Why Barack Obama could not be euphoric about killing Osama Bin Laden

Osama bin Laden was assassinated on May 2, 2010. That's six years ago, almost to the date.US President Barack Obama watched it all.  Live.  And he made a speech.  Six years on, things haven't changed.  They've got worse.  'Afghanistan' and 'Pakistan' have been cloned and the clones deployed in other parts of the world. A good time as any to revisit Obama's 'Osama Moment'.  This article was first published in the Daily News of May 4, 2010. 

The news of Osama bin Laden being killed naturally saw an avalanche of internet comments; after all, US forces have been searching for the man for almost a decade now.  As I searched for Barack Obama's ‘I-killed-Osama’ speech online, I was surprised to find a comment that seemed unusually down-in-the mouth.  David Brody, Chief Political Correspondent, CBN News, had apparently wanted to see a chest-thumping President Barack Obama.  Obama was not euphoric enough, according to Brody. 

It is reported that wild celebrations had swept across the United States of America. They celebrated and demonstrated such triumphalism that the less informed might have thought the US had wiped Al Qaeda off the face of the earth.  Obama, like his predecessor had set a modest target (capturing and killing a single individual). He had in the process killed hundreds of thousands more, and turned more than half a million people into IDPs. These could not have been the main reasons for Obama’s somber response.

Brody himself has offered an apology of sorts. He says he should have read Proverbs 24:17 in the Bible before posting his comment (‘Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when he stumbles, do not let your heart rejoice.’), and believes that in word and tone Obama had embodied the quote.  Had he read more of the Bible he might have found the real reason for Obama’s low-tone response. 

I am pretty sure that Barack Obama was appropriately humbled by Matthew 5: 38-48 (Judging others), Matthew 7: 1-5 (Love for enemies), and Matthew 7: 12 (‘So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets’).Barack, Brody should have known, has more intelligence than Dubya Bush, and he knew who cast the first stone.  He knew whose friend Osama was before he was tagged ‘Enemy No 1’. 

Barack’s low-tone, one might think, had to do with a decision to write his own speech (given the importance of the moment), and having his speech-writer blue-pencil huge chunks of this draft.  Barack can correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the following paragraphs would have been deleted.

‘On the 30^th of April, a missile fired by a NATO warplane, with our full blessings, hit a house in Tripoli.  This house belonged to the son of Muammar Gaddhafi, Saif al-Arab.  The missile killed Saif al-Arab.  It also killed his 3 little children, all under 12 years of age.  I regret to say that this was not anticipated when we moved to establish a No-Fly Zone.  Wars are not the surgical affairs we make them out to be.  This is why we turned ‘collateral’ into a military term.  I am happy to inform you that in just two days, we’ve demonstrated a marked improvement in precision. We went from killing babies to killing the world’s most ruthless terrorist, Osama Bin Laden.

‘As I wrote those words, something occurred to me that sobered me no end.  Bin Laden was not the world’s most ruthless terrorist until 2 years ago.  He earned that dubious title courtesy the Sri Lankan security forces.  And if I sound less euphoric than you expected me to be, it is because, whereas our forces took out a terrorist leader who was more figurehead and less strategist, their Sri Lankan counterparts politically, ideologically and militarily not just outmaneuvered all efforts to scuttle the military offensive launched against terrorism, but took out both leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran and the entire terrorist leadership of the dreaded LTTE.  Let me add, that my chagrin also derives from full knowledge that my representative in Sri Lanka, contrary to our declared policy of zero-tolerance, did his utmost to bail out the terrorists right up to the last moment. 

‘I am sobered, therefore, even as I report, and we celebrate the fact of Bin Laden being killed; even as we reiterate that he was a terrorist responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children, we must acknowledge that in the process of finding and killing this man, our forces killed thousands of innocent men, women and children.  Ladies and gentlemen, 2752 innocent people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.  Ladies and gentlemen, I am ashamed to say that we’ve put to shame the notion of eye-for-an-eye.’ 

Barack Obama’s grimace would have got worse when he realized that his speechwriter had deftly cut-pasted a perspective-giving paragraph, making it out that what he had said about the impact of US military action was in fact about the victims of 9/11:  

‘And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace. Nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us, leaving a gaping hole in our hearts.’

The last sentence had read, ‘Over one hundred thousand people given the collateral tag; easy for the tag-giver, but leaving nothing but a gaping hole in the hearts of those whose loved ones were killed in the name of our National Security.’

Here’s another crossed-off section. 

‘Ladies and gentlemen, there were no civilian casualties in this attack.  I was proud of the team that carried out this operation.  On the other hand, I remembered once again how Sri Lanka tackled terrorists.  I asked myself a few questions:

‘“If Bin Laden surrounded himself with a human shield of 300,000 people, including children, pregnant women, the elderly and the sick, would I have risked the lives of my troops to save them? Would I have entertained any suggestion by anyone to negotiate a surrender, or worse to facilitate Bin Laden’s escape?  Had our troops eliminated the Al Qaeda leadership and rescued those innocent civilians, would we have treated them any better than we have treated the half a million refugees that the execution of this operation to capture a single man has produced?”

‘The answer to all these questions, ladies and gentlemen, is “no”.  Sadly.

‘We stated that we were not at war with Islam, but the harsh truth is that it is those who belonged to this faith that we slaughtered in their thousands, almost as though non-Christians were by the very fact “fair game”.’

Barack, I am sure, frowned as he read the following lines: 

‘Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies.’

If consternation on Barack’s face turned a shade darker at this point, Brody might have wondered why.  Perhaps it’s because it is a copy-paste of something Mahinda Rajapaksa, President of Sri Lanka said after defeating the world’s truly most ruthless terrorist outfit, the LTTE. 

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who can be reached at malindasenevi@gmail.com. Twitter: malindasene

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Barack Obama (Unplugged) at the United Nations (Version 2014)

Barack Obama, President of the United States of America addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations last week.  He made a long and impassioned speech, touching on key global issues but as expected justifying everything that the USA has done and does and making a case for ‘more of the same whether you like it or not’.    The man is educated and even called an intellectual.  He can talk.  He can turn black into white and convince blacks that he’s black and whites that he is white.  

Such a man can get away with anything if given the opportunity to talk.  But what if someone entered the wrong script into the teleprompter?  What if Obama is everything he promised to be and not what he turned out to be?  What would have been his original script in such a scenario? We can indulge in a bit of harmless, drone-less conspiracy, right?

Mr President, Mr Secretary General, fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen:

Each year we come together to reaffirm the founding vision of this institution.   Those who built the United Nations believed it could allow us to resolve conflicts, enforce rules of behavior and build habits of cooperation.   Today, looking back, we can say with certainty that the awful carnage of two world wars did not shift our thinking.  

For most of recorded history, individual aspirations were subject to the whims of tyrants and empires.  Divisions of race and religion and tribe were settled through the sword and the clash of armies.  This has not changed in the last 69 years.  The idea that nations and peoples could come together in peace to solve their disputes and advance a common prosperity remains unimaginable. 

Speaking of tyrants and empires, when has my country ever champion the aspirations of individual countries?  When did we not act as tyrant and as empire?  We should not ask ourselves whether we possess the wisdom and courage as nation-states and members of an international community to meet new and profound challenges. We should ask ourselves wisdom and courage are enough when some of us place greater faith in power and arrogance. 

What did you do to put an end to war, someone might inquire regarding my tenure as President of the United States.  I can tell you that five years ago, nearly 180,000 Americans were serving in harm’s way in Iraq but that now we’ve quit that country.  I can tell you that as we ready to end operations in Afghanistan we’ve already dismantled the core of al Qaeda.  I can say we’re working diligently to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay.  I can tell you that we are targeting those who pose an imminent threat to the United States and that there’s near certainty of no civilian casualties when we use drones.  Someone would say, ‘you’ve taken war to another level’.  This is true.

First of all, imminent threat to the United States is an easy excuse because it is subjective and unverifiable.  We invaded Iraq, after all, to eliminate non-existent weapons of mass destruction.  We made the al Qaeda. We made the Islamic State.  They were not accidents.  They provided excuses to do what all empire-builders do: ‘bombs in – booty out’.  The IS, in fact, is helping us do what we always wanted to do in Syria without a by-your-leave from this institution. 

So it would be wrong to say that aid cannot keep pace with the suffering of the wounded and displaced.  We made sure that there’s enough carnage to make aid ineffective. Well, that’s not exactly true.  Aid-ineffectiveness, to us, is ‘collateral’.  It’s easy.  All we had to do was pick some people, call them moderates, arm them, turn some of them into extremists and then pretend to go after them when in fact all that matters is that they occupy some territory in a country also occupied by people we want to eliminate. 

We will say, for example, that Syria used chemical weapons.  We don’t have to prove it; when you have power, saying is enough (like weapons of mass destruction – non-existent).  We don’t say, you will notice, that Israel used chemical weapons.    We won’t say that the USA has used chemical weapons or that we’ve killed more people in more countries than any other country has done over the last 100 years. 

My country is chastised for meddling in the region, accused of having a hand in all manner of conspiracy, but it is also blamed for not doing enough to solve the region’s problems. This might seem to be a contradiction but the truth is that the complaints are from people we can call dependents with horrendous track records.  Take a poll and the overwhelming majority would say ‘get the hell out!’

Rest assured, ladies and gentlemen, that the USA will use all elements of power including military force to secure our core interests in the Middle East. In other words, we really don’t give a s*** about the general or majority concerns of this assembly.  We’ve turned the Middle East upside down politically and called it ‘Arab Spring’. Gumption? Yes.  That’s the privilege of the arrogant who have the power to name and misname things, people and even countries. 

The danger for the world is that the United States may disengage from all this and thereby create a vacuum of leadership that no other nation is ready to fill.  I am not kidding you here.  The ‘danger’ here is not to the world but to the USA.  But think about it, if it is about a single nation calling the shots, why should we gather here and talk as though it’s a one country one vote institution? 

Today we tell the world that without unsanctioned action (we added the label ‘international’ for reasons of courtesy) Libya would now be engulfed in civil war and bloodshed, never mind the fact that Libya IS engulfed in all that. 

I know what side of history I want the United States to be on.  I know where we stand.  You might think we are embarrassed but we are not.  Sorry. 

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Obama Unplugged at the UNGA*

Disclaimer: Barack Obama, President of the United States of America addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York on September 23, 2010.  President Obama is a Nobel Laureate, an intellectual (at least compared to his predecessor) and a man who understands words.  I am convinced that text that’s been doing the rounds was a dud.  I am convinced that chunks have been left out.  This is an exercise in correction.  I am taking his rhetoric and filling the blanks.  What’s given in UPPER CASE LETTERS is, I am convinced, paraphrasing of what was left out. No, this is not the entire speech, but includes key sections that appear to have been deleted.

REMEMBER ME AND THIS SPEECH. THIS IS THE FIRST TIME A US PRESIDENT IS BEING HONEST.

Underneath ALL THE challenges to our security and prosperity lie deeper fears: that ancient hatreds and religious divides are once again ascendant; that a world which has grown more interconnected has somehow slipped beyond our control.  I DO NOT NEED TO GIVE A LECTURE ON INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OR TRACE THIS HISTORY FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND THAT MY COUNTRY AND OUR ALLIES HAVE BEEN LARGELY RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS STATE OF AFFAIRS.

As for our common security, America is waging a more effective fight against al Qaeda, while winding down the war in Iraq. LET ME ADMIT RIGHT NOW THAT THE WAR ON IRAQ WAS ILLEGAL (AS MY BRITISH FRIEND NICK CLEGG SAID RECENTLY) AND UNWARRANTED.  IN SHORT IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.  IT WAS ABOUT OIL.  WE WILL LEAVE ONLY WHEN WE ARE CONVINCED ABOUT CONTROLLING OIL AND A SECURE MARKET FOR OUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES.  AS FOR THE A QAEDA, WE’VE DISPLACED CLOSE TO A MILLION PEOPLE, KILLED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS AND ARE NOWHERE CLOSE TO FINDING OSAMA BIN LADEN. INDEED WE’VE EFFECTIVELY PRECIPITATED A RESURRECTION OF THE TALIBAN. AGAIN, IT IS ABOUT OIL.

As we pursue the world's most dangerous extremists, we're MAKING SURE THAT WE ARE NOT denying them the world's most dangerous weapons. WE MAKE WEAPONS WE DON’T NEED.  IT IS LOGICAL TO SELL THEM. IN FACT IF THE ARMS INDUSTRY IS FISH, THEN WARS ARE THE MIGHTY OCEANS.  WE NEED WARS. WE LIKE WAR AS GEORGE CARLIN ONCE SAID. WE ARE INDEED ‘A WAR-LIKE PEOPLE’. I PLEAD: IT IS OUR CULTURE.

As part of our effort on non-proliferation, I offered the Islamic Republic of Iran an extended hand last year, and underscored that it has both rights and responsibilities as a member of the international community. I also said -- in this hall -- that Iran must be held accountable if it failed to meet those responsibilities. And that is what we have done. WELL, IT IS NOT THAT THE USA HAS A MORAL AUTHORITY TO TALK ABOUT NON-PROLIFERATION.  I PLEAD, ‘NATIONAL INTEREST’.

Iran is the only party to the NPT that cannot demonstrate the peaceful intentions of its nuclear program, and those actions have consequences. Through U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, we made it clear that international law is not an empty promise. NOT THAT I GIVE A JIT ABOUT SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTIONS OF COURSE.  WE WILL NEVER TAKE ISSUE WITH ISREAD FOR GIVING THE FINGER TO THIS AUGUST BODY WHEN IT COMES TO SUCH RESOLUTIONS, YOU WOULD NOTE. BUT HEY, THAT’S US DOING THE RIGHT THING IN TERMS OF NATIONAL INTEREST.

CLIMATE CHANGE: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I AM ASHAMED.  I WILL TAKE A ‘PASS’ ON THIS.

We have also been persistent in our pursuit of peace in the Middle East. WHAT AM I SAYING?  WHO SWITCHED THE SCRIPT?

In times of economic unease, there can also be an anxiety about human rights. OH YES, WE KNOW ABOUT THIS. I STATE HUMBLY THAT I REPRESENT THE COUNTRY THAT HAS PERPETRATED THE MOST HORRENDOUS CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY AND AS SUCH DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT TO TALK ABOUT leaders abolishing term limits, crackdowns on civil society.  I PROMISE TO DO BETTER IN THE FUTURE.

America is working to shape a world that fosters this openness, for the rot of a closed or corrupt economy must never eclipse the energy and innovation of human beings. SOME MIGHT THINK I AM TALKING ABOUT A WORLD WHERE WE CAN PLUNDER RESOURCES AT WILL AND EXPLOIT LABOUR TO THE MAX AS HAS BEEN ARE WAY AND OUR CULTURE.  WELL WE CAN’T PLEASE EVERYONE CAN WE?

The common thread of progress is the principle that government is accountable to its citizens. And the diversity in this room makes clear -- no one country has all the answers, but all of us must answer to our own people.  I AM SORRY, SOMEONE’S BEEN FIDDLING WITH MY TEXT.

The world that America seeks is not one we can build on our own. WHO THE HELL WROTE THIS SPEECH?  Part of the price of our own freedom is standing up for the freedom of others. I NEVER WROTE THIS! 

I NEED A TIME-OUT FOLKS. 

*This was first published in the 'Daily News' on September 25, 2010.  The man's got wilder over the past 4 years.  I re-post in the hope that it will encourage others to write their own versions of 'Obama Unplugged' in these UNGA days. 

msenevira@gmail.com

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Barack Obama’s amazing Márquez moment

Gabrial García Márquez lived a life. He wrote of lives and relationships, continents and histories, insults and humiliation. He unwrapped structures, teased apart production relations, laid out political economies without ever using those terms.  He wrote of people and peoples and in doing so described the commonalities of subjugation as well as the commonalities of resistance and resilience.  He wrote of love and loves, lovers and heartbreak. He gave us desolate landscapes where single flowers are cause for mindless celebration. He died.

When he died, the world lamented his passing.  When the world takes note, self-appointed world leaders, he would agree, must submit the proverbial two cents’ worth.  And so we have US President Barack Obama expressing his sorrow.   Obama tells us that Márquez was one of his favorite authors. He calls him a visionary. Sorry, ‘one of the greatest visionary writers’.  He mentions ‘magical realism’.  He offers thoughts to family and friends.  That’s it.

Reading Obama’s note one can’t help wondering if he’s actually read Márquez in the first instance and also whether he, Obama, has no clue about how the USA treated the writer.  For decades, Obama of all people ought to know, the USA stopped Márquez from entering the USA. It was not just Márquez of course. The USA has a policy of keeping out suspected Marxists, socialists and communists and their sympathizers (suspected of course).  Obama, who lets people call him an intellectual and a liberal, would know that it was not just Márquez.  He would know that the McCarran Act was used to stop many distinguished human beings, some of whom went on to win Nobel Prizes or nominations for the same. 

Kobo Abe, Tom Bottomore, Dennis Brutus, Julio Cortazar, Mahmoud Darwish, Michel Foucault, Dario Fo, Carlos Fuentes, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Ernest Mandel, Farley Mowat, Jan Myrdal, Pablo Neruda, Angel Rama and Pierre Trudeau are some of the thousands thus barred.  Obama would know of at least some of them.  If called upon to comment on any of these individuals, he would no doubt shower them with accolades and tell the world how they inspired him with their humanity, courage, resilience, sacrifice and outstanding abilities.  That’s Obama.

How could he forget that Márquez wrote about the glaring injustices perpetrated by the class whose interests Obama represents and on whose behalf Obama orders troops to wage war, displace communities, ravage lands and so on?  How could he forget that Márquez wrote about forgetting, natural and induced?  How could he forget that memory was important to Márquez and not just to keep tab on ailing celebrities of all kinds so that condolences can be fired off to the particular address? 

How can Obama talk of ‘Magical Realism’ without noting the ironies and the scathing critique of everything that Obama stands for and defends embedded in those magically real or really magical pieces Márquez worked into his text so effortlessly that magic bled into real and vice versa? If Obama was asked to offer a comment on Marquez' Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, what would he have to say?

Obama could not have known that Márquez was denied visa to visit the USA when his ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ was published, prompting a group of US citizens, booksellers included, to try to fly to Cuba to see the author (‘We would go to him, since he couldn’t come to us’).  But that’s the USA that Obama rules.  Those are the rules that sustain the Obamas of this world and it’s those rules and rulers that Márquez writes about with senstitivity, noting human frailty but faulting the vile within them. 

A few days ago, Palesa Morudu wrote about Márquez.  Morudu wonders, ‘does President Jacob Zuma read Garcia Márquez during his free time at Nkandla?’  The reason for the wonderment is an oft repeated quote from ‘The Autumn of the Patriarch’ where the dictator ‘discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth’. 

Perhaps that is a reality that grows on the Obamas and Zumas of this world.  This is why Barack Obama wrote what he did about Márquez.  And this is also why the Obamas and Zumas are read in particular ways by those who have read Márquez.

Márquez loved Cuba. He was friend to Fidel Castro.  He must have had reasons.  Those reasons are not too hard to fathom. 

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Barack’s spin on Ukraine

Barack Obama is livid.  He is angry about unconfirmed reports (‘unconfirmed’ is the word used by the US-friendly British press) of Russian military movements inside Ukraine.  Now, for the record, the area in the Ukraine that Obama is suddenly worried about, Crimea, happens to be the only Russian-majority region in that country and is the home of Russian’s Black Sea fleet.  So ‘movement,’ confirmed or not, could not have been something that happened yesterday.  In short, it is not ‘news’.

There are also unconfirmed reports that men in Russian military uniforms are blockading a military airport in the Black Sea port of Sevastopol while men in military uniform without national insignia are patrolling an airport in the Crimean capital Simferopol. Enough to upset any Ukranian, if true.  On the other hand if sovereignty is the issue then the presence of the Black Sea fleet itself would be an infringement.  By the same token, though, each and every unit in each of the more than 100 countries where there is US military presence constitutes sovereignty-infringement. 

But Barack is upset.  He is upset over the issue of sovereignty.  ‘Any violation of Ukraine sovereignty would be deeply destabilizing,’ he says.  He adds, ‘there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine’.  That’s a threat if ever there was one.

What is strange is that if military intervention ‘costs’ then the US national debt (metaphorically speaking) would be 100 times bigger than it is now.  If it is the USA that is going to make interventionists pay, they the US would have attempted self-destruction a countless number of times over the past several decades.  Stranger still is the fact that the USA was caught red-handed funding and otherwise supporting mobs that overthrew the Ukraine government a few days previously.  Perhaps non-military ‘intervention’ is okay in Washington’s book and military involvement a no-no?  But then again, how can a country that invaded Iraq on a lie, bombs civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, funds, trains and arms militants in a dozen country at any given time, have the gumption to complain?  It is now known, after all, that the US deployed troops disguised as Arabs in the much celebrated ‘Arab Spring’ offensives that turned the Middle East into a barren and endless winter, paradoxically. 

