Obama Snubs the Troops
President Obama’s speech at Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize has been surprisingly well received by the commentariat. Liberal pundit Mark Shields well summed up the conventional wisdom:
“I’m amazed,” he admitted this evening on the PBS NewsHour, “that, to this moment, I can’t find anybody who’s criticized the speech. I’ve never heard anybody give a speech of that complexity on that big a stage and go un-criticized.”
Obama’s Oslo speech has not been criticized, I think, because the bar for the president had been set so low. The Nobel committee, after all, clearly had awarded Obama its peace prize to disparage George W. Bush and to deprecate America’s use of military force abroad.
So simply by stating the obvious -- that he is Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, and that America is engaged in two wars -- Obama seems even to have right-leaning pundits swooning. The otherwise sober military analyst Max Boot, for instance, hailed the Oslo ceremony as “Obama’s finest hour” and lauded the speech as “a masterpiece that deserves inclusion in compendia of the finest presidential speeches.”
This is ridiculous and hyperbolic praise -- but fine. I certainly won’t begrudge the president a little social promotion. He is, after all, our president; and I want him to succeed. I also want Obama to embrace his role as the U.S. military’s top commander and top leader: because if Commander-in-Chief Obama is successful, then the U.S. military will be successful.
But let’s be honest. This was a substantively bad speech shrouded in cerebral and high-minded rhetoric. Obama talked about “just war,” but failed utterly to explain how the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan may be the most just wars -- and the most justly waged wars -- in human history. And, in so doing, the president failed to give proper recognition and credit to our military men and women, who now rank among the greatest peacemakers in human history.
I say this based upon my own experience as a marine in Iraq, but also based upon how the U.S. military is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Simply put, the United States is not fighting a conventional war aimed at destroying the nation-states in which we are fighting. To the contrary: we are waging counterinsurgencies aimed at building up and developing the nation-states and their governing institutions.
Consequently, our rules of engagement are quite strict and constraining; and our soldiers and marines incur great personal risk which no other nation’s military -- including the militaries of most of our NATO allies -- would ever dare to accept. And our soldiers and marines do this because they fight on behalf of a people and a nation, the United States of America, that everyone the world over knows -- and certainly the villagers in Iraq and Afghanistan know -- has no interest in conquest, plunder or pillage.
No, our soldiers and marines fight to serve and protect. They fight to serve and protect the innocent and the downtrodden, the weak and the vulnerable, the oppressed and the afflicted.
They fight to protect the young Afghan girls who cannot attend school without being viciously attacked by the Taliban. They fight to protect the Iraqi shopkeepers whom the extremist militias target with death and destruction should these shopkeepers dare to trade in Western goods and commerce. They fight to protect the Iraqi and Afghan soldiers and governmental officials who are bravely working to bring peace and opportunity to their peoples and their countries.
It’s the Marine Corps as Peace Corps and it works. In fact, I would argue that the Marine Corps does a much better job of providing aid and humanitarian assistance to oppressed peoples than the Peace Corps -- and that’s because the Marine Corps, what with its warrior ethos and martial skills and spirit, commands the respect and admiration of friend and foe alike.
There’s also the reality that war and war-like conditions are still omnipresent in both Iraq and (especially) Afghanistan. So even if America wanted to send the Peace Corps there in lieu of the Marine Corps, it simply couldn’t do so. That wouldn’t work. Without protection from the Marine Corps, the Peace Corps volunteers would be targeted and quickly killed.
But that’s not the case with our highly trained and highly skilled soldiers and marines. They can and do fight back and deter evil. They can and do protect the people from the terrorists, the extremists and the insurgents. They truly do constitute a just and righteous force; and, despite our occasional mistakes and transgressions, everyone the world over knows it.
The warrior ethos reverberates especially in more conservative, patriarchal and tribal cultures that have a history of war and violence. Indeed, strong and able men who know how to fight, and who know how to wield guns and knives, command great respect and reverence in these cultures.
