By Christopher DowdIt 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.
Not for a second are we ever exposed to the stark reality of Iraq: that DC, in our name, has brought murder, pain, and misery to the lives of millions of Iraqis for self serving opaque agendas that had no good intentions or noble reasons behind them and they hate us, with good and just cause, and want us gone, completely, from their country.
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.
Within any rhetoric out of our imperial Beltway on Iraq are underlying assumptions such as that Iraqis should be grateful to the United States for invading their country on false pretenses, destroying its infrastructure, and turning their nation into our battle ground for a ludicrous war on a tactic wielded by a largely mythical organization that is conveniently and fluidly defined.
The Iraqis, you see, after decades of suffering the results of American policies that could be described, at best, as having nothing but brutal indifference toward the lives of even the most vulnerable and innocent among them, should be thankful to the United States for finally invading them and "liberating" them.
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).
Obama also called the Iraq war an "extraordinary achievement".
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.
But for Obama it is time this country of Iraq, this ungrateful country that has had the good fortune to be blessed with the presence of our moral troops, picked from the cream of our society, who have nothing but respect for them and their culture- to step up and "take responsibility" for their country because we are just so sick of doing such a good job for them.
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