Obama's War-Is-Peace Prize speech: Give war a chance!

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Dec 13, 2009 at 10:00

"Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones."

Obama 2 (speaking for himself):

Whatever mistakes we have made.... the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.

If President Obama had been the least bit serious about combating the threat of global warming--potentially the greatest threat ever faced by the human race, and a grave threat to the future peace and security of America and the world (OL diary here)--he passed up the best possible opportunity to rally support for the kind of dramatic action that needs to be taken at the Copenhagen Summit in his Nobel Peace Prize Speech (transrcipt). Of course, there were two good reasons for doing so. First, he has absolutely no intention to push for such desperately needed action to combat global warming. Second, he was far too busy justifying war to think much about anything else.  (The word "peace" appeared 32 times in his speech.  The word "war" appeared 35 times.) Repeating one of his favorite lies from his Afghanistan War speech, he said:

Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: 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. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden, not because we seek to impose our will. 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.

So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.

Rather than repeat myself (Afghanistan and Obama's lies--a further note), as Obama has done, and parse his claims in detail once again, why not just look at one part of this claim--that "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."

Instead of picking one decade at random out of our past, to see how freely we intervened in other countries, let's first take a look at the period Obama referred to, and then take a step back to look at his speech in context.

On the flip is a list of post-WWII interventions.  Just take a look, and ask yourself, is this what global security looks like? Or is it a confused mish-mash best explained not as a defense of freedom and global security, but as the unaccountable workings of empire?  Remember, not a single one of the interventions listed on the jump was authorized by a congressional declaration of war--the legally prescribed process under the Constitution.  UN Security Council approval--required under international law, which is also binding under the US Constitution--has been almost as rare, meaning that virtually everything listed below is a specific collective national act of lawless violence, carrying with it countless individual acts of violence as well.  But this is the record of 'underwriting global security' that Obama blithely claims as justification for yet more of the same lawless violence in the name of 'peace.'

Here' the table of contents from Killing Hope: US Military and CIA
Interventions Since World War II by William Blum:

1. China - 1945 to 1960s: Was Mao Tse-tung just paranoid?
2. Italy - 1947-1948: Free elections, Hollywood style
3. Greece - 1947 to early 1950s: From cradle of democracy to client state
4. The Philippines - 1940s and 1950s: America's oldest colony
5. Korea - 1945-1953: Was it all that it appeared to be?
6. Albania - 1949-1953: The proper English spy
7. Eastern Europe - 1948-1956: Operation Splinter Factor
8. Germany - 1950s: Everything from juvenile delinquency to terrorism
9. Iran - 1953: Making it safe for the King of Kings
10. Guatemala - 1953-1954: While the world watched
11. Costa Rica - Mid-1950s: Trying to topple an ally - Part 1
12. Syria - 1956-1957: Purchasing a new government
13. Middle East - 1957-1958: The Eisenhower Doctrine claims another backyard for America
14. Indonesia - 1957-1958: War and pornography
15. Western Europe - 1950s and 1960s: Fronts within fronts within fronts
16. British Guiana - 1953-1964: The CIA's international labor mafia
17. Soviet Union - Late 1940s to 1960s: From spy planes to book publishing
18. Italy - 1950s to 1970s: Supporting the Cardinal's orphans and techno-fascism
19. Vietnam - 1950-1973: The Hearts and Minds Circus
20. Cambodia - 1955-1973: Prince Sihanouk walks the high-wire of neutralism
21. Laos - 1957-1973: L'Armée Clandestine
22. Haiti - 1959-1963: The Marines land, again
23. Guatemala - 1960: One good coup deserves another
24. France/Algeria - 1960s: L'état, c'est la CIA
25. Ecuador - 1960-1963: A text book of dirty tricks
26. The Congo - 1960-1964: The assassination of Patrice Lumumba
27. Brazil - 1961-1964: Introducing the marvelous new world of death squads
28. Peru - 1960-1965: Fort Bragg moves to the jungle
29. Dominican Republic - 1960-1966: Saving democracy from communism by getting rid of democracy
30. Cuba - 1959 to 1980s: The unforgivable revolution
31. Indonesia - 1965: Liquidating President Sukarno ... and 500,000 others
   East Timor - 1975: And 200,000 more
32. Ghana - 1966: Kwame Nkrumah steps out of line
33. Uruguay - 1964-1970: Torture -- as American as apple pie
34. Chile - 1964-1973: A hammer and sickle stamped on your child's forehead
35. Greece - 1964-1974: "Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution," said
   the President of the United States
36. Bolivia - 1964-1975: Tracking down Che Guevara in the land of coup d'etat
37. Guatemala - 1962 to 1980s: A less publicized "final solution"
38. Costa Rica - 1970-1971: Trying to topple an ally -- Part 2
39. Iraq - 1972-1975: Covert action should not be confused with missionary work
40. Australia - 1973-1975: Another free election bites the dust
41. Angola - 1975 to 1980s: The Great Powers Poker Game
42. Zaire - 1975-1978: Mobutu and the CIA, a marriage made in heaven
43. Jamaica - 1976-1980: Kissinger's ultimatum
44. Seychelles - 1979-1981: Yet another area of great strategic importance
45. Grenada - 1979-1984: Lying -- one of the few growth industries in Washington
46. Morocco - 1983: A video nasty
47. Suriname - 1982-1984: Once again, the Cuban bogeyman
48. Libya - 1981-1989: Ronald Reagan meets his match
49. Nicaragua - 1981-1990: Destabilization in slow motion
50. Panama - 1969-1991: Double-crossing our drug supplier
51. Bulgaria 1990/Albania 1991: Teaching communists what democracy is all about
52. Iraq - 1990-1991: Desert holocaust
53. Afghanistan - 1979-1992: America's Jihad
54. El Salvador - 1980-1994: Human rights, Washington style
55. Haiti - 1986-1994: Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?
56. The American Empire - 1992 to present
Notes
Appendix I: This is How the Money Goes Round
Appendix II: Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1945
Appendix III: U. S. Government Assassination Plots
Index

Stupid Wars

Obama owes his entire career as a national politician to one speech, his speech in which he came out against the invasion of Iraq, framed in terms of opposition to "stupid wars."  He was not against "just wars" he explained--invoking America's classic "good wars", WWII and the Civil War.  But he was against "stupid wars."

Then.  But not now.

Now he's all het up on fighting in Afghanistan.  He brought it up again in this speech:

The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense.

But in fact, the vast majority of world public opinion opposed a military response to 9/11.  People rightly saw that it was a monstrous crime, that its perpetrators were ciminals, not warriors, and that they should be treated accordingly.  And the people were right.  The invasion of Afghanistan did not lead to the capture of those responsible for 9/11.  And once Osama and his top aides escaped, there was no serious effort to go after them.  Now, less than 100 al Qaeda operatives are said to be in Afghanistan.  Obama's escalation there simply has no credible rationale.  It's the very definition of a "dumb war", since it only makes matters worse by increasing al Qaeda's recruiting pool, not only in Afghanistan, but around the world.

Obama's rationale has been utterly discredited, as is made plain, for example, in two recent pieces by Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist, author of Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, the first, "The Taliban - Al Qaeda Schism" in Counterpunch and the second, "Obama Had Rejected His Own Speech's Surge Rationale", for the Inter Press Service.

In the first, Porter went into some detail about the reasons why expert observers see a fundamental  schism between the Taliban and al Qaeda, which is why I quote at some length:  

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen argued in Senate Testimony Wednesday that the 30,000-troop increase is necessary to prevent the Taliban from giving new safe havens to al Qaeda terrorists.

But that argument is flatly contradicted by the evidence of fundamental conflicts between the interests of the Taliban and those of al Qaeda that has emerged in recent years, according to counterterrorism and intelligence analysts specializing in Afghanistan....

It is well known among government officials working on Afghanistan and al Qaeda, however, that serious tensions between the two organizations emerged after the attack on the "Red Mosque" in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad in July 2007. Western intelligence quickly discovered the attack was an al Qaeda operation, and that it marked the beginning of an al Qaeda campaign calling for the overthrow of the Pakistani government and military.

That created a serious conflict between al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, according to specialists who followed the issue closely. The Taliban leadership, which is based in Quetta, Pakistan, had been depending on assistance from the Pakistani military to increase its military capabilities and did not look kindly on that al Qaeda policy.

Despite widespread confusion over the two, the Tahreek-e-Taliban, the Pakistani jihadist group that has been an umbrella organization for the military campaign against the Pakistani military, is not related to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Pakistani group, which has now changed its name, is a close ally of al Qaeda, but does not see eye to eye with the Afghan Taliban....

Two former counterterrorism intelligence specialists who followed the Taliban closely until earlier this year told  me this week that the facts do not support the portrayal by Gates and Mullen of the Taliban and al Qaeda as ideologically united.

"We make a serious mistake in equating the two organizations," said Arturo Munoz, who was a supervisory operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center from 2001 to 2009 and is now a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation.

Munoz called the Taliban "a homespun Pashtun, locally-based revolutionary movement with a set of goals that are not necessarily those of al Qaeda".

"It is well known that deals have been made between the Taliban and Pakistani commanders," said Munoz. "Obviously the Quetta Shura [the top Taliban leadership organ] is located there because of a deal with the Pakistani government."

But al Qaeda's view has been different. "The more fanatical al Qaeda types say 'let's tear apart Pakistani society'," he observed.

