In February 1899, British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands."
The underlying premise of the poem, and our foreign policy concerning the Philippines, was imperialism and colonialism based on extreme racism. The idea was that brown-skinned people in other nations were incapable of ruling themselves, so it was necessary for "civilized" white men to run their countries for them so that they could "evolve".

The idea that "civilized people" in Washington should decide how countries with brown-skinned people should run their countries is not dead.

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Take up the White Man’s burden
In patience to abide
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
- Rudyard Kipling

Ahmed Mohamed, the Muslim-American 9th-grader who was arrested for bringing a homemade clock for show-and-tell got a tweet from President Obama, “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House?”
This was the president that so many voted for in 2008. The same president that said, “Trayvon Martin could have been my son.”

What few Obama supporters have bothered to ask is, "Do you know who else could have been your son?" 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki.

Roughly similar appearance and age. Both American citizens. Neither of them were guilty of committing a crime.
What's the difference between these two teenage boys?
One of them was assassinated by President Obama. The other will be his guest.

But Abdulrahman al-Awlaki wasn't on an American kill list.
Nor was he a member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusla. Nor was he "an inspiration," as his father styled himself, for those determined to draw American blood; nor had he gone "operational," as American authorities said his father had, in drawing up plots against Americans and American interests. He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him.

So how did the Obama Administration justify assassinating a 16-year old boy that wasn't guilty of breaking any laws?

GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don't think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.

It's one thing for Obama to pose as a fighter against anti-Muslim prejudice, but to do it while engaging in a lethally prejudicial drone war against multiple muslim nations, and casually killing children in the process, well, that's more than I can stomach.
When Ahmed meets Obama he should ask him if a teenage boy should be assassinated because of who his family is?

The White Man's Burden

Consider the current political debate in Washington about what to do with Iraq and Syria.
Invade them, don't invade them.
Keep bombing them, bomb them more, get more nations to bomb them.
The debate is pretty limited.

What is missing from the foreign policy debate is the one thing that was also missing from the debate 116 years ago - the opinions of the people who actually live there.

It's an amazing thing when you think about it.

We are obviously losing the War on Terror, and we are puzzled why that is.
We are stalemated against ISIS, and we have no answers for why that is.

Despite this complete lack of success no one bothers to ask the most basic question of all - what do the people most affected by our policies think?
Since they will ultimately determine our success or failure in this endeavor, you would think that someone in Washington would care, wouldn't you?
Is the reason we don't care arrogance? Ignorance? Or just simple Racism? I don't know, but it sure isn't because of intelligence and knowledge.

The world's most dangerous survey

Because of an amazing effort by an independent polling agency, we know the opinions of the people in and near the war zone.

But what is fascinating is that it was possible to conduct this opinion poll at all - especially given the continuing violence in Iraq and the chaos in war-torn Syria.

As you might imagine, collecting the results required going into ISIS-controlled regions and talking to people face-to-face, not just calling people on the phone.
If you are like the typical American, you will scoff at these survey results because they are so different from your own, much like people who suggested Filipinos could run their own country 116 years ago.
Ironically, Obama has bombed the Philippines via drones in this racist war.

Most Iraqis don't want us to bomb them, but when have you ever heard an American media outlet or politician admit that? And if they did, why do Americans never consider their wishes?
And it isn't ISIS influencing the results. 50% of people in Baghdad oppose U.S. airstrikes, while in ISIS-controlled areas 57% support airstrikes.
An ever larger percentage of Iraqis think the U.S.-led coalition is a negative influence. Interestingly, Shias disapprove of the U.S. coalition even more than Sunnis.

This is similar to our drone strikes in Pakistan, where only 5% of Pakistanis approve us bombing their country and an overwhelming majority oppose it, but we continue to do it anyway.
And why not? Even Democrats support bombing brown-skinned people.
Also, it is interesting that a third of Iraqis don't believe their country is headed in the wrong direction. That's a larger percentage than Americans.

I know the response to this is, "You can't run a war from opinion polls."
While there is some truth to that, the reply to this is, "Ignoring the opinions of the locals is how we lost in Vietnam, and why we are losing the War on Terror today."
What's more, ignoring the local culture is why the occupation of Iraq failed.

Despite those obvious truths, we just can't shake the temptation to ignore what the locals think. When they ask us to stop bombing them, we pretend to not hear them.
Why is that? Because they are foreigners, and thus not totally human.

