Change Dick Cheney Can Believe In

The oratory sugarcoats the poisons, helping to kill hope in the name of it. 

-Norman Solomon of truthout

     On Thursday, President Obama, received the Nobel Peace Prize a week after announcing not the ending of the war in Afghanistan but an escalation of the war and an additional deployment of 30,000 troops.

     Less than a month ago, Obama said that the U.S. would not sign the global landmine treaty and will continue the Bush-era policy on landmines.  Other countries not signing the Mine Ban Treaty are the peace loving nations of China, India, Pakistan, Myanmar and Russia.

     During the presidential election Candidate Obama promised "Change We Can Believe In" by ending the U.S. instigated war in Iraq and by closing Guantanamo.  Well, Guantanamo is still open and we're still fighting a never ending war in Iraq.

     Obama's Nobel acceptance speech was not one of peace, but one of a condemnation of pacifism and was full of the frighteningly familiar moralizing over good and evil that we came to expect from George W. Bush's diatribes that justified the invasion of Iraq.  President Obama is showing us by his words and actions that he is not giving us change that we can believe in; but hypocrisy we can believe in.

     Here are a few snippets from responses to Obama's peace-winning speech.

      AntiWar.com's response:

     But President Obama’s “acceptance speech” was far from an expression of contrition, spending most of the speech defending his War in Afghanistan as an inherently just war, and rambling on about all the other recent American wars and his ostensible justifications of them.

     Then, in what must’ve been one of the least humble and least appropriate speeches ever given before the Nobel Committee, Obama declared non-violence to be impractical and insisted that the “limits of reason” meant that the American military would continue to have to be used for “moral” reasons.

     In extolling the virtues of war while accepting what was supposed to be a prize for radical advocates of peace, President Obama had what could only be called one of the quintessential jerkass moments of American history, an embarrassing exhortation to the advocates of peace to accept violence as the one true way of solving the world’s problems.

     Truthout's response:

     From President Obama, we hear that peace is the ultimate goal. But "peace" is a fixture on a strategic horizon that keeps moving as the military keeps marching.

     Just a couple of days before Obama stepped to the podium in Oslo, the general running the US war effort in Afghanistan spoke to a Congressional committee in Washington about the president's recent pledge to begin withdrawal of US troops in July 2011. "I don't believe that is a deadline at all," Stanley McChrystal said.

     War is not peace. It never has been. It never will be.

     Yes, I am thankful that Obama is in office and not McCain, or dog-forbid Palin.  Still, after hearing Obama's war rhetoric in what was supposed to be a peace speech, I can only think back to a year ago and mourn for the time when I had so much hope.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.