Around the Horn: Reactions from the Blogosphere on Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

My reaction is here. Here are some reactions from the blogosphere:

The TOXIC Mud Pit:

What a joke. Such a huge slap in the face to those who have actually accomplished something for peace. As WaPo notes, two other US presidents have won…but in their second terms and after, ahem, actually achieving something. I thought giving it to Gore amounted to making it worthless, but this takes the cake.

Bungalow Bill:

Let's face it. The Nobel Prize means nothing. It's a silly peace of metal. Obama has done more to hurt peace by giving credibility to some of the most evil dictators in the world while lowering the security of peaceful nations everywhere. This isn't worthy of a metal. It's worthy of the western world laughing you out of office.

Cosmic X at Cosmic X in Jerusalem:

The Nobel Peace Prize became a joke ever since it was awarded to Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzchak Rabin in 1994 for the ill fated "Oslo Agreements". The Norwegians continue to prove that they have a poor sense of humor by awarding the prize to Mr. B.O. I am not laughing.

Mr. Trend at AlterDestiny:

In that regard, I think he's more deserving of the award than many. Is it too soon? I think that's a fair argument. Is it confusing? A bit (even after having awakened after a cup of coffee). Is there room for improvement? Of course - show me one person who's already perfect. That said, I think this is in part about Obama, and the (what I think is very real) change he brings to American foreign policy. But to focus on it just being about him is to miss the larger point, I think; it's also about embracing a major change in diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the world at large, a change that the U.S. initiated under the leadership of a particular man. And I'm fine with that.

Adam T. Rossi at Political Junkie:

But thank god the Nobel Prize committee does not except money from lobbyists, which allows them, if nothing else, to preserve the idea of peace on earth. Which would probably explain why the war mongering, in it for themselves, swine's of the Republican party are usually being lectured by the Nobel Peace Prize committee and not praised. I can just imagine what Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck will have to say about this. We'll probably be talking about a Tea Party rally in front of Noble Prize committee's Norwegian head quarters next week (Rabble Rabble Rabble), maybe even the total annihilation of Norway all together.

But enough about those sick bastards, because while they sulk over our president's monumental win (like they would if he reached world peace, stopped global warming and cured cancer), the rest of us should be proud that we now have a president, who is praised by the Nobel committee, instead of being chastised for unilateralism like his predecessor George W. Bush had been.

Taylor Marsh:

For Pres. Obama’s outreach to the Muslim community, which is nothing less than historic, especially looking through the prism of Bush-Cheney; when you look at his preliminary preparations for Middle East dialogue; when he took the bold step to demand a freeze in Israeli settlements. Barack Obama foreshadows what could be if partners come forth, even if nothing concrete has manifested. In Afghanistan, his determination to help the Afghans help themselves, but particularly the women of that country rise up.

Coralville Courier:

Never mind that the deadline for submitting a nobel nominee ended two weeks after Obama took office. So what's the deal, are we to believe that Obama won based on campaign trail talk?

Gee, what an accomplishment!

The award has truly lost its prestige, as Obama really hasn't contributed anything to global peace yet. Can you say, "Rigged?" I think you can.

And peace? Obama said he would end the Iraq war but he hasn't delivered as he promised on the campaign trail. In Afghanistan, the president is seriously considering ramping up the U.S. troop presence there - a surge. He's authorized predator drone strikes in Pakistan and helicopter attacks in Somalia.

President Obama Wins the Nobel Peace Prize

Like many of you did this morning, I received the news that President Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize, making him the third sitting U.S. President in history to receive this honor. I must admit that when I was initially told of this, I didn't think that I had heard the news correctly. Predictably there has been intense backlash on the right in reaction to this news and there has been reaction from some on the left praising the decision and deriding the detractors on the right. In reality, we should call this decision for what it is, incongruous.

From the AP:

For one of America's youngest presidents, in office less than nine months — and only for 12 days before the Nobel nomination deadline last February — it was an enormous honor.

The prize seems to be more for Obama's promise than for his performance. The Nobel committee cited as his key accomplishment "a new climate in international politics." The president has become "the world's leading spokesman" for its agenda, the committee said.

He has no standout moment of victory. Not surprising. Like most presidents in their first year, Obama's scorecard so far is largely an "incomplete," if he's being graded.

With Obama only being in office for nine months, it is natural that much of his work is still incomplete. The Nobel committee stated that they were honoring his creation of a new climate in international politics and his efforts to strengthen international diplomacy. I think it is notable to mention that this statement has some truth to it. Obama has made quite an effort to change the international climate, he did an interview with al-Arabiya, has reached out to the Muslim world through speeches, and he has made promises to close Guantanamo, end torture, and sit down with foreign leaders with whom he may not always agree. These are positive steps and a notable change in tone from the strategy that was engaged in over the last eight years.

In looking at the actions that have been undertaken by Obama, one needs to look no further than the fact that he is presiding over two wars, one of which he has escalated and one in which we have seen no considerable effort to end. Obama has adopted the war in Afghanistan by ordering air raids and drone attacks that have had large numbers of civilian casualties, including numerous children. Couple this with the protection of the previous Administration despite serious accusations of lawbreaking and his continued policies of extraordinary rendition and can one seriously make the argument that these actions are worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize?

Former peace-prize winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire has expressed her disappointment with this decision for this reason:

Mrs Maguire won the 1976 Nobel award along with fellow Belfast peace campaigner Betty Williams.

"President Obama has yet to prove that he will move seriously on the Middle East, that he will end the war in Afghanistan and many other issues," Mrs Maguire said.

"The Nobel committee is not meeting the conditions of Alfred Nobel's will, because he stipulated that the award is to be given to people who end militarism and war and are for disarmament."

and Glenn Greenwald asks the very stark question:

How can someone responsible for that, and who has only escalated that war, possibly be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the very same year that he did that? Does that picture above look like the work of a Nobel Peace laureate?

It is ludicrous to think that one who works to escalate war and militarism can win one of the highest honors for promoting peace.


This piece is cross posted here.

Bill O'Reilly isn't the Biggest Fan of Journalism

Check this out:



Ben Armbruster at ThinkProgress pointed this out:

Fox News and O’Reilly may not “break stories” that directly “hurt anybody,” but they certainly haven’t made great efforts to take targets off anyone’s back either. In fact, O’Reilly producer Jesse Waters regularly stalks and ambushes anyone O’Reilly and his goons disagree with (like TP’s own Amanda Terkel), even if it means following them home and confronting them in places such as their garages.

Fair enough, but I think the more revealing angle of O'Reilly's statement is that he admitted that his network doesn't hold journalism in very high regard. O'Reilly said the following (emphasis mine):

And I think you raise a very interesting point in what you said. And you said — I’m glad you mentioned me because that got attention And then people to think about this. We don’t break stories that are going to interfere with President Obama or President Bush or whoever’s in office if we feel that the story is going to hurt anybody, our military, our policymakers. We’ll hold it back. Okay? We’re not The New York Times. We’re not trying to do that.

I would be interested to hear what O'Reilly means by this. What is meant by the word "interfere" when O'Reilly says that he doesn't break stories that are going to interfere with policymakers, the President, or the military? Would breaking a story like that of Pat Tillman "interfere" with the goals of the military? Would bringing on dissenting voices about war "interfere" with the goals of President Bush and President Obama? Would exposing an affair like that of Mark Sanford, "interfere" with his career or "hurt" him personally?

Sounds like O'Reilly is looking out for everyone but the "folks".

Crackdowns on Twitter: Not Just for Iran Anymore

From Amy Goodman's latest in the Oregonian:

A social worker from New York City was arrested last week while in Pittsburgh for the G-20 protests, then subjected to an FBI raid this week at home -- all for using Twitter. Elliot Madison faces charges of hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime. He was posting to a Twitter feed (or tweeting, as it is called) publicly available information about police activities around the G-20 protests, including information about where police had issued orders to disperse.

[...]

The U.S. State Department, impressed with the importance of Twitter to Iranian protests, asked Twitter to delay system maintenance that might have interrupted the service during the Iranian protests.

While Madison optimistically mused, "I'm expecting the State Department will come out and support us also," his lawyer, respected civil rights attorney Martin Stolar, said: "This is just unbelievable. It is the thinnest, silliest case that I've ever seen. It tends to criminalize support services for people who are involved in lawful protest activity. And it's just shocking that somebody could be arrested for essentially walking next to somebody and saying: 'Hey, don't go down that street, because the police have issued an order to disperse. Stay away from there.'"

[...]

One Iranian twitterer for the virtual news hub Tehran Bureau recalled the June protests in an essay: "An officer spoke to us through a loud speaker: 'Disperse: This is your last warning.' The sight of them made my knees tremble, but the wave pushed on and so I went along." He was beaten, bloodied, arrested and held for 20 days. While Elliot Madison was not physically harmed, his legal battles are just beginning, and his case could prove central to the future of free speech in the mobile, digital age.

The Current Discussion About Afghanistan

As President Obama continues to deliberate on which path he wishes to take in regard to Afghanistan, it is becoming increasingly clear that ending the war or significantly reducing the number of troops committed to the conflict are options that are not even on the table:

Mr Obama did not indicate to the bipartisan group whether he was leaning towards or against a significant troop escalation.

Instead, he suggested he was looking at the middle range of the spectrum, somewhere between a major increase in forces and a large drawdown.

''The President reiterated that we need this debate to be honest and dispense with the straw-man argument that this is about either doubling down or leaving Afghanistan,'' one senior Administration official said after the meeting.

