{"id":48013,"date":"2014-09-29T12:00:08","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T11:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=48013"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:29:43","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:29:43","slug":"syria-becomes-the-7th-predominantly-muslim-country-bombed-by-2009-nobel-peace-laureate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/09\/syria-becomes-the-7th-predominantly-muslim-country-bombed-by-2009-nobel-peace-laureate\/","title":{"rendered":"Syria Becomes the 7th Predominantly Muslim Country Bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"President<\/a>

President Barack Obama makes a speech during the Nobel Peace Prize Concert at Oslo Spektrum on December 11, 2009 in Oslo, Norway.
Photo: Sandy Young\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

23 Sep 2014 – <\/em>The U.S. today began bombing<\/a> targets inside Syria, in concert with its lovely and inspiring group of five allied regimes: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Jordan.<\/p>\n

That means that Syria becomes the 7th predominantly Muslim country bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama\u2014after Afghanistan<\/a>, Pakistan<\/a>, Yemen<\/a>, Somalia<\/a>, Libya<\/a> and Iraq<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The utter lack of interest in what possible legal authority Obama has to bomb Syria is telling indeed: Empires bomb who they want, when they want, for whatever reason (indeed, recall that Obama bombed Libya even after<\/em> Congress explicitly voted against<\/a> authorization to use force, and very few people seemed to mind that abject act of lawlessness; constitutional constraints are not for warriors and emperors).<\/p>\n

It was just over a year ago that Obama officials were insisting<\/a> that bombing and attacking Assad was a moral and strategic imperative. Instead, Obama is now bombing Assad\u2019s enemies while politely informing his regime<\/a> of its targets in advance. It seems irrelevant on whom the U.S. wages war; what matters it that it will be at war, always and forever<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Six weeks of bombing hasn\u2019t budged ISIS in Iraq<\/a>, but it has caused ISIS recruitment to soar<\/a>. That\u2019s all predictable: the U.S. has known for years<\/a> that what fuels and strengthens anti-American sentiment (and thus anti-American extremism) is exactly what they keep doing: aggression in that region. If you know that, then they know that. At this point, it\u2019s more rational to say they do all of this not despite<\/em>\u00a0triggering those outcomes, but because<\/em> of it. Continuously creating and strengthening enemies is a feature, not a bug. It is what justifies the ongoing greasing of the profitable and power-vesting machine of Endless War.<\/p>\n

If there is anyone who actually believes that the point of all of this is a moral crusade to vanquish the evil-doers of ISIS (as the U.S. fights alongside its close Saudi friends), please read Professor\u00a0As\u2019ad AbuKhalil\u2019s explanation today<\/a> of how Syria is a multi-tiered proxy war. As the disastrous Libya \u201cintervention\u201d should conclusively and permanently demonstrate, the U.S. does not bomb countries for humanitarian objectives. Humanitarianism is the pretense, not the purpose<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_____________________________<\/p>\n

Email the author: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… after President Barack Obama bombed Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Iraq. The utter lack of interest in what possible legal authority Obama has to bomb Syria is telling indeed: Empires bomb who they want, when they want, for whatever reason; constitutional constraints are not for warriors and emperors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nobel-laureates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}