forces it supported
on the ground included the same Islamist militia elements that killed
the US ambassador in Benghazi. Its aims, as in Iraq, were not
humanitarian or democratic, but predatory—principally to assert US
hegemony over Libyan oil reserves, while denying control to its rivals,
particularly China.
Obama repeated his demand for regime-change
in Syria while expressing concern that the current civil war “not end in
a cycle of sectarian violence.” In reality, the US has done everything
it can to stoke sectarian warfare as part of its scheme to mobilize the
Sunni monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, as well as Al
Qaeda-linked militias, in a campaign to bring down the Syrian government
and thereby weaken Washington’s main regional rival, Iran.
The
US president offered no proposal whatsoever on the Israel-Palestine
question. Instead, he called for the region to “leave behind those who
thrive on conflict, and those who reject the right of Israel to exist.”
This amounts to a blanket endorsement of Israel’s illegal occupation and
its continuous expansion of settlements in West Bank and East
Jerusalem.
Echoing the bellicose rhetoric of his predecessor,
Obama spoke three times in his address about “bringing to justice” those
who attacked Americans abroad. It was a not-so-subtle reminder of the
US president’s status as “assassin-in-chief,” holding weekly meetings at
the White House to choose targets for execution by US drone attacks.
The
hollow rhetoric, hypocritical sermonizing and bullying threats received
a tepid response from the assembled delegates. The US president had not
a single new initiative or original conception to offer. The speech
only made clear that his administration will continue to employ military
aggression, economic pressure and CIA destabilization to secure US
control over the Middle East and its energy wealth, all the while posing
as the patron of “democracy.”
The whole world should rise with one voice against the Evil Empire , USA and destroy it before it destroys the world.
Southernglory1
