How easy it is for Bush-Cheney, followed by President Obama, and former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to speak of countries in the abstract: “Iraq is harboring weapons of mass destruction.” “Afghanistan is a home for terrorists.” “Libya and Syria have evil dictators…” as if these countries were floating somewhere in space with no families, no schools, no homes, no children, no pets…merely abstract human targets who must be killed in abstract countries that float in space somewhere absent of aunts, mothers, animals, trees, sewer systems, water, farmlands…
Wait a minute—there is something specific and tangible that both the Bush and Obama war commanders think about in those countries with grave concern worth protecting: oil and gas.
This is what we’ve learned for the last decades from ongoing US military intervention in the Middle East: oil is valued higher than life itself. It’s very real, it’s tangible and it merits the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of human beings because it is the engine of fossil fuel capitalism.
Other than that—they’re just disposable countries to G.W. Bush, Obama, and Hillary Clinton…floating in space, and so when the bombs fall, and a five-year-old girl’s legs are blown into shreds of flesh with her grandmother’s head that looks like a squashed watermelon covered in blood—that’s all simply lost in the euphemism of “collateral damage” when they give the orders to drop missiles from drones that are flown from pilots in secret rooms in the US thousands of miles away like a video game, and from fighter jets, where the earth can’t even sometimes be seen through cloud cover.
For example, they do not see their own daughters, Bush, Cheney, Obama and Clinton in a field gathering vegetables for their families when suddenly out of the sky, a missile blows their bodies into shreds of blood and bones, a hand over there, a leg buried beneath chunks of devastated earth and shredded skin…No, they can’t begin to imagine what that would be like to lose their own children in such an evil, horrific, unconscionable way.
That’s why it’s so easy for them to think of their war decisions as abstractions; they do not empathize, they do not see the faces of their own daughters or sons in the faces of the victims, the daughters, young girls and boys, and their homes blown to smithereens by bombs that they’ve authorized using satellite maps while enjoying their coffee and pastries.
When G.W. Bush annihilated all those innocent families living in Iraq, a people that did nothing whatsoever to the United States, wrongly accused of being associated with the 9-11 attack, when our own soldiers lost their limbs and families, he went out and played golf, or else he exercised in the White House gym. Everything’s fine, he must have told himself. The oil will continue to be 
under our control.
Fast forward to 2016, after Obama and Clinton pursued their “regime change” plans by stirring up chaos, something that the CIA is very good at doing by handing out weapons to anyone who wanted them while our U.S. corporate media reported them as “rebels” and “freedom fighters” in Syria around 2010-11 back when Syria was a functional country—they got what they wanted: a full-blown war of chaos. Ah, the weapon contractors must have been popping expensive bottles of champagne as they toasted to more billion-dollar contracts, paid for by, you, the American tax payers. And the bombs fell from all sides.
As Democratic Presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, has often said, “It’s easy to get rid of a dictator in the name of regime change, but then what happens in the aftermath? What about the consequences?”
Well, we see the consequences, don’t we? An estimated million Iraqis were killed, and about a million refugee families were forced to move to tent-camps after G.W. Bush left office. And now, after Obama-Clinton decided to invade Libya and Syria, an estimated eight million refugees are fleeing from their countries. Eight million!
Regarding Syria, both President Obama and Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, have contributed to this travesty in a big way by authorizing the CIA to stir up rebellion against Syrian’s President, Bashar Hafez al-Assad, and at the same time, they encourage Europeans and the world communities to “open your arms and welcome the refugees into your countries.”
They sanctioned regime change and utter destruction—and now there are millions of starving, homeless families. Keep in mind, dictators or no, before the Bush-Obama administrations invaded these countries, the majority of families had homes, water, food, jobs, sewer systems, electricity, and even if they didn’t like Assad, and even if conditions may not have been perfect, they at least had their families and homes and enough to eat.
So my suggestion to the Bush and Obama administrations, and their war advisers and weapon suppliers, is that before they give moral sermons to leaders of European countries and to the people of the United States to open their arms to eight million starving refugees from the Middle East, since they’re the ones that planned for invasions across those oil-rich countries in the comfort of their lush surroundings, since they’re the ones that gave the orders to drop thousands and thousands of weapons of mass destruction over millions of people and their homes for the last fifteen years—then they should be the first ones to adopt refugee families into their own homes.
They can afford it—just ask the weapons contractors that are worth billions of dollars—they can afford to take care of many, many families.
http://www.truth-out.org/
