war

Glenn Greenwald sums up nicely the objection to Obama’s Peace Prize shocker:

Beyond Afghanistan, Obama continues to preside over another war — in Iraq:  remember that? — where no meaningful withdrawal has occurred.  He uttered not a peep of opposition to the Israeli massacre of Gazan civilians at the beginning of this year (using American weapons), one which a U.N. investigator just found constituted war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.  The changed tone to Iran notwithstanding, his administration frequently emphasizes that it is preserving the option to bomb that country, too — which could be a third war against a Muslim country fought simultaneously under his watch.  He’s worked tirelessly to protect his country not only from accountability — but also transparency — for the last eight years of war crimes, almost certainly violating America’s treaty obligations in the process.  And he is currently presiding over an expansion of the legal black hole at Bagram while aggressively demanding the right to abduct people from around the world, ship them there, and then imprison them indefinitely with no rights of any kind.

It’s certainly true that Obama inherited, not started, these conflicts.  And it’s possible that he could bring about their end, along with an overall change in how America interacts with the world in terms of actions, not just words.  If he does that, he would deserve immense credit — perhaps even a Nobel Peace Prize.  But he hasn’t done any of that.  And it’s at least as possible that he’ll do the opposite:  that he’ll continue to escalate the 8-year occupation of Afghanistan, preside over more conflict in Iraq, end up in a dangerous confrontation with Iran, and continue to preserve many of the core Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies that created such a stain on America’s image and character around the world.

Through no fault of his own, Obama presides over a massive war-making state that spends on its military close to what the rest of the world spends combined.  The U.S. accounts for almost 70% of worldwide arms sales.  We’re currently occupying and waging wars in two separate Muslim countries and making clear we reserve the “right” to attack a third.  Someone who made meaningful changes to those realities would truly be a man of peace.  It’s unreasonable to expect that Obama would magically transform all of this in nine months, and he certainly hasn’t.  Instead, he presides over it and is continuing much of it.  One can reasonably debate how much blame he merits for all of that, but there are simply no meaningful “peace” accomplishment in his record — at least not yet — and there’s plenty of the opposite.  That’s what makes this Prize so painfully and self-evidently ludicrous.

It’s quite possible that, as many have suggested, this is the Nobel Committee trying to force Obama to live up to his very nice rhetoric, which to date has not been matched by his actions. And I will say that I understand the case Gary Wills was trying to make in the Oct. 8 New York Review of Books:

A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire’s secrets. He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.

The world has just put a little pressure on Obama to disentangle himself. By making some very nice speeches about new beginnings with the Islamic world and nuclear disarmanent, he’s indicating that he’s interested in trying. We’ll see what comes of all this.

The Englehardt essay is definitely worth reading in full. And that moon shot pretty much clinches it. We are the Martians.

Now, really.

If the Obama administration was responsible here, they’d de-emphasize this hype, this politically motivated hype, and deal with the reality that there is no nuclear weapons program in Iran, that the newly declared Qom facility is not a threat to international peace and security, and that when Iran and the United States sits down this coming Thursday, that we will—you know, the United States hopes to find a way out of this morass, that we hope to find a way to peacefully coexist with Iran, an Iran that has a nuclear energy program fully monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Fmr. UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter Warns Against “Politically Motivated Hype” on Iran Nuke Program

There are just a few things to remember here.

1. Iran is in compliance with its obligations vis a vis the NPT, and this revelation changes nothing. It’s only the additional voluntary protocols Iran agreed to take on (and then changed its mind about) that are at issue in any way.

2. Non-proliferation imposes obligations of both the non-nuclear states AND the nuclear powers. The United States, as well as the other nuclear powers, have an obligation to disarm. There has been significant reduction in the total number of weapons, but the U.S. military is striving to upgrade and “modernize” its arsenal, and can still blow the planet to dust many times over.

3. Israel threatens to attack Iran constantly. This is a nation that is doesn’t just talk about attacking. It has routinely attacked its neighbors, possesses a formidable nuclear arsenal, and has a really neat facility for making bombs. It has also no interest in non-proliferation.

4. Ahmadinejad is no one’s favorite head of state, least of all the Iranians’. His Holocaust denial is stupid and troubling. But he never vowed to wipe Israel off the map. See Juan Cole, who has covered the subject quite well. He is also not in charge of Iran’s armed forces. But it would be useful to remember that Iran is surrounded by hugely powerful military machines, the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel.

5. As awful as Ahmadinejad is, and as sketchy and brutal as the recent Iranian elections were, 81 percent of the Iranian public still consider him to be legitimate president of Iran. Which is pretty much the exact percentage who believed George Bush was the legitimate president after the 2000 election debacle in our own fair land. See here.

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If George Carlin were alive today, I can’t help thinking he’d have approved of Glenn Greenwald’s glossary of foreign policy double standards, as expressed in our leading national media.

Gary Wills makes a persuasive (and pessimistic) case that the “whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch” and that Obama will have a hell of a time reversing it, even if he wants to…..

The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the “war on terror”—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.