Ironic Obama

US President Barack Obama possesses the unique ability to present himself as a man whose life experiences taught him to straddle religious, racial and even political divides. This side of Obama was evident in the very first year of his presidency when he addressed the ‘Muslim world’ at Al-Azhar University in Cairo and it was evident again when this week he became the first US president to visit Hiroshima after his country deployed an atomic bomb on the city 71 years ago. The Cairo speech led to hope that this transformational figure would follow through on his words to take a different approach. Obama responded by waging war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Now that Obama is in the final year of his presidency, some cynicism is in order. In his speech at the Hiroshima Memorial, Obama did not apologise for the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed over 200,000 people at the time and continue to affect millions more today in the form of birth defects and higher rates of cancer. He did, however, ask for us to imagine a world without nuclear weapons. This is evidently a world Obama does not want to imagine for himself since he is the US president to have made the fewest cuts to his country’s nuclear arsenal since the end of the cold war.

Obama stirringly warned of scientific progress that is not accompanied by a ‘moral revolution’. It is interesting that Obama, without an iota of self-awareness, lamented how easily violence is justified in the name of a higher cause. The US president was referring to religion but it could just as easily apply to the mantras of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ used to justify interventions everywhere – from Latin America to the Muslim world. That countries like Iraq have now succumbed to the religious violence Obama decries is precisely because the US waged unjustified war there in the first place. This religious violence would also include Israel and its brutal war on the Palestinians, a war in which the US has been an enthusiastic supporter of Zionism, even as much of the world – the very target of this speech – looks on aghast. Obama did not acknowledge that the US is at the forefront of the global arms trade. It has also been at the forefront of scientific progress in the theatre of war but has been unburdened by any revolutions, moral or otherwise. Obama visited Vietnam before going to Hiroshima and lifted an embargo on selling arms to its government, which is richly ironic since the Vietnamese population is still suffering the after-effects of the US use of Agent Orange. The US has also refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or sign the Ottawa Convention banning the use of landmines. These are all concrete steps Obama could have taken to mark the bombing of Hiroshima. Instead, he retreated to the familiar confines of delivering a well-written but ultimately empty speech.