Robert Fisk: Obama, man of peace? No, just a Nobel prize of a mistake

Robert Fisk: Obama, man of peace? No, just a Nobel prize of a mistake

The US president received an award in the faint hope that he will succeed in the future. That's how desperate the Middle East situation has become

Sunday, 11 October 2009

His Middle East policy is collapsing. The Israelis have taunted him by ignoring his demand for an end to settlement-building and by continuing to build their colonies on Arab land. His special envoy is bluntly told by the Israelis that an Arab-Israel peace will take "many years". Now he wants the Palestinians to talk peace to Israel without conditions. He put pressure on the Palestinian leader to throw away the opportunity of international scrutiny of UN Judge Goldstone's damning indictment of Israeli war crimes in Gaza while his Assistant Secretary of State said that the Goldstone report was "seriously flawed". After breaking his pre-election promise to call the 1915 Armenian massacres by Ottoman Turkey a genocide, he has urged the Armenians to sign a treaty with Turkey, again "without pre-conditions". His army is still facing an insurgency in Iraq. He cannot decide how to win "his" war in Afghanistan. I shall not mention Iran.

And now President Barack Obama has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. After only eight months in office. Not bad. No wonder he said he was "humbled" when told the news. He should have felt humiliated. But perhaps weakness becomes a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Shimon Peres won it, too, and he never won an Israeli election. Yasser Arafat won it. And look what happened to him. For the first time in history, the Norwegian Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to a man who has achieved nothing – in the faint hope that he will do something good in the future. That's how bad things are. That's how explosive the Middle East has become.

Isn't there anyone in the White House to remind Mr Obama that the Israelis have never obliged a US president who asked for an end to the building of colonies for Jews – and Jews only – on Arab land? Bill Clinton demanded this – it was written into the Oslo accords – and the Israelis ignored him. George W Bush demanded an end to the fighting in Jenin nine years ago. The Israelis ignored him. Mr Obama demands a total end to all settlement construction. "They just don't get it, do they?" an Israeli minister – apparently Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – was reported to have said when the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, reiterated her president's words. That's what Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's crackpot foreign minister – he's not as much a crackpot as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but he's getting close – said again on Thursday. "Whoever says it's possible to reach in the coming years a comprehensive agreement," he announced before meeting Mr Obama's benighted and elderly envoy George Mitchell, "... simply doesn't understand the reality."

Across Arabia, needless to say, the Arab potentates continue to shake with fear in their golden minarets. That great Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir – murdered in 2005, quite possibly by Mr Obama's new-found Syrian chums – put it well in one of his last essays. "Undeterred by Egypt since Sadat's peace," he wrote, "convinced of America's unfailing support, guaranteed moral impunity by Europe's bad conscience, and backed by a nuclear arsenal that was acquired with the help of Western powers, and that keeps growing without exciting any comment from the international community, Israel can literally do anything it wants, or is prompted to do by its leaders' fantasies of domination."

So Israel is getting away with it as usual, abusing the distinguished (and Jewish) head of the UN inquiry into Gaza war crimes – which also blamed Hamas – while joining the Americans in further disgracing the craven Palestinian Authority "President" Mahmoud Abbas, who is more interested in maintaining his relations with Washington than with his own Palestinian people. He's even gone back on his word to refuse peace talks until Israel's colonial expansion comes to an end. In a single devastating sentence, that usually mild Jordanian commentator Rami Khouri noted last week that Mr Abbas is "a tragic shell of a man, hollow, politically impotent, backed and respected by nobody". I put "President" Abbas into quotation marks since he now has Mr Ahmadinejad's status in the eyes of his people. Hamas is delighted. Thanks to President Obama.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-obama-man-of-peace-no-just-a-nobel-prize-of-a-mistake-1800928.html

All this crying says exactly why the award was given. Obama has gone against the status quo to promote a better world down the road....and it just rankles the old guard to no end.

