Obama ’s Iraq speech: An exercise in cow ardice and deceit

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Obama’s Iraq speech: An exercise in cowardice and deceit
By Bill Van Auken
1 September 2010

President Barack Obama’s nationally televised speech from the White House Oval
Office Tuesday night was an exercise in cowardice and deceit. It was deceitful
to the people of the United States and the entire world in its characterization
of the criminal war against Iraq. And it was cowardly in its groveling before
the American military.

The address could inspire only disgust and contempt among those who viewed it.
Obama, who owed his presidency in large measure to the mass antiwar sentiment of
the American people, used the speech to glorify the war that he had mistakenly
been seen to oppose.

The most chilling passage came at the end of the 19-minute speech, when Obama
declared, “Our troops are the steel in our ship of state,” adding, “And though
our nation may be traveling through rough waters, they give us confidence that
our course is true.”

It is for this statement, rather than all the double-talk about troop
withdrawals, that Obama’s miserable speech deserves to be remembered. It was
rhetoric befitting a military-ruled banana republic or a fascist state. The
military—not the Constitution, not the will of the people or the country’s
ostensibly democratic institutions—constitutes the “steel” in the “ship of
state.” Presumably, the democratic rights of the people are so much ballast to
be cast overboard as needed.

The occasion for the speech was the artificial deadline fixed by the Obama
administration for what the president termed the “end of our combat mission in
Iraq.” This is only one of the innumerable lies packed into his brief remarks.

Some 50,000 combat troops remain deployed in Iraq. While they have been
rebranded as “transitional” forces, supposedly dedicated to “training” and
“advising” Iraqi security forces, their mission remains unchanged.

Indeed, barely a week after the media turned the redeployment out of Iraq of a
single Stryker battalion into a “milestone” signaling the withdrawal of the last
combat troops, 5,000 members of the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment, a combat unit,
were sent back into the occupied country from Ft. Hood, Texas.

Washington has no intention of ending its military presence in Iraq. It
continues to build permanent bases and is determined to continue pursuing the
original agenda behind the war launched by the Bush administration in March of
2003—the imposition of US hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

Obama’s speech was both incoherent and groveling. The president sought,
dishonestly, to take credit for fulfilling his campaign promise on Iraq. As a
candidate he had pledged to withdraw all US combat troops from the country
within 16 months of taking office. In the end, he merely adopted the time table
and plan crafted by the Pentagon and the Bush administration for a partial
withdrawal, leaving 50,000 combat troops in place.

The Democratic president felt obliged, under the mantle of paying tribute to
“our troops,” to fundamentally distort and whitewash the entire character of the
war they were sent to fight, painting one of the blackest chapters in US history
as some kind of heroic endeavor.

“Much has changed” since Bush launched the war seven-and-a-half years ago, Obama
stated. “A war to disarm a state became a fight against an insurgency” in which
American troops battled “block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a
better future.”

The speech was crafted as if the president were addressing a nation of
amnesiacs. Do they really think that no one remembers it was a war launched on
the basis of lies? The American people were told that an invasion of Iraq was
necessary because the government of Saddam Hussein had developed “weapons of
mass destruction” and was preparing to place them in the hands of Al Qaeda to
set off “mushroom clouds” over American cities.

There were no “weapons of mass destruction,” nor were there any ties between the
Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda. These were inventions of a government that was
determined to carry out a war of aggression to advance US imperialist interests.

These lies were thoroughly exposed and contributed to the growth of overwhelming
hostility to the war among the American people. All of this is to be forgotten,
dismissed as meaningless details.

The Iraqi people are presented by Obama as the fortunate beneficiaries of
American self-sacrifice and heroism, which bestowed upon them the “opportunity
to embrace a new destiny.”

One would hardly imagine that over a million Iraqis lost their lives as a result
of this unprovoked US war; that some 4 million have been driven from their homes
by violence, either forced into exile or displaced within the war-torn country
itself. Every institution and essential component of social infrastructure was
laid waste by the US invasion, which unleashed what can most accurately be
described as sociocide—the murder of an entire society. The devastation wrought
by US militarism has left a shattered nation of widows, homeless, unemployed and
wounded.

