War Eighteen Times

Nobel Prize-winning Obama used the word "war" in his acceptance speech 18 times.

Full text of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech
Remarks of the U.S. president in Oslo
updated 6:15 a.m. PT, Thurs., Dec . 10, 2009

OSLO, Norway - Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Distinguished Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, citizens of America, and citizens of the world:

I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility. It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations - that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.

And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. Compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize - Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela - my accomplishments are slight. And then there are 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 of cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women - some known, some obscure to all but those they help - to be far more deserving of this honor than I.

But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by forty three other countries - including Norway - in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.

Still, we are at war, and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill. Some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the cost of armed conflict - filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.

These questions are not new. War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease - the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.

Over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers, clerics, and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a "just war" emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the forced used is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.

For most of history, this concept of just war was rarely observed. The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God. Wars between armies gave way to wars between nations - total wars in which the distinction between combatant and civilian became blurred. In the span of thirty years, such carnage would twice engulf this continent. And while it is hard to conceive of a cause more just than the defeat of the Third Reich and the Axis powers, World War II was a conflict in which the total number of civilians who died exceeded the number of soldiers who perished.

Wednesday Cartoon Fun: Cognitive Dissonance Edition

Saturday Bonus Cartoon Fun: Reality Edition

By de profundis clamavi, October 10 at 2:39 pm

Sure, it’s nice to have these smiling Norwegians say officially that they approve of the new tone of the American president. Sure, it think it’s great that Obama charmed the Arabs in Cairo and says we’re going to close Guantanamo and won’t have secret black site prisons anymore and won’t engage in torture anymore. I think it’s great that Obama has halted programs for nuclear missile “defense” in central Europe so we’re not directly provoking Russia, at least not just now. It’s nice that Obama doesn’t use unnecessarily provocative terms like “axis of evil” or “war on terror”.

But those nice Norwegians don’t have to live in a country where poverty and inequality grow more extreme each day, and will continue to do so unless and until the president of the united states steps up and directly confronts the power of the banks, the corporations and the pentagon. Those nice Norwegians live in a country where every citizen takes for granted public education, publicly supported arts and media, public transport, public health care, public income and social support that we would not reach after a thousand years of Obama’s timid, corporate-friendly “leadership”.

Those nice Norwegians live in the kind of egalitarian society that only “left wing extremists” in the USA advocate, the kind of “left wing extremists” who are dismissed from mainstream public dialogue and marginalized even in Obama’s supposedly change-driven democratic party.

According to one of our major mainstream parties, those poor Norwegians suffer under “socialist tyranny”. according to all but the “extreme left” of our other mainstream party, the policies that have made the Scandinavian countries among the richest, most stable, peaceful and democratic in the world are simply “inappropriate for America” and are not worthy of discussion.

Those nice Norwegians don’t have to live in a country where state and municipal governments are going bankrupt, teachers and state workers are being laid off, police and fire departments are being cut, bridges are falling down, whole towns and regions have been economically reduced to rubble, all in the name of maintaining profits for a tiny elite, while the people whose impoverishment grows worse every day watch as their government continues to borrow trillions of dollars from foreign governments to finance a bloated military establishment and a far flung militaristic empire that benefits nobody but the defense contractors and whose aims, vaguely referred to as “American interests”, could best be described as “making the world safe for Exxon Mobil”.

Our military establishment is a voracious cancer eating away at the vital organs of American society, but Obama apparently does not recognize that, or if he does he refuses to say so.

It’s no skin off the Norwegians’ nose if Obama squanders what is perhaps the last opportunity this country will have to make the kind of major structural reforms we need to stave off irretrievable economic and social meltdown, because Obama hasn’t got the guts to call off a war with vague objectives in the same country that militarily and financially exhausted the soviet union, leading to its collapse.

Our empire can collapse, too, from financial exhaustion if nothing else, and if that happens, the resulting political tone of the united states of America is unlikely to be anything peaceful or moderate.

Sure, it’s nice the Norwegians gave Obama the prize, and it’s not just nice for him - it’s nice for all Americans. It’s sort of like the Norwegians sent us some pretty flowers with a card that says “hope you’re feeling better”.

Thank you Norway, we are feeling a bit better. But our corporatist militarist disease is serious and late stage. It will be terminal for American democracy if it isn’t treated.

It’s nice for a sick person to receive cards and flowers. but it doesn’t cure his disease.

President Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize: Updated II

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges."

Oslo, October 9, 2009

Update: I don't have much to say about this other than I think maybe Obama should have done more than talk good. Maybe if he had, I don't know, actually done something, like end a war or two, end a silly policy or two, been as transparent as he said he would, regulated Wall Street before he gave them billions of dollars....

I do believe he has altered the landscape in a good way. He has brought intelligence, rationality and a decency to the Presidency that the world has needed for a long time. The Nobel, I suppose, is to help keep us on our current trajectory, one that the world needs. In this respect I have no problem with Obama being awarded the Nobel. It just seems a tad undeserved premature.

Update II: