From the Reuters article “Obama victory infuriates Pakistani drone victims“:
The roars celebrating the re-election of U.S. President Barack Obama on television give Mohammad Rehman Khan a searing headache, as years of grief and anger come rushing back.
The 28-year-old Pakistani accuses the president of robbing him of his father, three brothers and a nephew, all killed in a U.S. drone aircraft attack a month after Obama first took office.
“The same person who attacked my home has gotten re-elected,” he told Reuters in the capital, Islamabad, where he fled after the attack on his village in South Waziristan, one of several ethnic Pashtun tribal areas on the Afghan border.
“Since yesterday, the pressure on my brain has increased. I remember all of the pain again.” . . .
Pakistanis were largely indifferent in the run-up to Tuesday’s election, expecting little change to the drone attacks regardless of whether Obama or Republican challenger Mitt Romney won.
“Any American, whether Obama or Mitt Romney, is cruel,” Warshameen Jaan Haji, whose neighborhood was struck by a drone last week, told Reuters on the eve of the election. “I lost my wife in the drone attack and my children are injured. Whatever happens, it will be bad for Muslims.”
Pakistani politician Imran Khan, a vocal critic of U.S. drone strikes, said he believed Obama stepped up the attacks in his first term so he wouldn’t look weak on national security.
“I think Obama essentially has an anti-war instinct,” he told Reuters. “Without the worry of being re-elected, he will de-escalate the war, including the use of drones. This is positive.”
But for Mohammad Khan, who is not related to the former cricketer, the damage is already done.
The February 2009 drone attack that destroyed his home left him as the main provider for 13 family members, forcing him to move to Islamabad and work with a real estate company.
“When the Sandy hurricane came, I thought that Allah would wipe away America,” he said. “America just wants to take over the world.”
Read the entire article here.
As Patrick Martin may have written here> but see also here“Neither candidate will tell the American people the truth: the next administration, whether headed by a Democrat or a Republican, will launch attacks on the living standards, social benefits and democratic rights of the American people on a scale never before seen. This will be combined with stepped-up military aggression overseas, from the Middle East to the Pacific.
Whether Obama or Romney is inaugurated next January 20 will affect only the details of this political prospectus, not its broad outlines. Both candidates, and the parties they head, represent and defend the interests of the American financial elite, the most reactionary and rapacious social force on the planet.”
The Christian Science Magazine had a similar quote 11/5 p. 33, which I cannot locate on-line.
The NET of this (socialist) thinker’s opinion is that the BIG CORPORATIONS, etc., absolutely control the USA government, and Obama will be no different now than before, and no less controlled.
Then let Pakistan control itself. It doesn’t, and it can’t, and it’s a threat to our country. Therefore, we have to control it.