The US media has broadly cast the speech delivered by President
Barack Obama at West Point on Wednesday as a farewell to the decade-long
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an embrace of a more multilateral and
less militaristic American foreign policy.
This interpretation
willfully ignores the content of the speech, which even more than those
Obama has given in the past asserts a policy of permanent and global war
in pursuit of the interests of the US financial elite. The media
distortion is driven, on the one hand, by the partisan motives of
Obama’s Republican rivals, who seek to portray him as weak-kneed, and,
on the other, by the support from a wealthy and privileged “liberal”
elite for wars of aggression waged under the banners of “human rights”
and “democracy.”
-- Bill Van Auken, "Obama’s West Point speech: A prescription for unending war" (WSWS).