Obama's win makes a mockery of the Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee awarded it to Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." If pretty words are all that is required to win the world's most prestigious award for promoting peace, then any tin-pot dictator who proclaims himself to have peaceful intentions while engaging in a war of aggression is equally eligible. Paul Craig Roberts masterfully highlighted the difference between what the president says and what he actually does:
Obama, the committee gushed, has created “a new climate in international politics.”
Tell that to the 2 million displaced Pakistanis and the unknown numbers of dead ones that Obama has racked up in his few months in office. Tell that to the Afghans where civilian deaths continue to mount as Obama’s “war of necessity” drones on indeterminably.
No Bush policy has changed. Iraq is still occupied. The Guantanamo torture prison is still functioning. Rendition and assassinations are still occurring. Spying on Americans without warrants is still the order of the day. Civil liberties are continuing to be violated in the name of Oceania’s “war on terror.”
[...]The non-cynical can say that the Nobel committee is seizing on Obama’s rhetoric to lock him into the pursuit of peace instead of war. We can all hope that it works. But the more likely result is that the award has made “War is Peace” the reality.
Obama has done nothing to hold the criminal Bush regime to account, and the Obama administration has bribed and threatened the Palestinian Authority to go along with the US/Israeli plan to deep-six the UN’s Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes committed during Israel’s inhuman military attack on the defenseless civilian population in the Gaza Ghetto.
The US Ministry of Truth is delivering the Obama administration’s propaganda that Iran only notified the IAEA of its “secret” new nuclear facility because Iran discovered that US intelligence had discovered the “secret” facility. This propaganda is designed to undercut the fact of Iran’s compliance with the Safeguards Agreement and to continue the momentum for a military attack on Iran.
[...]
“War is Peace” is now the position of the formerly antiwar organization, Code Pink. Code Pink has decided that women’s rights are worth a war in Afghanistan.
When justifications for war become almost endless--oil, hegemony, women’s rights, democracy, revenge for 9/11, denying bases to al Qaeda and protecting against terrorists--war becomes the path to peace.
The Nobel committee has bestowed the prestige of its Peace Prize on Newspeak and Doublethink.
Glenn Greenwald takes a slightly more ambivalent view, pointing out that Obama inherited much of these problems and, in any event, presides over a war-making state that accounts for 70% of worldwide arms sales. It's difficult to get past that kind of institutional inertia, and Obama should be commended for his efforts to adopt a more multilateral approach to foreign policy. But true efforts for peace require more than mere words, and thus far that's pretty much all Obama has had to offer.
Nothing of substance has changed in U.S. foreign policy. We have seen a cosmetic change in the country's approach to dealing with Iran, one that has already produced more dividends in one day than eight years of neoconservative threats. But the overall American tone remains one of aggressive bullying, where Obama embraces the Washington consensus of a supposed Iranian "threat" that has little basis in reality. It's an open question at this moment whether the U.S. or Israel will engage in military strikes on Iran; I'm guessing not, since any such action will cause the Middle East to explode and widen the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq into a horrific regional conflagration, but I could be wrong. Hopefully not.
It's true that Obama has only been in office for nine months and can't be expected to solve all of the myriad problems bequeathed to him by the criminal Bush administration. But the bottom line is that little has changed. Once you get past the rhetorical flourishes in his speeches, where Obama has demonstrated a consistent knack for saying one thing while doing the exact opposite, it's clear that he will prove no impediment whatsoever to Wall Street and the Pentagon devouring what's left of the American economy, nor to the continued waging of perpetual war. Again, credit must go to Greenwald for cutting to the heart of the matter:
That was from a May airstrike in which over 100 Afghan civilians were killed by American jets -- one of many similar incidents this year, including one only a week ago that killed 9 Afghan civilians. How can someone responsible for that, and who has only escalated that war, possibly be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the very same year that he did that? Does that picture above look like the work of a Nobel Peace laureate?
Let me be clear: any man who escalates one war, refuses to end another, orders drone attacks on a supposedly allied country, constantly threatens war with yet another nation, and says absolutely nothing while his country's proxy commits war crimes against defenseless civilians in a virtual open-air prison, slaughtering hundreds of children and unleashing white phosphorus on the population, is not a man of peace. He is a warmonger, plain and simple, once you get past the slick gauze of corporate PR. To see such an individual awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is an insult to peace-loving peoples everywhere, and merely confirms the enduring wisdom of George Orwell.
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