Obama, The Nobel Peace Prize & Justifications For War

The Nobel Peace Prize is an award Obama should have rejected when he was first told that he had won it. He has done nothing to rate this award - nothing beyond not being Bush, at least, and more often than not, treating America with the same disdain as your average European elite. As to the latter, there was none of that in Obama's acceptance speech yesterday. And indeed, his speech struck a note of realism that I honestly did not think he possessed. You can find the full text of his speech here.

That said, my major concern with his speech was that, for all he talked about "just cause" to engage in war - citing self defense and humanitarian intervention, he missed, it seemed to me, a major lesson of history. It is the lesson of WWII. The reality of that war was that, had Britain or France acted preemptively to challenge Hitler with military force in 1936 or 1937, WWII would not have occurred. It is a truth very much applicable to our modern Nazi's - the illegitimate Khomeinist regime currently ruling Iran. And yet, while at one point in his speech, Obama noted that negotiations would not and, in fact, did not end the threat of Hitler, he ignores, perhaps deliberately, that he is going down the same path with Iran.

At any rate, It was, in fact, perhaps the best speech he has given. to date. My personal favorite line of his speech was "for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice." That is shades of one of my favorite poems, Henley's Invictus.