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"That was not a peace prize acceptance speech. That was an infomercial for war. President Obama took the peace prize home with him, but left behind in Oslo his praise for war, his claims for war, and his view of an alternative and more peaceful approach to the world consisting of murderous economic sanctions. Some highlights:
Yet, you did argue. You argued by accepting the prize and then making a false case for war:
This is simply not true of all tribes and civilizations, unless we include war making as a criterion for being considered civilized.
How dare someone responsible for illegal occupations and air strikes and the use of unmanned drones say these words? (Responsible, that is, given the failure of Congress and of we the people to stop him.)
How dare a president refusing to support a treaty on land mines speak in these terms? Are we supposed to not see the actions and just hear the words?
Very wise. Very true. And completely violated by Barack Obama's actions and the better part of the words in this speech. Are we supposed to hear these words in a different part of our brains from the rest of the speech and its advocacy of war?
Now a group of fewer than 100 angry people in Afghanistan, and their allies elsewhere, are the rough equivalent of "Hitler's armies" and justify the brutal occupation of a nation by tens and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and mercenaries, tanks and planes, and unmanned drones? And negotiations, with the Taliban or anyone else, are not possible because because well, because of that rhetoric about Hitler's armies.
A 1993 Congressional Research Service (CRS) study of the U.S. Navys Naval Historical Center records identified "234 instances in which the United States has used its armed forces abroad in situations of conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes" between 1798 and 1993. This list does not include covert actions or post-World War II occupation forces and base agreements. In a 2006 review of this study and two others, Gar Smith found that "in our country's 230 years of existence, there have been only 31 years in which U.S. troops were not actively engaged in significant armed adventures on foreign shores." In other words, fewer than 14% of America's days have been at peace. As of 2006, there were 192 member states in the United Nations. Over the past two centuries, the United State has attacked, invaded, policed, overthrown, or occupied 62 of them. Read more
The United Nations Charter, to which the United States is party, and which is therefore the supreme law of the United States under Article VI of the Constitution is apparently not a standard that governs the use of force, since President Obama has just thrown it away in a statement of Obama Doctrine that appears indistinguishable from the so-called Bush doctrine. Obama then doubles down with a Bush the Elder / Clintonian doctrine of humanitarian war:
Obama equates non-military action, non-hostile action, with inaction, pure and simple. Where is aid? Where is diplomacy? Where is cooperation? Why are all non-hostile approaches to other nations banished from the text of a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech a mere 25 years after 1984?
What can be said to render that statement less persuasive than it is on its own? Maybe this:
Torture was illegal internationally and in the US code of law before Obama became president. He publicly instructed the Attorney General of the United States not to enforce those laws. He claimed the power to "rendition" people to other nations where they might be tortured. His CIA Director and a top presidential advisor have claimed the president has the power to torture if he chooses to. And President Obama has here claimed the power to prohibit or un-prohibit torture, spitting in the face of the very idea of the rule of law. The prison at Guantanamo is not closed, and moving those prisoners to Illinois or Bagram or any other lawless U.S. prison will not bring the United States into compliance with the Geneva Conventions.
At last, mid-speech, we are presented with a drop of that toxic trademarked substance: hope. Only to swallow a mouthful of this:
Set aside the hypocrisy of the globalism and rule-of-law talk from a commander in chief escalating wars and occupying 177 nations around the world. The message here is that a decent alternative to war is crippling sanctions that "exact a real price." The wisdom of a creative nonviolent outlook has not yet penetrated. And the President does not develop the idea any further, turning instead to nuclear arms:
The United States is not seriously pursuing disarmament, is developing new nuclear weapons, is in clear violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And Iran is not.
President Obama, in his famous Middle-East speech earlier this year admirably acknowledged the U.S. overthrow of a democratically elected president in Iran, and the installation of a dictator -- who, like many dictators than and now, was one of our closest friends. The greatest success of international law in recent years has been the precedent set by prosecutors seeking to hold responsible Augusto Pinochet. Does anyone recall how he came into power?
Indeed.
And there, as this reprehensible speech is dragging to a close, are the words with which it should have begun, the words denied by the thrust of everything else here and by the actions of the man delivering the words. And then there was a bit more:
A bitter statement for the people of Afghanistan or the United States to hear from a president who has acted to divert our resources upward to Wall Street and downwards into bombs and bases. But true and worth repeating nonetheless. Let's not imagine, however, that George W. Bush would not have said the
same. He would simply have said it with a smaller military budget, a smaller
war budget, fewer troops in the field, fewer mercenaries in the field, bases
in fewer countries, and worse grammar." (David Swanson, Electronic
mail, December 10, 2009)
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