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October 14, 2009
Peace Prize Becomes a Travesty
Peace prize becomes a travesty
by Paul Sheehan
Long before the Nobel Peace Prize was debased and trivialised into an episode of American Idol, the failure beneath the soaring rhetoric of Barack Obama had been exposed. Even the secretary of the Nobel committee sheepishly admitted on Friday: ''Nominations for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize closed just 11 days after he [Obama] took office.''
Since then, the US President has knowingly propped up a corrupt and violent regime in Afghanistan led by a lying fraud. He has achieved nothing to prevent the continued building of Israeli settlements on the Palestinian West Bank. To hand the Nobel prize to someone whose credentials are in the potential rather than the execution confirms that the prize has degenerated into a beauty pageant.
Three times in the past eight years the starry-eyed progressives who run the prize have given it to leaders of the US Democratic Party - Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and now Obama. One of them, Carter, actively sowed the seeds of what would become a global jihad.
Why is it that US governments continue to support corrupt, violent and dysfunctional regimes? The Obama Administration has locked straight into this pattern. Young American soldiers are again being asked to fight and die for a duplicitous foreign leader. You can throw in Kevin Rudd, who has committed Australian troops to fight in the pointless cause of preserving the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, and his warlord allies.
A flaming arrow through the front door of this pretence arrived on September 28, courtesy of George Packer, of The New Yorker, who accompanied the US special envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, on a recent trip to Afghanistan. Packer's reporting, with its high-level access, made a mockery of the charade of democracy in Afghanistan.
''Every time an Afghan encountered the government, he was hurt by it - abused, asked for a bribe, hauled off to jail without evidence,'' Packer wrote. Worse, he came to believe the Karzai regime was not even interested in providing services to the people, let alone that it could do so.
He was also present at a meeting between Holbrooke and Karzai, and his portrait is disturbing: ''[Holbrooke:]
'Wherever our troops have driven out the Taliban in Helmand over the last few weeks, there has been no effort to bring in administrative structures of your government.'
'''Has this been done in co-ordination with our government?' Karzai asked, chewing nervously, his eyes shifting everywhere except to Holbrooke's face.''
Packer concluded: ''The election of August 20th was a disaster that could change the course of the war. The evidence of fraud was so overwhelming that it threatens to render the entire vote illegitimate … Holbrooke must know that there will be no American victory in this war; he can only try to forestall potential disaster.''
Within days of this public assessment the former United Nations official responsible for elections in Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith, exposed the lying that went all the way to the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. Writing in The Washington Post eight days ago, Galbraith said: ''Afghanistan's presidential election, held August 20, should have been a milestone in the country's transition from 30 years of war to stability and democracy. Instead, it was just the opposite. As many as 30 per cent of Karzai's votes were fraudulent, and lesser fraud was committed on behalf of other candidates … The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners … I was ordered not to pursue the issue of fraud …''
As the disastrous truth continued to seep out, despite the efforts of the UN and the silence of the Obama Administration, more details of fraud were made public last week. All of this was consistent with a warning delivered in Sydney this year by the bravest woman in Afghanistan, Malalai Joya.
She had set up an orphanage and a health centre before becoming the youngest person elected to the Afghan parliament. But in 2006, after describing the parliament as a sanctuary for ''warlords and theocrats'' and a ''zoo'' she was thrown out of office, threatened with death, abandoned by the government, and has survived two assassination attempts.
''Your government is supporting a corrupt, mafia-ridden, criminal state,'' she told me in June.
''The warlords are the sworn enemies of democracy, women's rights and justice. The Australian troops are really guarding US strategic and military interests, not the Afghan people … We are living under jungle law.''
She predicted a corrupt election and was proved right, while Washington and Canberra remain silent and complicit. All of which makes a mockery of the Nobel award citation on Friday: ''The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples …
''Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts … Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future.''
None of us would hope for anything else.
The person most responsible for the Nobel committee's sycophancy is the chairman of the five-member committee, Thorbjoern Jagland, 58, a former prime minister of Norway with a long history of left-wing politics. Now he can meet his political hero. The juxtaposition of white-tie glamour and real-world squalor surpasses irony.
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Wild Thing's comment........
Interesting article, well done.
....Thank you Lyn in Australia for sending this to me.
Posted by Wild Thing at October 14, 2009 05:45 AM
Comments
Yipes! According to this article the present govt in Afghanistan is very corrupt.
All Third World govts are corrupt. Hell, now the US govt is corrupt.
Our mission in Afghanistan is to disrupt and kill Taliban so they cannot shelter al-Queda. Nation building is a nice thought but Astan is a tribal country with many tribes and warlords. They fight each other all the time. Our Special Forces were able to unite enough northern tribes to drive the Taliban out of most of Astan in 2001/2002. Once the common enemy is gone the tribes go back to dickering with each other.
I don't know what to do in Astan other than to let the generals run the show. They understand much more than DC or obama, or me.
Posted by: TomR at October 14, 2009 08:52 AM
Thank you Chrissie and Lyn.
I take solace in the fact that others in the media get it when our own media turns a blind eye to corruption.
I do know that eliminating covert surveillance and intelligence on our enemies leads to strategic failure. We can't afford to blind ourselves any more than Israel can, the western culture is under islamic and communist assault and ignoring the threat or playing PC games will get your throat slit. Our best ambassadors are the troops on the ground, they gauge the local sentiments and politics then forward that information up to their commanding general, that and covert methods are all that we have to direct our present and future responses.
Trying to buy influence didn't work against the NORK's or in Vietnam, it didn't work in Iraq either, what worked was taking the battle directly to the enemy while engaging the local militia in their own defense. Currently all our enemies have to do is hold on for 4 years and our policies change with the presidency, we don't have long term policies and have demonstrated over and over that any policies we have are worthless, that we are fair weather allies every time the Democrats assume power.
Pogo said it best to Porky: "YEP, SON, WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US"
Posted by: Jack at October 14, 2009 01:14 PM
The rightful name of the Nobel Peace Prize (NPP) is Nobel Appeasement Prize (NAP), e.g. it lacks meaning after the anti-American, and anti-freedom 2009 NPP to Mr. Barack Obama, as well as previous anti-American, and anti-freedom NPPs, when Pres. Roland Reagan, and Pope John Paul II, didn´t win the NPP for defeating Soviet Union in the Cold War.
I have previously addressed, that the Iranian Freedom Protesters, and honoring the death of Ms. Neda Agha-Soltan that was killed June 20, 2009 in the streets of Tehran, during the 2009 Iranian election protests, and also that the US Armed Forces should have won the 2009 NPP.
Posted by: Anon at October 14, 2009 06:58 PM
I agree, I have no idea on this.
Really for me I only know I want the
troops and Generals to make the decisions
they are there and they know the truth of
what is needed and how it is going.
Obama knows zip and could care less.
Worse yet he hates our military.
Posted by: Wild Thing at October 15, 2009 12:47 AM
