I Can’t Wait For Oprah Winfrey’s First Drone Strike in 2020

If you think that replacing the current President with a more nuanced celebrity icon will cure America’s domestic and international woes then you are naïve at best. And you are hopelessly stupid at worst, and you deserve exactly what’s coming to you.

No, I don’t want Oprah Winfrey to be the next president of the United States. And no, it’s not because I’m racist, or sexist, or any of the nonsense arguments put forth by the small-minded pundits of identity politics.

Even if you are a fan of Oprah Winfrey, then by definition there is no conceivable way you could possibly want her to become your president, either.

The presidency of the United States is an office of death and destruction. If Oprah Winfrey were elected president, she would inherit bombing campaigns in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. By 2020 she would also have inherited a renewed bombing campaign in the Philippines (which secretly began under Barack Obama), a hot war in Ukraine, and a new Israeli war with Lebanon which is targeted at Iran, a longstanding foe of the United States.

Ms. Winfrey would also inherit Saudi Arabia’s deadly siege of Yemen (in addition to her own campaign there) as the United States is providing the military assistance required for this crime to continue unabated, Israel’s routine bombing of the Gaza strip (which has been documented destroying disability centres), and whatever is left of the Korean peninsula.

Seriously, what the fuck does Oprah Winfrey know about war? What do any of us know about war? Unless Oprah plans to adopt all of the child refugees that these conflicts create, then why would you want her to go anywhere near these policies? Unless she plans on bringing all the troops home and winding down these endless wars of unnecessary suffering, it is ludicrous beyond belief that anyone would want her to even consider the presidency – given her failure to discontinue these dangerous policies would transform her from a talk-show host into a war criminal in a matter of weeks.

For example, the Obama administration was well aware that Obama’s extensive drone strike assassination program violated international law and amounted to war crimes. The drone strike program kills suspects without due process and without having to formally charge them with a crime. The strike can target someone based on their movements and behavioural characteristics alone, whether or not their identity is known. Specifically, if they are moving and behaving as a militant might. Then, as is typically the case, once the initial strike has been cast, a follow up strike (known as a double-tap strike) comes into effect and murders the civilians and aid workers who have rushed to the aid of the victims. None of this is legal; and is absurdly and grossly immoral.

According to David Kilcullen, former counterinsurgency advisor to General David Petraeus from 2006 to 2008, and Andrew Exum, an army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2002 to 2004, Pakistani press reports indicated that over a three-year period between 2006-2009, American drone strikes had killed 700 civilians and only 14 terrorist leaders. This is equivalent to killing 50 civilians for every one terrorist target – a hit rate of two percent. According to the Intercept’s “The Drone Papers,” at least 90 percent of those killed by American drone strikes have been civilians. If it looks like a war crime, sounds like a war crime…

Unless you want Oprah to barge into the White House, dismantle this program in its entirety and pay compensation to all of the families negatively affected by this policy of normalized murder, then I don’t know what you are talking about when you say you want Oprah for President. If the end goal of your “resistance” is just to have Trump removed from office, you are literally saying you care more about your feelings than you do about the countless men, women and children being buried by a radically expanding U.S. foreign policy. Because none of it matters if the murder continues without hindrance; which it will.

And just so we are clear, as unfit as Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey are, this doesn’t detract from the much bigger elephant in the room: that there is no one fit for this Office. There is no one in the world who is fit enough to take up the powers of a King: the be-all and end-all, Judge Jury and Executioner of the world, with a nuclear weapons arsenal that makes the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem like child’s play.

The idea that one person can be elected to lead a country of over 300 million people is one of the world’s biggest fallacies, particularly for a country that represents as many divisions as the United States does. It’s time to stop pretending it’s a great system whenever the corporate media throws a candidate our way that we resonate with, only to openly decry it when the candidate we don’t like wins the nuclear hot-seat.

Trust me, to the rest of the world: it makes no difference. The bombs keep falling, the children keep dying, mother nature keeps imploding and the rest of the world keeps burning around us.

But at least Oprah says nice things and is coherent, right?

Image: General Atomics/Market Watch.