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War, Peace, and Obligation: Obama in Oslo
President’s Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech did not sidestep the controversy of his award. He willfully and gracefully acknowledged that he is the Command-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars, and spoke about the justification for armed conflict, but the importance and long-lasting qualities of non-violence. After all, he says, an African-American president would not be possible without the non-violent civil rights movement.
Barack Obama’s speech is in many ways a conceptual speech about war. He begins by addressing Iraq, a war that “is winding down” and Afghanistan as “a conflict America did not seek;” rather, Afghanistan is the shared responsibility of “forty three other countries – including Norway – [waged] in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.” After this, the speech is far more conceptual, discussing the legitimacy and evolving morality of armed conflict.
There is “deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause;” and yet, Obama argues that war has a role to play in peace keeping, and that non-violence would not have stopped Hitler or Milosevic. America has provided global security for the past 90 years, sacrificing the “blood of our citizens” for the promotion of peace and prosperity abroad. Perhaps more importantly, the United States has given war an objective morality; restrictions on the most dangerous weapons, and “mechanisms s to govern the waging of war…protect human rights, [and] prevent genocide.”
Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony Webcast Tomorrow!
The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded to President Obama tomorrow at 5:00am EST/2:00am PST, and will be available on live webcast. The prize was given mere weeks before the president’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, and many opinions and editorials have been written addressing this. If for some reason you are unable to watch the webcast, come over to Globalshift.org for an update and overview of the speech. But make sure to not take our (or anyone else’s) impressions as truth — watch for yourself and form an educated opinion. You can watch the speech here.
