The protests concern the nature of these attacks, which disregard national sovereignties, the laws of war and the principles of American and international law.

The attacks must be described as assassinations because, as no state of war has been declared between the US and these persons or their states, they are unlawful killings.

As John Fabian Witt of the Yale Law School wrote: "The categories of war and peace, which the modern world thought it had carefully separated, are collapsing into one another."

President Barack Obama consciously undermines the civilised order of modern society. The US has quite deliberately made itself an outlaw state.

Washington's explanation is that drone attacks are economical and expedient methods of destroying enemies to defend against, and if possible put an end to, terrorism.

This is a campaign of extravagant ambition with virtually no possibility of success, since the campaign itself inspires resistance and retaliation.

The drone campaign is another product of modern America's widespread disregard of legal norms, which as we have learned includes kidnap, torture and assassination teams operating in friendly, neutral and hostile countries.

These measures derive from moral ruthlessness interacting with two special interests concerning the Muslim world - the main US preoccupation since the end of the Cold War.

The first is the interest of the American government, pressed by the American oil industry, to exercise sufficient control over the Middle East and Central Asia as to prevent the nationalisation of foreign or domestic energy industries or the organisation of resource boycotts (British and American resistance to the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian oil company caused Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979).

The second issue is the prevention of an Arab challenge to Israel's regional military domination.

The Gulf War against Iraq served Israeli interests as well as enlarging American regional influence.

The 9/11 attacks were conceived and carried out by a small group of extremists hostile to America's mounting regional influence and specifically outraged by the post-Gulf War stationing of US forces in proximity to holy Islamic sites.

This was part of a covert Pentagon project to establish a global US base system.

The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was meant to damage Al Qaeda, while the 2003 invasion and wrecking of Iraq was an exploitation of the 9/11 attacks, plus "war of civilisation" hysteria, for Israel's strategic benefit.

President Obama's renewed and reinforced war in Afghanistan in 2008 and 2009, followed by increasing and extensive American interventions in or concerning Pakistan, Yemen and the Gulf states, was justified by the same hysteria.

Expansionist Pentagon forces are now opening new theatres of American intervention elsewhere, as well as developing the promising new zone of expanded military activity in the Far East, with China identified as a permanent threat to the US.

The war is to be extended, the conduct presumably the same. The June 8 issue of Army Times announced a new programme in which army brigades will next year be rotated throughout the world, according to a "regionally aligned force concept."

Brigades composed of 3,000 soldiers will be sent to Africa, which until now has been relatively neglected by the US, but "where terrorist groups have become an increasing threat to US and regional security."

How have they become a threat?

The troops will "learn regional cultures and languages and train for specific threats and missions".

In addition, Special Operations Command soldiers will be active in other African countries "including those amid conflict".

The endless war expands.

Source: Gulf Daily News