President Obama Risks Becoming a Major-League War Criminal

The president’s position as stated yesterday is a hodgepodge of confusion and self-contradiction.

It is also the expression of a criminal mentality. The president himself said in his interview that he does not believe Iran has either the “intention or the capability” to attack the U.S. Yet he implies the US is contemplating such an attack on Iran. And make no mistake: An attack by the US on Iran would be a war crime of the highest order — the crime of aggressive war and a fundamental violation of the Nuremberg Charter drawn up at the end of World War II. Leaders of countries that launch wars of aggression against countries that do no pose an imminent threat to the aggressor nation are war criminals. President George W. Bush was and remains a war criminal for his unprovoked invasion of Iraq, and President Obama, if he launches a war against Iran, will be just as much of a war criminal.

In fact, even threatening such a war is a war crime, and the president has come pretty close to doing that with his “no options off the table” rhetoric.

What is truly sick about all this saber-rattling is that even sane Israeli leaders admit that they don’t think Iran, if it obtained or created a nuclear weapon, would actually launch an attack on Israel. That claim of Iran’s being a mortal danger to Israel is a red herring. The Israelis, who after all have some 300 nuclear weapons themselves and are the only nuclear power in the middle east, simply don’t want Iran with a nuke because it would limit Israel’s power in dealing with Arab states bordering it, and in dealing with Hezbollah and Hamas. That’s a far cry from an existential threat.

Also sick is the American public — sick of pointless wars that is. Polls make it clear that despite a massive propaganda campaign run by the US government and broadcast by a colluding corporate media, only a small minority of Americans are buying the notion that Iran poses any kind of threat to the US, despite the best efforts of National Intelligence Director James Clapper to push the fear button. That kind of public sentiment is supposed to mean something in a democracy. It’s also supposed to be one of the lessons learned from the Vietnam War: Don’t go to war without the public’s solid support.

War crime aside, even the idea that President Obama would even think of going to war against Iran, a country of 74 million people (more than two times the size of Iraq or Afghanistan), when this country has already blown some $3 trillion on two pointless wars that have both been lost and that have both created disastrous chaos in the countries the US invaded, and when the US economy, hugely in debt, is still mired in recession, is truly appalling.

But surely the most appalling thing of all was hearing the US president say on national TV that he is operating US policy towards Iran in “lockstep” with the pipsqueak nation of Israel–an apartheid country currently being run by a bunch of corrupt, neofascist, genocidal war-mongers and religious fanatics. To tie the fortunes of the US rigidly and unthinkingly to such lunacy and to allow such lunatics to drag the US into yet another disastrous and wholly unnecessary war should be seen as an act of lunacy itself, and certainly should in itself disqualify Obama for the office of president of the United States.