December 11, 2009--Obama's Nobel War & Peace Speech
Barack Obama's speech when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize might more appropriately have been called his Nobel War and Peace speech since it was at least as much about the purposes and justifications for certain wars than it was about peace. “Just wars,” he called them. And I admire him greatly for this.
Considering the controversy in regard to his receiving the prize prematurely and at the very time he was escalating the war in Afghanistan (as he claimed to bring about peace), and considering the venue--progressive, dovish Europe--it was an act of intellectual and global political courage to say what he had to say about his world view and human nature in that setting and at this time.
He could so easily have not mentioned the "need" for wars at all and simply riffed about the imperative to bring about peace through economic and social development and nuclear disarmament. Rejecting the realist as much as the idealist ideologies as in and of themselves too limited a way to view the world and our place in it, he took the bolder route to tell us like his thinks it is.
That no matter how complicated and seemingly contradictory this perspective might be, it is the truth and we need both to deal with that truth and have multiple approaches and strategies to confront it.
To make things even more nuanced and truthful, and which as a consequence provided additional confusion for progressives, he even had the audacity to speak about “evil.” Where have we heard that before? Conservatives back home in the U.S. were especially confounded by this. They of the axis-of-evil set of mind.
Poor Sarah Palin, caught so off guard by this, as self-involved as she is, if you can believe it, told an interviewer yesterday that Barack Obama must have been reading “the book.” I of course thought she meant the Bible; but, no, she meant hers! She told USA Today, "I liked what he said, in fact, I thumbed through the book quickly this morning and said, 'Wow, that sounded really familiar!' because I talked in my book too about the fallen nature of man and how war is necessary at times."
Thankfully Obama in Oslo did not lay out an Obama Doctrine (we already have enough of those) but he did let us know a lot about how he views us as fallible as we are and the differences between the world of "is" and the world of "ought." That we have no choice but to live in one while attempting to bring about the other.
If you haven’t, do read all of this remarkable speech. It is linked below.
Considering the controversy in regard to his receiving the prize prematurely and at the very time he was escalating the war in Afghanistan (as he claimed to bring about peace), and considering the venue--progressive, dovish Europe--it was an act of intellectual and global political courage to say what he had to say about his world view and human nature in that setting and at this time.
He could so easily have not mentioned the "need" for wars at all and simply riffed about the imperative to bring about peace through economic and social development and nuclear disarmament. Rejecting the realist as much as the idealist ideologies as in and of themselves too limited a way to view the world and our place in it, he took the bolder route to tell us like his thinks it is.
That no matter how complicated and seemingly contradictory this perspective might be, it is the truth and we need both to deal with that truth and have multiple approaches and strategies to confront it.
To make things even more nuanced and truthful, and which as a consequence provided additional confusion for progressives, he even had the audacity to speak about “evil.” Where have we heard that before? Conservatives back home in the U.S. were especially confounded by this. They of the axis-of-evil set of mind.
Poor Sarah Palin, caught so off guard by this, as self-involved as she is, if you can believe it, told an interviewer yesterday that Barack Obama must have been reading “the book.” I of course thought she meant the Bible; but, no, she meant hers! She told USA Today, "I liked what he said, in fact, I thumbed through the book quickly this morning and said, 'Wow, that sounded really familiar!' because I talked in my book too about the fallen nature of man and how war is necessary at times."
Thankfully Obama in Oslo did not lay out an Obama Doctrine (we already have enough of those) but he did let us know a lot about how he views us as fallible as we are and the differences between the world of "is" and the world of "ought." That we have no choice but to live in one while attempting to bring about the other.
If you haven’t, do read all of this remarkable speech. It is linked below.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
2:13 AM
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