Nobel Oblige
"We did not seek this conflict."
--- George W. Bush (Weekly Radio Address, 9/29/2001)
"The other [war] is a conflict that America did not seek."
--- Barack Obama (Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 12/10/2009)
I know I'm a little late to the game, considering that five days is an eternity in the current news cycle universe, but I had shopping to do -- so cut me some slack. Last week, the President begrudgingly but triumphantly accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, apparently for having some great ideas about peace and hope and brotherhood, ideas that may eventually come to fruition after industrial civilization has shriveled down to smoking entropic embers. On a related note, I was just nominated for an Oscar, thanks to this totally awesome idea I had for a movie in a bar one night. You see, there's these time-traveling, Ninja lesbians, and they go back to the days before Atlantis sank, and they...., they..... oh hell, that sucks.
In any case, Saint Barry has mind-melded with Dubya across almost a full decade, to declare before the world that the Global War on Terror, or whatever it's called nowadays, is not a fight we asked for. We're like snowy white innocent lambs -- until you eff with us, that is. Then we're your worst nightmares all rolled into one, like Chuck Norris with Steven Seagal for one fist and The Rock for the other.
Conservatives and other mainstream types have applauded Obama's tough Nobel speech, especially for eloquently sticking it to those peace-loving peaceniks in the heart of socialist Scandinavia. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich alike praised Obama for his willingness to remind the pansy Europeans that we've been yanking their latte-drenched stones out of the fire for a long time.
Obama: "The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity."
America has indeed been underwriting something for the last sixty years, but global security ain't it -- or at least, it is only a necessary condition for the real McCoy. What US foreign policy has been all about in recent decades is prying open a shy globe for the ascendancy of a corporate plutocracy. The guns remind our rainbowed brethren, via almost 800 military bases worldwide, that markets and economies must remain open to the marauding companies that have managed to gather the vast majority of the planet's wealth onto their balance sheets. And of course, as the leading exporter of weapons of mass destruction by a robust margin, the US has absolutely benefited from every shape and form of conflict, uprising, insurgence, war, invasion, cleansing, etc. We send the world's peoples the missiles and guns with which to kill each other. Then, we swoop in and "fix" everything with our own armies, racking up nice numbers for military contractors and greasing the skids for all kinds of business-friendly structural adjustments. In Emmanuel Todd's memorable phrase, we are the world's Arsonist-Fireman.
Obama's Nobel speech acknowledges none of these muddying complexities. Despite all of the courtier praise for Obama's wonkishness and intellectual chops, last week's address had the same crude, basically stupid, ideas at its core that were floating around in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The role of corporate power is disappeared. The history of American military and clandestine interference in global affairs is forgotten without even a shrug. The CIA fixing elections and assassinating leaders and sponsoring coups to overthrow democratically-elected governments that wouldn't play corporate ball? No way! Sweet innocent ol' us would never do things like that.
Now I understand that Obama has very little to work with in the way of stock American intelligence amongst the citizenry. And for all I know, he may believe all of the shopworn pablum from his Nobel speech. But we're really into fruit of the poisonous tree territory here, in that if the originating ideas for war are bogus and incorrect on their face, then no amount of effort or money will ever deliver the desired results. Faulty premises cannot produce righteous outcomes.
Consider how little distance has been covered between Dubya in 2001 and Obama in 2009, in explaining why "the terrorists" hate us:
Bush: "Americans are asking, 'Why do they hate us?' They hate what they see right here in this chamber [Congress]: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other....These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us because we stand in their way."
Obama: "War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man....And yet, a decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale....the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states -- all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos.... Evil does exist in the world..."
Obama goes on to describe that, with the "dizzying pace of globalization" and the "cultural leveling of modernity," "it perhaps comes as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish in their particular identities....In some places, this fear has led to conflict."
So for Bush, the terrorists are just jealous lunatics, while for Obama, they are essentially confused lunatics. In either case, the hyper-focus on "the terrorists" distracts from the much larger undercurrent of anti-American sentiment which allows extremists to bubble up in the first place. I described this in some earlier posts here and here, so I won't belabor the point. But suffice it to say, the obsession with the handful of criminals who actually pulled off 9/11, and then going after individuals as if they were a discrete set of evil incarnate, is supreme folly, especially when it is pursued via the massive tools of the military. Terrorists bubble up because of the general unrest spawned by specific anti-American grievances: the one-sided support of Israel, the continued American support of corrupt Islamic monarchies, and the sacrilegious quartering of troops in Muslim holy lands. Our refusal, out of the box, to examine American foreign policy as a primary cause of terrorist activity is both stupid and expensive. Remember, it's a hell of a lot cheaper to just stop supporting certain regimes than it is to wage endless wars to change cultures that have been entrenched for centuries. When Obama glosses over these facts, and continues to pretend that America is fighting some specific set of nefarious evildoers, then there literally will be no end to the cash and blood we'll spill into the sands of Mesopotamia.
But perhaps equally damaging is what Obama's trite approach does for how to achieve peace. We're treated to these gems of intellectual discovery:
"The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Peace requires responsibility. Peace entails sacrifice....a just peace includes not only civil and political rights -- it must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom from fear but freedom from want....development rarely takes place without security."
Heady stuff indeed! And how do we get all of this peace and development and freedom from want? How do we wage peace? We should use global sanctions when necessary, push for nuclear disarmament, work for human rights and political freedom, practice diplomacy with both friends and adversaries, help farmers feed their own people, work for education, medicine, shelter for all people. And oh yeah, work for clean energy to fight global warming.
It just seems very awkward to hear the President talk about how to establish all of these wonderful things around the world, as almost every one of them slips through the fingers of his own country's citizens. There is this deadly liberal gloss in his laundry list of worthy causes, a kind of undeserved self-righteousness that seems to assume that America somehow knows how to do these things already, and is thus the appropriate global ambassador for positive change.
This is what happens when a democracy has been replaced by a plutocracy. The real conditions of corporate ascendancy and hyper-concentration of wealth and power are disappeared, leaving the uneasy nausea that economic growth and consumer confidence are the only avenues of "recovery" recognized as legitimate by the ruling classes. All challengers to the corporate empire are crazy, and all resistance to the American definition of progress is portrayed as irrational terrorism.
The peace described by Obama will never exist -- indeed, it cannot exist. Food security, lifelong learning, humane medical care, dignified labor, true freedom (defined as "participation in power" by Cicero) --- these will never be byproducts of economic growth, no matter how much we might wish it. As industrial civilization continues its entropic slide downhill, we'll have to recreate all of these markers of real human progress from different seedbeds.
Posted by Jeremy Raymondjack at 12/15/2009 8:07 PM 
Categories: Politics and Economics
Tags: barack obama president obama nobel prize acceptance speech
Categories: Politics and Economics
Tags: barack obama president obama nobel prize acceptance speech
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