Obama answers failed airline bombing with threat of new wars

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Obama answers failed airline bombing with threat of new wars
By Bill Van Auken
30 December 2009

Three days after the failed attempt by a 23-year-old Nigerian student
to trigger an explosion on a Northwest Airlines passenger jet,
President Barack Obama threatened to unleash US military power in
Yemen and across the globe.

Obama interrupted his Hawaii vacation Monday to deliver his bellicose
remarks in the face of a crescendo of Republican criticism. The
Republican right has tried to exploit the abortive attack in order to
indict the Democratic administration as “soft” on terrorism.

This campaign has been fueled in part by the claim initially made by
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that “the system worked”
in the incident, which easily could have claimed the lives of 300
passengers and crew members.

In fact, there are serious questions about how the student, Umar
Farouk Abdulmutallab, was able to board the plane. He reportedly
bought a one-way ticket, paid for in cash, and checked no luggage.
Moreover, according to an account given by fellow passengers, he and
an accomplice had tried to get him on the flight without showing a
passport.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press cited unnamed intelligence officials
as stating that they had recordings of conversations between
Abdulmutallab and at least one member of al Qaeda. His father had
informed the US Embassy in Lagos more than a month earlier that his
son had fallen in with Islamist extremists in Yemen, which resulted in
his name being placed on a terror watch list.

Any one of these things should have triggered intense scrutiny. That
they did not suggests the possibility that Abdulmutallab’s boarding
the flight was facilitated from within the national security
apparatus, allowing him to carry out an action that is now being used
to justify yet another US military intervention abroad.

Clearly, the Republicans in Congress have no interest in probing any
of these issues. Rather, they are trying to turn the failed bombing
into an argument in defense of torture, for keeping open the US prison
camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and to vindicate all of the criminal
policies of the Bush administration.

Obama’s response has been an attempt to outflank his Republican
critics from the right by threatening another expansion of US
militarist aggression. There can be little doubt that this will be
supplemented with intensified attacks on democratic rights and the
continuation of the policies of torture and preventive detention.

In his remarks Monday, Obama vowed “to use every element of our
national power to disrupt, to dismantle, and defeat the violent
extremists who threaten us—whether they are from Afghanistan or
Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or anywhere where they are plotting
attacks against the US homeland.”

The US administration is already in the midst of an escalation that is
sending another 30,000 US troops into Afghanistan. It has mounted an
intensified campaign of Predator drone missile attacks against
Pakistan, while, according to recent press reports, also sending
Special Operations units and CIA operatives into the country to
conduct covert assassination and “snatch and grab” missions.

It has justified these acts of military aggression as a necessary
defense of the “homeland” against terrorist attacks, the same
rationale given by the Bush administration for launching the
eight-year-old war in Afghanistan as well as the invasion and
occupation of Iraq, now in its seventh year.

Now, the Obama White House is preparing to unleash “every element of
our national power” against Yemen and Somalia, and perhaps other
nations yet unnamed.

The Pentagon and the CIA are already involved in semi-covert
operations in both of these countries. In Somalia, having organized a
proxy invasion by US-assisted Ethiopian troops in 2006, Washington is
now channeling arms and other military aid to the Transitional Federal
Government (TFG), while carrying out clandestine assassination raids
by American commandos operating from US warships.

In Yemen, US warplanes have carried out repeated strikes against
purported Al Qaeda targets as well as against Shia rebels known as the
Huthis in the country’s northwest. Washington has cemented
increasingly close relations with the repressive dictatorship of Field
Marshal Ali Abdullah Saleh, dispatching top officials, including
Central Command chief General David Petraeus and Obama’s
counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, to the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.

The December 25 bombing attempt on the Northwest flight may now be
used to make the US military interventions in both countries more
direct, overt and deadly.

In his remarks Monday, Obama justified these actions as a means of
keeping the American public “safe and secure” in the face of what he
termed “a serious reminder of the dangers that we face and the nature
of those who threaten our homeland.”

The reality is that the military actions being prepared by Washington
will have just the opposite effect. If the statement attributed to the
group Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula claiming responsibility is to
be believed, the attempted airline bombing was undertaken in
retaliation for the December 17 US bombing of Yemen that claimed the
lives of more than 60 civilians, nearly half of them women and children.

What does the December 25 incident reveal about “the nature of those
who threaten our homeland”? Abdulmutallab, the son of one of Nigeria’s
wealthiest bankers, was apparently radicalized while attending the
prestigious University College London. Like millions of young Muslims,
most from far less privileged backgrounds, he undoubtedly was outraged
by the images of dead and wounded men, women and children produced by
the US invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as
by the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza by Washington’s closest ally
and client state, Israel.

That this anger is channeled into the retrograde Islamist politics and
reactionary terrorist methods of groups like Al Qaeda is no accident.
These organizations represent in a real sense Washington’s
Frankenstein’s monster. For decades, the CIA promoted Islamist
movements ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to the precursor of
Hamas as a means of undermining socialist and left-nationalist
movements in the Middle East.

This policy found its most lethal expression in Afghanistan, where
Washington spent billions of dollars in financing and arming an
Islamist insurgency against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul,
triggering a war that devastated the country and killed more than 1
million Afghans. It was in this war, initiated in 1978, that Osama bin
Laden and Al Qaeda got their start.

Similarly, in Yemen, as part of its Cold War crusade, Washington
backed the Islamist regime in the North against secular nationalists
in the South who called themselves socialists and forged ties with
Moscow. In the country’s 1994 civil war, Yemenis returning from
fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan played a prominent role in
helping to secure the rule of Saleh.

That the Obama administration is now threatening to launch offensives
in Yemen and Somalia, supposedly to root out terrorism, only exposes
similar justifications for the wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq
as a fraud against the people of the United States and the world.

Three hundred innocent people nearly lost their lives in Detroit on
December 25. If they had, their deaths would have been one more
episode of “collateral damage” in a military offensive by US
imperialism that has cost the lives of well over a million people over
the past eight years in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

These military campaigns have been driven by the interests of US
capitalism in asserting dominance over the strategic oil supplies as
well the pipelines and shipping routes of the Middle East and Central
Asia.

In targeting Yemen and Somalia, Washington is preparing to militarily
straddle the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, giving it control of the chokepoint
in a key route for shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to the West.

America’s ruling financial elite is pursuing these aims with
cold-blooded indifference to the loss of human life that they entail,
including among innocent American civilians forced to pay the price
for the criminal acts of their government.

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/yeme-d30.shtml

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