Tag: nobel peace prize

By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, poverty, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I admire your constant calls for peace, Donald. I just wish I could believe them. You see, there’s this little problem: saying you want peace isn’t enough. You have to actually BE a peacemaker. And you haven’t been one.

You’ve claimed to end eight wars. Independent fact checking shows that you did in fact have a role in bringing several of those countries to the table, and I commend you for that. However, your grand, sweeping claims that peace wouldn’t have happened without your aggressive diplomacy are highly exaggerated. And several of the peace agreements aren’t exactly working out. For example, the United Nations reports that 339 Palestinians were killed by Israel in the six weeks following the ceasefire. We’ll give you a B-.

You renamed the US Institute of Peace after yourself.  You spent months telling Oslo you deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, it’s true that some recipients didn’t deserve it either: Barack Obama was new in office and hadn’t done anything significant toward peace at that point. Henry Kissinger was a war criminal responsible for much harm during the Vietnam War, the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship that followed the US-aided coup, and many other foreign policy debacles. But still, if you have to nominate yourself for the peace price and name an institution that is supposed to be independent after yourself, it doesn’t scream “qualified.” It actually says “laughably insecure and demanding.” Grade: D-.

Then there’s Ukraine. You’ve been so inconsistent that nobody knows where you stand. You berate the Ukrainian president in person on national TV. Next, you tell Putin to negotiate. Then you bring forward a proposal so lopsidedly Russia-centric that even Mitch McConnell dismissed the plan and said Putin had made a fool of you. One key principle of peacemaking: It has to include all the sides and let all of them at least claim some small victory, which this plan utterly fails to do. Grade: F.

How about relations with our near neighbors? You’ve killed at least 87 people in 22 separate attacks on vessels in the Caribbean, claiming that they were smuggling drugs. You’ve provided no evidence that this is true (and your long record as a massive serial liar doesn’t boost our confidence). And even if it were true, the proper procedure is to interdict and seize the boat, arrest the crew, and hold the cargo as evidence—not to blow it out of the water without warning. Both Colombia and Venezuela have accused you of extrajudicial murder. At least two of those were killed while clinging to the wreckage after you destroyed their boat, in clear violation of international law.  And it’s hard to believe that you really care about keeping drugs out of this country when you just granted a full pardon to the former president of Honduras, who had just started serving more than 40 years for a huge cocaine smuggling operation. There’s widespread speculation that this is really about setting your sights on Venezuela’s oil, and that you’re willing to start a war against them. Grade: F.

And then there’s your “peacemaking” right here in the  good old United States of America.

  • You send armed, masked goons to snatch honest, hard-working non-criminal immigrants away from jobs, loved ones, and decent places to live,  without a shred of due process. Sometimes, your goons snatch up people who have citizenship or permanent residence. Other times, you target people who are going through all the proper steps of being able to stay legally. This creates terror, not peace. It serves no useful function, disrupts families and the economy, and makes the whole country unsafe. Grade: F.
  • You rip the safety net apart, causing economic dislocation of the kind that encourages crime, making our streets less safe and less peaceful.
  • Your energy policies, pushing the most destructive, resource-intensive, and economically unworkable energy options, will lead to resource conflicts, which will lead to more wars. Grade: F.
  • Finally, your public language is the opposite of a peacemaker’s. You issue all sorts of smears against people of color, non-Christians, people with disabilities, even those who happen to belong to a different political party, as well as people you have specifically named and declared they are your enemies. You are an attack dog with a remarkably thin skin who insults others but has zero tolerance for dissent. To paraphrase Three Dog Night, “That ain’t the way to make peace, please.” Grade: F.

So if you want to be seen as a peacemaker, you have to become one. That’s going to take major restructuring of your whole way of being president. Are you up to the challenge? I’d love to see you succeed at embracing peace and would cheer you on publicly if you’re sincere. I’m not optimistic that you’re up to it—but I’d love to be proven wrong.

 

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Peace and War, Uncategorized Tagged with , , ,

Woke up this morning to the startling news that US President Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Price–and a perceptive entry on Huffington Post wondering why.

After all, he has initiated a slow and limited timetable for withdrawing from Iraq, pretty much continuing the “progress” of his predecessor–and has made very clear his intent to expand the war in Afghanistan.

Now it’s true that these were wars he inherited, and that he’s had a very full plate even by presidential standards. It’s also true that he has moved us forward on climate change and the environment, on labor, and on the idea that foreign affairs should be primarily addressed through diplomacy And that last bit has certainly help the slow process of rebuilding the U.S.’s stature in the world, after eight years of a rogue coup d’etat regime that left the world negatively astounded and quite terrified. His speech in Cairo was a terrific example.

But the Nobel award does seem a bit, ummm, premature. I’d have rather they waited until he successfully extricated us from the Bush wars, or until he made a speech like this:

Ladies and gentlemen, both my fellow Americans, and my fellow citizens of the world–in the 21st century, war simply has no place in the arsenal of foreign policy. The last significant example of a war achieving policy ends was World War II, when the world responded to a series of power-mad totalitarian regimes with equal force, stopped the aggressors at a great cost in human lives, and installed democratic governments in West Germany, Italy, and Japan. That was 64 years ago, and took six bloody, difficult years to achieve. Korea was a stalemate, Vietnam was a failure, and both Iraq and Afghanistan are succeeding only in giving strength and comfort and eager recruits to the enemies of freedom. Therefore, I have ordered the immediate drawdown of troops. Over the next three months, all US military personnel in both Iraq and Afghanistan will be coming home, along with the private US military contractors that participate. In their place, we will devote significant resources toward hunger relief, education, rebuilding of bombed infrastructure, and eliminating corruption in those countries. There will be a small security presence whose mission is to protect the workers for social and economic justice that we will send over, but there will be no military mission beyond that. We can learn from the powerful example of countries like South Africa, Poland, and Northern Ireland, where peace and democracy were not imposed through the barrels of guns, but by the powerful leadership of indigenous residents who organized together to say, ‘enough of this.’ It’s long past time, in the words of John Lennon, to Give Peace a Chance.

The Nobel committee has made strange choices before (can you say Henry Kissinger?). I can only hope that they’re following the philosophy of rewarding the behavior they want to see in the hopes that the behavior will rise to meet the treatment. This is a great strategy in parenting, in conflict resolution between individuals, in customer service desks (I even write about it in my sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First). It would be great if it turns out to work in international politics too.

Oh, and President Obama, I give you free and full permission to use the above speech in full or in part, at any time—including your Nobel acceptance speech in Sweden!

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail