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President Obama: As someone who
stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life's work, I am
living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is
nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naive in the creed and lives of
Gandhi and King.
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaidas leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
I raise this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause. At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the worlds sole military superpower.
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaidas leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
I raise this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause. At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the worlds sole military superpower.
That 'ambivalence' to military action the president represents as universal to any conflict, is fiction, at least in America. Our nation's citizens didn't start out ambivalent to chasing bin-Laden into Afghanistan. They became ambivalent when that effort was distorted into opportunistic nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan; all the while with the fugitive terror suspects that were at the heart and soul of the military mission left free to instigate and motivate violent resistance against our nation's strident military presence and activity across sovereign borders, mostly by the virtue of their freedom from justice.
The nation became ambivalent when those occupations, in turn, were escalated to facilitate the politics behind the propped-up regimes our nation's defenders sacrificed and languished in these foreign countries to defend and preserve in assumed power and authority over the hapless populations.
The suspicion of America's military force abroad was born in the 'extraordinary renditions' by our military and intelligence agencies; and in the indefinite imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans without charges or counsel - many held and tortured as in Gitmo - many tortured and disappeared in 'black sites' in compliant nations.
Many are suspicious of this president's escalation of force in Afghanistan against the Taliban there. We've been told by the administration and the military that there are relatively few individuals thought to be in Afghanistan who are al-Qaeda. Yet the U.S. military aggression there in defense of the regime we helped ascend to power in a corrupt election is directed against an entirely different 'enemy' who is operating against the U.S. 'interest' in our maintaining of the ethically-challenged regime in dominance over whoever there recognizes and is affected by America's beneficent-but-poison paternalism.
President Obama: . . .
the world must remember that it was not simply international
institutions -- not just treaties and declarations -- that brought
stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made,
the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped
underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of
our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of
our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from
Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the
Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our
will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we
seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe
that their lives will be better if other people's children and
grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.
So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another -- that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldiers courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause and to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.
So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes necessary, and war is at some level an expression of human folly.
So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another -- that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldiers courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause and to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.
So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes necessary, and war is at some level an expression of human folly.
So we mustn't 'trumpet' war, we should trumpet our benevolence and patronage instead - which Mr. Obama believes is the true expression of our 'will' as Americans. War is just an inconvenient inevitability to the president and the best we can do is to be beneficent and muddle through . . . like we've done throughout the history he describes.
If the president has his way with the dual occupations, he will end one and win the other. It's no matter to him that he contradicts the very reasons he once spoke out in protest against the Iraq invasion and occupation with the justifications he uses for continuing to pursue both to some 'successful' end. He'll presumably pull our troops out of Iraq without any regard at all for the increased violence there or without concern about staging a continued defense of the politics and voting there which was supposed to be central to the reasons for his foot-dragging exit. Reports today were that the military is satisfied, as is the administration, that none of the recent developments and political setbacks will delay their planned drawdown of about half of the 100,000-strong force there. That's as it should be. The U.S. forces are useless to the cause of 'keeping the peace' between the feuding Iraqis, Kurds, and others. Whatever 'moral' influence anyone hoped to assert there behind the force of our military has been terminally corrupted from the start and aggravated by the collateral consequences and effects of the shock and awe of our opportunistic occupation.
All of this folly still festering in Iraq - the president anxious to cut the losses and end the occupation- and the best he can imagine for those retreating forces is to join his new, escalated folly in Afghanistan. What was notable about President Obama's speech in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize was how much of it was centered on justifying war; just wars, in his estimation. It's safe to say that his actions and decisions regarding Afghanistan were at the forefront of his excuses. American exceptionalism reigns supreme in his elevated view and his own militarism is to be seen by others as no exception to the history of America's 'just' wars.
At the end of his address, the president quoted Martin Luther King Jr.'s remarks at his own Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance . . .
As
Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago: "I refuse to accept
despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse
to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present nature makes him
morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that
forever confronts him . . . We can acknowledge that oppression will
always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the
intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. We can
understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace . . .
It's understandable that President Obama would want to justify his own duplicity between his stated ideals against 'dumb wars' with a declaration of a pursuit of peace behind his escalation of military force in Afghanistan. But King wasn't trying to reconcile the contradiction between a wartime president who's escalated an occupation and a peace-seeker. King's answer to the dilemma the president faces was non-violence. His own acceptance speech was a promotion of peace and love, not a litany of excuses for militarism.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy," King said in 1967. "Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars."
