Election year, when the elaborate stagecraft and electoral machinery anointing the US president roars into gear, is now upon us.
With the gory newsfeed of the Houla massacre, the war in Syria seems to be morphing into the horror movie storyline from a DVD watched too many times on Friday rec-nights.
Before US President Barack Obama landed in Chicago to attend the NATO conference on Afghanistan (May 20–21), albeit to noisy protests from the anti-war and Occupy Wall Street movements, he already had two agreements tucked under his arm...
During his 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama repeatedly said the war in Iraq was ill-advised and should be ended.
When US President Barack Obama (an Uncle Tom if there ever was one!) or even petty officials talk about America the “land of the free,” it makes me sick.
State of the Union addresses by US presidents are occasions for chest thumping and blowing the American trumpet. Barack Obama tried to do just that on January 24 but he did it against the backdrop of a crippled economy and his own approval ratings hovering at 45.9%. That the approval rating of the Republican controlled Congress is even lower — at 13.3% — will offer him little consolation.
Disturbing evidence has emerged of continued abuse and torture of prisoners by sadistic American guards in Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo), the American gulag in the illegally occupied Cuban island. To protest mistreatment and continued illegal detention, many prisoners resort to hunger strikes.
For his May 18 speech on the Muslim East, US President Barack Obama gave his latest performance in the production titled (Steadily Weakening) Empire Strikes Back. His flowery words have long since lost their perfume and his grammatically complex sentences, such a heady delight after the linguistically-challenged Bush, now seem to fall as flat as an out-of-tune piano.
In the late hours of May 1, US President Barack Obama went on the air to break the news of Osama bin Laden’s killing in Pakistan. While he did not give much detail about the operational side of the attack, he did “thank” the Pakistanis for their “cooperation” in the operation that was carried out on a “compound in Abbottabad”, home to the Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul (just outside Abbottabad).
Arab dictators--kings, presidents-for-life, generals and colonels--feeling the heat from Egypt's determined protesters, have urged US President Barack Obama not to press the Egyptian tyrant Hosni Mubarak too hard.
True, there is no shortage of armchair warriors in Washington insisting that the US cannot cut and run, or that President Barack Obama does not have the spine for a fight.
“These people are the worst of the worst,” bellow some family members. “We cannot let them loose to attack America or Americans again.” Others chime in: “They have better facilities here than they have at home..."
The so-called NGOs that are financed by the US government are an important part of US policy to advance its hegemonic goals. It is likely that during the presidency of Barack Obama the NGO sector may be used even more frequently as a tool of US foreign policy.
Since the election of Barack Obama as President, US rhetoric about war on terror has been toned down but the policies instituted by his discredited predecessor continue...
US President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world delivered in Cairo on June 4 was quite rhetorical duly impressing his audience. He touched all the right emotional buttons: commencing his address with the traditional Muslim greeting of Assalamu alaikum and quoting verses from the Qur’an.
This year’s spring has arrived with the Americans singing a new tune about Afghanistan: the Taliban cannot be defeated militarily. While this was obvious for quite some time to most observers familiar with the Afghan scene, the Americans being slow learners needed extra time to grasp this reality. From US PresidentBarack Obama down, most Americans are now singing from the same page.
US President Barack Obama’s Nowruz video message to “the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” on March 20 created quite a stir globally but it did not impress Iran’s leadership, its intended audience. The reasons are clear but first let us look at some of the positive aspects of Obama’s message. He is perhaps the first US president to address the country by its correct name: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Barack Obama’s election on November 4th and his inauguration as the 44th president of the United States on January 20th have led to misplaced optimism even among those who should know better. Obama’s claims to America’s “greatness” because it afforded him — son of a cattle-herder from Africa — the opportunity to rise to the highest office in the land should not mislead anyone.
Two narratives have dominated news about Barack Obama’s victory in the US presidential elections. The first is the corporate media’s hype that democracy in America is vibrant because even an African-American can be elected president. The second is the global euphoria over Obama’s “historic” victory carrying the implication that a similarly “historic” shift is about to occur in US policies.
The celebrations in large parts of the US and most of the rest of the world following the election of Barack Obama as next president of the USA were perhaps understandable, even though there was very little chance of his failing to be elected, given the totality of the failure of the neo-cons under George W. Bush over the previous eight years.
