RNA - In addition to Iraq and Afghanistan, the “reluctant warrior” and Noble Peace Prize winner expanded Bush’s “War on Terror” with major military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. In addition, he involved Special Operation units and private contractors in combat operations in 134 countries – with no UN mandate and certainly no legal justification.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped at least 26,171 bombs on many Muslim nations. This means every day last year, the US military blasted combatants, terror leaders, “lieutenants" and civilians overseas with drone strikes. Obama also authorized over 10 times more drone strikes than George Bush, and automatically painted all males of military age in these regions as combatants, making them fair game for remote controlled killing.
Nor is that all. According to a recent report by the Center for International Policy, since 2009, the Obama administration has offered over $115 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia in 42 separate deals, more than any US administration in history. The majority of this equipment is still in the pipeline and could tie the Pentagon to the Saudi military for years to come. It’s for everything from small arms to tanks, combat aircraft, cluster bombs and air-to-ground missiles - weaponry now being used to slaughter civilians in Yemen and arm terror proxies in Iraq and Syria.
The outgoing drone-warrior-in-chief is free to claim his military adventures were legal under the 2001 authorization for the use of military force passed by Congress to go after Al-Qaeda. But he is wrong to assume his wars and arms sales had anything to do with the September 11 attacks on US soil, let alone International Law.
Obama can shed his crocodile tears and brag about this bloody legacy in his final speech. But he can't change the fact that he is leaving Donald Trump with even broader war powers. Trump will reconstruct Obama’s same twisted legal architecture to justify new wars and new “humanitarian” interventions, especially extrajudicial drone killings with no geographic restrictions. He will also destabilise the Middle East with more chaos and divisions than Obama.
Just like Obama, he will continue to switch from troops on the ground to airstrikes and special forces “to save American lives;” he will continue the Gitmo torture program; he will kill untold numbers of foreign lives in the name of democracy and humanitarianism; and he will carry out more bombings in Iraq and Syria on the pretext of pursuing ISIL in the middle of urban neighborhoods. Mind you, like Obama he will then come up with ridiculously low and unverifiable numbers in regards to civilian casualties to avoid any possible international backlash.
Which brings us to the final frontier: nuclear weapons. Obama, the only president who has ever called for nuclear abolition and whose administration has retired fewer weapons in US nuclear arsenal than any other in the post-Cold War era, will soon allow Trump to preside over the early stages of a trillion-dollar modernization of that very arsenal. It includes full-scale work on the creation of “precision-guided” nuclear weapons. These weapons would potentially bring nukes to the battlefield in a first-use way, something the US is proudly pioneering well beyond the official war zones.
A reminder that during his reign of terror, Obama was not just commander-in-chief but an assassin-in-chief and indeed a war president - a role that Trump is unlikely to reject. Endless wars have become the heart and soul of Washington’s way of life that only seems to spread further under the Trump presidency.
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