R2P, 'Atrocities Prevention':
Obama's Road to Nuclear War
by Michele Steinberg
"Dating backing to the British Empire's pollution of United Nations debates after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, 'Responsibility To Protect,' known as R2P, is not a new concept, but it is now in danger of being pushed through as official U.S. policy under the mentally unfit Obama, through a network of British agent financed by George Soros. Included among its personnel are ... White House advisor Samantha Power; and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice. After the Libya resolution and action, it will be far easier to bulldoze through military actions against any country that is deemed to have 'attacked its own population.' "[1]
April 30—In May 2011, months before the murder of the already captured and wounded Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, EIR warned that President Barack Obama would use the British Empire-created doctrine, "Responsibility to Protect," to launch a series of imperialist wars disguised as "humanitarian interventions"—wars that are not in the national interest of the United States, but that of the British Empire's financier oligarchy, to destroy the sovereignty of nation-states, and preserve its own power structure.
Now, unless stopped by Constitutional action to remove him from office either by impeachment, or by invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, Obama has put the United States and the world on the path to thermonuclear war, because the real targets of this drive for a succession of wars are Russia and China. On April 23, 2012, in a performance at the Holocaust Museum in Washington that rivaled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's railing about a new holocaust threat against Israel coming from Iran, Obama launched a full-scale plan for preventive war against national sovereignty—starting with Iran and Syria.
Obama didn't just deliver a speech: He outlined several measures by unilateral executive action that go beyond rhetoric, including:
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convening the first meeting of the Atrocities Prevention Board (APB), under its chairperson Samantha Power, a framer of the R2P doctrine, working for billionaire hedge-fund operator George Soros;
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ordering the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies to prepare a National Intelligence Estimate on the risks of mass atrocities that require U.S. intervention;
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imposing new sanctions against companies doing technology business with Iran and Syria, because these countries have supposedly used technology to deny their populations their "human rights" to use the Internet;
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hosting a hypocritical White House Facebook/Twitter/podcast event on the theme of fighting human-rights violations, in which Samantha Power, Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, and some dozen other "humanitarian interventionists" could rant against Syria, Iran, Sudan, or any other nation that is dubbed a human rights violator.
A 'Core Interest'
Obama declared on April 23 that the establishment of the APB is a "core interest" of the United States—and his actions were immediately recognized as an implicit announcement that he is planning for war against Syria and Iran. But Obama was not acting on his own; he is acting from a script first spelled out in public in April 1999 by then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Chicago. Blair, speaking in the midst of the Kosovo War, declared that the world had entered a post-Westphalian and post-national-sovereignty phase, in which the collective authority of the international community could dispose of any government under the guise of "humanitarian interventionism."
In fact, Tony Blair, still Obama's Mideast "Quartet Envoy," who meets regularly with Netanyahu in Israel, where he has a permanent office, was in the United States in the week immediately before Obama's Holocaust Museum speech. Blair met with Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and with UN Ambassador Rice. Whether Blair had another one-on-one meeting with Obama at the White House has not been disclosed.
"Last year, in the first-ever presidential directive on this challenge, I made it clear that 'preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States of America,' " Obama said on April 23. That directive, Presidential Study Directive 10 of August 2011, created the APB, and declared the prevention of mass atrocities and genocide to be a "core interest" of the United States. And stopping mass atrocities could mean military action, ordered by the President and Commander-in-Chief, without consulting Congress.
"Now ... we're making sure that the United States government has the structures, the mechanisms to better prevent and respond to mass atrocities," Obama continued. "So I created the first-ever White House position dedicated to this task. It's why I created a new Atrocities Prevention Board, to bring together senior officials from across our government to focus on this critical mission. This is not an afterthought. This is not a sideline of our foreign policy" (emphasis added).
Over and over Obama intoned,
"Never again," to the audience at the Holocaust Museum. He added that the Board "will convene for the first time today, at the White House.... We'll strengthen our tools across the board, and we'll create new ones. The intelligence community will prepare, for example, the first-ever National Intelligence Estimate on the risk of mass atrocities and genocide. We're going to institutionalize the focus on this issue. Across government, 'alert channels' will ensure that information about unfolding crises—and dissenting opinions—quickly reach decision-makers, including me."
In reality, the grand opening of the Atrocities Prevention Board under the R2P doctrine is "Plan B"—the war against Syria, once the British Empire bloc of nations succeeds in burying UN envoy Kofi Annan's ceasefire plan. And in lockstep with Obama, groups of treasonous Senators unveiled resolutions for the next war of this new British offensive—against Syria. One group, of Senators—Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and John McCain (R-Ariz.)—introduced a resolution that denounced the Syrian government for "ongoing crimes against humanity," and called upon President Obama "to refer the situation in Syria to the newly established Atrocities Prevention Board and other available international legal processes."
Kerry then announced that he would be introducing another bipartisan Senate bill—S.2381—to strengthen the State Department's Rewards Program for capturing accused human rights violators whose alleged actions fit under the APB's rubric. Then, on April 26, Kerry also rammed through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a resolution calling for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad—but not without intense debate.
Backlash in the U.S. and Israel
But in the wake of this announcement of the APB meeting, following months of Anglo-American propaganda for war against Syria, and for an Israeli attack on Iran, an unexpected backlash—first in the United States, including from U.S. Senators, and now even more stridently inside Israel—has put both Netanyahu and Obama on notice that their insane actions to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war will be resisted.
From the pages of activist websites such as antiwar.com, to senior members of the U.S. Senate who opposed the Libya War, to the legal experts who have outlined the arguments for impeaching Obama, the APB announcement caused an explosion of opposition. Inside Israel, an interview with Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz on April 26, hit Netanyahu like a bolt of lightning. And before Netanyahu could fully recover, Yuval Diskin, the former head of Shin Bet, the internal security service, gave a speech in which he denounced both Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak as leaders he knew "up close" and would not trust with taking the world to war with Iran (see below).
While U.S. institutions' attacks on Obama have been far less hard-hitting, the legal implications, coupled with the nationwide organizing by the LaRouche political movement to remove Obama from office, could be far more definitive.
Beginning on April 17, when Senator Kerry, immediately following his meeting with Blair, held a hearing to plan so-called "safe zones" in Syria, two Republican Senators, Bob Corker of Tennessee and Ranking Member Richard Lugar of Indiania, attacked the policy as nothing but a continuation of the illegal war against Libya, which they had opposed. In addition, Corker forecast that the Blair-Obama "Plan B" for war against Syria will involve the U.S. in war with Russia.
Corker warned:
"[I]f we keep going down the path of the armed rebels ... and—and [think] just how that ends up. So—so for that ["safe zones"] to happen, our military is going to be involved in some form or fashion." ... "Arming rebels obviously is the opposite of what Russia is now doing. They're arming Syria. So play that out if you will and—and take us—you know, where does that go? Because it would involve us having, I would think, some type of boots on the ground or something else happening in that regard in direct conflict to another P-5 member" (i.e., Russia) (emphasis added).
At the same hearing, Lugar, who had been quite strenuous in opposing Obama's illegal Libya War, said that it is "almost an illusion that our overall goal is somehow to formulate a government that is acceptable to the Syrian people," through "some degree of citizen participation and democratic procedures...." Evoking the lies about Libya told by Obama, Lugar added that the idea of establishing "safe zones" "may not be a full-scale military operation, but it does have implications" of a military operation.... Why, at the present time, first of all, have we been so intent on the fact that Assad must go?"
By April 26, a stormy mark-up session on the British Empire-inspired Senate Resolution for the overthrow of President Assad found Corker and Lugar openly battling Kerry and Obama on the R2P doctrine, and leading a revolt of five Republican Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee in opposing the bipartisan overthrow bill.
The five Republicans were joined by Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, a former Secretary of the Navy (under Reagan), who also voted against the insane bill that went so far as to condemn Russia for continuing its long-standing military trade agreements with Syria. Both Lugar and Corker demanded, unsuccessfully, that reference to removing Assad from office be taken out of the resolution, but Kerry insisted it stay in, since Obama had already proclaimed the overthrow of Assad as his policy. Most of the Senators went along.
Lugar warned,
"For us to get into a situation where we are making these sorts of judgments seems to be overstepping without really having a fundamental debate. We crept [up] on this before, during the Libya situation ... and we've never really had a debate. The personalization of this resolution is not a good idea.... Many thousands of people have been killed in Russia and China and even in Burma," Lugar continued. "The president could say [Russian President-elect Vladimir] Putin must go, or Chinese leaders, because they are committing crimes in Lhasa all the time. But we are not affirming that.... This is a shift in making foreign policy that I am very uncomfortable with."
The opposition to the "humanitarian" interventionist drive by London and its Obama tool has been percolating inside Republican Party circles for some time—including among some unlikely figures. Back on March 31, 2011, during the early phases of the Libya operation, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, blasted President Obama and the R2P scheme in opening remarks at a hearing on "Libya: Defining U.S. National Security Interests."
