By CHRISTOPHER DOWD
It is hard to know where to begin on Obama's remarks in Iraq yesterday during a visit described unnecessarily by our press as a "surprise" since that is the only sort of visit a US President can make to Iraq. What is more appalling? The casual obscenity of a US President calling upon a nation that the US has been beating, brutalizing, and raping (that is when not using like a pawn in geo political games) for decades to "take responsibility for itself" or the fact that he has absolutely no idea of how much like a criminal sociopath he sounds when making such remarks?
It isn't Obama's fault. He is, after all, a product of the imperial Beltway and thus has never been exposed to anything approaching reality . . . to anything that lies outside the allowable parameter of opinion on Iraq. This parameter runs the gamut from the kook "right wing" belief that still believes Iraq was behind 9/11 and that the WMDs were there but just got moved to Syria . . . to the "left wing" opinion that the Iraq war, though fought for noble reasons and with good intentions, was the wrong war at the wrong time but since "we" are there "we" should make the best out of it.
I want to make something clear here. Obama's remarks yesterday in Iraq were not extraordinary or atypical in any way for an American politician, official, or military commander to make. Rather, they were par for the course in their staggeringly narcissistic and sociopath like assumptions.
And it isn't our fault that though they haven't been "killing each other for thousands of years" as is the the idiotic and wrong American sound bite on Iraqi sectarian history that they are now doing so. Nope. We had nothing to do with creating the cauldron of horrendous sectarian violence in Iraq that is ongoing to this day (and that as a ratio of population produces one or two 9/11 type casualty events in Iraq every week- that is when one of the unreported hundreds of US air-strikes in Iraqi urban centers are not doing so).
The "extraordinary achievement" that Obama called the Iraq war is a nation that high ranking American officials can't visit pre-announced. It is an "extraordinary achievement" with an "unknown" civilian casualty component- killed civilians by the way- the US military didn't even deem worthy of counting. It is an "extraordinary achievement" with as many as four million people (or nearly 20 percent of the population) either displaced or refugees. It is an "extraordinary achievement" with a capital city being walled off- as if an ancient city under siege- from the rest of the country and only allowing four access points. It is an "extraordinary achievement" still, six years on,without the same levels of pre-war clean drinking water.
No comments:
Post a Comment