Top Ten Reasons President Obama Should Give Back the Nobel Peace Prize
Created 10/14/2009 [print_link]
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Look to what he does, not what he says.
Black Agenda Report salutes the European journalist who posed the key question at the Nobel press conference. Corporate American media being the great force for openness and accountability that it is, the query would have been a career-killer for any American reporter who dared utter it. In that same spirit of reality-based reporting and commentary we offer these top ten reasons the president ought to reconsider accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.
Reason Number Ten: The president is escalating, not ending the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Reason Number Nine: President Obama is still peddling lies about Iran building nuclear weapons.
Reason Number Seven: President Obama retained Robert Gates, a bloodthirsty Reaganite war criminal as Secretary of Defense.
Reason Number Five: The US government, in and out of uniform still practices torture and maintains a global gulag of law-free secret prisons.
Reason Number Four: The president has utterly disregarded his campaign pledge to withdraw one combat brigade per month from Iraq.
Reason Number Two: The US is Funnelling Billions Into Expanding Its Military Presence Across the African Continent.
The Nobel Peace Prize is bad politics, even for Obama supporters. For the rest of his career it will invite unflattering comparisons of Barack Obama with the work of genuine peacemakers like Dr. Martin Luther King who declared that his own country, the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” The US presidency would be a great place to put a genuine peacemaker, a visionary woman or man who would bend the law to enforce respect for human rights, who would take the lead in nuclear disarmament by trashing the largest stockpile of nukes in the world which would be under his control. A peacemaker would open the doors to travel and trade with Cuba, and follow the Cuban example of aiding Africa with teachers, doctors and appropriate technology rather than flooding the continent with arms. A peacemaker would close the torture chambers and prosecute war criminals so that justice would roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. None of that is going on.
The formidable Bruce Dixon
Bruce Dixon is managing editor of Black Agenda Report, and can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.