Washington, January 27: A prominent political analyst says US President Barack Obama’s praise of the “courage, selflessness and teamwork” of America’s Armed Forces in his State of the Union address was “sickening and laughable.”
“From beginning to end, Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech was replete with delusion and falsifications,” Finian Cunningham wrote on the Global Research website.
Cunningham added that Obama’s promise of building an “America that lasts” was predicated on a “sentimental, but utterly disingenuous notion of selfless teamwork.”
“The invocation of American military ‘heroes’ and their ‘achievements’ during nine years of waging war on Iraq as an exemplar of how to salvage his nation from economic and social catastrophe was both sickening and laughable,” he said.
On Tuesday night, Obama delivered his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, during which he lavished praise upon the US military forces, who have been variously involved in a number of countries including Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya in recent years.
“These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations,” Obama said.
Obama’s praise comes as earlier this week, Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich who had pleaded guilty over his leading of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha, was merely sentenced to a demotion to the rank of private.
Reports coming out of Fallujah in April 2004 indicated a massacre of some 600 Iraqis, including many women and children, at the hands of US troops.
In May 2004, an American helicopter fired on a wedding party in western Iraq killing more than 40 people, including many children.
On September 16, 2007, private security firm Blackwater guards shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad.
A footage posted on YouTube earlier in January showed four members of the US Marine Corps in camouflage uniforms making lewd jokes, while urinating on the bodies of three Taliban militants.
None of the four Marines have been charged yet with any crimes, but the Geneva Conventions forbid desecration of the dead.
These audacious crimes committed by the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are only the tip of the iceberg.
The nearly nine-year US military invasion and occupation of Iraq, which ended in 2011, claimed the lives of around a million Iraqis killed.
“More disturbingly, the president seems to think, and wants the US public to think, that with that kind of American ‘achievement’ and ‘courage’ their country can overcome the moral and material meltdown that it faces,” Cunningham added.
“That is tantamount to urinating on the public’s intelligence,” he concluded.
——Agencies