Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama is now waging war in five separate countries

Image via WikipediaUS military forces are now waging simultaneous drone missile attacks, bombings, special forces assassination raids and ground combat in five separate countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen.

President Barack Obama, who owed his 2008 election victory in large measure to the popular revulsion felt by millions of Americans toward the wars of aggression launched by the Bush administration in Afghanistan and Iraq, has more than fulfilled George W. Bush’s predictions concerning the “wars of the 21st century.”

He has gone his Republican predecessor at least one better. Bush proclaimed an infamous doctrine that asserted the right of US imperialism to wage war against any country that it perceived as a potential threat, now or at any time in the future. In doing so, he embraced the principle of “preventive war,” a form of aggressive war for which the surviving leaders of the Third Reich were tried at Nuremberg.

In justifying the war against Libya, Obama has promulgated his own doctrine, which dispenses with even the pretense of a potential threat as the justification for war. Instead, he claims that the US is within its rights to wage war wherever it deems its “interests and values” to be at stake, even if the targets for attack pose no conceivable threat to US security.

In his speech on Libya, Obama included among these inviolable American values “maintaining the flow of commerce,” i.e., the flow of profits into the coffers of US oil companies and other corporations. More...