Peace to the Warlord

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Obama said there were perhaps others who were more deserving of the award. That was said in an attempt to put an end to the pointless debate over whether this president had accomplished enough in one year to be awarded the 2009 prize. Of course, there were others who may have deserved it even more, but that is almost always the case. And it wasn’t Obama’s decision to make the selection that, when it was announced on October 9, seemed to take him by surprise as much as anyone else. What was he supposed to do? Refuse it?

The interesting question since the announcement, itself, has always been what useful purpose Obama would be able to find for the honor. Would he be able to fulfill the high hopes the award brought with it – not to mention the heavy burdens it entails – to justify it? Could he get the award in anticipation of his performance? In its justification, the Nobel Committee praised his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and international cooperation.” They emphasized his vision of a world free of nuclear arms. The message was clear: The pundits in Oslo were looking for a Peace President.

That being said, the acceptance speech Obama gave on Thursday is more than noteworthy. He appeared as a self-confessed wartime president, as commander in chief of a military currently waging two wars on foreign soil. He came as a president who may have made a painful decision but, at the same time, a decision for which he accepts full responsibility: namely, to send another 30,000 troops into battle in Afghanistan. The subject of his speech was an attempt to explain the apparent contradiction.The sparse applause and stiff attitude of his audience may be an indication that many were expecting something entirely different from him. But this time, Obama didn’t want to rouse new hopes; he wanted to stifle expectations and explain that he chose to fight the war he is waging for the cause of peace.

It was a reflective and presumably very honest speech, a speech that allowed insights into Barack Obama’s thoughts and his worldview. In any case, it is very seldom that a president of the United States has to wrestle with the question of what constitutes a just war in order to attain just and lasting peace, the question of when and whether force is ever right and even necessary. “We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes,” Obama said. These are uncommon remarks for a Nobel Peace laureate. Obama went on to say that war was sometimes necessary, and that a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King could preach pacifism, but a president of the U.S. must play a different role. “I face the world as it is,” he said.

Whoever suspected Obama of being a pacifist was naïve. As early as his Senate speech against the invasion of Iraq in October 2002, the then-unknown senator from Illinois publicly said, “I’m not opposed to all war. I’m opposed to stupid wars.” The gloomy tone from Oslo shows that Obama now recognizes the leaden consequences of such words, now that he is the warlord. It honors him that he didn’t simply accept the award with an empty, feel-good speech.

But he said surprisingly little in answering the question of how he intends to justify the award over the next three years of his presidency. He said much about the abstract theory of waging just wars, but little concrete about making peace, and not much at all about what the “alternatives to force” that need to be examined might look like. In reality, Obama’s foreign policy has often fallen victim to inconsistency. His grandiose Cairo speech, promising reconciliation with Islam, was followed up with a confusing zigzag policy in the Middle East that has cost him a great deal of credibility in the region. Torture is forbidden, but Guantanamo remains open. Compared to Peking and Tehran, human rights are scarcely mentioned anymore. Obama also didn’t sign on to the anti-personnel landmine treaty, although the use of those weapons can have no place in waging a just war.

A lot of work remains to be done by this Nobel Peace laureate; Obama certainly doesn’t want history to measure him by the wars he fought, regardless of how just he thinks they were.