“The ‘New American Century’ proclaimed by the neoconservatives came to an abrupt end on September 6 at the G20 meeting in Russia,” Paul Craig Roberts said this weekend. “The leaders of most of the world’s peoples told [President Barack] Obama that they do not believe him and that it is a violation of international law if the US government attacks Syria without UN authorization.”
Identifying President Obama with the neoconservatives is an impactful statement from Roberts. An American economist, he served as Assistant Treasury Secretary in the Reagan Administration and was noted as a co-founder of Reaganomics. Neoconservatives-who primarily push for religious opposition of evil via military power, with calculated focus on the Middle East and Islam-held influential positions in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations.
Still, Roberts, a columnist for Creators Syndicate, clarified his view in his weekend writing:
[Russian President Vladimir] Putin told the assembled world leaders that the [Syrian] chemical weapons attack was “a provocation on behalf of the armed insurgents in hope of the help from the outside, from the countries which supported them from day one.” In other words, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Washington-the axis of evil.
China, India, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, and Argentina joined Putin in affirming that a leader who commits military aggression without the approval of the UN Security Council puts himself “outside of law.”
In other words, if you defy the world, Obama, you are a war criminal.
Realizing opposition against his plan was rising, Obama last week-even while at the G20-was also taking his plan to Congress. After all, Congress has given the last two presidents basically everything they’ve wanted for hawking, ranging from invasions of other countries to creating a surveillance state in America. But Congress, who appeared to be leaning Obama’s way early, evidently began hearing from their more-than-skeptical constituents. As a result, opposition to the president began to grow, particularly in the House of Representatives.
Seeing support waning in Washington, Obama has decided to present his endless-war continuum on television, planning to make an address Tuesday. He’ll be talking to an American people experiencing a $1 trillion credit-card debt, a $1 trillion college-loan debt, a $17 trillion national debt, infrastructure repair requirements of $2 trillion, a still staggering unemployment rate and most job creation going to low-scale and part-time jobs. In other words, he’ll be addressing a less-than-happy public. But, odds are, he won’t address those negative economic points.
The president will be banking (good word for him and who he really supports) that the audience will buy his argument that the Assad regime, and not the Syrian insurgents, have used chemical weapons-even though that’s not the way the United Nations and the G20 countries have observed it.
He’ll also be banking that the American public has no sense of history, particularly regarding the U.S. government’s extensive assaults with chemical weapons. Peculiar Progressive offered a column on that last week. You can read that here.
It appears that Obama finally may have carried his efforts at abusive power abroad and at home too far. We’ve traced those efforts over the past couple of years in columns covering his endless-war invasions ranging from drone strikes in Pakistan to military maneuvers in Mali, to the current Syrian crisis; and in his tyranny at home ranging from massive surveillance to, when he was campaigning, avoiding the five vital issues facing America.
He’s hoping that on Tuesday, he’ll be talking to an uninformed public, and he’ll probably be right. But he’ll also be addressing an exhausted American public, and he may not be able to overcome that.
