Fifty years ago this month, U.S. President John F. Kennedy delivered his historic "Strategy of Peace" address at American University in Washington, D.C.
It was a landmark speech, leading to a treaty banning above-ground nuclear tests, portraying the Soviet "enemy" as human beings, and rejecting the ugly sort of military imperialism that has been U.S. foreign policy for the past dozen years.
"What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek?" Kennedy asked. "Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living."
Marking the anniversary of the famous speech, President Barack Obama paid lip service to Kennedy by calling for a one-third reduction in the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. More significantly, he announced days before that Washington would provide weapons of war to the "rebels" in Syria.
And who are the rebels in Syria? Just like Libya two years ago, the rebels include the Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists who are supposedly the enemies of "freedom."
As Reuters reporters Oliver Holmes and Alexander Dziadosz wrote this week: "During a 10-day journey through rebel-held territory in Syria, Reuters journalists found that radical Islamist units are sidelining more moderate groups that do not share the Islamists' goal of establishing a supreme religious leadership in the country. The moderates, often underfunded, fragmented and chaotic, appear no match for Islamist units, which include fighters from organizations designated 'terrorist' by the United States."
In giving his reasons for the decision to overtly arm terrorists in order to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation, Obama sounded a lot more like George W. Bush than Kennedy, saying Syria had crossed a "red line" by using chemical weapons - the nerve gas sarin - against the insurgents. That claim, which many international observers immediately shot down, seemed to spring out of the same jack-in-the-box as Bush's false claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
In fact, United Nations investigator Carla del Ponte said witness accounts point to the "rebels" as the side using the sarin gas, not the Syrian government, for whom such a move would be suicidally reckless.
No matter. Let's say they did it anyway.
It's a strategy of war and, as a NATO ally, Canada has been going along with it: in Afghanistan and Iraq (where we provided naval and command support) under Bush, and in Libya under Obama, where we helped bomb one of the most progressive countries in Africa so that armed fundamentalists could take it over and ruin it.
Whether Syria becomes the next "no fly zone" remains to be seen. What is clear is that the brutal and duplicitous Pax Americana of our time is a far cry from what Kennedy envisioned five months before he was gunned down. The peace of the grave and the security of the slave? For this president, like the last one, all options are on the table.
