Obama Tightens the Chain of Wars

Could it be that what Dick Cheney wanted in 2007 and what George W. Bush lobbied for, is now part of the plans of Barack Obama’s Pentagon?

The question comes to mind because the former vice president’s memoir reveals that he tried unsuccessfully to get the commander-in-chief to launch an attack against Syria four summers ago. He gave Congress the usual justification: that Syria could become a nuclear site. But no one seconded him and, according to his laments, he was the "lone voice” in Congress.

However, three months after his failed proposal, their good ally, Israel, bombed the place, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency could not verify the claim that appears in Cheney’s book, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” which will soon be on shelves.

The most likely reason the Bush Congress expressed such a poor reception of such a dangerous and hawkish proposal would have to be found in another war — the Iraq War, which was also the work of the ultra-right wing Cheney, the man with Halliburton’s interests in mind and who gained so much that he seemed like the contractor of an assault on the imperial hordes against the Mesopotamian country.

The compromise was a bit much. In the same year the United States increased its aerial attacks six-fold and was scheduled to increase its deployed troops by 30,000, it dedicated itself to encouraging confrontations between the resistance and the Mahdi army to further divide the country and, when the November elections were near and Saddam Hussein had been humiliated and hung, they took the blame, even though the actual executors were Iraqi.

And even though the elections won them the democracy that had been promised to end the war and bring the troops back home, nothing happened. Fifty-thousand American troops are still over there, and contracted mercenaries supplement the regular forces to secure U.S. interests (in January 2011 there were 87,000 contracted forces in Afghanistan and 71,000 in Iraq).

Add to that the fact that internal divisions remain, that there is no practical recovery for the destroyed infrastructure or economy (since it won’t come from the profits of transnational oil companies that divide the booty among themselves), and that Iraqis are killed on a daily basis in a series of never-ending violence, which justifies it being classified as an eternal war.

The resources that the administration has taken away from the Iraqi theater have been reallocated to Afghanistan, where the operations have a more sophisticated air and they are trying out their robotic weaponry, while at the same time, the United States has tripled its presence. Let’s not forget that until a couple months ago, Obama kept Robert Gates as his secretary of Defense, officially prolonging the warmongering policies of the Republican for equally as long.

In reality, he has turned out to be as war loving as Bush. He has extended the Afghan war into Pakistan, and, according to the declarations of the military forces and U.S. intelligence, there are barely one-hundred fighters in the terrorist group al-Qaida. The “revolutions” in other Arab countries, beyond any internal dissent, have the hallmark of U.S. intelligence operations. Libya fits into this entirely, and the U.S. military budget has surpassed all barriers. That is the military policy of Barack Obama.

Who can be sure that he won’t open the door to aggression against Syria, which is already subject to a dirty war in the world media and the pressure of an internal rebellion? Is he going to try the domino effect in Latin America, a real possibility if we follow the thread of the ongoing attacks against Venezuela?

It’s more than just a few political scientists who are telling us that Obama, in essence, has continued and expanded the policies of the Bush era.