Barack Obama

I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where number 44 once lived as a student at Harvard Law School (HLS), on the night he became the first black president of the United States. The celebrations in that cold winter went on into the early hours of the morning.

Introduction

On 7 April 2016, I published an essay on Barack Hussein Obama entitled “‘African American son’: US foreign policy and Africa” (Pambazuka News, 7 April 2016).

Nearly every day there is a new report of desperate migrants rescued at sea in the Mediterranean. Some are less fortunate and are among the estimated 12,000 who have died there in the last three years alone.

Free Haiti’s interest converges with that of Donald Trump. We both do not want a third Obama term with the Clintons back in the White House.

There is intense push for the NATO countries to make an overt intervention in Libya. In this moment, the justification is to fight the Islamic State and to prevent terror from spreading across the Mediterranean to Europe.

Barack Obama’s last nine months in office will provide plenty of opportunity for him to spoon-feed his scribes in the corporate media. Under the pretense of writing history they will serve as one collective pro-Obama mouthpiece between now and January 20, 2017.

A ruined Libya still lives in the US politics. There’s still no escape from the country devastated by imperialist intervention. It was, as is claimed, a failure in planning. But is it a failure in planning or “something” else?

This piece is indeed part of work in progress and is only presented here because of the recent interview of US President Barack Obama in The Atlantic magazine (Jeffery Goldberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine’, The Atlantic, April 2016 Issue).