Mr Obama also said ''his decision won't make everybody in the room or the nation happy''.

Obama even met with a bipartisan group of lawmakers yesterday to discuss various options surrounding the conflict:

Although lawmakers sought after the meeting to express bipartisan support for Obama as he makes the most far-reaching foreign policy decision of his tenure, Democrats questioned whether the Afghan government remains a viable political partner after the flawed Aug. 20 presidential election, and Republicans challenged the administration's determination to defeat the Taliban.

In recent weeks, Obama has made clear that defeating al-Qaeda is the goal of his policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the group's leadership is believed to be operating in the largely ungoverned tribal areas. His national security team will assemble Wednesday at the White House for a meeting focused on Pakistan, whose nuclear-armed government has shown more willingness recently to take on the Taliban within its borders.

So the war will apparently slog on as members of Congress continue to blindly support vague efforts in a country with which the United States has been engaged in for the last eight years. This is a familiar exercise that we have watched happen with President Bush with the only exception being that Obama is actually consulting with Congress. The end result will be the same. More troops, more money poured into a seemingly bottomless pit, more lives lost, more "accidental" bombings, and on it goes.

In the middle of all of this, the media is portraying President Obama as trying to find the "middle ground" on this issue. This has been defined by the Los Angeles Times as "somewhere between a major increase in forces and a large drawdown". As Peter Hart at FAIR points out, this is quite a large range and really isn't helpful to the discussion. Hart makes a suggestion:

If you look at polls of the public, there is very little support for sending more troops--and much more support for either keeping troop levels where they are, or decreasing the size of U.S. forces in the country. So the "middle" ground isn't so hard to locate--it's somewhere between decreasing U.S. forces or keeping them at current levels. The fact that the debate in Washington doesn't seem to reflect that is, of course, telling; perhaps a more open media debate would change that.

What would a more open media debate look like? Take a look at the line-up that was put together by the folks at Democracy Now! this morning. There coverage included:

- An interview with Rep. Barbara Lee, the only lawmaker who initially voted against going to war in Afghanistan. She has now introduced a bill to block any surge in troops.
- An interview with a woman identified as Zoya, who is a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.
- A discussion with independent journalist Rick Rowly on this recent reporting on the return of the warlords to Afghanistan.

This is the type of reporting and news gathering that should be happening in the so-called "mainstream" media. We should not simply be hearing what is coming out of policy-makers in Washington and then be told that this is how the debate is going to be framed. We need a more in depth look into how these decisions will impact the people of Afghanistan, the financial status of the United States, and examine why other voices are not being included in this debate. It is the kind of reporting like you see on Democracy Now! or the type of filmmaking like you see in ReThink Afghanistan, the latest from Brave New Films.

Glenn Greenwald makes an interesting point that would be interesting to explore through a more open media debate:

The great fallacy at the heart of discussions of Afghanistan is this: if one can plausibly argue that a war was originally justified, then that proves that the war should continue even eight years later (there's no need for us to leave because the Taliban let Al Qaeda use that country to attack us in 2001 and therefore it's self-defense). Often, the discussion, for many war supporters, rarely progresses beyond that point. But whether a war is "justified" is a completely separate question from whether it's "wise." Just as was true for Iraq, the supposed "costs" of leaving Afghanistan are endlessly highlighted (the Taliban will return, Al Qaeda will come back, it'll be a brutal and lawless state), while the costs to the U.S. from staying -- and from continuing to be a nation in a state of perpetual war and occupation -- are virtually ignored.

and dday asks an interesting question that should be addressed as well:

So the Taliban has been in control of at least half the country for at least two years, more than enough time for Al Qaeda to pack up from the border region and reinstall themselves into these safe havens. Skelton stated specifically that if the Taliban regains hold in "all or part of Afghanistan," Al Qaeda would return to plot attack. Well, the Taliban control lots of the country. But Al Qaeda aren't there. They don't need to be.

This persistent lie about Al Qaeda's aims in the region underpins the entire case for escalation, just the way the domino theory underpinned consistent troop buildup in Vietnam. And yet nobody in the media, up to and including Chris Matthews today, has bothered to challenge this basic falsehood. Nobody has asked the question, "If Al Qaeda is so desperate to find a safe haven, why haven't they returned to Afghanistan now, when the Taliban controls large swaths of the country?" It's not like they aren't under as much threat from drone attacks in Pakistan as they would be in Afghanistan.

[...]

Will anyone present these basic facts to the "serious foreign policy" dittoheads when they go on and on with a demonstrably false argument about safe havens and how we must send as many troops as possible into danger or we'll all be killed in our beds?

With a lot of political "reporters" like NBC's Chuck Todd running around Washington, I am not holding my breath that we are going to get these questions asked.


This piece is crossposted here.

Does the "Left" Exist in Today's America?

