Posing a Question to Obama

One day last year* the tenacious Arab-American journalist Helen Thomas asked U.S. President Barack Obama when she was in the White House press corps, “Do you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons?” Barack Obama gave this answer: “I don’t want to speculate.”

Years before Obama, Helen had asked the younger President Bush this question: “I’d like to ask you, Mr. President, [about] your decision to invade Iraq … Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is: Why did you really want to go to war? …. You have said it wasn’t oil…quest for oil, it hasn’t been Israel, or anything else. What was it?”

Once again, we are entitled, especially as we are citizens of the region, to ask Obama about the decision he announced a few days ago to send the largest aircraft carrier in the world to the Middle East in accordance with an announcement made by U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta a few days before, during a visit to the giant carrier’s base in Washington, D.C.

Doesn’t Obama know that this decision is just pouring oil on the flames lit by the U.S. and its allies in the region, who are seeking to prevent security and peace for even just one year? This is normal U.S. procedure, similar to the wars Washington is fighting tens of thousands of miles away from American soil. The result is tens of thousands of young American soldiers killed, and many times that dead and wounded in the countries that the U.S. tanks invaded. This happened in Iraq, where they wasted millions of lives and in Afghanistan, and before that in Vietnam, where millions were killed over more than a decade. More than 58,000 American soldiers were also wounded. Events like this also happened in Lebanon in the ’80s, Somalia in the ’90s and in Latin American nations and elsewhere.

I do not understand why Washington is seeking obedience without any justification, trying to find enemies rather than world peace, trying to make their enemies weak and small, seeking control of the world just like every administration, Republican or Democrat, will do without any convincing reason, until the American people take to the streets to protest the horrors of war.

*Editor’s note: The interview took place in February 2009.