Obama seems to be dictating to the world what is right and what is wrong and punishable by us bombing with incredibly blunt wording, "We will not attack nations" [referring to nuclear attack], the president stated, that "play by the rules."
Most of the world and certainly America's Financial Military Industrial Complex expects U.S. presidents to act without much regard for international law or respect for lives of non-Americans. "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every postwar American president would have been hanged." Noam Chomsky spoke in 1990 and went on to cite their crimes against humanity
http://www.chomsky.info/talks/1990----.htm
This is still the age of U.S. world domination and Obama doesn't look worried about a change and possible curtailment of his apparent immunity from prosecution for war crimes in his lifetime.
However, in the world of financial clout that often underlies political, and ultimately military, prerogatives, things are changing ever more rapidly. Though the U.S. even before reaching preeminent superpower status has been able to act with impunity, a near future scenario of it losing its homicidal bully privileges is calculatedly imaginable. And Obama is young enough to be still be alive during such a change.
Former high American officials have been sued in courts around the world. Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld and a few others, generals included, at last look, still had cases pending for lives taken on their orders according to the plaintiffs.
The accused, and others with guilty consciences, make foreign travel plans wary of exposing themselves to the reach of courts in nations whose judicial tribunals have in the past claimed jurisdiction regarding crimes committed against their citizens abroad.
Even former president George Bush the second, recalling at least one attempted citizens arrest upon him in Canada, will be advised caution on entering at least some foreign lands.
In October 2009, the Brussell Tribunal, representing hundreds of prominent public figures from all over the world, working with and on behalf of Iraqi plaintiffs, filed a case before the Audiencia Nacional of Spain against four U.S. presidents and four UK prime ministers for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Iraq. The case presented spanned 19 years, including not only the wholesale destruction of Iraq witnessed from 2003, but also the sanctions period during which 1.5 million excess Iraqi deaths were recorded. This lawsuit in a Spanish Court was directed against George H. W. Bush, William J. Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Anthony Blair and Gordon Brown.
When America is no longer dictating from a position of ownership of nearly half the world's resources, such cases might well not be automatically dismissed from investigation by courts wherever. A less ominously capable U.S. might find itself the object of in serious lawsuits brought by governments of nations previously cowed by America's ability to punish economically any trouble-makers.
Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung at a meeting with American Veterans yesterday in Hanoi, urges the United States government "to take responsibility for solving the aftermath of its war with Vietnam" emphasizing that more than two million Vietnamese were killed, millions more were injured, and more than 300,000 are still missing, three million were exposed to toxic chemicals like Agent Orange sprayed by the U.S. military during the war. He further urged the U.S. government to "listen to its conscience." Some future Vietnamese PM might be emboldened by a weakened U.S. to seek prosecution rather than to merely urge.
When U.S. power wanes as a half century of living beyond its means takes its toll, will the world not revolt against this American immunity from prosecution only begrudgingly respected by other large nations today? When no longer forced to accept American hegemony for being so inextricably interlocked in the U.S. dominated global capitalism system, will nations put up with such arrogance? When no longer feeling compromised by their reluctant acquiescence or collaboration in U.S. crimes against humanity?
When the U.S. is forced to renege on its debt to international creditors, is unable to do otherwise but sell off enough to survive bankruptcy, will it not lose the economic preeminence that backs up its claim to exceptional treatment before international laws?
2010, the U.S. still enjoys the support of foreign stooges and compliant servants of its financial-political-military empire and willing co-conspiritors like Russia and China, but what if the Secretary of the UN were to become a representative of the aspirations of majority mankind? Not a Ban Ki-Moon, but an forthright dynamic leader appointed by a UN General Assembly aware of its primacy within the original intended structure of the United Nations.
(The UN's founders' saw the General Assembly as the basis of the UN. The chapter on the UN General Assembly appears in the Charter before the chapters on the Security Council, Economic and Social Council, Trusteeship Council, International Court of Justice and Secretariat.)
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