Killing Machine (14 page)

The Nobel Laureate

The announcement from Oslo, Norway, that President Barack Obama had been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize came as the greatest shock of the decade. The right—but not only the right—criticized the act as a preposterous move by the “lefties” on the peace prize committee to commit Obama to their agenda. It even seemed to be a none-too-subtle piece of interference in American politics, one that logically followed from Obama’s choice of Berlin during the 2008 campaign to deliver what amounted to a major partisan campaign address. To those who thought this way, it was the Anti-Bush Prize, awarded to anyone who drove out the Republicans. In a strange sort of way, as we will see below, Obama (and especially certain advisers) did worry about the implication that he was being “jammed” from the other side by the Nobel Prize committee in the same way he supposedly had been by the Pentagon.
He would prove once again, however, that he understood the stakes of all the players in the game.

Candidate Obama had come to Berlin after a whirlwind trip to the Middle East. He netted pictures with Petraeus in a ten-minute helicopter ride that immensely pleased aides, and neatly trumped John McCain’s challenge that he go to Iraq and see for himself how well the surge was working. Although denied a platform at the Brandenburg Gate where John Kennedy had shouted in 1961, “Ich bin ein Berliner!,” and Ronald Reagan in 1987 called out a challenge, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Obama channeled both men from a nearby spot.

Before a crowd of about a hundred thousand on July 24, the prospective nominee of the Democratic Party called for a new era of European-American unity on a whole series of issues. Those who saw him as the true spirit of America come to save the world from George Bush’s minions who had thrust forward their version of liberty on bayonets focused on his promises to end torture and provide the world with new examples of enlightened leadership like the Marshall Plan and Berlin airlift, while also tackling questions of global warming. Obama’s surrogate Robert Gibbs pushed the envelope of great expectations and told reporters that in private talks with German chancellor Angela Merkel the candidate had praised her leadership in international affairs and on the climate issue in particular, and in return had pledged “to pursue an 80% reduction in US greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.”
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These were the headlines reporting on the speech in the press. But it was also a speech about the sterner duties of Europeans in the immediate present.

This is the moment when we must renew our resolve to rout the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan, and the traffickers who sell drugs on your streets. No one welcomes war. I recognize the enormous difficulties in Afghanistan. But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO’s first mission beyond Europe’s borders is a success. For the people of Afghanistan, and for our shared security, the work must be done.
America cannot do this alone. The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation. We have too much at stake to turn back now.
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This speech, as well as his proposal on entering office to reset Russian-American relations and his Cairo speech six months earlier that called for new beginnings with the Arab world, were all fodder for embittered Republicans, who, just as much as Obama’s most ardent supporters, brought to Obama’s every pronouncement what they thought they heard and what they knew they believed. And therein was the dilemma posed by the speech Obama had to give in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

The award was just too much for the
New York Times
’s designated conservative, David Brooks, who called it a “travesty” and a “joke” on the
PBS NewsHour
on October 10, 2009. And Brooks did not stop there. “He wrote a book. That’s literature. He has biological elements in his body. He could win that prize. He could have swept the whole prizes.” On the same program, the
Washington Post
’s Ruth Marcus (not a conservative) said she was stunned and amazed, and seemed to agree when Brooks said that he ought to turn it down. How could he do that? Lehrer asked. People do it, insisted Brooks, and Marcus added an almost snide comment: “Marlon Brando not going to the Academy Awards.”
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It occurred to not a few that the prize was indeed meant to guide the president’s behavior, since he had no accomplishments yet on any peace front one could name. James Fallows of the
Atlantic Monthly
picked up on that notion, pointing out that the chairman of the prize committee introduced Obama by saying,

Commenting on the award, President Obama said he did not feel that he deserved to be in the company of so many transformative figures that have been honoured by the prize, and whose courageous pursuit of peace has inspired the world. But he added that he also knew that the Nobel Prize had not just been used to
honor specific achievements, but also to give momentum to a set of causes. The Prize could thus represent “a call to action.”

President Obama has understood the Norwegian Nobel Committee perfectly.

Fallows gave the president high marks for the acceptance speech that followed, noting first of all that it did not attempt to slide over “his predicament as a war president getting a peace prize.” He continued, “I don’t think he provided even a five-second passage of the speech that could be isolated by U.S. opponents to show that he was ‘apologizing’ for America.”
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Fallows concluded that Obama’s Nobel speech, delivered two weeks after the president announced the Afghan surge, would repay close inspection, embracing as it did the contradiction of war as a means to peace.

