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It’s not as much of a travesty as when Henry Kissinger, a war criminal of the first order who was an architect of the latter stages of the Indochina War, and was personally responsible for the slaughter of well over a million innocent people, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, while that war was still raging, but the awarding of the latest Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is travesty enough.
We’re talking about a man whose practically first act upon taking office early this year was to escalate the ugly and pointless war in Afghanistan with the addition of some 20,000 troops, and who, even as the Nobel committee was discussing his award, was meeting with his military and political advisors to consider expanding that war even further, both in Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan.
The Nobel Committee claimed that during Obama’s short period as president, the US “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.”
Well, certainly when compared to the prior presidency of George W. Bush, that statement is correct, but that’s not saying much. After all, under President Obama, Guantanamo’s terrorist prison is still in operation and is holding people whom even the government admits are guilty of nothing. Under President Obama, the US has also blocked the Goldstone Report which condemns Israel of war crimes in its recent assault on Gaza. And under Obama, the US military in Afghanistan has continued to slaughter disproportionate numbers of civilians through its wanton use of aerial bombardment, pilotless Predator drones, and antipersonnel weaponry.
President Obama may have, as the Nobel Committee states, put forward a vision of nuclear disarmament, but his administration at the same time continues to refuse to sign the international anti-landmine treaty (putting America in the wretched company of just Russia, India and China). And under Obama, the US continues its role as not only the leading producer and exporter of arms, but also as the major initiator of wars in the world. Under Obama the US continues to outspend the rest of the world’s nations combined on its military. And don’t forget, Obama, like President Bush before him, continues to threaten to attack Iran, over that nation’s alleged nuclear weapons program—a program the very existence of which remains highly debatable.
As for climate change policy, President Obama in practice has taken a largely hands-off approach to getting Congress to act, not using his considerable political clout to force action on climate change legislation. It is now conceded that the US will go to the international climate conference in December with no bill passed to limit or reduce the nation’s CO2 emissions. Nor is the Obama administration likely to push for any significant program of CO2 reductions in the future.
Nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize closed on Feb. 1, less than two weeks after Obama took the oath of office as President, but the Nobel Committee in Norway had a good nine months since then to observe this president’s actions—and his lack of actions—on the key issues weighing on the decision. In the end, committee members were bamboozled by this president’s rhetoric of hope just as were the American people during the election campaign. As the committee wrote in announcing its decision: “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.”
If Nobel Peace prizes are being awarded to people who are simply giving the world hope, surely the judges could have found any number of worthy speechifiers. Hell, even the dictatorial leaders of China and North Korea can make flowery speeches about peace and human dignity. More to the point, the committee had under consideration at least two far more deserving nominees for the award who were actually acting at great personal risk to further peace and human rights: Chinese freedom-fighter Hu Jia and Afghani women’s rights advocate Simi Samar.
It is an insult to the memory of former award winners like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jody Williams, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, and others who put their lives and careers on the line to struggle for peace and human dignity to give this award to a man who has accomplished so little, and who, in fact, in his short time in office, has managed to expand one war, to block the international condemnation of the brutality of another, and who has done nothing to reverse his own country’s leading role as a promoter of war and international violence.
Henry Kissinger hung his blood-drenched Nobel Peace Award on his office wall on Wall Street and continued to make obscene sums of money off human suffering in his dotage. One can only hope (ah, that intoxicating word!) that President Obama will take his award seriously, and will use his new status as official man of peace to halt America’s campaign of violence in Afghanistan, calling a regional peace conference to settle that conflict instead of simply expanding the war, that he will announce a major cut in American military spending and a halt to arms exports, that he will sign the landmine treaty and voluntarily end the production and use of antipersonnel weapons of all kinds, and that he will finally have the US join the International Criminal Court of Justice.
Right. Now that’s the audacity of hope.
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net
Chinese Human Rights Activist Hu Jia – imprisoned for campaigning for human rights in the PRC, not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama.
Wei Jingsheng, who spent 17 years in Chinese prisons for urging reforms of China’s communist system. — not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama. (Not to mention the symbolic value of awarding a Chinese dissident on the 20th Anniversary of the Tianenmen Square Massacre.)
Greg Mortenson, founder of the Central Asia Institute has built nearly 80 schools, especially for girls, in remote areas of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan over the past 15 years – not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama.
Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, a philosophy professor in Jordan who risks his life by advocating interfaith dialogue between Jews and Muslims, also not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama.
Afghan human rights activist Sima Samar. She currently leads the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and serves as the U.N. special envoy to Darfur and is apparently also not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama.
I don’t see the NPP as nearly as influential, in pacifying war-mongers, as the committee evidently does. If such were the case, if rhetoric was all it took, Obama’s campaign promises would’ve constrained him, right? Instead, looks to me like the War Party, the permanent National Security state, is pulling strings same as before.
