The President's Speech Reveals He Has Never Seen War

The hypocrisy and narcissistic entitlement and righteousness of our nation and government is often breathtaking. The conversation that we  Americans are exposed to in the corporate media spreads this propaganda as truth and fact. And my heart is angry and weeps. As I listen to Obama speak of the atrocities committed by other nations, I am left wondering how it is that our president can get up and look himself in the mirror while continuing to spew war talk and America being the shining light that needs to lead the world. And that's the problem - I don't believe he does look in the mirror... or at the images and realities described in this article. But I do, and I am changed. May more and more of us be courageous, care enough to know the truth, and awaken... Molly

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Wednesday, 11 September 2013 15:14By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

President Barack Obama walks to the podium before giving a television address in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Sept. 10, 2013. (Photo: Evan Vucci / Pool via The New York Time

In his big address to the nation last night, President Obama said that the videos of the August 21 gas attack in Damascus are “sickening.” I agree with him – they are sickening. And it is because they are sickening that every American should watch them.

We have a long tradition in this country, at least since Vietnam, of no longer showing genuine images of war. During the opening months of the Iraq war, for example, while international news outlets showed civilians dying in Iraq, domestic ones showed nothing of the sort.

This is just wrong - we don’t need to be afraid of shocking the American people. In a democratic society, we trust everyday people to grapple with complicated issues like war and peace. They can only do this if they see all sides of a story, and when it comes to war, that means images of death and destruction.

But the average American isn’t the only person who needs to think about the true brutality of war. What the president’s speech last night revealed to me is that this president has never actually considered the real consequences of war. Unlike General Eisenhower, or President Kennedy, who had actually been in war and seen the horrors of war, President Obama is operating under the delusion that there are "good" ways to kill people and "bad" ways to kill people. There are no "good" ways to kill people.

I have been in war zones and I have done international relief work in areas recovering from war. I've seen people injured by war and I’ve watched children die from the consequences of war. I've held them in my arms as they died. I’ve seen them die long, drawn-out protracted deaths from malnutrition and disease that were the direct consequences of war. There was nothing civilized or decent about it.

War is organized insanity. And, frankly, it's often not even that organized.

Rather than watching a drone strike from 50,000 feet, our president should look at the bodies blown apart upon impact from the ground. He should watch some footage from actual wars like Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. If he saw people dying in agony from bullet wounds or shrapnel, he might have different thoughts about drone-bombing people from the sky or arming Syrian rebels, something that will only make Syria more violent.

And if the president is so concerned about the horrors visited on children by war, he should take a look at the images of children being born today in Iraq. We blanketed that country from one end to the other with depleted uranium.

Depleted uranium is radioactive, toxic, and lasts for centuries. And today, Iraq is covered with its dust. This has caused an epidemic of birth defects, all thanks to the United States. Look at these images, Mr. President, and consider doing some remediation in Iraq, cleaning up the depleted uranium, and eliminating it from our arsenal before starting another war in the Middle East.

In Iraq, we dropped cluster bombs and many of those small clusters did not go off. Children later picked them up, thinking they were toys, and immediately lost arms or legs or died. Cluster bombs should be outlawed, but we regularly use them.

All across the world today, people lose their legs as they step on old landmines from previous wars. And yet, the United States has yet to sign onto the international Mine Ban Treaty.

If the American people were to see images like this on their television news on a regular basis, images that the rest of the world sees all the time when war is covered, they might be sufficiently horrified by the entire concept of war to be a little less enthusiastic about "good wars" and "bad wars."

There is no good war. There's only the possibility of a justifiable war – and that would be a war of self-defense. And, our nation has not been attacked by another nation since Pearl Harbor.  

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