Veteran specialist on counterterrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan Rick "Ozzie" Nelson agreed that the relationship between al Qaeda and the Taliban that has evolved in recent years is very different from the one they had up to 2001.

"The Taliban is a nationalist organization, which wants to govern Afghanistan under Sharia law, not attack the United States," said Nelson, who was on the inaugural staff of the National Counter-Terrorism Center's Directorate of Strategic Operational Planning in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2005 to 2007.

Nelson directed a Joint Task Force in Afghanistan until early 2009 and is now in the International Security Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"The Red Mosque was a big deal," Nelson recalled. The al Qaeda-directed assault on the mosque and subsequent Taliban reaction to its jihadist campaign in Pakistan were what convinced officials that "their goals have become more divergent", he said.

More recently, counterterrorism analysts have noted that the gap has widened even further, as the Taliban leadership has gone public with a "nationalist" line that openly departs from al Qaeda's global jihadist stance.

Taliban leader Mullah Omar's Sep. 19 message for Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan, called the Taliban a "robust Islamic and nationalist movement" which "wants to maintain good and positive relations with all neighbors based on mutual respect".

I would go even further, and argue that this split in thinking was always present, although submerged by circumstances prior to 9/11, circumstances that were deeply intensified when we recklessly chose the path of war and invaded Afghanistan in November, 2001. But be that as it may, it's quite clear that there's a fundamental split in place today, and Porter's second article points out that Obama himself knows this--and that's the reason he resisted the push for escalation for so long:

President Barack Obama presented a case Tuesday for sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan that included both soaring rhetoric and a new emphasis on its necessity for U.S. national security....

But during September and October, Obama sought to fend off escalation in Afghanistan in part by suggesting through other White House officials that the interests of the Taliban were no longer coincident with those of al Qaeda.

....

Only three days later, however, the New York Times reported that "senior administration officials" were saying privately that Obama's national security team was now "arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States".

That "shift in thinking", as the Times reported, was an obvious indication that the White House was preparing to pursue a strategy that would not require the additional troops McChrystal was requesting because the Taliban need not be defeated.

One of the senior officials interviewed by Times said the administration was now defining the Taliban as a group that "does not express ambitions of attacking the United States". The Taliban were aligned with al Qaeda "mainly on the tactical front", said the official.

A second theme introduced by the official was that the Taliban could not be eliminated because it was too deeply entrenched in the country - quite a different goal from that of the counterinsurgency war proposed by McChrystal....

Porter goes on to discuss how Obama's foreign policy team argued against his position--a battle that raged over two months, before he retreated.  Still Porter notes:

Although Obama bowed to pressure from his major national security advisers to agree to the 30,000 troops, his conviction that the Taliban is not necessarily a mortal enemy of the United States could influence future White House policy decisions on Afghanistan.

Obama's speech even included the suggestion that the defeat of the Taliban was not necessary to U.S. security. That point could be used by Obama to justify future military or diplomatic moves to extract the United States from the quagmire he appeared to fear only a few weeks ago.

So, in short, Obama knows he's just announced the escalation of a stupid war, and the sole reason for doing so is that he's on the inside now, and thus is committed to doing all the stupid things he claimed to be against in order to get where he is.

Which brings us directly to our next level of hell section.

Delusion? Or Collusion?

David Mizner's quick hit, "Obama's Delusion" quoting from David Bromwitch in the London Review of Books has attracted a flurry of comments.  The graph he quotes is this:

Delays in the passage, first, of Obama's 'stimulus package' to strengthen the economy after last September's financial collapse, and, second, of his healthcare bill, have been due in large part to his public pauses to wait for Republicans to lend these measures a bipartisan glow. A few came along, at a high price, to vote for the economic stimulus. None has taken up the offer on healthcare. The Republicans stand in place, and give no sign, and watch as the president's stature dwindles. His reason for waiting doubtless has something to do with fear. Obama receives four times as many death threats as George W. Bush did. Yet he is also encumbered by the natural wish of the moderate to hold himself close to all the establishments at once: military, financial, legislative, commercial. Ideally, he would like to inspire everyone and to offend no one. But the conceit of accommodating one's enemies inch by inch to attain bipartisan consensus seems with Obama almost a delusion in the literal sense: a fixed false belief. How did it come to possess so clever a man?

But I fear that Bromwich's analysis doesn't cut nearly deep enough.  In his very first paragraph, he writes:

It was always clear that Obama, a moderate by temperament, would move to the middle once elected. But there was something odd about the quickness with which his website mounted a slogan to the effect that his administration would look to the future and not the past. We all do. Then again, we don't: the past is part of the present. Reduced to a practice, the slogan meant that Obama would rather not bring to light many illegal actions of the Bush administration. The value of conciliation outweighed the imperative of truth. He stood for 'the things that unite not divide us'. An unpleasant righting of wrongs could be portrayed as retribution, and Obama would not allow such a misunderstanding to get in the way of his ecumenical goals.