More than any other individual besides himself, Harvard professor Samantha Power, a strong believer in the use of force to save endangered peoples from cruel rulers, was responsible for much of the wording and tone of the speech. An immigrant from Ireland as a child, Power began her adult career as a freelance writer in Bosnia during the period of Serbian atrocities against Muslims. She wrote for various magazines as she reported crimes against civilians from Rwanda, East Timor, Sudan, and Kosovo. Her first book,
A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide
, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize and catapulted her into Harvard, where she established the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Soon after he took his seat in the Senate, Obama called Power and told her how much he liked her book. Over a four-hour dinner the two bonded, and she became what one author said was a “charismatic presence” in his Senate office and then in the campaign.
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Early in the campaign she made a bad error that sidetracked her for a short time. An intense foe of the Iraq War, she called Hillary Clinton a “monster” for her tactics in the Ohio primary. She resigned from the campaign, but after the election things were patched over and Power was named to the National Security Council as an adviser on human rights. Her first year in that role was largely uneventful
until she sent a memo to the president suggesting that the first draft of the Nobel Prize speech could be improved; she was invited into meetings, where she was not shy about advancing her own ideas. “Power accompanied Obama to the Nobel ceremonies. Afterward, she put up a large photograph of his handwritten draft on the wall of her office. Her pride was understandable: Many of the ideas in the speech bore her distinctive imprint, particularly his emphasis on the use of force for humanitarian purposes.”
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One can get a pretty good idea of what her private memos to Obama said from a piece Power wrote for the
New York Times Book Review
in 2007, reviewing several books on counterinsurgency and discussing the problems of meeting the terrorist challenge. Opening with a short history of how the Bush administration had fought the war on terror, including that president’s dismissal of old-fashioned restraints on presidential power, Power argued that the way that president had gone about things was wrongheaded: “Six years later, most Americans still rightly believe that the United States must confront Islamic terrorism—and must be relentless in preventing terrorist networks from getting weapons of mass destruction. But Bush’s premises have proved flawed, and the war-on-terror frame has obscured more than it has clarified.”
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Most grievously, Bush had used the war on terror to “smuggle” his obsession with Saddam Hussein into a full-blown invasion that had actually done great harm to the effort to quash al Qaeda’s terrorist threats and the wider effort to put an end to all such activities. The bogus war made many of America’s friends dismiss genuine American concerns about terrorism as stemming from the same impulse. Even worse, some of these friends feared any association with Washington at all, wrote Power: “Many of our friends believe that too close an association with American objectives will make them electorally vulnerable and their cities potential targets.” The question had become how to reclaim the moral high ground, and in doing so strike the blows needed to defeat this new enemy of freedom. She stated, “We must urgently set about reversing the harm done to the nation’s standing and security by simultaneously reasserting the moral
difference between the United States and Islamic terrorists and by developing a 21st-century toolbox to minimize actual terrorist threats.”

In what would become a massively ironic twist on the timing of the Nobel speech, President Obama and close aides in the White House were picking out their favorite weapon from that twenty-first-century toolbox precisely at the time of its delivery. But Power’s main concern was that Bush had carried things so far that his successor would have great difficulty in keeping presidential prerogatives intact so that they could be used to fight the good fight: “One question in particular hangs over this discussion: Are the American and international publics so disenchanted with Bush’s effort to curb terrorism the wrong way that they will deprive his successor of the resources he or she needs to change course?”

As both Power’s supporters and critics noted, the basic formulation of the issues facing a new administration and how it would go about claiming for “right” use the powers Congress had granted George Bush after 9/11 were all here. Henry Kissinger had once put the question in similar terms as he tried to explain the problems facing the Nixon administration as it sought to disentangle American foreign policy from the Vietnam debacle. After World War I, he wrote in his memoirs, the United States isolated itself from the world because its people thought they were too good for the world; after Vietnam there was a feeling among critics that America should isolate itself because it was too evil for the world.

Power was actually voicing a variation on that realist theme. But some conservative critics saw her as little more than a mouthpiece for the radical critic Noam Chomsky, using her seat on the National Security Council to direct the president’s decisions toward what had once been called by an earlier generation of conservatives “one-worldism.” In the
National Review
, Stanley Kurtz claimed that the whole point of the Power-Obama foreign policy was to subsume American interests into a worldwide crusade against injustice everywhere. The result would be to so dilute American power that it would be unable to fight for national interests anywhere. “Her goal is to use our shared horror at the worst that human beings can do in
order to institute an ever-broadening regime of redistributive transnational governance.”
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However much Obama’s Nobel speech reflected Samantha Power’s insight and contributions, others saw different antecedents. To his surprise, David Brooks suddenly discovered—after bashing the Nobel Committee—good old Cold War antecendents he could trace to George F. Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr and shouted something like
Bravo, bravo!
“His speeches at West Point and Oslo this year are pitch-perfect explications of the liberal internationalist approach. Other Democrats talk tough in a secular way, but Obama’s speeches were thoroughly theological. He talked about the ‘core struggle of human nature’ between love and evil.”
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Brooks thus labeled Obama a proper heir of “Cold War liberalism,” and put him alongside Senator Scoop Jackson and other Democrats who shared such views of man’s divergent yet simultaneous capacities for good and evil. Samantha Power might have blushed a bit at such praise from David Brooks, but he was essentially right about the emerging Obama “Doctrine” in these speeches.

Former Bill Clinton speechwriter Ted Widmer was equally fulsome in his praise of the speech. He definitely knew a Clinton “centrist” when he saw one. The speech might have lacked sound bites, but the Nobel oration is not really a speech, but a lecture. And in that vein it deserved high marks. “It threw down gauntlets left and right, challenging lazy assumptions of his liberal base (that war is avoidable) and his conservative opposition (that war is glorious). It gently chided his European audience, reminding them that the remarkable achievement of 64 years of relative peace has been possible because America ‘helped underwrite’ it.”
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The quotation marks around “helped underwrite” were meant, of course, to convey the point that without the United States nothing would have happened to save the world from Communism and/or chaos. Widmer did, however, have some little problems with the historical record as Obama cited it. “It is regrettably true that the United States has on occasion undermined the democratic aspirations of other countries, from the Philippines to Iran and Guatemala. But historical elisions are very much a part of the speechwriting
business, and a lapse or two should not detract from the overall message.”
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