War and Peace, by Barack Obama
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
It is a timeline rich in irony. On Dec. 10, Barack Obama will star at a glittering ceremony in Oslo to receive the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. That’s just nine days after he ordered 30,000 additional American troops into a war many of his fellow citizens think the U.S. can neither win nor afford.
Whether the sharp escalation of the war in Afghanistan he ordered on December 1 will achieve its stated aim – disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan – remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: more troops equals more fighting equals more deaths — of soldiers, insurgents and the hapless civilians caught in the middle. Not exactly a scenario of peace.
In Oslo, Obama will become the fourth American president (after Jimmy Carter, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt) to be handed the coveted peace medal and invited to give the traditional Nobel Lecture. It is meant to spell out the award winner’s vision of peace, a challenging task for a man who just picked a much bigger war from a range of options that included reducing the U.S. military presence.
Resolving the contradiction will require the mastery of words of Leo Tolstoy, author of the epic novel War and Peace about the run-up to the unsuccessful invasion of Russia by Napoleon.
The deployment Obama announced at the U.S. military academy at West Point will bring U.S. forces to around 100,000, more than three times as many as when the president took office in January. The combined strength of American troops and soldiers from 42 other nations will be 140,000 – the same level as the peak of Soviet forces during an eight-year war that ended in a humiliating defeat.
Obama and his war council are as confident that the U.S. will not share the same fate as they are determined to reject comparisons between the American involvement in Afghanistan and the war in Vietnam. “This argument depends upon a false reading of history,” Obama said in his West Point speech.
Obama in the footsteps of George W. Bush
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. —
Words of wisdom from an American leader: “The United States must be humble and must be proud and confident of our values but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.
“If we are an arrogant nation, they’ll view us that way but if we are a humble nation, they’ll respect us.”
President Barack Obama, the newly-minted winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, speaking about U.S. engagement with the rest of the world, including anti-American leaders? No, the exhortation for superpower humbleness came from George W. Bush when he was running for president in 2000.
Whether this was campaign rhetoric or conviction will never be known but if it was the latter, it ended eight months into Bush’s first term.
The word “humble” disappeared from Washington’s political lexicon after the Sept. 11, 2001 mass murders in New York and Washington and during the rest of Bush’s eight-year presidency, the United States came to be seen, in large parts of the world, as the epitome of superpower arrogance.
“Humble” is back in fashion. Nine months into his first term, Obama told the United Nations General Assembly he was “humbled by the responsibility that the American people have placed upon me” and determined to meet the challenge of collective action. Three weeks later, he stood in the White House Rose Garden to say he was “deeply humbled” by the Nobel Committee’s decision to give him the Peace Prize.
Anything that has anything to do with G W Bush must be HUMBLED. But the more accurate description is DESTROYED.
The concept of corporate entities was introduced back in the roman ages and has been with us since then.
It is as old and solid a principle of law as any other you could care to name. Almost as old as the concept of legal rights or private property rights. And certainly older then very recent legal concepts such as international human rights.
And even if we removed corporate citizenship, it wouldn’t have any effect on the arms industry.
Corporations are individuals. People are individuals. Corporations can manufacture weapons for governments. People can manufacture weapons for governments.
The situation would be exactly the same. The only distinction would be whether people manufacture and sell weapons as a corporation or a partnership. The legality remains the same.
So if there was as you say, a ‘military industrial complex’ that exists, then the difference between corporate and partnership would mean very little.