If the Roman Empire Had an Air Force

     President Obama's Asia trip provided him with the opportunity to express his commitment to something he calls "peace."  To illuminate this idea, imagine a father who keeps order in his household by giving regular beatings to his children, and keeping his wife cowed through the ever ready threat of violence.  Thus, for the father, does peace come about.  He reads the newspaper, drinks his coffee far enough away from the sounds of his children weeping to easily ignore, and quickly forget about, the violence that makes life in his house smooth, for himself only.
     My heavy-handed allegory touches on American dealings with two countries, Vietnam and Japan, both visited in recent days by Obama.  While the president announced that the Peace Corps will be going to Vietnam for the first time, he also has opened that country to arms deals.  Surveillance aircraft and drones, made by Boeing and Northrup Grumman respectively, would assist the Vietnamese military in keeping an eye on the waters in their sphere of interest--binoculars trained, so to speak, on the Chinese.
     A few days ago, while watching cable news, I saw on the news scroll at the TV screen's bottom, a sentence on Obama's announcement about the Peace Corps and Vietnam, and right after that a sentence on upcoming U.S. arms deals with Vietnam.  Does my TV suffer from cognitive dissonance?  Or does President Obama?
     In Japan, Obama visited Hiroshima--"the first U.S. president to visit that city..."
     He hugged survivors of the atomic bombing, gave a speech characterized by the idea that we must seek a world "free of nuclear weapons."  There's an idea, prevalent among those in political and military circles who don't like to talk about the lethal alternatives to nuclear weapons, that nukes are absolutely the worst kind of weapon.  In destructive terms, they are.  Used in massed multiple explosions worldwide during the type of exchange envisioned during the Cold War, nukes could bring about "nuclear winter," turning Earth itself into a temporarily (but long enough to wipe us all out) uninhabitable place.  During Ronald Reagan's time in the highest office, this fate seemed likely at times.  He believed in the Day of Judgment and in the Apocalypse as described in the Bible's cryptic last book.
     As Obama said, "a world free of nuclear weapons," I thought, "You're not saying, 'a world free of cluster bombs.'"
     We know, too, that Obama loves the effectiveness of Hellfire missiles.  He killed the Taliban's leader a short while back using a Hellfire.  The nice thing about those weapons is that they fulfill the adage, "Shoot first, ask questions later," except here it's "Shoot first, don't ask or answer questions."
     Obama's been criticized by high-ranking spooks, like former CIA Director James Woolsey, for killing too many terror suspects.  We need, Woolsey says, more of them alive and captured so they can be interrogated.  Since the U.S. record on capturing and interrogating "enemy combatants" is so egregiously bad during this century, Woolsey's longing for a different tactic coming from Obama only tells me that the former CIA director's good intentions sound like a different way of practicing ineffective and dehumanizing policies.  Still, he has a point.  George W. Bush sought to conquer; Barack Obama assassinates.  He uses machines and, occasionally, Special Forces teams.  What has this power done to his psyche?
     In 2012 it was revealed in the news that Obama had a "kill list."  Unlike those who just fantasize about having such power, the president really does have the capability of looking at his list, choosing a name, and giving an order, crossing off the name when he gets the word, delivered no doubt in a stern neutral voice by some male underling, that the "target" has been eliminated.  Collateral damage?  Possibly, sir, we're looking into it.
     At one point, someone in the Obama administration figured out (I'm not making this up), that if a "target" could be eliminated but was in a civilian area, upwards of twenty-nine innocent civilians could die before the hit would be cancelled as "too risky."  Thus, twenty-nine innocent lives equal one untried, alleged terrorist.  When carried out by machines, this kind of killing is very easy to do.  It's like pressing buttons on a microwave oven, but recall the scene in Syriana when Matt Damon's character is in a car among a long line of vehicles that has a "high value target."  The drone flies overhead.  A control room in America has people waiting for the go-ahead.  The drone pilot works the thing; it looks like he's playing a video game.  The kill order comes from the master assassin, the control room is tense and then the explosion blooms on their screen.  In another hemisphere, people and vehicles are blasted to smithereens.  Violence for the sake of peace.
     Syriana came out in 2005 during Bush's time, but the drone strike scene is one of Hollywood's most chilling depictions of the War on Terror.  The sky is clean, the ground is a horror.  I mistrust anyone, Obama or his successors, who can kill and maim with such passionless dedication.
     Orwell had it right: peace means war.

                                                                             Vic Neptune