Want to stop ‘just one’ act of evil, Obama? Here’s how.
As Barack Obama’s presidency limps towards its anticlimax, the outgoing commander in chief has been in a wistful mood.
Late last year, Aretha Franklin’s performance of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” moved him to public tears, and in early January he was at it again, crying at a press conference as he announced his latest efforts to impose gun control against the wishes of a hostile Congress.
Obama’s tears made headlines around the world. According to the calculations of CNN, it was “the most emotion an American president has ever shown on camera”. Obama’s performance, some speculate, may spark new fads, or fundamentally recast the nature of masculinity.
“Men”, declared associate professor Jerald Podair of Lawrence University, “are allowed to cry now”. It was a long way from the carefree and mischievous Obama of 2010, who joked at a journalists’ dinner about using military drones to assassinate the teen pop stars known as the Jonas Brothers.
Obama was brought to tears by the scourge of gun violence in the United States. “We know we can’t stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world”, he told the assembled reporters. “But maybe we could try to stop one act of evil, one act of violence.”
He’s absolutely right. But for the commander in chief of the United States armed forces, stopping evil begins at home. So before he concerns himself with the pistol in his neighbour’s hand, perhaps Obama should consider the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper Drone in his own.
Because, even as he frets over the prevalence of small arms in the United States, Obama expands the reach and capacity of his own fleet of murderous drones, and puts them to heavy use.
Weeping over gun deaths at home, Obama listed the sites of infamous gun massacres that had taken place under his presidency, from Fort Hood to San Bernardino.
But he neglected to mention the sites of the massacres he has ordered, like al-Malaja in Yemen, where 41 civilians were annihilated by a Tomahawk cruise missile bearing cluster bombs and flinging fragments of burning zirconium.
Obama’s first drone strike took place just three days after his inauguration. That year, he carried out roughly 10 killings by drone every month: some single murders, some massacres. By 2014, his permanent bombing campaign had claimed 2,400 lives – that we know of.
His years-long global rampage of remote-controlled homicide is so intense that he can barely take a break to cry on camera: Obama gave his gun control speech on 5 January. Four days later, he ordered the drone bombing of a house in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan, killing five people.
Complaining about gun violence, his face stained by tears, Obama mourned: “We’ve created a system in which dangerous people are allowed to play by a different set of rules”. He’s right. We don’t know exactly how many drones Obama controls, or how many people he kills with them, because many of their operations are shrouded in quasi-legal secrecy.
He even tasked lawyers with inventing a legal excuse for the aerial murder of US citizens without that pesky “due process” required by the constitution. That is, under Obama, the president of the United States routinely decrees the murder of citizens.
A week after his speech, Obama delivered his final State of the Union address. A chair was left empty to memorialise victims of US gun violence. But there was no empty chair for 2-year-old Fatima Jaljala, killed by Obama’s bombs alongside her sister, her brother and her parents.
The easiest way for Obama to “try to stop one act of evil” would be a New Year’s resolution: no more murders. As he himself said: “Just because it’s hard, that’s no excuse not to try”.
