QUOTE: On the last night of August, the president used an Oval Office speech to boost a policy of perpetual war.
While now trumpeting the nobility of an Iraq war effort that he’d initially disparaged as “dumb,” Barack Obama is polishing a halo over the Afghanistan war, which he touts as very smart. In the process, the Oval Office speech declared that every U.S. war -- no matter how mendacious or horrific -- is worthy of veneration.
Obama closed the speech with a tribute to “an unbroken line of heroes” stretching “from Khe Sanh to Kandahar -- Americans who have fought to see that the lives of our children are better than our own.” His reference to the famous U.S. military outpost in South Vietnam was a chilling expression of affinity for another march of folly.
With his commitment to war in Afghanistan, President Obama is not only on the wrong side of history. He is also now propagating an exculpatory view of any and all U.S. war efforts -- as if the immoral can become the magnificent by virtue of patriotic alchemy.
A century ago, William Dean Howells wrote: “What a thing it is to have a country that can’t be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!”
Nearly eight years ago, in November 2002, retired U.S. Army Gen. William Odom appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program and told viewers: “Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. - Norman Solomon
Full article here: http://www.counterpunch.org/solomon09012010.html
Retired Monk - "Ideology is a disease"
Comments
From the article: the cost of war counters at http://www.costofwar.com/ -- Choose your city or state to get a scale on the trillion dollars total... And don't forget on 9/10/2001 Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said that 2.3 Trillion dollars had been utterly lost by the Pentagon... the day before 9/11.
Obama has no spine. Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Pearls, Rumsfeld - should have been tried for crimes against humanity and starting two illegal wars, leading to two illegal occupations. Period. Unfortunately for him, by not condemning the illegal acts of aggression these men are responsible for, he has the blood of untold innocents on his hands.
By not condemning these men the world condemns us.
Probably, if we condemned ouselves, we'd stop doing it.
QUOTE "But no American should be allowed to forget that the nation of Iraq, the society of Iraq, have been destroyed, ruined, a failed state."
"... the people of that unhappy land have lost everything -- their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women's rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives ... More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile ... "
http://www.counterpunch.org/blum09012010.html
Goverment didn't do it on its own. The American people put it into office. Guess who is responsible for the horrors being perpetuated on the world?
If there is such a thing as karma, Americans have set themselves up for one heck of a fall.
Retired Monk - "Ideology is a disease"