President Obama gave a thoughtful, meditative speech in Oslo to accept his Nobel Prize. But he also used sophistry to defend his actions in Afghanistan and to blur the U.S. record over the past 60 years. And his realpolitik justification for war was odd, to say the least, given the forum. He was graceful and humble, though.
He acknowledged that he was not as worthy as Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela, since he was still “at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage.” And he acknowledged that there were those “far more deserving of this honor than I,” citing “the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics.”
I agree with him there. That’s why I would have preferred that someone like Malaila Joya of Afghanistan had received the prize.
Obama also owned up to an obvious, unavoidable fact: “I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars.” He said the Iraq War “is winding down,” and he pointedly did not endorse it as a “just war,” though he did say the first Iraq War was justified.
As for Afghanistan, he said it was “a conflict that America did not seek” and that was designed “to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.” But Al Qaeda has only 100 members in Afghanistan right now. Its leadership is actually in Pakistan. And the United States has been waging this war for eight years now.
Leaving aside the question as to whether Washington could have persuaded the Taliban at the outset to hand over bin Laden, the current war is no longer a war against Al Qaeda. It’s a different war, and a war that Obama himself is escalating.
Obama broke no new philosophical ground with his discussion of “just war” theory. In fact, he was remarkably jaded in his outlook. “We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes,” he said. “There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”
But nations that go to war always manage to find moral justifications for them. And even when the cause may be morally justified, it does not follow that the war itself is just. (See Howard Zinn) Obama said Hitler and bin Laden needed to be stopped by force of arms, but he didn’t rewind the clock far enough to recognize that nonviolence and sensible foreign policies could have prevented the rise of Hitler and bin Laden.
Instead, he spread his arms and soared into metaphysical nonsense. “To say that force may sometimes be necessary,” he said, “is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.” Actually, it is a call to cynicism.
Finally, as he did at West Point, Obama got out the airbrush to paint of over the U.S. role since World War II. “The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms,” he asserted. Global security wasn’t so secure when the United States raced the Soviet Union to the abyss of nuclear destruction.
And what he called global security came at the expense not only of U.S. blood but of the lives of two to three million people in IndoChina, a million in Indonesia, 200,000 in East Timor, and hundreds of thousands throughout Latin America, who fell to dictators supported by the United States.
Sounding like Rudyard Kipling, he said, “We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will.” (At West Point, he called it our “special burden.”) Propagating the myth of the benign empire won’t convince anyone who has been caught in its claws.
Obama also showed a ridiculous double standard when it came to Israel and Iran. After making reference to Iran and the Middle East, he said: “Those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war.” Israel has about 200 nuclear weapons, and the United States stood idly by as they acquired them.
Still, Obama hit some high notes, and not just with his repeated denunciation of torture. He was right when he reflected: “As the world grows smaller, you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are; to understand that we’re basically seeking the same things; that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families. . . . And yet somehow . . . people fear the loss of what they cherish in their particular identities.”
And he was eloquent when he said: “Somewhere today, in this world, a young protestor awaits the brutality of her government, but has the courage to march on.”
But for all his thoughtfulness and rhetorical flourishes, Obama could not transcend his job as the Commander in Chief of the world’s largest military, the man who is waging two wars, and the person who presides over the U.S. empire. In doing his job, he showed that he didn’t deserve the Nobel Prize.