The Obama Doctrine: Imperialism masked as humanitarian interventionism
The Four Masks of Hypocrisy: Which face is
that of the United States?
The Obama administration, in yet another display of the use of Orwellian language, has embarked on a military doctrine called "Mass Atrocity Prevention" (MAP), the Pentagon operational plan to implement the White House's "R2P" or "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine. Essentially, the Pentagon doctrine is crafted to militarily support the intervention of regional and worldwide international forces operating under the umbrella of NATO, UN, the African Union, the Organization of American States (OAS), the Arab League, and other organizations in the name of “humanitarian” intervention to prevent widespread massacres. The doctrine’s first major test case was in Libya, where NATO forces, in support of Western- and Saudi/Gulf potentate-backed rebel forces, ousted the 42 year-old regime of Muammar Qaddafi.
And in yet another display of oxymoronic Orwellian “Newspeak,” the main Defense Department activity for developing “Mass Atrocity Response Operations” or “MARO” is the Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI) at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
The new American justification for military intervention arises from Presidential Study Directive 10/PSD-10, a memorandum issued by the White House on August 4, 2011, which created an Interagency Atrocities Prevention Board and interagency review to bring administration policy in line with a new presidential policy that deems “preventing mass atrocities and genocide” a “core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.”
The new American foreign policy initiative was justified by the 2008 report of the Genocide Prevention Task Force co-chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen. The task force was heavily influenced by the neoconservative and federally-funded U.S. Institute of Peace, as well as George Soros-funded think tanks like the Center for American Progress and pro-Israeli organizations like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
PSD-10 was largely the brain child of National Security Council staff member Samantha Power, who is married to Obama’s “propaganda czar” Cass Sunstein, and Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the UN. The White House press briefing on Obama’s Mass Atrocity Prevention doctrine specifically mentioned Syria, Libya, Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire, and Kyrgyzstan as examples of when U.S. diplomatic and stronger intervention was required. The announcement cited the Holocaust in Europe and the genocide in Rwanda as reasons for the new U.S. policy but curiously omitted the U.S.-supported Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia and the CIA-supported post-1965 coup genocide in Indonesia, the latter involving President Obama’s Indonesian step-father, a lieutenant colonel in the Indonesian army.
A core elite of Democratic Party foreign policy wonks, many sheep-dipped through Soros-funded and – influenced non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the Clinton administration. In addition to Power and Rice, a major player behind MARO and U.S. “humanitarian” interventionism is Sarah Sewall, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peace Operations in the Clinton administration. She now heads a MARO team at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations-heavy Kennedy School at Harvard. Sewall’s MARO project director is Sally Chin, formerly with the U.S. Institute of Peace-funded Search for Common Ground (SFCG), which has also received support from Soros, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Saudi billionaire Prince Al Waleed bin Talal. SFCG target countries include Sudan, Pakistan, Kosovo, Kenya, Indonesia, Cote d’Ivoire, Burundi, Liberia, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, and the city of Jerusalem.
Funding for Sewall’s foreign policy-laundering operation for the Obama administration comes from PKSOI and Humanity United, an NGO having interlocking management links with many other George Soros-funded operations, including Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Tides Center, and the International Crisis Group (ICG). In addition Humanity United is linked to the U.S. intelligence and Pentagon military operations planning contractor, the RAND Corporation; CIA-linked World Vision; and the William J. Clinton Foundation, headed up by the husband of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has also embraced the MARO doctrine.
Current targets for meddling by MARO and the Soros NGO network are Syria, Somalia, Philippines, Kenya, post-Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) Colombia, Guatemala, Pakistan, Uganda (targeting the Lord’s Resistance Army), and North and South Yemen. Past target nations that saw major “humanitarian” destabilization efforts by Obama’s new doctrine were Haiti, Kosovo, South Sudan, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.