David Sirota doesn't think so:

What are the signs that there isn't the American Left we've think there is? Obviously, the Emanuel White House shunning movement progressives from its team was a good signal - as was its reflexive firing of the few movement progressives it hired in low level positions (see Van Jones and now Yosi Sergant). The Professional Beltway Left's willingness to be corralled into the veal pen, as Jane Hamsher aptly calls it, is also a big sign that often times "progressive" organizations are all too happy to subvert movement goals for access to the perks and privileges of the D.C. cocktail party circuit. As the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend, the Professional Beltway Left is now being given orders every Tuesday by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina - the same Jim Messina who was chief of staff to Max Baucus when Baucus helped President Bush ram through almost every one of the Republican's signature initiatives (with the exception of Social Security privatization).

But we can't just blame President Emanuel for - rather predictably - being President Emanuel. It goes much deeper than that.

What has prevented an American Left from existing is a deeper "trust" ideology among activists. Maybe it's because we are more optimistic, maybe because we want to see the good in everyone, or maybe it's because we're as innately wimpy as the Right says - but it's clear that progressives are far more willing to "trust" celebrity politicians and others perceived to have Establishment power than pressure or even question those icons. You hear this all the time - in the demands by self-proclaimed liberals for progressives to STFU and "trust" the president; in the inevitable claims that when Democrats betray their progressive promises, they are actually implementing a Super Secret Pony Plan to fulfill those promises; and most prominently, in the silences.

Our (lack of) Collective Memory

Columnist Chris Hedges has an interesting piece that is posted over at Truthdig.com today on the topic of how society collectively thinks (or doesn't think) about war. Here is a clip:

War memorials and museums are temples to the god of war. The hushed voices, the well-tended grass, the flapping of the flags allow us to ignore how and why our young died. They hide the futility and waste of war. They sanitize the savage instruments of death that turn young soldiers and Marines into killers, and small villages in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq into hellish bonfires. There are no images in these memorials of men or women with their guts hanging out of their bellies, screaming pathetically for their mothers. We do not see mangled corpses being shoved in body bags. There are no sights of children burned beyond recognition or moaning in horrible pain. There are no blind and deformed wrecks of human beings limping through life. War, by the time it is collectively remembered, is glorified and heavily censored.

[...]

A war memorial that attempted to depict the reality of war would be too subversive. It would condemn us and our capacity for evil. It would show that the line between the victim and the victimizer is razor-thin, that human beings, when the restraints are cut, are intoxicated by mass killing, and that war, rather than being noble, heroic and glorious, obliterates all that is tender, decent and kind. It would tell us that the celebration of national greatness is the celebration of our technological capacity to kill. It would warn us that war is always morally depraved, that even in “good” wars such as World War II all can become war criminals. We dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Nazis ran the death camps. But this narrative of war is unsettling. It does not create a collective memory that serves the interests of those who wage war and permit us to wallow in self-exaltation.

[...]

The detritus of war, the old cannons and artillery pieces rolled out to stand near memorials, were curious and alluring objects in my childhood. But these displays angered my father, a Presbyterian minister who was in North Africa as an Army sergeant during World War II. The lifeless, clean and neat displays of weapons and puppets in uniforms were being used, he said, to purge the reality of war. These memorials sanctified violence. They turned the instruments of violence—the tanks, machine guns, rifles and airplanes—into an aesthetic of death.

These memorials, while they pay homage to those who made “the ultimate sacrifice,” dignify slaughter. They perpetuate the old lie of honor and glory. They set the ground for the next inferno. The myth of war manufactures a collective memory that ennobles the next war. The intimate, personal experience of violence turns those who return from war into internal exiles. They cannot compete against the power of the myth. This collective memory saturates the culture, but it is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I think Hedges makes some very interesting points about collective amnesia. The late folk musician Utah Phillips has a quote that always sticks in my mind where he states that the most radical idea in America is a long-term memory. I think that there is a lot of insight in that quote and this article by Hedges speaks to one reason why the collective memory of this country has the ability to not only forget historical lessons, but create mythical memories of more complex events.

The brutality of war is often more understated than it is represented accurately. Take a look at the recent example of the war on Iraq in 2003 to see a prime example of this. Newscasters focus on the "awesome" technological advancements of warfare all while sanitizing images of bloodied children and refusing to air the images of coffins returning back to the United States. While this strategy may be easier on the eyes and conscious of the American public, it does not represent reality.

Just as the news coverage of war often does not take into account essential elements that would paint a more realistic picture, war memorials are guilty of the same. They help to sanitize and perpetuate myths about soldiers and about the very nature conflicts that are far too complicated to capture in an inscription. While war memorials may help us collectively feel better both about the actual conflicts as well as the sacrifice of soldiers, they do not help to portray a realistic account of said conflicts. Myths then are perpetuated and society ends up with a much different recollection of the events than actually happened at the time.