But Barack is worried about ‘destabilizing’ the region.  He thinks this ‘unconfirmed’ move by Russia ‘represents a profound interference in matters that must be determined by the Ukrainian people,’ and ‘would be a clear violation of Russia's commitment to respect the independence and sovereignty and borders of Ukraine - and of international laws.’ 

This same Barack sent troops into a house located in Pakistan, watched on television while his men dragged out an unarmed man, shot him dead in cold blood.  He ordered his men to airlift the body to Afghanistan and from there to drop it into the sea.  That’s ‘respect for independence and sovereignty and borders’?  That was just one man, but what was done to Osama bin Laden, the US government consciously does for entire countries. All the time. 

And Mr Holier-Than-Thou Obama also knows the following: The U.S. has not ratified, or participated in, a series of core UN conventions on human rights, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

So what do we have here, ladies and gentlemen?  Crisis-makers lamenting about crises?  Compulsive invaders getting hot under the collar because someone is cutting in on the action?  Hypocrites with selective memory?  Are they expecting the world to cheer?

Cut to the chase, this is superpower reality.  The US is fond of saying that it is the sole super power, but considering the fact that China owns that country’s debt and the fact that a man wearing a turban and sporting a beard is seen as a threat to the security of the US, one really is hard put to take seriously these ‘concerns’ expressed by Barack Obama. 

If ordinary people were asked whether they like people from other countries interfering in their lives (forget invading their countries), they’ll probably say ‘heck, we don’t even like our governments telling us what to do’.  It is not a question of whether Russia is white and the US black, vice versa, or if they come in shades of grey.  It is about people not having the privilege of determining their futures.  It is about being asked to inhabit other people’s versions of their reality. 

If Barack believes that the Ukranian people must determine matters themselves, then the principle can be applied across the board.  Come on, Barack, when are you going to issue an order for all US troops to return to and remain on US soil, for ever and ever (amen)?      

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A ‘briefing note’ for Nisha Biswal

One can get away with murder (as the USA has) when one is judge, jury and court reporter.

Assistant Secretary of USA for South and Central Asia Nisha Desai Biswal, currently visiting Sri Lanka, has issued a warning.  The lady, sent here by President Barack Obama, says ‘if Sri Lanka doesn’t make meaningful progress in addressing the accountability issues, the patience of the international community on Sri Lanka will start to wear thin and urged Sri Lanka to take some “concrete steps” to address the issue of human rights, accountability and reconciliation process’. 
‘Accountability’ is the word here.  ‘International Community’ is the definer.  ‘Patience’ is the commodity in short supply.  And charity begins at home, they say. 

President Obama is a man of words (which, by the way, is not the same thing as ‘a man of his word’).  On Wednesday the 13th of May, 2009, Obama urged ‘both sides in Sri Lanka's 25-year civil war to take measures to avert a humanitarian crisis and aid tens of thousands of people trapped in the war zone.’ ‘Without urgent action this humanitarian crisis could turn into a catastrophe,’ he worried. "Now is the time to put aside some of the political issues that are involved and to put the lives of the men, women and children who are innocently caught in the cross fire, to put them first," he pontificated.

Obama probably knew and still knows the meaning of the word ‘catastrophe’ and one assumes that Biswal does so too. So let’s talk catastrophe.  Policy-driven catastrophe.  Ms Biswal might have heard that around the time that Sri Lankan forces are supposed to have committed war crimes, the US Air Force dropped bombs in Bala Boluk, Afghanistan, killing some 150 people. That’s just one of thousands of such policy-driven, systematic crimes against humanity.  She knows of Drone Attacks.  She knows about how her country bombed Iraq into the middle ages, when thousands of air sorties dropped millions of tons of bombs on places where there were millions of civilians. I am being brief here by the way. But briefly, let me remind Nisha (and the world) that US-led sanctions on Iraq caused the death of half a million Iraqi children.

She knows that her government maintains over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees in 909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories, and that’s not counting the on-going wars including the non-declared troop deployments in subversive actions to gift democracy (read ‘instability, submission, anarchy’) to certain selective Arab nations.  She knows of abuses and usurpations of American standing armies and they include rape, murder, sexual harassment, robbery and other crimes such as the seizure of people’s lands, destruction of property and cultural imperialism.  All this is not catastrophe-recipe, is it catastrophe-ongoing [if unpunished, uncompensated crimes is the subject, the international community would have nothing else to do but investigate, investigate and investigate the USA let’s not forget – that’s catastrophe-past-tense].
 
But let’s forget it all.  Let’s go back to accountability.  Nisha must have heard that the Deputy Prime Minister of Britain, Nick Clegg, confessed that the invasion of Iraq was illegal. She knows also that the whole Iraq adventure was about WMDs or Weapons of Mass Destruction.  A country was invaded after obtaining the green light of the US citizenry through their elected representatives who were told that Iraq possessed WMD. It was a lie and those who uttered it knew they were lying. And today, more than a decade later, Obama cannot straighten his twisted tongue to admit the fact.

So let’s get to this accountability business.  And also ‘credible, transparent, domestic investigative mechanisms’.  Dear Ms Biswal, is there such an entity back in the USA that’s inquiring into the invasion of Iraq on the basis of a deliberate lie? Is there an entity that is inquiring into the systematic use of torture on political prisoners?  Is there an entity that is inquiring into deliberate and indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations?   

We don’t know and we don’t know if Ms Biswal knows or if she does whether she would tell us.  But the world knows that her president announced to block the release of photographs documenting American military personnel torturing detainees in Iraq, in a reversal of an understanding given earlier. The justification is that releasing such photographs would demoralize his troops. So it seems that Mr. Obama, who has ‘eyes’ to see ‘catastrophes’ where none exist, does not have eyes to see the catastrophes his country orchestrated and perpetuated and worse, wants to world to close its eyes as well.  

So Ms Biswal, tell us, how many WMDs did US and allied trooped find in Iraq?

Nick Clegg said the invasion was illegal.  It is known that there was absolutely no evidence of anything warranting an invasion but the US Congress and Senate were deliberately misled into believing otherwise.  Is there any mechanism to investigate how all this happened?

President Obama himself has said ‘don’t talk to us about such things’, clearly implying that the USA is not willing to subject itself to the kind of international scrutiny it demands for when it comes to other countries. But in the clear absence of a credible, transparent domestic mechanism to investigate these crimes against humanity (and here we are talking about concrete evidence and not allegations made by people totally dependent on hearsay and that too from unreliable sources such as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers), is an international investigation, distasteful as it may be, the only way to get to the truth?

One can get away with murder (as the USA has) when one is judge, jury and court reporter. But Ms Biswal must understand that at this end of this political economy of justice, the general perception is that the world has too much colonial posturing and too little reason. 

In other words, the leaders of this country are answerable. They are answerable to the people of this country.  They are not answerable to a bunch of terrorist who use wealth and weapons to convince the world that the rivers of blood they make flow are the inevitable juices that give life to democracy, peace, civilization etc. 

And that brings us to ‘patience’.  The world, Nisha, has been patient over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention the D-Day massacres.  The world has been patient over your country’s use of chemical weapons in Vietnam and other unhappy places.  The world has been patient about CIA operatives disguised as diplomats sowing discord, fermenting anarchy. We have watched patiently as the USA toppled one democratically elected head of state after another in Latin America and while it moved to install despots instead.  We have watched tyrannies being propped up, monarchies having their lifespan extended and the most ruthless autocrats being embraced as benefactors of humankind by your leaders, Obama included. 

And we have patiently observed the machinations of your ‘friendly-to-Sri-Lanka’ government in Geneva and elsewhere, even as it continues to perpetrate horrific crimes against humanity across the globe.  Do you think that we think that if this Government cures itself of all its ills you will get off our national back?  No. We have no illusions.  That’s a discard that accrues, paradoxically, when people have been as patient for as long as we have.  In fact, the one concrete thing that will result from these games people like you play, is the further strengthening of the regime.  Perhaps that’s what you want? 

So, spare the lectures.  Spare the tuition classes.  Say your piece, by all means. 

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