Obama gave the impression of a moral man struggling to change an immoral world, writes LARA MARLOWE
AS HE wrestled with what he called “difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace” in his Nobel lecture in Oslo yesterday, Barack Obama gave the impression of a moral man struggling to change an immoral world, and compromising himself in the process. “We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace,” he concluded.
Criticism of the award in the US forced Obama to re-state his humility. “I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labours on the world stage . . . my accomplishments are slight,” he said.
It seemed sad that the most inspired and inspiring US leader in decades could not admit pride in having transformed America’s relationship with the world.
Though Obama’s honesty is often disarming, the sense of unease was compounded by things left unsaid.
The Iraq war is “winding down”, he said, a dubious assertion when one considers there are still 120,000 US troops in Iraq and 130 people were killed in bombings in Baghdad on Tuesday.
Of the three criteria cited by Obama for a just war – self-defence, proportional use of force and the protection of civilians – arguably only the first applies to Afghanistan. And even the president’s statement that 43 countries are fighting there “to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks” has been challenged by US critics who point out that al-Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan, but in neighbouring Pakistan and further afield.
Obama deplored that “the capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible”, ignoring the fact that the US is far and away the world’s leading manufacturer and exporter of weapons.
US critics would pounce on anything resembling an apology, so it wasn’t surprising that Obama regretted the lost “distinction between combatant and civilian” without mentioning that in all their recent wars, America and Israel have blurred that distinction.
Referring to Islamic extremists, Obama denounced “a few small men with outsized rage [who] murder innocents on a horrific scale”.
The history of US Middle East policy, of the festering wound of the dispossession of the Palestinians, of unconditional US support for Israel and for Arab dictatorships, was absent.
In the most glaring gap of the speech, neither Israel nor Palestinians were cited, only the briefest allusion to “the conflict between Arabs and Jews”.
Reiterating words used nine days earlier in his speech on the Afghan war, Obama praised the US for bearing the (white man’s?) “burden” of “underwriting global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms”.
Yes, Obama quoted the golden rule, instilled in him at his mother’s knee. But his Nobel lecture was a farewell to idealism, a reasoned espousal of pragmatism. Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Prize for seeking to ban war through the creation of the League of Nations.
Obama paid homage to his non-violent heroes, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, but recognised regretfully: “To say that force is sometimes necessary . . . is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”