"Whether we agree or disagree with the decision to intervene in Libya, concerns have now been raised across both sides of the aisle about implied future obligations under the 'Responsibility to Protect,' a vague concept first articulated in a UN General Assembly Resolution more than a year ago, which the UN has endorsed but has failed to define," said Ros-Lehtinen. She singled out Samantha Power as the driver behind the Libya War, "based upon this principle and over the objection of military planners."
Now, with the official establishment of the Atrocities Prevention Board, the opposition to Obama could become a drive to remove him from office along the lines of the House Concurrent Resolution 107, sponsored by Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), which would make "the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress," an impeachable offense.
Already, in response to the APB inauguration, legal scholar Bruce Fein, who previously outlined the legal reasons for impeaching Obama, wrote on April 25 in the Huffington Post, that Obama's
"unprecedented principle [of interventionism] would justify endless presidential wars anywhere.... Unless repudiated by the political leadership of the United States, the principle will lie around like a loaded weapon ready for invocation by some future self-deified Caligula to justify martial law...."
On the same day, Prof. Stephen Walt, author of the book The Israel Lobby, wrote "Three reasons against the APB," which detailed how the Board will "aid interventionism," which in no way solves the core problems that create atrocities, and that Obama's definition of atrocity is skewed to what everyone does, except the U.S. and its allies. The Christian Science Monitor warned that this Obama declaration will lead to more "Libyas" immediately—another era of perpetual wars.
The Roots of R2P and the Atrocities Prevention Board
The twisted doctrine known as the "Responsibility To Protect" goes back more than a decade to a concerted British Commonwealth campaign at the United Nations. But it was self-confessed Nazi-collaborator and British agent George Soros who most explicitly defined it as the end of the recognition of national sovereignty. "Sovereignty is an anachronistic concept originating in bygone times when society consisted of rulers and subjects, not citizens," Soros wrote in a 2004 article in Foreign Policy (emphasis added).
"It became the cornerstone of international relations with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.... The rulers of a sovereign state have a responsibility to protect the state's citizens. When they fail to do so, the responsibility is transferred to the international community."
The R2P doctrine has been the British Empire's drumbeat since Tony Blair's 1999 Chicago speech calling for a ground invasion of Kosovo, but it has been kept alive through the foundations and operatives of Soros, including the Soros-owned Samantha Power, since the mid-1990s, when Soros was creating the International Criminal Court, and trying to take over the nearly failed states of the former Soviet Union through his Open Society Foundation.
But despite decades-long efforts of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the myriad media empires they control, R2P has never been accepted by the UN General Assembly. In fact, at the lengthy debate covering several General Assembly sessions in July 2009, only a weak resolution to continue to consider R2P was passed. The Non-Aligned Movement, which has 118 members and 18 observer nations, opposed the R2P concept as a danger to national sovereignty, and a tool of selective punishment.
At the same debate, China's UN envoy, Amb. Liu Zhenmin, in an eloquent statement, warned against "abuse of the concept" of R2P, which threatened to become "another version of 'humanitarian intervention.' " Liu also said emphatically, that R2P "remains a concept. It does not constitute a rule of international law.... States must refrain from using the 'R2P' to exert pressure on others." Most importantly, the Chinese Ambassador asserted, "[T]he basic status of the purposes and principles of the UN Charter remain unchanged. There must not be any wavering over the principles of respecting state sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs."
China and the members of the Non-Aligned Movement—victims of British imperialism—immediately recognized the R2P sophistry for what it was—an attempt to bust up the protection of national sovereignty in Article 2 of Chapter 1 of the UN Charter, which says that "nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state," and that the UN "is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all of its Members."
But the UN and its Charter are exactly what the R2P imperialists—the British monarchy and its lackeys like Blair—are out to destroy. Despite being rejected by member nations of the UN, the R2P cause did not lack sponsors; it was being built up through a score of organizations led by the International Coalition for the Responsibility To Protect, headquartered at the World Federalist Society offices in Washington, D.C., and funded by the Soros operations. It has affiliates in about 20 countries.
A leading co-thinker outfit, the Global Centre on the Responsibility To Protect (GCR2P) in New York, was created in February 2008, to "transform the principle of the responsibility to protect into a cause for action," and turn R2P into the doctrine of perpetual war.
In January 2009, the book Responsibility To Protect: The Global Moral Compact for the 21st Century, was published as the blueprint for R2P interventions. Its principal author, Richard Cooper, is the Convenor of the Responsibility to Protect Coalition, and the Forward to the book was written by Samantha Power.
[1] Michele Steinberg, "The British Empire Is Using 'R2P' To Destroy the U.S.," EIR, May 6, 2011.
