Being the mother of a year-old, it has become an everyday affair to wake up during wee hours of the morning! However, the morning of September 10 was rather unusual. While changing my son’s nappy at 5:30 AM, I was thinking whether I would be able to catch President Barack Obama’s address to the nation on attacking Syria. Paradoxical though it may seem, but there are several babies, like my son, in Syria, whose fate now rests on this one man’s decision.
So here he goes… answering and snubbing his critics who have vehemently condemned the US’ continuing war-mongering stance. While I was carefully listening to the US President, whose speech was beamed ‘live’ on BBC and CNN, I was particularly angry when he said, “What happened to those (Syrian) people, to those children, is not only a violation of international law, it’s also a danger to our security.”
Does the US really care about the children of Syria, orfor that matter children of any country or region? It was this very United States of America that used chemical weapons – Napalm – during the Vietnam War under former US President John F Kennedy in 1962.
In one of the most brutally fought wars, the US ground troops used Napalm over innocent Vietnamese people not once but several times. While the US ground troops used the weapon to burn pockets of guerrilla fighters, it even dropped Napalm bombs over fields and forests. I hope it isn't too difficult to remember the photo of the 'Napalm Girl' shot by AP's Nick Ut, which fetched him a Pulitzer.
I felt outraged when Obama pointed out the fact that the alleged use of chemical weapons, in this case probably Sarin gas, by Bashar al-Assad’s regime might encourage other such “tyrants” to acquire and use them. Was this prophecy not applicable then, when US administration encouraged the use of ‘Agent Orange’ (a toxic chemical) during the Vietnam War, which was 11.4 million gallons of the deadly chemical over innocent civilians?
US Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D Butler in his book ‘War Is A Racket’ had stated how the US always went war with those countries where it was business and commercial interests.
Renowned scholar Noam Chomsky recently said in an interview that Syrian civil war suits the interest of US and Israel and any intervention by the US will be a gross violation of international law.
Looking at Obama uttering sentences like “failure to stand against the use of chemical weapons would weaken prohibitions against other weapons of mass destruction” or “After all, I’ve spent four and a half years working to end wars, not to start them” I could not help but remember lines from George Orwell’s 1984 that ‘he controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.’
After Obama finished his speech, I went inside my son’s room, who was by then sleeping tight, and wondered what world I would give him.
