Iraq Isn't the Only War Obama's Whitewashed in Belgium This Week

As I wrote yesterday, Obama gave a very whitewashed interpretation of the Iraq War in a speech at Brussels amidst meetings with allied leaders from the EU and NATO.

Well, as it turns out, that's not the only war he whitewashed in his European tour.

From The Progressive:

President Obama just went to Flanders Field in Belgium to pay homage to those who lost their lives in World War I.

But rather than use the occasion to point out the idiotic hideousness of that war, he whitewashed it, praising “the profound sacrifice they made so that we might stand here today.”

He saluted their “willingness to fight, and die, for the freedom that we enjoy as their heirs.”

But this was not a war for freedom. It was a triumph of nationalism, pitting one nation’s vanity against another. It was a war between empires for the spoils.

Historian Allen Ruff, who is studying the causes and effects of World War I, was not impressed with Obama’s speech. “With Both NATO and the European Union headquartered in Brussels,” Ruff says, “it would have been a true homage to the dead buried in Belgium a hundred years ago if Obama spoke out against all major power imperial ambition, the true cause of so much slaughter then and since, rather than mouthing some trite euphemisms about the honor of dying for ‘freedom.’ ”

But Obama insisted on repeating the very propaganda that fed that war. Without irony, he quoted the poem from John McRae that was used to encourage soldiers to sign up and civilians to pay for war bonds.

I look forward to "Obama reinterprets the Vietnam War" and "Obama celebrates the War of 1898 while attacking Russian imperialism."