War dove

The Nobel Peace Prize winner traveled last week to Vietnam, a country that resisted one of the longest wars in modern history, in which more than a million (maybe even 2 million) Vietnamese and some 58,000 American soldiers died, and, while acknowledging the wounds and seeking to close this chapter of war history offered not a rose or an olive branch or peace doves but — weapons.

More than half a century after the start of U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia, President Barack Obama visited Vietnam in an act of strong symbolism for that country and its people, who still suffer the sequel to that war, especially the use of chemical weapons such as Agent Orange, and permanent injuries due to the dropping of more bombs than the bombs dropped on Germany, Japan and Italy by the allies in all of World War Two. Some of the undetonated bombs continue to explode and kill civilians.

In Vietnam one can find the ineradicable images of the use of weapons as brutal as napalm to burn the civilian population, including children. It is the same country where, from now on, the president and other U.S. politicians think they have the moral authority to dare criticize human rights violations.

But the news that topped that historic trip, whose objective was to celebrate the start of a new relationship and to overcome the past, was that Obama announced that the U.S. will suspend its embargo on the sale of weapons to Vietnam. That was the present carried by the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Apparently, the best way to celebrate the end of the history of war between Washington and a country it tried to “destroy in order to save” is with a firearms fair.

(The famous phrase was a reference to a village in Ben Tre province and it came from a U.S. Army major who was quoted by A.P. correspondent Peter Arnett in 1968 as saying that “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it” from the Vietcong)

It should be remembered that the United States, during the Obama administration, broke the record of every president since the end of World War Two in the volume of arms and military equipment sales to the world.

In fiscal year 2015, the total of the arms sales program to the world — not including arms transfers to other countries — was 46.6 billion dollars, according to Defense Department figures.

In Japan, second stopover in the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s Asian tour, Obama became the first U.S. president to go to Hiroshima, the site of the first example in history of the use of a mass-destruction weapon.

There, on Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb that killed approximately 140,000 men, women and children. Three days later, it dropped a similar bomb on the city of Nagasaki. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilian cities, not military objectives, although a military base existed in Hiroshima.

This week, Obama placed a wreath before the memorial to that tragedy and recalled that “71 years ago […] death fell from the sky and the world was changed. […] a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.”

He did not mention that the official story — which says the bombs were used to avoid the prolongation of the war, which would result in many more deaths, i.e., the bomb was the lesser of two evils — has been refuted by historians. Besides, most people have concluded that that story, to a great degree, is false, recalled historian Alex Wallerstein in The New Yorker.

Obama offered no apology (Washington almost never apologizes to other countries), recalled that Japan was to blame for the war and, in an emotional message, declared that “a moral awakening” is needed worldwide to shed nuclear weapons and asked his listeners to “have the courage to escape the logic of fear, and pursue a world without them.”

What the president did not say in his ever-pretty words was that his government has initiated a billion-dollar program to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal in the next 30 years. The program includes the development of a new generation of tactical nuclear bombs, or nuclear mini-bombs, for use on the battlefield.

Moreover, a report from the Pentagon itself, issued last week and analyzed by the Federation of American Scientists, demonstrates that the Obama administration has reduced the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal less than any other president in the post-Cold-War era, i.e., less than George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.

In 2015, the United States had 4,571 nuclear bombs, a reduction of 702 bombs since 2008, yes, but more than enough to destroy the world several times.

“Although President Barack Obama assumed his post with a strong commitment from the United States to reduce the number and role of nuclear weapons and to take solid steps toward a world without atomic weapons, his administration may eventually be remembered more for its commitment to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal,” warned the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists more than a year ago.

In this context, it should be remembered that this Nobel Peace Prize winner has continued the wars he inherited in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are now the longest in the history of this nation. At the same time, the Commander in Chief who was elected to the White House in part for his promise to put an end to those two wars has opened new fronts in Syria and Libya and has raised war tensions with China (part of the purpose of his trip to Vietnam) and Russia.

At the same time, he has expanded and coordinated one of the broadest campaigns of special ops and assassination and international intervention via remote control, utilizing drones at various spots on the planet.

In sum, this week something flew in the skies that we couldn’t identify: was it a war dove or a peace eagle?

(From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada)