I'm a bit surprised to be the first one posting on this! Count me among those who woke up on Friday to this farcical news and assumed it was, well, a farce. Not so! Yes, its true, Barry Obama is your 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner! Really, Norway? Really?
On one hand, I appreciate the theoretical idea behind an aspirational prize as a call to action-- in theory. But surely this is a bridge too far-- nominations for the prize were due over the winter, so Obama must have been nominated with mere days or at most a few weeks in office. Of course this plays into the DC meme of Obama as an all-hat-no-cattle creature of the teleprompter, but how things play on cable news is not really my concern.
The real farce here, of course, is not that Obama hasn't accomplished anything-- its that what he has actually accomplished has had the precise opposite effect. As he contemplates escalation in Afghan (and he will ultimately choose escalation-- mark my words)he continues a six year occupation in Iraq. Ever more civilians are killed in drone strikes in Afghan and yet we pretend Obama is somehow a man of peace. We remain in Afghan not because it is essential to our national security, but because it would be too politically costly to withdraw. Can anyone really say what our mission is there? The two successful counterinsurgencies of recent years were in Indian Kashmir and Sri Lanka, and those successes required force ratios of 40+:1, well over 10 times the increase Obama is contemplating. There is no winning there, just a question of how long we want to send kids over there to get shot up. I fail to see how prolonging this godawful stalemate in any sense makes Obama deserving of a prize for peace, but I'm just some blowhard. This just looks to me like the Noble committee voting themselves into irrelevance.
1 comments:
I know our mission:
"...defeat Al Qaida and to defend America, our allies, and all who seek a better future."
Obama laid it all out in his speech... in MARCH! I guess we're still waiting to implement the strategy he came up with.
I never thought I'd agree with not one but TWO things that WOHJR would write in a single, political post but I do!
1) Obama, though seemingly a totally nice dude, did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
2) We are running around like chickens with our heads cut off in Afghanistan and the situation is getting a bit ridiculous whether you agree with a surge or withdrawal.
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