A Speech for Endless War

[Panaconda]

A Speech for Endless War

by Norman Solomon

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!"

...

http://www.truth-out.org/a-speech-endless-war62881

[Catherina]

1. It was the last straw for me. Last straw. Rec'd n/t

[MineralMan]

2. Hmm...that writer must have listened to a different speech than

I did.

Unrecommended for bending the truth into a pretzel.

[Panaconda]

3. What did you think of this line?

"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."

[MineralMan]

5. I don't read speeches to hunt for lines to quote.

It's not my thing. It's far too easy to pull stuff out of context to make whatever point you wish to make. That's not useful at all.

You're welcome, of course, to do as you please.

[IndianaJoe]

4. I totally agree with you, but I don't u/r anything.

Like a lot of people here, I'm kind of disappointed with his "centrism" and his seeming inability to be the least bit confrontational with the Right, but I don't really see Obama as a big war-monger and that isn't the way I heard his speech at all. He's more about getting us out of wars than putting us in them -- and that's the message I took from his speech.