Glenn Greenwald reported on the DNC’s apparent adoption of Rovian methods, tarring all and sundry with the “terrorist” lable for criticizing the award. I expected to see some of that vitriol here.
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GLENN GREENWALD: What’s particularly bothersome about yesterday’s attacks is the premise that it’s improper, unpatriotic and even Terrorist-mimicking to do anything but cheer — have a “national celebration” — when Obama is awarded the Nobel Prize. Whether Obama is actually pursuing policies of peace happens to be an extremely legitimate topic of debate. The same is true for whether he’s done anything meaningful yet to merit the award. Numerous liberals in good standing objected to Obama’s award — from Ezra Klein (“It is undeserved. It is a bit ridiculous”) to The Nation’s Richard Kim (“I woke up, read the New York Times website and thought I had come to the Onion instead . . . Obama doesn’t deserve the prize, yet”) to Naomi Klein (“disappointing, cheapening of the Nobel Prize”). While there are arguments to make in his favor — I even made some myself yesterday in the first two paragraphs of what I wrote — there is something unquestionably bizarre about awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to a leader who did not merely “inherit,” but is advocating, actively prosecuting and escalating, a major war that is killing large numbers of civilians with no plans to stop, while at the same time building prisons to house people who will have no due process.
Unquestionably, those are and must be legitimate topics of debate. Some smart people yesterday made some reasonable arguments for Obama’s Prize. But to insist that it’s the patriotic obligation of every American to stand and cheer — and that those who don’t are “casting their lot with the Terrorists” — is creepy and repugnant. It’s also a very dangerous game to play.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/10/prize_reaction/index.html
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Is this the MO of Obama, the DNC, both together?
If one wishes to make a list of bad Nobel awardees — and frankly, I don’t take the Nobel committee’s rankings any more seriously than I do the AFI’s list of 100 best movies — after Kissinger, one could add the 1919 award to Fritz Haber, head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut in Berlin, and the creator of the first lethal chemical weapon. Because of his work, and that of colleagues, as well as scientists later in other countries, including the U.S. and Britain, hundreds of thousands died horrifying deaths from chemical gases in World War I, and well over a million were seriously injured.
Obama’s award is not in the same category as Kissinger and Haber. It was a political play by the committee, and how one feels about it will mirror how one feels about how issues are unfolding under the Obama administration. I personally don’t advocate the committee choose one person or another. That’s their job, their award. Nice brand, if you can get it.
As happens often, Scott Horton has a piece about the award that has me rethinking me initial reaction.
My ignorance and assumptions are showing. I had the naive belief that the prize expressed an objective measure of “peacefulness.” I didn’t bother to learn the history before judging the judgment.
SCOTT HORTON: What was the Nobel Committee recognizing by giving the award to Carl von Ossietzky, a man reviled by his fellow countrymen, accused and convicted of an act of treason? He sounded a clarion call about the rise of Nazism and the resurgence of German militarism, and he committed his life to their exposure. He tried to awaken the world to the threat they presented and nothing contributed more to the cause of world peace at this time than his wake-up call. In fact, at this time, leaders in Whitehall and in the Washington saw Ossietzky and his associates as part of a hysterical fringe who were overstating the dangers of “Herr Hitler” and his movement. Seventy years later, however, the wisdom of the judgment of the Nobel Committee shines through.
…So, the award to Obama is necessarily to some extent an expression of confidence in him as a politician. But this award clearly is focused on his ability to shift the course of international dialogue relating to peace. Many of Obama’s domestic critics are so absorbed with the debates over health care and other internal issues that they fail to understand the shift that Obama has already brought about on the international stage through a handful of steps. He extended a hand to the Islamic world in a striking speech delivered in Cairo. He revived flagging European confidence in the Atlantic Alliance (in which, by no coincidence, Norway has long been a stout-hearted member) by moving away from American unilateralism and back to a policy of closer coordination with traditional allies. He removed a key irritant from Russian relations with the west by pulling back a missile defense plan focusing on Poland and the Czech Republic and putting in its place one more genuinely attuned to the purposes that Bush articulated: defense against a missile threat from Iran. Finally, he has once again moved efforts to control the nuclear arsenal to the top of the agenda. These developments have been all but ignored in the United States,…”
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005893
Including by yours truly. My personal preference would be to see laureates like the people suggested by John Watts, as they clearly operate out from under the shadow of war crimes. But I’ve come to see merits of awarding it to Obama.
The Nobel prize lost its shine when Kissinger got it. Now it’s just an oscar for best actor.
A woman who save hundreds of jews during WW II is turned down for the award and it gose to a former veep who is a #1 hypotcrit and a charltent and liar