Barak Obama RIP. He Was The Future Once.

Obama Speaks To His Allies In The Middle East

Obama died in the Oval Office durIng his address on the Iraq 'withdrawal'. He wanted credit for concluding Operation Iraqi Freedom - a term he deliberately invoked - with the pullout of combat brigades from the land America and its supine allies had devastated for seven and a half years. He proceeded right on schedule - the schedule provided for him by the Bush administration in its Status of Forces Agreement with what is laughingly called the Iraqi government. July 30, 2009 was the date handed to him by George W. Bush, and Aug. 31, 2010 was the date he met.

That, though, wasn't what was principally repugnant in Obama's speech. Nor should we begrudge him the cruel nonsense about his hopes for the future of the country the Coalition have crippled if not destroyed. No, what was truly indefensible was his Orwellian whitewash of the war itself. A few caveats aside, this was the speech that Bush himself might have given had he still been in office. For example -
Iraq was, "a war to disarm a state [that] became a fight against an insurgency."

Eh? The Bush rationale for the war was that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened the world. Those weapons, of course, did not exist, and the assertion that they did, as Dick Cheney acknowledged, was no more than a pretext for a war being waged in pursuit of regional hegemony and resource control. In other words, if Hussein's WMD had not existed they would have been invented - and, guess what, they were. No more cynical a remark may ever have been made by a ranking public official. Yet here was Obama giving the imprimatur of his presidency to the myth of WMD, thus offering it as the official executive version of the war.

The point is a legally as well as morally critical one. If Hussein did not palbably threaten us or possess the capacity to do so, and if responsible parties in the Bush administration knew this to be the case, then we had no casus belli, and the invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression as defined in the Nuremberg Code and a wide body of international law. Notoriously, Bush, Blair and their minions have escaped not only judgment but proper investigation for the Iraq war (and much else) under the Obama administration.

Obama went on to say, that US troops "fought in a faraway place for people they never knew. They stared into the darkest of human creations - war - and helped the Iraqi people seek the light of peace."

Orwell's Big Brother might have blushed at that.