Former US president Barack Obama is on the campaign trail to marshal the troops for Joe Biden’s re-election bid. Biden is a deeply unpopular president due to declining standards of living and increasing public disorder. Crime, inflation, mass immigration, war, and woke progressive social engineering are key issues on the public mind. Biden is sinking in the polls and those groups whose votes he previously counted on are looking at alternatives to the Democratic Party.
Biden’s record stands in stark contrast to Trump’s. Under Trump, the country experienced significant economic growth, with expanding GDP and unemployment reaching historically low levels, especially for black and brown workers. Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy saw strong job creation and rising wages. Moreover, an increasing number of citizens are doubting that the outcome of the 2020 election was legitimate, and their growing incredulity threatens to give Trump another term.
With contrast and developments in mind, and with Obama remaining a popular figure among Democrats and many independent, the Biden campaign needs Obama—and Obama needs Biden to continue the neoliberal and neoconservative project that selected Obama to be president. It was only a matter of time before Obama returned (some suggest he never left). With Bill Clinton in tow, the forty-fourth president appeared at a fundraiser held at Radio City Music Hall, New York, hosted by Stephen Colbert. The event, replete with rock concert lighting and smoke machines, took in a record 26 million dollars.
Earlier in the day, on Long Island, Donald Trump, along with hundreds of police officers and family members, stood outside a funeral home to observe the wake of a New York City police officer who was killed in the line of duty only days earlier. Officer Jonathan Tiller leaves a widow and an infant son behind. He was murdered by a man, Guy Rivera, who had a least 21 prior arrests. Rivera should have been in jail but wasn’t in large measure because of the progressive criminal justice policies Obama and the Democratic Party champion.
Obama’s adoration is undeserved. On the domestic front, among other things, his presidency was marked by increasing income and wealth inequality. This contrast to the Trump years flies in the face of the deep reservoir of good will Obama enjoys, as economic conditions tend to shape public feelings about presidencies.
According to data from the US Census Bureau, the Gini coefficient, a common measure of income inequality, rose during the Obama period. The wealthiest households continued to accumulate a larger share of the nation’s wealth, while lower- and middle-income households experienced stagnant wealth growth. While the economy had recovered from the Great Recession (2008-2009), wage growth remained modest or stagnant for most workers. Meanwhile, high-income earners, particularly those in finance and technology sectors, saw significant increases in compensation.
There are many other things one might talk about concerning the Obama years, but I want to focus in this essay on matters of war and imperial adventure. Obama’s presidency, which spanned two terms (2009-2017), saw numerous military actions and interventions. His use of the United States vast military capacity was brutal and reckless. It was also in the service of the transnational corporate project to put the planet under the command of a global elite.
Obama was a particularly cruel warmonger. Remember when, in 2010, President Obama joked about sending a predator drone after the Jonas Brothers? “Sasha and Malia are huge fans,” he said during the May Day White House Correspondents Association Dinner. “But boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming.” He then added, with a serious look, “You think I am joking.” He wasn’t. A year later he killed 16-year-old American Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, along with the boy’s 17-year-old cousin and several other innocent Yemenis in a Predator drone strike, one of more than 500 carried out in various countries, primarily in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
Obama continued major military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, conflicts started by his predecessors from both parties. Afghanistan was an ongoing operation traceable to the Carter regime, who green lit a project devised by National Security Advisor and former director of the Trilateral Commission Zbigniew Brzezinski to destabilize that country to compel the Soviet Union to honor a defense agreement and thus mire that social country in a long military campaign against asymmetrical forces organized by the US deep state.
In 2019, I dusted off an analysis I wrote in the early 2010s and shared it on Freedom and Reason: Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan. Long story short, what occurred between the enactment of the Carter-Brzezinski scheme and the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC on September 11, 2001, played a key role in fomenting those attacks, which in turn were exploited by George W. Bush and his neoconservative to shift from covert action to an open military campaign followed by a lengthy occupation, all while covering up the deep state’s role in creating the crisis.
