Honored to No Avail

Today in Afghanistan, Obama is doing exactly what he promised.

Did Barack Obama deserve the Nobel Peace Prize he accepted today in Oslo? The simple and popular answer is no, because the president is waging war in Afghanistan and will, in fact, escalate that conflict with the announcement that he plans to send an additional 30,000 troops there. Many, pleased and excited by Obama the presidential candidate, those who celebrated him as a new messiah as he spoke in Berlin and other world capitals, were disappointed by that.

But even during his election campaign and his appearances in Europe, Obama gave justifications for the Afghan campaign, demanding that Germany and other European allies also increase their troop strength there. At the same time, he criticized the Iraq war begun by his predecessor, George W. Bush, by calling that engagement a waste of America’s military resources in the “wrong place,” instead of concentrating on “the right war” in Afghanistan. Despite justified criticism that Obama’s fatal decision to engage in a war that could potentially plunge his nation into another Vietnam-like quagmire and ruin his re-election chances in 2012, Obama cannot be accused of doing what George W. Bush did with the Iraq war: namely, leading his countrymen down the garden path with lies and deception.

Obama’s current actions in Afghanistan are exactly what he promised during the election campaign. Why three of the five Nobel Committee members voted to award him the Peace Prize despite that is, as yet, unknown. Do they also see the Afghan war as “just” and “necessary?” Do they hope awarding Obama the prize might encourage him to end the war? Or do they, perhaps, want to encourage his other foreign policy initiatives?

There are good reasons for the latter because, apart from his disastrous war policies in Afghanistan, a conflict in which his predecessor played a decisive role, President Obama is, nonetheless, the best thing that could have happened to the United States and the rest of the world. That holds true, even when comparing him to his opponents in the 2008 election; it also holds true in view of the monumental challenges facing the U.S. and the rest of the world today.

Obama has intellectually understood and accepted two facts of life: First, the U.S., when compared to up-and-coming rivals like China or India, is in relative decline. And second, over the past couple of decades, the U.S. has promoted a whole range of policies – from energy and environment, to the Middle East and on to armaments – that weren’t necessarily in the best interests of the U.S. nor of the American people. Both facts of life were already apparent as early as the end of the Cold War, but all Obama’s predecessors in the Oval Office, from Bush senior to Clinton and George W. Bush, ended up ignoring them. They were suppressed by the hoopla surrounding capitalism’s victory over communism, a second economic boom during the nineties, and by the emerging threat of terrorism following September 11, 2001.

Superpower in decline

Obama’s agenda on health care reform, as well as his foreign and environmental policies, signal an attempt to translate these realizations into shaping America’s future direction, but Obama faces a U.S. Congress bent on pursuing a catastrophic collision course with him. Republicans have yet to advance a single counter-proposal to any of Obama’s initiatives; they are single-minded in pursuing one goal and one goal, only: Obama’s failure. All their energies are directed toward next year’s mid-term elections, in which they hope to regain a majority of seats in Congress, and toward recapturing the White House in 2012. Republican opposition is supported in large measure across the U.S. by a fanatical, ideological and often racist propaganda machine, using fear-mongering against the “socialist” or “Muslim” president who is selling America out to its enemies. Whether it’s Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel or Nicolas Sarkozy, no other head of state in the free world has to contend with such dismal domestic political conditions as Obama.

Destructive opposition

For the rest of the world, the most significant and obvious sign of this dilemma is evident in the area of environmental protection. The president took the completely untenable position of reversing his predecessor’s position on the climate, announcing as early as February his intention to reduce America’s CO2 emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050. Not only Republicans rejected the environmental bill Obama submitted to Congress; many Democrats representing districts where oil, coal and the automobile industry had powerful influence dismissed it as well.

Obama is the first U.S. President in history to suggest a world free of nuclear weapons. A follow-up treaty to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia would be a concrete first step toward that goal. Without nuclear disarmament by Russia and the U.S., convincing Paris, Tehran or Pyongyang to forgo nuclear weapons is an unrealistic hope. But even this ambitious goal is in danger of being scuttled by Congress: Obama’s about-face on stopping the Israeli program of settlement expansion in the West Bank can be traced directly back to several members of the House and Senate who threatened to jump ship on supporting health care reform unless Obama backed down on the settlement issue. That alone was enough to nullify all the good will Obama had created in the Muslim world with his Cairo speech.

Under such conditions, can Obama’s Nobel Prize be helpful to him anywhere? Not very likely.