Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech was dynamite

This place would be a paradise tomorrow if every department had a supervisor with a submachine gun.
   - Jim Jones on Jonestown

At home, the Obama Justice Department is busy trying to insulate the Bush administration at large and torture memo author John Yoo in particular from the US Geneva Conventions obligation to prosecute war criminals wherever they are found. Jonathan Turley notes the sad irony that the administration’s pursuit of immunity for Yoo falls on the anniversary of the end of the Nuremberg trials of Yoo’s counterparts in the Nazi regime.

Abroad, Obama is tripling the size of the US military presence in Afghanistan, with no assurance that further escalations are “off the table,” as the president is fond of saying, and no genuine commitment to an exit date (Arianna Huffington makes the obvious Sartre pun here; someone had to do it …). The Committee knew this was coming when they voted him the prize, and if they were paying attention, they knew that he had essentially adopted the Bush doctrine of preventive defense (i.e., the use of military force against anyone who might be perceived to be a threat somewhere down the road) and advocated expanding the size of the US war machine before he even won the Democratic nomination.

Obama isn’t quite the tragicomic choice that Henry Kissinger was, at least not at this point in their respective careers, but neither has he made any appreciable contribution to anything that could rationally be described as “peace.” He can’t be blamed for being nominated—George Bush was too, every year of his presidency—or for being awarded the prize. But he could have graciously declined it, and in fact in the opening paragraphs of his acceptance speech made a good case, direct and implicit, for doing just that: others are far more worthy; the US, under his leadership, is sheltering those who routinely violated the principles Obama claims to uphold with actions he claims to abhor; he is avidly prosecuting a war for which the rationale vanished within days of its inception eight years ago.

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.

Grotesque, absurd, sad and surreal, and yet just another day.