Is Obama Accept Nobel Peace? What is Nobel Peace?
Watch the video.. In his acceptance speech, President Obama quoted Martin Luther King Jr. and spoke on the necessity of war.
MARK COLVIN: The headline is a paradox: “Obama Defends War in Peace Prize Speech”.
Barack Obama has made his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo with an exposition of what’s known as just war theory.
US politics specialist Dr Michael Fullilove of the Lowy Institute has been studying the speech. He joins me now.
Just unpack the paradox for us to start off with.
MICHAEL FULLILOVE: Well he was giving a speech to collect the Nobel Peace Prize the week after he gave a speech to the military cadets at the US military academy in West Point in which he announced a surge of an additional 30,000 troops into a war in Afghanistan that a lot of Europeans are getting increasingly uneasy about.
So that was the problem that he was presented with; how does he give this speech to collect a peace prize when he is a commander in chief of a country at two wars.
MARK COLVIN: So does he square the circle?
MICHAEL FULLILOVE: Well he did it in a very interesting way. I think he did it by giving the speech that, probably the speech that his hosts didn’t expect and probably the one they didn’t want to hear and that is with a very strong defence of just war, of war fought for humanitarian principles.
An imputed criticism actually of pacifism, of some of his heroes like Martin Luther King, a strong defence that sometimes the waging of war for humanitarian reasons is the lesser evil.
MARK COLVIN: Yet this is not the speech that Martin Luther King or Mandela made for example.
MICHAEL FULLILOVE: Not at all. In fact it was intriguing given that so many people have made the link between King and Obama that he specifically called up King and said for example in relation to King and Ghandi, “I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is. I can’t stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.”
He said, “A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms”.
So I mean one criticism that I think is sometimes rightly made of Obama is he likes the applause line. He’s reluctant to give a speech sometimes, a hard speech that his audience won’t appreciate. But today I think he did just that.
MARK COLVIN: You reckon this was a hard speech? I mean how hard? Because for instance he singled out Iran and North Korea and said they’d been gaming the system. How ominous is that?
MICHAEL FULLILOVE: Well I think in relation to, well a couple of caveats I think to that point. First of all he made it clear that although he believes in the use of force on occasion he was also implicitly critical of George W. Bush’s unilateralism.
He had some language there that Bush would never have used – going by the rules of the road – which I think is code for not acting unilaterally and seeking the approval of the Security Council before America used force.
I think secondly he gave a strong defence of human rights but he also twinned it with a comment that diplomacy is necessary. And the specific historical example he used was Nixon engaging with Mao at the time of the Cultural Revolution.
So I think that’s a, you know the other side of the speech was a strong defence of diplomacy even with repressive regimes. More… http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2009/s2769537.htm
The president laid out circumstances in which war is justified — in self-defense, to come to the aid of an invaded nation, on humanitarian grounds such as when civilians are slaughtered by their own government.
At the same time, he also stressed a need to fight war according to “rules of conduct” that reject torture, the murder of innocents and other atrocities.
“We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend,” he said. “And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.”
He emphasized a need to exhaust alternatives to violence, including worldwide sanctions with teeth to confront nations such as Iran or North Korea that defy international demands. He pushed himself away from George W. Bush in defending diplomatic outreach that engages even enemies. He defined peace as civil rights, free speech and economic opportunity, not just the absence of conflict.
“Let us reach for the world that ought to be,” Obama said. “We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.”
Back in the U.S., presidential historians and foreign policy specialists saw the speech as underscoring Obama’s revamping of America’s stance — away from confrontation and toward cooperation and negotiation when possible, and military action when unavoidable.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, said Obama had presented “a very broadly stated case that we cannot in all circumstances avoid war.” But he said he would have liked to have heard “some greater clarification of how he will pursue the broad objectives he has articulated.”
Obama showed “a sense of daring” in talking about war as he was honored as a man of peace, said John Baick, professor of history at Western New England College in Springfield, Mass. “He bared his soul, said we were going to have to kill, have to send soldiers to die, we hope we’re doing the right thing,” Baick said.
The centerpiece of Obama’s swift trip to Europe, the speech doubled the length of his inaugural address. Appearing tired here, Obama had worked all the way through the night on the flight to Norway, an aide said.
Such is the weight of the prize. Suddenly and forever, Obama is in the company of King, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama. More… http://www.thereporter.com/wirenews/ci_13975588