The Iraqi operation also had a long history. During the Reagan Administration, the US government provided support to Iraq, including intelligence sharing and the supply of dual-use technology, such as agricultural and chemical materials. This support was primarily motivated by the containment of Iran, at least ostensibly, although the vice-president at the time, former CIA director George H. W. Bush, ran a shadow government during this period that also supplied Iran with intelligence and weaponry (and trafficked in cocaine to fund it; see Contras and Cocaine). As president, in January 1990, in what is now known as the First Gulf War, Bush invaded Iraq, but left its leader Saddam Hussein in power. In a mop up operation, the junior Bush used the 9-11 terrorist attacks as a pretext for invading Iraq a second time. (See my essay War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Middle East Policy for a detailed analysis of this.)
For his part, while eventually following through with the junior Bush’s scheduled withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, Obama increased troop levels in Afghanistan by 30,000 at the end of 2009. At the NATO Summit in Chicago, in the fall of 2012, Obama and NATO allies endorsed a plan to transition full security responsibility to Afghan forces by the end of 2014. This never happened.
During the Trump administration, the rise of belligerent Islamism across the Eurasian landmass in the context of regional instability caused by the Bush and Obama wars in the Middle East and Central Asia compelled the Trump Administration to ramp up counterterrorism operations. Having prevailed in these struggles and having secured a peace agreement between parties in Afghanistan, plans were made to pull troops from that country. Actions by the Biden regime in executing this plan resulted in a disastrous final act that recalled the scenes of the US withdrawal from Vietnam.
Even before the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, Obama, along with NATO allies, transitioned to a new war in Libya, providing intelligence and logistical support to rebel forces in globalist efforts to overthrow Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. These efforts proved successful—at least for the aims of the globalists who planned it. Briefly, in March 2011, the United Nations Security Council authorized the use of military force in Libya. The operation began in March 2011 with a series of airstrikes targeting Libyan government forces and military infrastructure. The operation involved a coalition of NATO members and regional partners, including the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, and others.
Gaddafi was captured, tortured, and killed by rebel forces in October 2011, a war crime which Secretary of State Clinton notoriously mocked (for a discussion of Clinton’s 2016 presidential run see How Bad Would a Democrat Have to Be? Because Clinton is About as Bad as it Can Get). The intervention caused a power vacuum and produced ongoing instability in Libya as various factions vied for control in the post-Gaddafi era. There were scores of civilian casualties, widespread destruction of infrastructure, and the destabilization of Libya.
Thanks to significant oil reserves and relatively small population, Libya had been an affluent nation compared to many other African countries. Under Gaddafi’s regime, Libya experienced periods of significant economic growth and development. The country’s oil wealth allowed the government to invest in infrastructure, education, and social welfare programs. After the fall of Gaddafi’s regime, and subsequent civil war, Libya experienced significant economic challenges and political instability. The country’s economy suffered due to disruptions in oil production and export, as well as ongoing conflict and insecurity. As a result, Libya’s socioeconomic situation deteriorated, with widespread poverty, unemployment, and humanitarian concerns affecting large segments of the population.
Libya wasn’t the only front Obama opened in the neoconservative project of continuous warfare. Obama and other elites used reports that Bashar al-Assad regime deployed chemical weapons against civilians (echos of propaganda used in the build up to the Iraq war) as a pretext to carry out a proxy war using rebel troops—which gave rise to the Islamist threats Trump was compelled to address during his presidency. The Syrian Civil War that began in March 2011 as part of the wider wave of uprisings known as the Arab Spring, a multi-nation color revolution, proved useful to the establishment. The Obama regime armed and trained rebels to overthrow Assad and launched air strikes ostensibly against ISIS, although the rebels and ISIS were hard to distinguish—because they were often the same people.
In essence, the Libya campaign was a proxy war against Russia. As I discuss in a series of essays, Obama and US intelligence services were involved in positioning Ukraine for yet another proxy war against Russia. (See History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War; The US is Not Provoking Russia—And Other Tall Tales; Will WWIII Begin in Eurasia?)
Trump once told the public, “I am especially proud to be the first President in decades who has started no new wars.” In my book, perhaps the most important thing a president can do is not mire the country in unnecessary war. Trump pulled us out of Syria. He sought peace with North Korea and in the Middle East. Obama was a disaster in this regard. Hillary Clinton would have been as bad or worse.
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