Great Speech, But It’s Time To Sober Up

Posted by Bob Lord

Natasha Leonard over at Salon puts out some really good stuff, IMHO. Today, she takes issue with Obama's proclamation of an "end to a decade of war":

In his inauguration address Monday, President Obama proclaimed that a “decade of war is now ending.” Mere hours earlier, a U.S. drone dropped missiles over Yemen, killing two al-Qaida militants as part of an intensified airstrike campaign which began last month.

It has been well-established in reports (like those from the Washington Post‘s Greg Miller) that the Obama administration has set up a national security apparatus ensuring, contra the president’s words Monday, a perpetual war. Obama’s speech may have been referring to the withdrawal of troops form Iraq or the winding down of U.S. military leadership in Afghanistan, but an increasingly militarized CIA and the perpetuation of shadow wars in Yemen and Somalia, to name just two, let alone the U.S. funds and arms sent around the world to bolster or undermine regimes as U.S. interests dictate, make talk of ending war a semantic gamble at best.

She concludes:

“We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war,” said Obama Monday. Whether “we, the people” believe this or not seems somewhat irrelevant while perpetual and amorphous war is cemented as the status quo of U.S. national security and “we, the people” are usually the last to hear about it.

This is the cost of empire. It transcends politics, as evidenced by the nearly identical policies of Bush and Obama on this front. Utlimately, it will destroy us. It may already have.