That’s why ordinary Iraqi and Afghan villagers typically hail U.S. soldiers and marines as heroes and liberators. And that’s why many of these same villagers dread the day our soldiers and marines leave, or might leave, their country.
Ordinary Iraqis and Afghans, of course, want to be a free and independent people who are part of a sovereign tribe or state. But by the same token, they don’t want the U.S. military to leave prematurely, before the violence and war which have wracked their countries has been righted and remedied with relative peace and opportunity.
President Obama, however, alluded to none of this in his speech at Oslo. The selfless service, the grace and humanitarianism of U.S. servicemen and women in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere was completely ignored. Instead, U.S. military intervention abroad, both past and present, was discussed in cold and calculating terms as necessary only to “underwrite global security.”
Oh, to be sure, the president did say that “we seek a better future for our children and our grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity… The soldier’s courage and sacrifice,” he added, “is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause, to comrades in arms.”
This is all true and important; but the soldier’s courage and sacrifice today in Iraq and Afghanistan involves so much more than that. It involves great acts of kindness and generosity, personal warmth and commitment, aid and assistance. Yet, about these heroic and unheralded acts by our fighting men and women, Obama had nothing to say.
Moreover, the president insisted that:
in a world in which threats are more diffuse, and missions more complex, America cannot act alone. America alone cannot secure the peace. This is true in Afghanistan. This is true in failed states like Somalia, where terrorism and piracy is joined by famine and human suffering. And sadly, it will continue to be true in unstable regions for years to come.
In fact, the exact opposite is true: In a complex and dangerous world rendered much smaller by technology, America sometimes must act alone. America sometimes must assume the lonely mantle of leadership. America must lead if even other countries will not follow. And this is true in Afghanistan (although fortunately, and in fairness, many other countries are following our lead there), as well as in other failed states like Somalia, which, Obama rightly notes, are plagued by terrorism and piracy.
The president also insisted that “War itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.” At the risk of sounding scandalously and politically incorrect, let me disagree. War itself can be glorious, and we must recognize it as such.
This doesn’t mean that war is desirable or good; it’s obviously not. After all, war can be murderous and barbaric, too. We absolutely, of course, should studiously try to avert war. But the fight for freedom and justice is never wrong; it is always right. And sometimes, as George Orwell explained, the tyrannical and the wicked can only be brought to heel by “rough men [who] stand ready to do violence on [our] behalf.”
There is great glory in this effort. There is great glory in the fight for freedom and justice. And all glory and honor is due to those men and women, our fellow countrymen, who take up arms on our behalf -- and not just because they are undergirding “global security”; and not just because they are “expressing devotion to country, to cause, [and] to comrades in arms.”
No, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are somewhat glorious because the United States has liberated oppressed peoples and devoted itself to giving these oppressed peoples a chance to live better and more peaceful lives. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are somewhat glorious because our fighting men and women are serving abroad as missionaries for hope and opportunity. They are comforting the afflicted and afflicting the powerful. They are aiding the dispossessed and the powerless and fighting evil and wicked men.
Yet, instead of heralding their accomplishments -- the great works and good deeds of our fighting men and women -- President Obama referenced his favorite subject: himself.
And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength.
That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. (Applause.) And we honor -- we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it's easy, but when it is hard.
But the Nobel Peace Prize is not all about Obama; it is about the United States of America – our country, our culture, and our people. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, likewise, are not all about Obama; the Judeo-Christian ethic that undergirds U.S. foreign policy did not begin and end with him. Indeed, for 99% of U.S. servicemen and women, Obama did not “prohibit torture”; their moral consciences did.
Oslo was the place for Obama to recognize all this -- all that was and is great and glorious about the United States and the United States military. But unfortunately, the only thing that Obama recognized is his own sense of moral rectitude and his own deep-seated belief that he stands on a moral plane above us all.