While a temporary reduction in armed resistance to the US occupation was
achieved by bleeding the Iraqi people white, what has been left is an unviable
society and political system, dominated by sectarian divisions and overshadowed
by the continuing US presence.

Among the more stomach-churning sections of the Obama speech was his gratuitous
tribute to his predecessor, George W. Bush. While acknowledging that they had
“disagreed about the war”—a disagreement he had no desire to spell out—Obama
insisted that “no one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or
his love of country and commitment to our security.” This proved, he continued,
that “there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it.
And all of us are united in appreciation of our servicemen and women.”

Bush launched a war that was illegal under international law. He and the other
leading figures in his administration—Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza
Rice—dragged the American people into a war crime, essentially the same act for
which the Nazis were tried and convicted at Nuremberg—the planning and waging of
a war of aggression.

Obama told his audience that he had spoken to Bush that afternoon, apparently
expressing his solidarity with a war criminal who belongs on trial at The Hague.

Inevitably, out of that essential crime, a host of other crimes followed. The
American “servicemen and women,” whose honor is constantly invoked to justify
mass killing, became participants in hideous crimes.

The people of the United States and the world were revolted by the images that
emerged from Abu Ghraib. But the Obama administration has intervened in court to
prevent the exposure of evidence of other criminal acts that are even more
unspeakable.

The troops were themselves victims of this war. Nearly 4,500 lost their lives in
the aggression launched by the Bush administration, with 35,000 more wounded.
Hundreds of thousands have suffered psychological trauma as a result of being
thrown into a dirty colonial war.

“The greatness of our democracy is our ability to move beyond our differences,
and to learn from our experiences as we confront the challenges ahead,” Obama
continued. What a travesty!

The reputation of American democracy was built upon constitutional principles
and rights that were shredded by the Bush administration in the name of a
“global war on terrorism.” The Obama administration has fully embraced these
attacks on democratic rights, defending domestic spying, rendition, imprisonment
without charges or trial and even arrogating to the executive branch the right
to designate US citizens as terrorist suspects and order their extrajudicial
execution.

The twisted path of the speech led Obama from Iraq to Afghanistan. Here he
claimed, was a war that could be supported by “Americans from across the
political spectrum,” because it is supposedly being waged against Al Qaeda,
which “continues to plot against us.”

He declared that the “drawdown in Iraq” had allowed greater resources to be
dedicated to this war, resulting in “nearly a dozen Al Qaeda leaders” being
“killed or captured all over the world.”

What this has to do with the tripling of the number of US troops deployed in
Afghanistan since Obama entered the White House was not explained. According to
US military and intelligence officials, there are less than 100 Al Qaeda members
in all of Afghanistan, which is now occupied by nearly 100,000 US and another
40,000 NATO and other foreign troops.

Obama went on to acknowledge that US forces “are fighting to break the Taliban’s
momentum,” without bothering to even make a case for a connection between that
and “taking out” Al Qaeda members around the globe. The reality is that in
Afghanistan, US forces are fighting Afghans who are resisting foreign
occupation. The aim is not defeating “terrorism,” but establishing US dominance
in Central Asia, with its geo-strategic importance and vast energy resources.

Finally, after acknowledging that the Iraq war has contributed to bankrupting
the country, Obama suggested that the change he has ordered in the military
deployment in Iraq is somehow linked to a determination on the part of his
administration to shift its focus to resolving the crisis that confronts more
than 26 million American workers who are either unemployed or unable to find
full-time jobs.

“Today, our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of
Americans who have lost their jobs back to work,” he said. “To strengthen our
middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve, and all
our workers the skills that they need to compete in a global economy.”

This is one more lie. While the administration has handed over trillions of
dollars to bail out Wall Street, it has repeatedly made clear that it will do
nothing to create jobs for the unemployed. As for education, the federal
government is continuing to cut funding, ensuring increased layoffs of teachers
and more school closures.

Behind the duplicitous rhetoric one thing is underscored by the speech: the
decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan have been dictated by the military brass and
obediently implemented by the Obama White House. This is a government that has
no independent policy, much less convictions. It implements policies that are
worked out elsewhere—on Wall Street and within the Pentagon—and is dedicated to
the defense of the financial aristocracy at the expense of the American people.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/sep2010/obam-s01.shtml

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