This isn't wrong so much as it is incomplete: his "ecumenical goals" just happen to exclude precisely the very foundation of his national political career--his outspoken opposition to "stupid wars".  He was against them, before he was for them.  Unfortunately, he was against them when he was virtualy powerless to do anything to counter them, and he's for them when he is virtually unfettered in waging them.

Indeed, it's now quite clear that Obama's main reason for not prosecuting Bush officials was not a desire to avoid conflict with Republicans.  It was because he wants to continue those very same practices himself, and completely normalize them.  Warrantless wiretapping.  Stupid wars.  Secret prisons.  Corporate-friendlywritten legislation.  Adopting the Nazi's Nuremberg Defense as official US policy. This is not delusion.  It's collusion. And it has absolutely nothing to do with peace--except, of course, for the peace of the dead.

Adopting the Nazi position on war crimes is the most clearly despicable aspect of this collusion agenda.  Jonathan Turley made this quite clear in a blog post this week, Nuremberg Revisited: Obama Administration Files To Dismiss Case Against John Yoo:

John Yoo is being defended in court this month by the Administration. Not the Bush Administration. The Obama Administration. As with the lawsuits over electronic surveillance and torture, the Obama administration wants the lawsuit against Yoo dismissed and is defending the right of Justice Department officials to help establish a torture program - an established war crime. I will be discussing the issue on this segment of MSNBC Countdown.

The Obama Administration has filed a brief that brushes over the war crimes aspects of Yoo's work at the Justice Department. Instead, it insists that attorneys must be free to give advice - even if it is to establish a torture program....

The Obama Administration has gutted the hard-fought victories in Nuremberg where lawyers and judges were often guilty of war crimes in their legal advice and opinions. The third of the twelve trials for war crimes involved 16 German jurists and lawyers. Nine had been officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice, the others were prosecutors and judges of the Special Courts and People's Courts of Nazi Germany. It would have been a larger group but two lawyers committed suicide before trial: Adolf Georg Thierack, former minister of justice, and Carl Westphal, a ministerial counsellor.

They included Herbert Klemm, who was sentenced to life imprisonment and served as minister of justice, director of the Ministry's Legal Education and Training Division, and deputy director of the National Socialist Lawyer's League.

Oswald Rothaug received life imprisonment for his role as a prosecutor and later a judge.

Wilhelm von Ammon received ten years for his work as a justice official in occupied areas.

Guenther Joel received ten years for being an adviser (like Yoo) to the Ministry of Justice and later a judge.

Curt Rothenberger was also a legal adviser and was given seven years for his writings at the Ministry of Justice and as the deputy president of the Academy of German Law

Wolfgang Mettgenberg received ten years as representative of the Criminal Legislation Administration Division of the Ministry of Justice,

Ernst Lautz (10 years) had been chief public prosecutor of the People's Court.

Franz Schlegelberger, a former Ministry of Justice official, was convicted and sentenced to life for conspiracy and other war crimes. The court found:

'...that Schlegelberger supported the pretension of Hitler in his assumption of power to deal with life and death in disregard of even the pretense of judicial process. By his exhortations and directives, Schlegelberger contributed to the destruction of judicial independence. It was his signature on the decree of 7 February 1942 which imposed upon the Ministry of Justice and the courts the burden of the prosecution, trial, and disposal of the victims of Hitler's Night and Fog. For this he must be charged with primary responsibility. 'He was guilty of instituting and supporting procedures for the wholesale persecution of Jews and Poles. Concerning Jews, his ideas were less brutal than those of his associates, but they can scarcely be called humane. When the "final solution of the Jewish question" was under discussion, the question arose as to the disposition of half-Jews. The deportation of full Jews to the East was then in full swing throughout Germany. Schlegelberger was unwilling to extend the system to half-Jews.'

It was the "ideas" that these lawyers advanced that made the war crimes possible. Other officials were tried but acquitted. All of these officials used arguments similar to those in the Obama Administration's brief of why lawyers are not responsible for war crimes that they defend and justify. Bush selected people like Yoo to justify the war crime of torture. If they had written against it, the Administration might have abandoned the effort. The CIA director and others were already concerned about the prospect of prosecution. The Obama Administration's brief revisits Nuremberg and sweeps away such quaint notions. Indeed, the brief for Yoo could have been used directly to support legal advisers Wolfgang Mettgenberg, Guenther Joel, and Wilhelm von Ammon.

If successful in this case, the Obama Administration will succeed in returning the world to the rules leading to the war crimes at Nuremberg. Quite a legacy for the world's newest Nobel Peace Prize winner. [Emphasis added]

Make that the Nobel War-Is-Peace Prize winner.