President Dwight D. Eisenhower is credited with masterminding the D-Day invasion and Allied victory that brought World War II — and the horrors of Nazi Germany’s Holocaust — to an end. In his 1961 farewell address as a two-term president, he famously warned Americans to beware “the military-industrial complex.”
Eisenhower closed that speech not with a call to military dominance, but with a vision of the true American dream — one rooted in peace, shared prosperity and moral responsibility.
Eisenhower said: “We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings … that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease, and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”
Sixty-five years later, instead of evolving toward this ideal of cooperation, peace and shared humanity, the world has spiraled deeper into the power, greed, violence and oppression Eisenhower warned against.
Nowhere is this failure more evident than in Gaza.