Obama, Nobel War Laureate

“Obama, your country does not have the moral authority, legitimacy or legality to invade Syria.”

This emphatic expression is from one Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Argentinian Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, to another, the president of the United States. More than the interested position of Putin, the Russian, so that instead of bombings there is an inspection and the Syrians will hand over their chemical weapons, the letter the Argentine sent to the American on Sept. 4 is more valuable and humane.

In the letter, where Pérez Esquivel recalls Martin Luther King’s dream of brotherhood, it says that the motivation behind the American military invasion plans against Syria is not “the death of hundreds of Syrian children,” but actually the objective of Obama and his court is “Iran and holding back the realization of the Palestinian State.” This brings into question the old tactic of an empire functioning as the “global policeman” in the name of freedom, democracy and human rights.

History, recent and distant, shows how the U.S. has been the greatest violator of freedom, democracy and human rights, as well as the sovereignty of people. It comes back and plays out as a sort of hypocrisy, held up in large part by the West, around chemical weapons which, additionally, are produced precisely by superpowers like the USA. In the whole world, it is the country that most uses and possesses such terrible weapons.

If its use is indeed abnormal, and even against civilians, it is not for the reasons of strength and the invasion of a sovereign country to resolve the ownership of such destructive devices. What moral authority can aid the United States to rise as a guardian when it has used these weapons to exterminate civilians and noncivilians? Perhaps it’s been forgotten, for example, that the United States supported Saddam Hussein, when he was their ally, in using chemical weapons to destroy the Kurds and put down the Iranian revolution? That’s what the Argentine Nobel laureate recalled in his letter.

Martin Luther King was assassinated because he was opposed to the U.S. invasion in Vietnam. We must remember that in 1970, the U.S. Senate reported that the United States had dumped a quantity of toxic chemical substances, dioxins, equivalent to 2.7 kilos per person. This was the origin of what was referred to in the Asian country as the “cycle of fetal catastrophe.” Generations of children have been affected by monstrous deformities, as stated in the newspaper The Guardian. In Iraq, the U.S. occupying forces used white phosphorous and depleted uranium.

A military state, like the United States, which, as well as manufacturing weapons including chemical ones, uses them for blackmailing and, as seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, to spread terror and massive destruction, has little interest in a Russian peace agreement regarding chemical weapons. There is more: Syria is hardly a bridge to Iran. And a pacifist and sensible letter like the one sent by Pérez Esquivel should cause Obama little worry.

Why should legitimacy and legality matter to them, if in U.S. history, the same which includes the 19th-century “manifest destiny” (which Bush brought into vogue with his “providential” bombers), the facts have gone against the self-determination of nations and people. You, reminds Pérez, do not have the moral authority to invade Syria or any other country “much less after having killed 220,000 people in Japan dropping bombs of mass destruction.”

Who does Obama obey? The transnationals? The general clamor of the people against the war? The situation is, as the letter says, that Barack Obama’s government has become “a danger to the international balance and to the American people themselves. The United States has become a country which cannot stop exporting death to maintain its economy and strength.”

The dream of civilization and freedom which Martin Luther King died for, Obama wants to transform into a nightmare for humanity.