TheMillerCircle.org

Juan Cole has a short, thoughtful summary of Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Obama clearly delivered an eloquent, powerful speech, perhaps the most forceful speech ever given in support of the American military-industrial complex. It was a speech also aimed at the NATO countries, whom he is asking to pony up with additional troops to send to Afghanistan and join him in his uncertain war of escalation. Right now, everyone of those countries is asking themselves if NATO might not have outlived its usefulness.

If it was a speech about peace that the Nobel Committee was hoping for, they got instead a speech about war, that included the idea that the United States  could not be held accountable for its actions in Iraq–no one will be prosecuted for crimes against humanity related to that war, even though our invasion of that country was illegal, as clearly defined by our own constitution and the Geneva Conventions to which we are a signatory. According to Obama, in the conduct of its foreign affairs, the United States has always been motivated by the best intentions for America and the other members of the international community. What’s more, the fragmented remains of al-Qaeda will be the subject of actions by the Pentagon, not the domain of Interpol: they are a military threat, not a criminal one. Besides, that’s the only way we know how to go after those who attack us, especially when they are evil.

In promising peace, Obama said that we will probably be at war for a long time to come, perhaps until the urge for evil acts are expelled from the human genome, if that’s where they are located. But credibility becomes a problem for Americans who want to talk about peace. It is hard for the leader of a country that is unwilling to sign the treaty banning the use of land mines (because that country is the largest manufacturer of such items of destruction, whose favorite targets turn out to be children) to sound credible on the issue of peace; it is always much easier and more credible to provide eloquent cover for the militaristic manner that we use to address our international problems. In exchange for good relations with America, we need to put a base in your country, and possibly a giant telecommunications center somewhere within your borders.

It was disappointing to hear Obama mention “evil” as a way of characterizing the opposition in Afghanistan, since our policies and support helped to directly create the Taliban and al-Qaeda. I had hoped that when Bush left office, words like “evil” would go with him, never again to be used in description of those opposed to our policies and insistent on resisting them. Furthermore, Obama seems unwilling to give lip service to the concept of “blowback”–the idea that we have created a good share of our own enemies. He did so when he was candidte Obama, but that alternative way of looking at our enemies seems to have been taken off the table.   As Juan Cole stated “Obama has yet to decide whether he is a visionary or a technocrat. The Nobel Peace Prize committee hoped for the former. In this speech they got the latter.” In so many ways Obama is turning out to be a good speaker for the present state of American interventionism, rather than a visionary for the change he promised, including those ideals and commitments that got him elected. Obama has fallen short of expectations, as he has further strengthened the hand of the military in all of our future foreign policy decisions. He is a master of learning the facts, followed by sycophantic capitulation in favor of the military option. Right now he looks a lot more like the technocrat  than the visionary. We will have to wait and see if Obama becomes another “Kissinger” as a former Nobel Peace Prize recipient, or if perhaps he might move a bit closer to Martin Luther King and/or Ghandi by the time he finishes his civic duties as President. The world is desperate for an international leader who can turn us away from pitting humans against other humans through acts of armed conflict, and massively convert our efforts to confront the only just war that remains in front of us. The mother of all enemies is the blowback of the industrial revolution and the global climate change that is already at work to change the planet.  Obama needs to set in motion the armies  needed to confront global climate change, a war that needs to involve everyone.  So far, Obama’s response to that issue is also disappointingly shallow, as his Copenhagen proposal falls woefully short of expectations.

Obama’s focus on war as the thrust of his Nobel Peace Prize speech, forces each of us to wonder about his own future as a President. Right now Obama’s situation is eerily similar to that of Lyndon Johnson just after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. While Kennedy had only sent “advisors” to Vietnam, Johnson was encouraged by the military, with McNamara’s help, to send combat troops into Vietnam. Johnson’s gut instinct was against it, because he had a grand domestic program he wanted to implement. But, out of fear of being the first President to lose a conflict with the communist monolith, he committed himself to follow the course of war recommended by his generals, on and on until it shattered his Presidency and destroyed his domestic program, even though he accomplished revolutionary legislation in Civil Rights and  Medicare/Medicaid. How will Obama respond to what is surely the beginning of a new major escalation of forces, if not in fact, certainly in dealing with the demand for additional troops that will be favored by the military. Didn’t his commitment for more troops and a cost estimate of another $ trillion, destroy any attempt on his part to initiate a badly needed jobs program and actually begin the process of remaking our economy? Isn’t our national security more dependent on securing a decent living wage for American workers?

Obama’s first capitulation to the military option was signaled in his Nobel speech, in which  we heard warrior Obama make the clarion call for the military option against the evil forces in the world. If you want to see a gripping film on what Johnson went through, all driven by his complete naivete about the outside world, and his incremental capitulation to the military, watch John Frankenheimer’s “Path to War,” available from Netflix. In Johnson’s war against the evils of communism, we killed 2-3 million Vietnamese, mostly women and children, those that die most often from saturation aerial bombing. Obama did not mention something implicit in the way we go to war–that our aerial methods kill mostly women and children. From the air, you don’t see these kinds of deaths and that’s why we prefer to go to war that way. Now with drones firing missiles,  we don’t even get a chance to see the outcome.

RFM