On November 15, 2008, I wrote these words concerning President Elect Obama's impending inauguration as 44th US President:
"So help me God".
Within minutes, if not seconds of saying those words on January 20, 2009, which inaugurate Barack Obama as President of the US and Commander in Chief of the armed forces, some innocent civilian around the world will die by unnecessary US military action. As the life is snatched from some unsuspecting man, woman or child simply trying to live out the Iraqi or the Afghan or the Pakistani or the Syrian or the Iranian dream, President Obama will have exercised the most awesome power that comes with that solemn oath: his License To Kill.
We don't spend six hundred fifty billion dollars a year on weapons of civilian destruction for nothing. The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex demands that they be used, frequently if possible, to maintain need for endless replenishment. These folks will lobby and propagandize and bully and cajole the American public endlessly until the guy at the helm aggressively gives the order to fire or passively allows the overt and covert operations already in place to continue their murder and mayhem.
We now know that many, perhaps, thousands of innocents have been needlessly killed in the President's first term. However, unlike his predecessor, the current Commander In Chief is not the bloodthirsty and unrepentant warmonger his predecessor was. Obama ended the criminal Iraq war and has set a deadline to end the criminal Afghanistan war. He has pushed back mightily against the real warmongers who salivate to attack Iran. One of those warmongers is Senator John McCain, who, had he been elected in 2008, may well have kept us in Iraq, put no timetable on exiting Afghanistan and quite possibly led the charge to demolish Iran. McCain was nuts enough to imply we needed to support Georgia militarily in their failed bid grab a province back from Russia. In re-electing Obama, we told warmonger wannabe Mitt Romney to go back to making millions busting up good companies instead of busting up America.
The Military-Industrial Complex still runs this country lock, stock and smart bomb fired by dummies. We need to oppose this leviathan with our words and our votes. As their chief executive, as our chief executive, we must hold the President accountable for all the needless militarism and deaths and destruction our gargantuan military visits upon the world. The drone campaign of murder from the skies must end. New wars must not be started. We should all work to reduce, if not stop this madness. So help us God.
