Obama, the Prince of Bait-and-Switch

John Pilger
Lew Rockwell.com
Friday, July 25, 2008

On 12 July, The Times of London devoted two pages to Afghanistan. It was mostly a complaint about the heat. The reporter, Magnus Linklater, described in detail his discomfort and how he had needed to be sprayed with iced water. He also described the “high drama” and “meticulously practiced routine” of evacuating another overheated journalist. For his US Marine rescuers, wrote Linklater, “saving a life took precedence over [their] security.” Alongside this was a report whose final paragraph offered the only mention that “47 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday.”

Slaughters on this scale are common, and mostly unknown to the British public. I interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family, including six children. A 500lb US Mk82 bomb was dropped on her mud, stone and straw house. There was no “enemy” nearby. I interviewed a headmaster whose house disappeared in a fireball caused by another “precision” bomb. Inside were nine people – his wife, his four sons, his brother and his wife, and his sister and her husband. Neither of these mass murders was news. As Harold Pinter wrote of such crimes: “Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

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A total of 64 civilians were bombed to death while The Times man was discomforted. Most were guests at the wedding party. Wedding parties are a “coalition” specialty. At least four of them have been obliterated – at Mazar and in Khost, Uruzgan and Nangarhar provinces. Many of the details, including the names of victims, have been compiled by a New Hampshire professor, Marc Herold, whose Afghan Victim Memorial Project is a meticulous work of journalism that shames those who are paid to keep the record straight and report almost everything about the Afghan War through the public relations facilities of the British and American military.

The US and its allies are dropping record numbers of bombs on Afghanistan. This is not news. In the first half of this year, 1,853 bombs were dropped: more than all the bombs of 2006 and most of 2007. “The most frequently used bombs,” the Air Force Times reports, “are the 500lb and 2,000lb satellite-guided…” Without this one-sided onslaught, the resurgence of the Taliban, it is clear, might not have happened. Even Hamid Karzai, America’s and Britain’s puppet, has said so. The presence and the aggression of foreigners have all but united a resistance that now includes former warlords once on the CIA’s payroll.

The scandal of this would be headline news, were it not for what George W. Bush’s former spokesman Scott McClellan has called “complicit enablers” – journalists who serve as little more than official amplifiers. Having declared Afghanistan a “good war,” the complicit enablers are now anointing Barack Obama as he tours the bloodfests in Afghanistan and Iraq. What they never say is that Obama is a bomber.

In the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear as if he is ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan and, in effect, an invasion of Pakistan. He wants more combat troops, more helicopters, more bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the Republicans have built an ideological machine that transcends the loss of electoral power – because their collaborators are, as the American writer Mike Whitney put it succinctly, “bait-and-switch” Democrats, of whom Obama is the prince.

Those who write of Obama that “when it comes to international affairs, he will be a huge improvement on Bush” demonstrate the same willful naïvety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton – and Tony Blair. Of Blair, wrote the late Hugo Young in 1997, “ideology has surrendered entirely to ‘values’… there are no sacred cows [and] no fossilized limits to the ground over which the mind might range in search of a better Britain…”

Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a black man is irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of 500lb bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses.

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2 Responses to “Obama, the Prince of Bait-and-Switch”

1. vein Says:
   July 25th, 2008 at 7:49 am

   Unknown to the british? Actually, we, like the citizens of nazi Germany before us, are vastly better informed than the average american. We know, we care, but we are beaten by the most relentless pummelling psychological warfare has ever produced into a state of acceptance? I don’t think our state of mind has a good or accurate name. What state did Hitler pummel the german people into. THEY were loyal, hardworking, well educated, moral, decent, people, but they fought to the death to allow a terrible monster to have his absolute will. We won’t fight to the death for Blair (we’ll leave that to you americans), but we will passively empower his every repugnant, foul and evil desire.

   Yeah, Hitler and Blair had supreme masters of propaganda flood their nations with lies, but i’ll tell you this- neither the germans then, nor the brits now, believed those lies in their hearts.

   Something happens to a people when a ruthless, smart, genocidal psychopath like Blair or Hitler gain control (and notice I most certainly didn’t say charismatic- I always thought “bulls**t” when told that Hitler was charismatic to the german people, and having witnessed the rise of Blair, the least charismatic leader imaginable, I know my instinct was proven correct).

   What existed at the core of Hitler, and what exists at the core of Blair is a demon, and I promise you, I do not believe in demons.

   In many regions of Afghanistan, culture dictates that men gather separately to women. Whenever a satellite shows such a gathering, those men, whatever they are doing, are exterminated in a missile strike. Far from NATO having any problem with the unarmed nature of the corpses, they actually boast about this aspect of the kill.

   The numbers murdered as a direct consequence of Blair’s invasion of Afghanistan have been estimated (using the same methods as those that counted jewish deaths in WW2) at between 3 and 6 million (and actually much higher now). Luckily for Blair, not engaging in ‘holocaust denial’ is a mainstream media crime, when it comes to counting the deaths in Somalia, Chechnya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. By that I mean modern holocaust denial is a required practice by all the mass media of the West.

   Obama likes the current size of the new holocaust, but he knows he can do much much better for his masters. His ancestors were those house slaves that specialised in castrating new slaves, and picking out the young girls for his master to rape that evening. Obama is made from the same stuff as that found within any collaborator, proud to sell out any number of his own ‘people’, so that he and his family may gain power in the future.

   However, I could give a stuff about Obama, but for one thing. Unlike the equally evil and/or worthless McCain and Bush, decent people will give Obama their support, the same as Blair at his beginning. Obama will be able to turn this support into a level of social change within the US, and war mongering without, beyond the wildest dreams of any republican.

   Obama is no Blair in the scheme of things. Obama is a worthless corrupt strutting puppet, and Blair is of the highest rank. However, Obama will give his masters success in all those areas the Neo-Cons could never reach, try as they might.

2. brad Says:
   July 26th, 2008 at 7:02 am

   they should call him “Obomber”