The concept of R2P arose from a December 2001 report from another Orwellian “Newspeak”-named entity, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), the brainchild of then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The commission is defunct but its role in pushing R2P was assumed by the Global Center for Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P), which has been championed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. GCR2P was founded by the same cast of Soros-influenced NGOs that helped to develop the MARO doctrine for the Obama administration: ICG and HRW, the founding partners of GCR2P. Among the major donors to GCR2P is Soros’s Open Society Institute (OSI). GCR2P’s target countries match those of other NGOs involved in advancing the MARO doctrine: Syria, Libya, Uganda, Sudan, and Democratic Republic of Congo.
The MARO doctrine and R2P are currently being used to justify covert and proposed overt NATO and U.S. military operations to topple the government of President Bashar Assad in Syria, the same “humanitarian” intervention template used to justify NATO’s and the Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) military intervention in Libya on behalf of the Transitional National Council, which plunged Libya into a worse human rights situation under rebel rule than anything ever experienced under the Qaddafi regime, including the massacre of Libyan civilians and foreign black African guest workers; summary executions of Qaddafi, members of his family, and his supporters; and detention of children.
One of the MARO principles, establishing “safe areas” for internally-displaced persons, is now at the heart of proposed NATO intervention in Syria. Another MARO military principle being proposed for Syria is the establishment of an “oil spot,” systematically securing limited areas with a “clear-hold-build” approach. Yet another MARO principle, containment through blockades and no-fly zones, was used to justify NATO intervention in Libya and is being proposed for Syria and Iran.
Other MARO operations include fomenting labor strikes in targeted nations; saturating large areas in target nations with sufficient military forces; creating buffer or demilitarized zones between perpetrator forces and victims; partner enabling by supplying advisors, equipment, and special support to host nations, coalition partners, and “victim groups” (more Orwellian “Newspeak” for rebel and secessionist forces – MARO doctrine, thus, incorporates decades of U.S. military doctrine on counter-insurgency – COIN – operations, which brought the world such “humanitarian” achievements as the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam, and other U.S. massacres of civilians in Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Iraq, and Afghanistan); and militarily defeating “perpetrator” leadership and their capabilities.
MARO and R2P, especially the training and special assistance to coalition partners, are being used by the Pentagon and CIA to beef up the U.S. military and intelligence presence at bases in east Africa and the Horn of Africa, ostensibly to protect Somalis from Al Shabab Islamist guerrillas. In fact, a virtual invading force of U.S. Special Operations forces, CIA operatives, and private military contractors have descended on the region, under the aegis of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), to prop up local armies in order to secure a developing western oil and natural as production infrastructure, including pipelines and oil sea terminals in the area. Drone, intelligence collection, and U.S. special forces and training bases have been established at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti; Victoria, Seychelles; Manda Bay, Kenya; Bujumbura, Burundi; Entebbe, Uganda; Mogadishu, Somalia; and Arba Minch, Ethiopia.
Beyond Africa, the Obama administration is building five new military bases in Australia, including a Marine base in Darwin. The U.S. military presence is also being expanded in the Philippines and Vietnam. It is well-known that beyond the Middle East and Africa, MARO doctrine is being used to eventually challenge the governments of China and Russia. In the world of Obama’s Orwellian “Newspeak,” mass atrocity prevention could result in a situation where billions die as a result of global thermonuclear warfare because a few oligarchs like Soros, Obama, and neo-conservative “New American Century” advocates decide that Western imperialism cannot be satisfied until “problem” regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang and, eventually, powerful governments in Beijing and Moscow are replaced by vassal regimes. In the world of the globalists, vulture capitalists and bankers, and militarists, the R2P promoters are now leading the initial military charge up the hill.
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Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. Has some twenty years experience in security issues. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. He has been invited to testify as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the French government. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club. Lives in Washington, D.C. His website is here.
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Illustration: Dangerous Creation
Article published here: Strategic Culture Foundation
URL: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2011/11/28/the-obama-doctrine-imperialism-masked-as
