More War for Peace

Barack Obama gave an almost irritating speech in Oslo. As he was receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, of all things, his speech was an attempt to justify the war. He philosophized about the conditions and circumstances for a “just war.”

Even the shorter part of his address, the part that was dedicated to peace, dealt mainly more with the impediments to peace than it did with how one goes about creating it.

A Nobel Peace laureate who defends war comes off as strangely as if Herta Müller, this year’s Romanian-born laureate in literature, had expressed sympathy for Nikolai Ceauşescu’s secret police, the Securitate, in her acceptance speech. She, of course, did no such thing. In other words, she didn’t pull an Obama.

There are two valid arguments against the decision made by the Oslo jury. First, Obama is still, even if less than before, a president of future hopes and not of already accomplished successes. While his words point to a better world in the future, his scorecard so far is very much locked in the present. The Nobel Prize is thus more of an enticement to greater accomplishment than it is a reward for what he has already done. Besides that, many Europeans think he may have won the prize mainly for not being George W. Bush.

But, second, Obama is also a wartime president. He may have inherited both Iraq and Afghanistan from Bush, but he hasn’t scaled back the war in the Hindu Kush; in fact, he’s escalating it with a troop surge.

His speech was an attempt to close the gap between being a war president and a Nobel peace laureate. It didn’t work. He described the war as if it belonged to mankind right from the beginning, something like a phenomenon that might be contained but as something one had to first come to terms with.

Obama sees this coming-to-terms as a process of developing and maintaining a set of rules for the war in its evolution toward becoming “just.”

Obama’s speechwriters gleefully mixed the Western tradition of just wars with the new-world American missionary vision. Like his predecessor, Obama talked of the evil in the world today and, in a single breath, linked Hitler and bin Laden with those evildoers. A politician who senses similarities always hates to differentiate.

Of course, it’s admirable when a U.S. president contemplates whether to try justifying a war and how one should go about doing so, especially if he’s the one waging the war. And it would be miraculous if he came to any conclusion other than “war is sometimes necessary,” as Obama did in Oslo.

Just about every president, prime minister or chancellor in office long enough turns into a part-time Clausewitz. But up to now, the Nobel Prize committee shielded themselves and us from the embarrassment of having war defended or at least rationalized at their own awards ceremony. They saved that honor for Barack Obama.