Last Wednesday’s reflection was about Peggy’s and my
experience in St. Peter’s Square ten days ago. It was then, I was saying, that
Pope Francis gently and subtly confronted our bellicose president and joined
Russia’s President Putin in defusing a potentially disastrous crisis not only
for Syria and the United States, but for the world. I suggested the pope might
be the unsung hero of day.
By all measures, President O’Bomb ‘em was the villain.
His speech last Tuesday confirmed that. There he
maintained his belligerent stance despite world opinion, that of the U.S.
electorate, and of world moral leaders. Worse still, he portrayed the
administration’s position as continuous with a supposed United States moral
leadership. Specifically, he claimed that for seven decades the United States
had been “the anchor of global security.”
Let’s see: that would bring us back to 1943. Was Mr.
Obama referring to the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically
elected prime minister of Iran in 1954 and the 25 year reign of terror by
Mosaddegh’s CIA replacement, the brutal Shaw of Iran, Resa Palavi? Or perhaps
Obama had in mind the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guatemala’s democratically
elected president that same year – and the 40 year dirty war waged by the U.S.
supported military which then killed more than 200,000 of “their own people.”
Or was the president thinking of the U.S. wars in Indochina and the millions of
lives it claimed. Or perhaps he was referring to the overthrow of Chile’s
democratically elected president Salvador Allende in 1973 – on September 11th
of that year (what Latin Americans refer to as “the first September 11th). By
all measures, the Chile coup was far worse than what occurred here on September
11th 2001. Or maybe the president was referring to our countries disastrous
support of Mobutu in the Congo or of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The list truly
goes on and on.
Either our Harvard educated president is ignorant of
those details, has forgotten them or he was deliberately lying to intentionally
foster Americans’ legendary ignorance of history. I’d recommend that he read
Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and Oliver Stone and Peter
Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States. That would make him realize
that only the ignorant can say (as the president put it in his speech) that we
are “exceptional.”
That is, unless by American “exceptionalism” he meant (as
Rob Kall recent
ly put it) that:
“We have more prisoners than any other nation– and most
of them haven’t harmed anyone, but prosecuting and jailing them keeps them off
the voter roles in many states.
We have the largest military and largest military budget–
which means more money going to expenses that do not grow the economy or build
the nation’s inner resources and strengths.
We spend more on healthcare than any other nation, yet we
are the only first world nation, the only member of the G-20 nations which does
not provide health care for all citizens.
We are a nation that spends more on spying on citizens
than any other nation.
We are a nation that uses more psychiatric drugs than any
other nation.
We are a nation that sets the standard for voting
corruptibility, with electronic tallying that is impossible to reliably
recount.
The list goes on and on, and then there are all the other
list items where we are low, like infant death rate, access to WIFI,
educational skills…”
No, America is not exceptional in the way the president
meant. It is a rogue state, an outlaw state. It is the world’s bully and needs
to be reined in.
Interestingly, the ones doing that reining are the
pariahs of the last century, Russia diplomatically and China economically. For
example, it was the Russian president who in the Syrian crisis ended up taking
the high road stressing the need for diplomacy, dialog, and reconciliation.
Definitely conceding that high ground to Mr. Putin, Mr.
Obama seemed content with the low. While calling Mr. Assad to observe
international law, Mr. Obama himself violated those norms by peppering his
speech last week with threats of violence that are themselves thereby
prohibited. (Remember, the use or threat of force outside circumstances of
immediate self-defense is prohibited by international law.)
So with black hat firmly in place, the U.S. president
attempted to persuade Americans, both conservative and liberal of the moral
superiority of bombing rather than diplomacy, dialog, and reconciliation. In
defending the morality of bombing, the president said nothing of the will of
his constituents or the alignment of votes in Congress. Certainly, no mention
was made of the dissenting positions of Pope Francis, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, or the Dali Lama all of whom had strongly opposed Mr. Obama’s
plans.
Meanwhile, the president ignored a golden opportunity for
using Mr. Assad’s concessions around chemical weapons for ridding the entire
Middle East of such threats along with nuclear weapons. He could easily have
done so and reclaimed the true moral high ground by calling for a Geneva
Conference to that end.
He did not for one simple reason. And that is that
Israel, America’s staunch ally, has refused to sign the Chemical Weapons
Convention which prohibits not only the use of chemical weapons, but their
possession. Israel stands in violation of international law in virtue of its
huge stockpile of chemical weapons along with an equally huge arsenal of
nuclear weapons. No one in our government or the mainstream press says anything
about that. They never will.
Israel also continues to illegally occupy the Golan
Heights in Syria no less.
There’ll be no discussion of that either by our
president, secretary of state or mainstream media.
Mr. Obama succeeded in only one thing last Tuesday. He
made it clear that he and his country are not exceptional.
We are “deceptional” on the one hand and deceived on the
other.
Mike
Rivage-Seul
**
Re-posted with
permission. Follow Mike’s blog at:
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