War, Peace and Obama’s Nobel

Noam Chomsky wrote:The hopes and prospects for peace aren’t well aligned—not even
close. The task is to bring them nearer. Presumably that was the intent
of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in choosing President Barack Obama.

The prize “seemed a kind of prayer and encouragement by the Nobel
committee for future endeavor and more consensual American leadership,”
Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in The New York Times.

The nature of the Bush-Obama transition bears directly on the
likelihood that the prayers and encouragement might lead to progress.

The Nobel committee’s concerns were valid. They singled out Obama’s rhetoric on reducing nuclear weapons.

Right now Iran’s nuclear ambitions dominate the headlines. The
warnings are that Iran may be concealing something from the
International Atomic Energy Agency and violating U.N. Security Council
Resolution 1887, passed last month and hailed as a victory for Obama’s
efforts to contain Iran.

Meanwhile, a debate continues on whether Obama’s recent decision to
reconfigure missile-defense systems in Europe is a capitulation to the
Russians or a pragmatic step to defend the West from Iranian nuclear
attack.

Silence is often more eloquent than loud clamor, so let us attend to what is unspoken.

Amid the furor over Iranian duplicity, the IAEA
passed a resolution calling on Israel to join the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty and open its nuclear facilities to inspection.

The United States and Europe tried to block the IAEA resolution, but it passed anyway. The media virtually ignored the event.

The United States assured Israel that it would support Israel’s
rejection of the resolution—reaffirming a secret understanding that has
allowed Israel to maintain a nuclear arsenal closed to international
inspections, according to officials familiar with the arrangements.
Again, the media were silent.

Indian officials greeted U.N. Resolution 1887 by announcing that
India “can now build nuclear weapons with the same destructive power as
those in the arsenals of the world’s major nuclear powers,” the Financial Times reported.

Both India and Pakistan are expanding their nuclear weapons
programs. They have twice come dangerously close to nuclear war, and
the problems that almost ignited this catastrophe are very much alive.

Obama greeted Resolution 1887 differently. The day before he was
awarded the Nobel Prize for his inspiring commitment to peace, the
Pentagon announced it was accelerating delivery of the most lethal
non-nuclear weapons in the arsenal: 13-ton bombs for B-2 and B-52
stealth bombers, designed to destroy deeply hidden bunkers shielded by
10,000 pounds of reinforced concrete.

It’s no secret the bunker busters could be deployed against Iran.

Planning for these “massive ordnance penetrators” began in the Bush
years but languished until Obama called for developing them rapidly
when he came into office.

Passed unanimously, Resolution 1887 calls for the end of threats of
force and for all countries to join the NPT, as Iran did long ago. NPT
non-signers are India, Israel and Pakistan, all of which developed
nuclear weapons with U.S. help, in violation of the NPT.

Iran hasn’t invaded another country for hundreds of years—unlike the
United States, Israel and India (which occupies Kashmir, brutally).

The threat from Iran is minuscule. If Iran had nuclear weapons and
delivery systems and prepared to use them, the country would be
vaporized.

To believe Iran would use nuclear weapons to attack Israel, or
anyone, “amounts to assuming that Iran’s leaders are insane” and that
they look forward to being reduced to “radioactive dust,” strategic
analyst Leonard Weiss observes, adding that Israel’s missile-carrying
submarines are “virtually impervious to preemptive military attack,”
not to speak of the immense U.S. arsenal.

In naval maneuvers in July, Israel sent its Dolphin class subs,
capable of carrying nuclear missiles, through the Suez Canal and into
the Red Sea, sometimes accompanied by warships, to a position from
which they could attack Iran—as they have a “sovereign right” to do,
according to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.

Not for the first time, what is veiled in silence would receive
front-page headlines in societies that valued their freedom and were
concerned with the fate of the world.

The Iranian regime is harsh and repressive, and no humane person
wants Iran—or anyone else—to have nuclear weapons. But a little honesty
would not hurt in addressing these problems.

The Nobel Peace Prize, of course, is not concerned solely with
reducing the threat of terminal nuclear war, but rather with war
generally, and the preparation for war. In this regard, the selection
of Obama raised eyebrows, not least in Iran, surrounded by U.S.
occupying armies.

On Iran’s borders in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, Obama has
escalated Bush’s war and is likely to proceed on that course, perhaps
sharply.

Obama has made clear that the United States intends to retain a
long-term major presence in the region. That much is signaled by the
huge city-within-a city called “the Baghdad Embassy,” unlike any
embassy in the world.

Obama has announced the construction of mega-embassies in Islamabad and Kabul, and huge consulates in Peshawar and elsewhere.

Nonpartisan budget and security monitors report in Government Executive
that the “administration’s request for $538 billion for the Defense
Department in fiscal 2010 and its stated intention to maintain a high
level of funding in the coming years put the president on track to
spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in
one term of office since World War II. And that’s not counting the
additional $130 billion the administration is requesting to fund the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, with even more war spending
slated for future years.”

The Nobel Peace Prize committee might well have made truly worthy
choices, prominent among them the remarkable Afghan activist Malalai
Joya.

This brave woman survived the Russians, and then the radical
Islamists whose brutality was so extreme that the population welcomed
the Taliban. Joya has withstood the Taliban and now the return of the
warlords under the Karzai government.

Throughout, Joya worked effectively for human rights, particularly
for women; she was elected to parliament and then expelled when she
continued to denounce warlord atrocities. She now lives underground
under heavy protection, but she continues the struggle, in word and
deed. By such actions, repeated everywhere as best we can, the
prospects for peace edge closer to hopes.

This column appears, in edited form, in In These Times’ December 2009 issue.