What is the value of an innocent life?

The answer to that question depends on the color of their skin and their nationality.
When a drone strike killed two white, western hostages, President Obama publicly apologized.
But what happens when the innocent people getting killed aren't white and western?
What if they are, say, Yemeni police officers.

It seems the Obama Administration has known for years how Salem and Waleed died, and what a terrible mistake it was. Yet the President refuses to admit it.
Instead of an official apology, a few months after my visit, members of my family were handed $100,000 in sequentially-marked U.S. dollars in a plastic bag. A Yemeni security service official was given the unpleasant task of handing this over. I looked him in the eye and asked how this was acceptable, and whether he would admit the money came from America. He shrugged and said: "Can't tell you. Take the money."
What is the value of a human life? The secret payment to my family represents a fraction of the cost of the operation that killed them. This seems to be the Obama administration's cold calculation: Yemeni lives are cheap. They cost the President no political or moral capital.

Faisal's family are the lucky ones. As it stands, the United States plans no compensation payments to the families of innocent victims in Iraq and Syria, despite killing at least 100 children.

"The joke was that when the CIA sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers – but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued."
- NY Times, 2012

Our drone war really is nothing but a Global Assassination Program, complete with Secret Kill Lists and Terror Tuesday.
If that isn't a problem with you, consider that the President is the judge, jury, and executioner, without review or appeal. A concept incompatible with a free society and rule of law.

Probably the most convoluted rationalization for our Global Assassination Program is to "save lives". Also known as a Weaponization of Human Rights. Never mind that bombing your way to peace amounts to f*cking your way to virginity. Never mind the piles of dead children along the way (aka "Oops"). Never mind that it almost never works for achieving peace or greater human rights.
Nevertheless, this short cut has convinced some human rights groups to actually buy into this marketing scheme.
It might be easier to make this compromise of values when the innocent victims aren't "real people like you and me."

“The war on terror has been the basis for an ideology of racism, Islamophobia, and a climate of massive repression.”
- Ralph Schoenman

The real stab in the back is the liberals and progressives who back this racist war, and even attack those don't.

Amazingly, some Democratic partisans, in order to belittle these injustices, like to claim that only those who enjoy the luxury of racial and socioeconomic privilege would care so much about these issues. That claim is supremely ironic. It reverses reality. That type of privilege is not what leads one to care about and work against these injustices. To the contrary, it's exactly that privilege that causes one to dismiss concerns over these injustices and mock and scorn those who work against them. The people who insist that these abuses are insignificant and get too much attention are not the ones affected by them, because they're not Muslim, and thus do not care.

Some will justify this global assassination program based on the fact that most of the brown-skinned people getting killed are "bad guys". How do they know that most are "bad guys"? Because government officials tells them so.

Ironically, government officials are also the ones defending the shooting of brown-skinned people on American streets because they were "bad guys". The only differences are that when its done on American streets we actually know and care who we killed, while there is a distinct lack of outrage against our racist War on Terror.

Others justify this lack of outrage against our racist war based on national borders. Which makes one ask if the color of your passport is now an acceptable racism? Or if a black man getting shot down in San Diego is worthy of outrage, but the very same black man getting shot down while trying to come back from Tijuana is A.O.K?

Those who seek to seize the moral high ground against racism should not discriminate between which racist act outrages them.

The Black Man's Burden

Not everyone approved of Kipling's poem.
Henry Labouchère responded with The Brown Man's Burden.

Pile on the brown man's burden
To gratify your greed;
Go, clear away the "niggers"
Who progress would impede;
Be very stern, for truly
'Tis useless to be mild

However, the best reply of all was by African-American clergyman and editor H. T. Johnson who wrote The Black Man’s Burden.

Hail ye your fearless armies,
Which menace feeble folks
Who fight with clubs and arrows
and brook your rifle’s smoke.
Pile on the Black Man’s Burden
His wail with laughter drown
You’ve sealed the Red Man’s problem,
And will take up the Brown,

Even in 1899, the minority community of the United States could see the connection between a racist foreign policy and a racist domestic policy.

A “Black Man’s Burden Association” was even organized with the goal of demonstrating that mistreatment of brown people in the Philippines was an extension of the mistreatment of black Americans at home.