Handle with care: American psycho system a 'co-worker of God'

US President Barack Obama made his eighth – and final – address to the United Nations General Assembly this week. What a relief, not to be subjected to any more florid speeches filled with vacuous, psychopathic lies.

Unfortunately, his successor – whoever that is – will pontificate more of the same. For the American psycho power-system is delusional about being a force for good.

As usual, Obama delivered another one of his soaring rhetorical pirouettes. The American Conjurer-in-Chief presented a sweeping vista of history that was a travesty of reality. Sweeping American global crimes under a carpet of lies.

“I say all this not to whitewash the challenges we face,” he declared at one point, without a trace of irony that that was exactly what he was doing.

What is nauseating about an American president standing up in front of the world’s nations at the opening of the UN annual assembly is not merely having to tolerate listening to such venal verbiage. It is an insult to common human intelligence to witness such brazen falsification of world conflicts – and specifically the sickening self-exoneration of American responsibility.

With patronizing, syrupy cant, Obama urged nations and world leaders to “work together” in order to resolve conflicts by “our commitment to international cooperation rooted in the rights and responsibilities of nations.”

Obama even had the gall to quote Martin Luther King by calling on nations to join with the United States as “co-workers of God”.

But how can any nation possibly combine constructive efforts with a superpower that is so deluded about its systematic criminality?

In his address, Obama referred to a host of wars, flash-points and security problems. He mentioned Ukraine, Syria, the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock, tensions in the South China Sea, North Korea’s nuclear weapons, alleged Iranian nuclear ambitions, Middle East instability, racism, sectarianism, fundamentalism and ISIL terrorism.

In front of the world, Obama had the audacity to blame Russia of “attempting to recover lost glory through force” by purportedly threatening Ukraine, the Baltic region and Europe.

“After all, the people of Ukraine did not take to the streets because of some plot imposed from abroad,” claimed Obama, in a breathtaking denial of how the US and European Union actually destabilized the country in 2013-2014, leading to a CIA-backed coup d’état and an ongoing war in eastern Ukraine.

In virtually every conflict cited by Obama it can be factually counterposed that US intervention has played a critical role in unleashing hostilities and tensions with a death toll exceeding millions of victims. Yet all he would admit, with astounding understatement, was that the US has “made our share of mistakes” over the past 25 years since the end of the Cold War.

We don’t have space or patience to rebut every one of the falsehoods spouted by Obama at the UN. But let’s take a few.

Syria’s “tragic civil war” is not due to a sectarian regime abusing its power, as he makes out. The nearly six-year war is the result of US-led efforts to destabilize a pluralist Arab democracy for regime change towards a puppet willing to serve American hegemonic “core interests” in the region. This criminal US objective is in violation of international law, including Washington’s covert support for proxy terrorist insurgents.

Obama deplores “fundamentalism” and the rise of “medieval” ISIL terrorism without a hint of shame that seven decades of US strategic collusion with the medieval fundamentalist Saudi dictatorship has spawned ISIL and other Islamist terror networks.

The mentality of extremism and sectarian intolerance that Obama rhetorically condemns is a major plank in US foreign policy to destabilize the Middle East for its own hegemonic needs. And this week as the head-chopping Saudi regime’s air force slaughtered 20 civilians in the Yemeni port city of Hodeida, the Wahhabi monarch in Riyadh was rewarded with yet another US arms deal worth $1.15 billion – one of over 40 such arms deals under Obama administrations worth a total of $115 billion.

On the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, the American president lectured Palestinians to “reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel”. For token balance, he added that Israel “cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land.” But permanently occupying and usurping Palestinian land is the modus operandi of the Israeli government, whose unwavering sponsorship by Washington was only last week testified to by the release of $38 billion in US military aid over the next decade.

Unsurprisingly, there was no mention of the recent disclosure from former US Secretary of State Colin Powell that Israel has 200 nuclear missiles targeting Iran. Instead, however, Obama singled out Iran and North Korea as having sinister nuclear designs.

Obama talked about “protecting allies” in Europe from Russian aggression and made a veiled swipe at China for stoking territorial tensions in the South China Sea. When in reality, it is US-led NATO military build-up on Russia’s borders and Washington’s muscle-flexing in Asia that is driving the world to an all-out war between nuclear-armed states.

“But I believe America has been a rare superpower in human history insofar as it has been willing to think beyond narrow self-interest,” intoned the 44th occupant of the White House with a straight face. “And as a consequence, I believe we have been a force for good,” he added.

In summing up, Obama appeared to misspeak: “Let me conclude by saying that I recognize history tells a different story than the one that I’ve talked about here today.”

You can say that again.

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Russia uses force to 'recover lost glory', says Obama

As he narcissistically regaled the Assembly with delusion American virtues, one would hardly know that the American “co-worker of God” is simultaneously bombing seven countries: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

The world’s instability over the past 25 years can be traced directly to the invasion of Iraq under President Herbert Walker Bush in 1991, and from then on to an unrelenting criminal US policy of military intervention around the globe in dozens of countries, including former Yugoslavia and the Balkans and across the Middle East.

Obama solemnly exalts the “rule of law” and “multilateral constraints” and yet in the same breath the mendacious, contradictory Commander-in-Spiel declares Washington’s unilateral prerogative to pursue its “core interests”.

That is the kernel of the problem. American power sees itself as above international law. It is only bound by the interests of its ruling class of Wall Street and corporate oligarchs. And, as history shows, that power is prepared to wage war, destroy other nations and exterminate millions of human beings in order to gratify its interests.

At the UN, Obama warned: “And so I believe that at this moment we all face a choice. We can choose to press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration. Or we can retreat into a world sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict.”

The sense of urgency is appropriate. But the choice facing the world is whether the rampant lawlessness of American power can be deactivated in a safe way that avoids a world war igniting.

And what makes that task especially fraught with danger is that the American psycho actually thinks itself a “co-worker of God”.