When President Barack Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, everyone asked what had he done to deserve it?
Now we can all fairly ask what has he done to deserve to keep it?
In 2009, the Nobel Committee said that it was honoring Obama for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
Oh really.
Our peace president let fly many more drones into Pakistan, and made Afghanistan his war of choice, while remaining in the Iraq theater that he promised he’d leave.
President Obama signed an 007 shoot-to-kill death warrant, very James-Bond-like, on an American citizen (Anwar al-Awlaki) without any judicial review - and not so much as a rubber-stamping grand jury ever considered the charge or the Alice in Wonderland ?sentence-first-no-trial-to-follow.
President Obama sent missiles to kill crazy Qaddafi (a precedent for taking out heads of state that will yet have somebody trying to send drones into the West Wing). Did I overlook to mention the carpet bombing we’ve unleashed on Libya? We kill and destroy to save other lives. At least, that’s how I understand our rules of engagement in a civil war that threatened us not at all.
I hate to imagine what a warring president would be like if this is the peace president.
Nor should my chortling friends in the Republican party take heart from this critique of the Democratic incumbent - as if their plowshares to weapons side show offers this nation any better hope of peace.
The Republican leadership and its candidates don’t want us out of Iraq.
They can’t stand the thought of us reducing troops in Afghanistan. They insist we are going to “win” that war in Afghanistan - when someone defines what “win” means.
The Republican’s beef about Libya - is that we don’t have “boots on the ground,” meaning putting more American service men and women at risk of life and limb in another war theater for an uncertain military objective when we have hardly the resources or treasure to continue the wars that we have elsewhere.
When we had imperial adventures in the recent past, the barely concealed message was that, we did so because we could - and no one had the chutzpah or resources to stop us.
By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office tells us that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost $2.4 Trillion and it’s costing us more because we are fighting these wars on the American family credit card.
Think of that the next time you buy that product from China in its toxic card board wrapping; appreciate that you are funding our nation’s major creditor.
The former chief economist of the World Bank and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics said more recently that it could cost us $3 Trillion.
Wow!
Our elected “leaders” are debating how to cut $3 Trillion dollars from the budget over the next decade.
If it’s not from war spending, it will be from your Social Security, Medicare, Education, Infrastructure and other services now taken for granted.
We need a peace dividend to avoid a surplus of despair.
Speak up now or regret at your leisure.
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