Obama’s Nobel War Speech

By Colman McCarthy

Should we really be aghast, much less surprised, that Barack Obama has outed himself as a war president in both his West Point and Oslo speeches? Like bergs of ice in a shipping lane, signs of a collision between Obama as a seeker of peace and Obama an escalator of war loomed large from the beginning of his presidency. In addition to raising the military budget, he placed the hawkish Hillary Clinton at the State Department, the Bush holdover Robert Gates at the Pentagon and four star Marine general James Jones at the White House as national security adviser. The only thing missing was a military helipad atop the White House.

Dutifully, the three praised the West Point speech and its call “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan” by adding 30,000 more American soldiers to the 68,000 already there. John McCain and assorted Republicans added their bravos, as did the applauding West Point cadets, who were about the safest audience in the hemisphere for Obama to whoop war. Which future warriors, it should be wondered, might be killed in Afghanistan serving a commander-in-chief safely bunkered in his oval office. Which ones will obey orders to kill Afghanis who had the bad luck to look like terrorists? Which ones will return home haunted, and perhaps suicidal, about their killing other human beings?

After rallying the future troops and escalating the war, it was on to Oslo for Obama to

accept--with a straight face--the Nobel Peace Prize. “Compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize,” Obama said that his accomplishments “are slight.”

Which giants did he have in mind? Perhaps Oscar Arias?--who accepted the 1987 Nobel with these words: “Because mine is a land of teachers, we have closed the barracks; our children walk with books under their arms rather than guns on their shoulders. We believe in dialogue, in negotiations, in the search for consensus. We repudiate violence….We believe in convincing rather than in vanquishing our adversaries.”

Or Martin Luther King, Jr.?--the 1964 winner who said three years later in New York City: “The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling difference is not just.’”

Or Desmond Tutu, the 1984 laureate who said in Boston in 1984: “The war on terrorism will not be won as long as there are people desperate with disease and living in poverty and squalor. Sharing our prosperity is the best weapon against terrorism.”

The newest laureate rejects such thinking as irrelevant, saying in Oslo: “There will be times when nations--acting individually or in concert--will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.” He meant violent force, bombing from drones force, the force of the gun, the grenade and the torturers garrote--all of it moral, of course. Left unanswered is a question: how often does a leader seek public support with the cry “this war is immoral and not justified”?

The tinniest lines in Obama’s Oslo speech were his references to Mahatma Gandhi and King: “There’s nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naïve in their creed or lives.” The praise reeked of condescension. “I face the world as it is,” said America’s latest war president, implying that the world of Gandhi, King and fellow pacifists is one of fantasy and addled idealism and worthy only of rejection. No, says the president, America can kill its way to peace. It can surge its way to security.

Whether he has been duped by Reinhold Niebuhr’s just-war theorizing or has no yen to dismiss the thinking of his generals, Obama egregiously misreads nonviolence. It, too, is based on force: the force of non-cooperation, the force of organized resistance, the force of justice, the force of sharing wealth, the force of fighting fire not with fire but with water.

In Oslo, the Nobel chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland brought the president to the stage by saying, with another straight face, that “Dr. King’s dream has come true.” If that were so, Obama might have announced that he would begin a long overdue effort to heal his country’s soul, to make it less a belligerent empire and more a model for wealth-sharing and nonviolence. He would have explained to the world that hope has no audacity unless twinned with humility. He would have pledged to bring home his soldiers not just from Afghanistan and Iraq but from the hundreds of bases in all parts of the world where the poor cry out for food, housing and mercy, not guns, bombs and might.

Obama came nowhere near voicing such ideals. He was right: his accomplishments “are slight.”