Peace

President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize  a couple Fridays ago, an amazing accomplishment for a president in his first year of office, and it reflects the interests of voters ecstatic about the end of the Bush/Cheney years of worldwide destruction and imbues with it a sense of responsibility that Obama should take seriously, a responsibility to make the world a more peaceful place, on his watch, now that he is in charge.  Because, sadly, we are still in the same exact wars that the Bush/Cheney machine brought us into, for the foreseeable future, with Obama considering General McChrystal's request to up the ante in Afghanistan with another 40,000 young men being sent off for the service of something -- what that is remains unclear -- and perhaps give their lives, for us, or for the military industrial complex that continues to be fed by nearly every president of this country since World War II.  Is Obama listening to the Peace Prize advocates in Norway?  Or to the general of his armed forces, who -- brilliant as might be -- would never, ever advocate for less troops, or less money.  No general ever has, in the history of war.  And when the history of war is over and Afghanistan has passed Vietnam as the longest American conflict ever (which it will soon), will Obama be a deserving recipient of the Peace Prize?  Or will he be closer to Kissinger and Arafat, two other world leaders prodded by the Nobel Peace committee but ultimately failing in their roles as potential peacemakers in the world.

I haven't written much about politics since the election of Obama nearly one year ago.  I've watched with some sense of glee as the right wing has devolved into a lunatic fringe of birthers, tea baggers, and secessionists, most of them out of unadulterated racism, the rest out of fear, and I've seen Obama work with Congress to stabilize the economy and put us on the road to recovery, which isn't yet realized, but which seems the likely result.  But beyond that, beyond some wonderful speeches and an unwillingness to be baited by cheap Republican propaganda, there's been a dearth of accomplishments so far in this administration.  And that's been rather shocking to me.  And it's becoming more and more disappointing.

Now, the Republican side is so woefully bereft of ideas or solutions or any sense of common decency that anyone with half a brain can dismiss them wholeheartedly from the public discourse, but just because the Democrats have the arena of sensible ideas all to themselves does not mean we shouldn't criticize them, and we must, if only because they've done so very little with so much power, and they have spent the past few months merely fending off the lunatic fringe on the right over the most inane and unnecessary battles, like the entire "death panel" "debate" and the cries of socialism over a simple public option to insure the 45 million Americans without health insurance.  You see, it's not a debate when one side is absolutely bonkers.  It's just a waste of time.  And all that Congress has done since January, it seems, is waste our valuable time.  No health care reform.  No environmental reforms.  No change in our oil policies or our tax policies or our corporate policies.  No investigation into tortures.  No closure of Guantanamo Bay, yet, and that was announced months ago.  Oh, and we're still in two wars.  And perhaps escalating in one of them, a place that no foreign government in history has been able to exert external control over (not the Russians or Brits or even Alexander the Great), and where -- much like in Iraq -- it seems impossible to ever define victory.  Why is this happening?

I haven't been a Democrat for very long.  I only stopped voting for Republicans after Katrina put the final nail in the coffin of the warped conservative ideology I had blindly (and stupidly) followed for many years.  I would hope that if it weren't for Katrina, all the other insane things the party has done in the intervening years -- up to and including putting Sarah Palin on the ticket -- would have turned me off of them, like it has for so many other Americans.  But back then, there was a party for me to turn towards -- a minority party that had spent the better part of a decade in the wilderness and that had strong progressive voices demanding that the war end, that the power return from the corporations to the people, that we confront global warming, that we get universal health care, that we'd get religion out of government and government out of our homes (and our phone lines), and that we'd become a positive force in the world, instead of the destructive one that Dick Cheney had masterminded.  Last November, we rose up together -- liberals and moderates and independents and disaffected Republicans -- and voted for a charismatic leader who vowed to change the system, to deliver on all those promises I just listed above, and we believed him, he was our JFK, he was our FDR, he was our Abraham Lincoln that could save our country from the tarnished wreck that George Bush had wrought.  And so far?  Not so much.  You can blame Congress all you want, and I do -- I can't believe how little the Senate can achieve, even with 60 Democrats seated (the House has been way, way more effective), but ultimately this rests on our president.

He's saved our economy, maybe, and that's no small feat, but it's quite difficult to tell how much his actions have helped, or if other actions would have helped more, or less, but even if we give him full credit for the recovery, such as it is, what else has he done?  Our standing in the world has improved dramatically, as shown in the Nobel Peace Prize presentation, but how much of that outpouring of affection is just because Bush is out of office?  And I do love the way international affairs are being pursued through diplomacy, not weapons, particularly in Iran.  But the two biggest foreign affairs challenges facing this country remain our two wars, and we're still fighting them.  Obama said he's pulling out of Iraq, and that's great, but when, and when "out" means we're leaving behind 50,000+ troops, is that really meaningful?  I've already talked in some length about Afghanistan, but if Obama adds more troops there, to the 20,000+ he already added, this becomes his war.  And running a war is not something that a Nobel Peace Prize recipient should be doing, especially if we're there not to capture bin Laden, who's actually in Pakistan, but to fight the Taliban, who didn't attack us -- not directly at least -- and aren't any more likely to send suicide bombers onto our soil as any other group of extremists, Islamic or otherwise, from any Middle Eastern country, or in fact, as the recent domestic cases have shown, our own. 

I'd like the war to end.  I'd like both wars to end.  I'd like health care reform -- it's too late to get a single payer system, but we can at least get a public option, and that's the minimum I'd accept.  I'd like global warming attacked, through green programs at a national level and the elimination of our dependence on oil, preferrably at an international level.  I'd like an investigation into the previous regime's torture memos, and an end to Guantanamo Bay.  I'd like reform in corporate law and oversight and dependence on banks for our well-being, so that "too big to fail" doesn't become taxpayer' debts again.  And I'd like about a million other things that Obama promised, that I know he truly believes in -- just like me -- and that I wish he had the will to push through.  I don't think he lied to us.  I cannot believe that someone as intelligent as he, and as composed, and as seemingly selfless, and as brave, would not share these same beliefs, the very ones he campaigned on for over two years.  I just don't know what he's waiting for.  America shouldn't have to wait much longer.

Comments

[LegFuJohnson]

Welcome to the Anti-politics party.

[rooibos]

Hello
I really adore Obama and Barack Obama truly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.President Obama has given a lot of people hope around the world and has helped in improving the image of the US.Thank you very much for this very informative post.