Dick Cheney and Barack Obama - polar opposites, right?
Who could be more different than the steely, surly torture-authorizing former V.P. and that cool, sophisticated shining embodiment of hope and change Barack Obama? If you were among the 74% or so who loathed Dick Cheney, than you may have been quite pleased to see Barack Obama become president.
Perhaps a more challenging recent political figure to pigeon hole is someone like George W. Bush's first Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Yet if we read the words of these three men with regards to nuclear weapons, especially the acquisition of these by some countries (but not others), the question changes to not "who could be more different," but "why are they so similar?"
Read the following three quotes - one from each of the above men - and see if you can match the words with the speaker.
"If the governments of Iran and North Korea choose to ignore international standards, if they put the pursuits of nuclear weapons ahead of regional stability and the security and opportunity of their own people, if they are oblivious to the dangers of escalating nuclear arms races in both East Asia and the Middle East, then they must be held accountable."
"The pursuit of weapons of mass destruction only invites isolation and carries with it great costs. Leaders who abandon the pursuit of those weapons will find an open path to far better relations with governments around the world."
"We want to engage our friends with respect to North Korea: these criminal activities that [it] participates in, as well as the large army it maintains at the expense of taking care of its people, and its proliferation of missiles and other technologies that can be used to develop weapons of mass destruction."
How did you do? (*answer at the bottom of this post) Was it obvious? Perhaps not.
All three speak out against certain countries (Iran, North Korea) pursuing nuclear weapons or maintaining a large military or weapons arsenal, painting such endeavors as tantamount to being "oblivious to the dangers of escalating nuclear arms," coming at the "expense of taking care of its people" and bringing with it "isolation" and diminished relations with governments around the world.
But who is the U.S. to lecture Iran, North Korea or any other country about the perils of nuclear weapons or maintaining a large military?
How can any one of these men or any other American politician stand before any world body or any television audience and wag their finger at other nations as the United States continues to maintain and protect its own massive nuclear and "conventional" weapons stockpiles?
In a country where we can't even offer our own citizens public health insurance or ensure that public libraries and schools will remain open for our own children, yet we can dump Trillions of dollars into maintaining over 700 military bases in foreign countries around the world, pay tens of millions per day to occupy and fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and still keep our nuclear weapons ready to fire in an instant, who would take what any of these men say for anything other than glaring hypocrisy?
And now we have the nuclear armed Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown talking about sanctions and "lines in the sand" with regard to Iran's nuclear ambitions. Well, unfortunately, these men have no legs on which to stand.
So while we ponder the words of Obama, Cheney and Powell, really, with regards to America's own hypocrisy and its own WMD stockpiles, nothing has changed.
*First quote was Obama addressing the U.N. General Assembly on September 23, 2009. The second quote was former Vice President Dick Cheney in a speech before the Italian parliament and the third was then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in an appearance on Meet the Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment