War is peace, or something like that

Barack Obama is more like George W. Bush than any of his supporters has been willing to admit. The 44th president, like his predecessor, has shown a willingness to break disagreements down into simple, binary equations, especially when it comes to his defense of empire.

“Evil does exist in the world,” he said during his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, echoing his predecessor, radically simplifying the world around us. Evil, he says, justifies our use of extreme force — which is what war is — rather than a smaller-scale attempt to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice. The president has opted to reinvigorate the 9/11 meme to justify a wider-scale effort to remake the so-called Afpak border area, even if this war of his (and it is now his war) has nothing to do with 9/11.

The troubling aspect of this — beyond the Afghan escalation — is that he used his Nobel acceptance to hawk his own hawkishness, to defend his own indefensible decision to ratchet up the war. Obama, of course, is not a pacifist and has never claimed to be one. He has, from the beginning, viewed Afghanistan as a war of necessity in the very same way that Bush viewed Iraq.

And like Bush, who purposely conflated Saddam Hussein with Hitler, Obama has done the same with Al Qaeda.

A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

Al Qaeda is not Hitler and terrorism is not the same as Nazism. Terrorism is a tool — like a gun or a tank — generally used by the relatively powerless to level the playing field against more powerful nations. It’s use is a symptom that our system is sick, that we have allowed some level of injustice to fester, to create an atmosphere in which violent reaction is viewed as necessary.There is no real difference between Timothy McVeigh and a Middle Eastern suicide bomber, no difference between the America militia movement and Al Qaeda. The extremisms they spout might come from different places, but the violence they unleash ultimately is the same, based on the same mix of grievance and moral certitude.

The president, however, for whatever reason, chooses to ignore this, to conflate the big ideological movements with a small regenerating band of extremists who pose a physical threat to individual security but in no way pose an existential threat to the United States.

He further argued during his speech that “it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world,” as if a world that witnessed dozens of political assassinations and violent uprisings, wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Algeria, the Middle East, a massive arms race and a calamitous international chess game between heavily armed nuclear powers can be called stable.

Obama is just a year older than I am, so I have to imagine he remembers crouching beneath his desk during air raid drills and hearing newscasters reporting on body counts and violence in American streets.

Let’s be clear: There was much to like in his speech — such as his acknowledgement that economic and social justice can prevent the slide into despair that creates the conditions in which violent extremism flourishes and his commitment to working within an international framework of established rules and in cooperation with other nations. But, in the end, his insistence that “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace” left me wondering just how much has changed during the last 11 months.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet