GULF WIDENS BETWEEN SPEECH AND REALITY IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

By Christine E. Black

President Barak Obama said in his speech in Cairo Thursday, June 4, 2009, that his administration wants to repair relations with Muslim countries. I am troubled by how his lofty words appear disconnected with what’s actually happening now in the U.S. and some Muslim countries.

In some respects I am more disturbed when I listen to Obama than I was when listening to former President Bush. Bush and Cheney snarled accusations and threats while unleashing destruction in Iraq, at rendition sites around the world, and at Guantanamo. Obama, on the other hand, says to Muslim people, we are not the enemy, we bring a message of peace and goodwill while just this past week U.S. military bombs killed more than 140 people in Afghanistan in what the government said was an accident and the most those in power can say is that they “regret” it.

Incongruities between speech and action disturb me.

The Obama administration has ordered an increase in drone attacks in Pakistan since he took office in January. I learned recently this means that a person at a computer in California or Nevada controls a robot-powered fighter plane that blows up clusters of huts in Pakistan. Hundreds of people have been killed like this, including families sleeping or doing mundane domestic chores. Imagine the horror and trauma those survivors will live with. In a country where many people are illiterate, where dwellings often don’t have running water or electricity, a robot plane flies out of nowhere and blasts your home as you scramble to save your dying children and other relatives. And yet, in Obama’s speech, he said that violence is an ineffective tactic of the weak and wrong-headed; this is admirable language that is unfortunately not supported by the reality that his administration is creating, not too unlike the one created by the last administration.
War deaths increase in Iraq yet that turm oil no longer makes the front page of U.S. newspapers. I read on www.antiwar.com or www.aljazeera.net that dozens of Iraqis are blown up each day on the streets of Iraq along with 2, 3 or 5 American soldiers. Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq War, calling it a “dumb” war, which to me seems an insultingly trivial term when more than a million Iraqis have died senselessly and millions more lost their homes.

That’s not “dumb”; it’s tragic, unbelievably sad, not to mention criminal. I might understand more responses like grief, public acknowledgement of the enormous suffering the U.S. led invasion caused, an apology, and an offer to pay for reconstruction and damages. I have befriended an Iraqi refugee woman in our town who had to pay for her own airfare from Iraq to Syria to the U.S. after she fled her home and high school teaching job she loved. With her low paying job the International Rescue Committee helped her obtain, she will make payments on the bill for two years, she told me. When she first arrived, she talked of seeing her new husband killed in front of her. When speaking of the invasion, she raised her palms, grimaced. “Why?” she asked, shaking her head.
Obama said in his speech that his administration does not plan oc cupation or permanent military bases in Muslim countries, but one is being built now in Afghanistan. In Iraq the U.S. built the largest American embassy in the world along with several bases.

Forty percent of all of our tax money goes to pay for war, according to the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Part of my family’s income pays for weapons that assault families in Gaza and for construction of military bases in Iraq, and I don’t agree to it. I would like to hear Obama talk about this. He declared emphatically that he ordered torture to end at Guantanamo and the prison closed, but it’s not closed and doesn’t look like it will be any time soon, and lawyers for prisoners there report that torture still goes on, especially from hired thug squads. Additionally, the larger and worse prison, Bagram, still operates and is being expanded in Afghanistan. And just this week, another prisoner in Guantanamo killed himself while photos circulate in the government, but not to the public, of the U.S. military sadistically abusing prisoners. If anything, I would view all these occurrences as part of a spiritual and national emergency, not cause for pontificating and self-congratulatory speeches.

During Israeli military’s vengeful bombardment of Gaza in December, a place where people cannot even flee because the borders are blocked, I kept waiting for Obama to say something that indicated he understood the accumulated suffering there and America’s part in it. But he did not. He, like most others, touted Israel’s “right to defend itself,” a justification that rings more and more hollow in light of Israel’s refusal to halt settlements on Palestinian land or end a siege that prevents food, medicine, and building supplies from passing through, crippling any hope for Palestinian economic survival.

Certainly, the “extremists” who criticize or resist our government’s actions remember these violations all too well. Some of Obama’s speech reminded me of an assailant who asserts to his victim: “But I’m really a nice guy, you can trust me. I mean you no harm. Really.” To me, Obama does seem like a nice guy. And yet, he oversees the largest military budget in the history of the world, and the U.S. government continues to act as an assailant. Obama has access to and can wield enormous power around the world, and yet he has not even been to Gaza where more than a thousand people died in a recent military assault, largely funded by the U.S. Most of the dead and wounded in Gaza are children.

I have a friend and former student who is on his way to Afghanistan after fighting in Iraq for fourteen months. He called the other day and said he had heard that the violence was horrible and getting worse. “In Iraq?” I asked. “No,” he said. “In the other place.” This battle-hardened Marine sounded sick with dread as he waits for the official word that he is shipping out. In charge of about 400 hundred other Marines who are also headed back to war, he has had to tell at least three sets of parents in the last six months that their son committed suicide. Soldier suicides have become a national emergency. A base in Kentucky closed down last week because of the outbreak of suicides.

Why didn’t we hear from Obama about this deep and encroaching harm? And how could he have decided to plow ahead with more war that we cannot afford either spiritually or financially after what the country has endured for years and after what it has inflicted on others? The gulf widens between our political language, with its platitudes and glowing abstractions, and the crushing realities of peoples’ lives. Obama’s skill at this type of speech impresses as well as alarms me as it contributes to this widening gulf. I fear that we will forget what U.S. policies are doing to others and to ourselves.