Ouch! Here is an uncompromising piece by Robert Fisk, who resides in Beirut and has always choice words about Hizbollah and Syria. Fisk was the first foreign correspondent in Kabul just before the war in Afghanistan began, and he was the first to report the bombing of civilian targets by US Air Force in Afghanistan, and the use of incendiary bombs by Israel in Lebanon.

Rather swell headed of him to think he's going to tell the Nobel committee who to choose. He's also a truther.

and policies, with the reality on the ground.

May come as a shock to you, but outside the United States, no one looks at global problems through the lens of the American duopoly.

It might shock you that the world looks at this country in a different light than it did before Nov. 2008. Fisk writes what he wants, he's pro Fisk as the best writer in the ME. He wrote an op ed on the Nobel prize and I didn't like what he had to say.

Abbas has publicly disgraced himself to the people he is supposed to represent. Being a subservient lapdog has only emboldened and strengthened the hands of Hamas. Ambassador Mitchell's efforts have yet to produce even on inch of progress. FM Avigdor Lieberman has said that it will be many years before there is any sort of deal, a refreshing candor that is missing from the other players.

In summary, this is what is going on:

1. Settlement construction and expansion continues unabated.
2. Arabs families continue to be expelled from their homes to make way for the "Greater Israel."
3. Neither Hamas nor Hizbollah will ever give up their ultimate goal of liquidating all the Jews out of Palestine.
4. Lebanon's fragile government continues to be undermined by Hizbollah and its masters in Damascus.
5. Iran, despite all the warmongering by the Zionists, cannot be taken at its word that it is not pursuing a nuclear military program (the old Reagan quote of "Trust, but verify" comes to mind).
6. Things have gotten worse since Bill Clinton was President.

He went off on his ME tangent and then ended up with Obama again. You can stick up for what he said in between all day long, I don't care. As far as I'm concerned it's evading the issue of what he was intent on writing about....the peace prize.

Obama's Nobel win: Full citation

The following is the text of the official announcement that US President Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize:

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.

The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

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.

The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations.

Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting.

Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

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.

His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman.

The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8298689.stm

Clearly, the main criteria for the award was one based on potential rather than substantive change. Obama himself referred to the award as a "call for action" not a recogniton of accomplishment.

They awarded the prize to the person who best met the criteria. President Obama.

This pretty much said it all:

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman.

to continue to apply pressure to Congress and to him (Obama) on the issues we care about. Obama himself referred to the Nobel as a "call to action" and not as a recognition of accomplishments.

We've now gone from the peace prize to the ME to the peace prize to gay rights.

Accept this fact, I didn't like what Fisk had to say.

You aren't going to coerce me into giving it a pass and agreeing with you.

My sister is a lesbian and I'll fight to the end for her rights so we can drop that too.

Apply pressure where you think you want to, and so will I. But I won't tell you what to do, you have sense enough to do what you feel is best.

The prize was awarded by the committee and it is a done deal. You don't have to like it and I don't have to like seeing it smeared.

Have a nice day before they delete this subthread.

:rofl:

for his work exposing Syrian and Hizbollah complicity in crimes in Lebanon.

you could at least give a little more coherent insult. At least one credible (and substantiated) reason why it would suck to be him.

I wasn't the one who said that 'it must suck to be Fisk' but I do think it's a very flawed article. While it makes a few good points, it draws a lot of wrong conclusions. Firstly, Obama did not get the Nobel Prize just over the Middle East, but over a general policy of moving toward diplomacy (I would say that it was at least partly for not being George Bush!) and probably especially for shelving Bush's missile shield. For the rest, his comments on Iran are strange:

'A Revolutionary Guard commander, an adviser to Supreme Leader Khamenei, warned that Iran would "blow up the heart" of Israel if Israel or the US attacked the Islamic Republic. I doubt it. Blow up Israel and you blow up "Palestine"'

I agree that they are unlikely to blow up Israel - but I don't think that they would care that much about the Palestinians if push comes to shove.

'Iranians – who understand the West much better than we understand them – have another policy in the case of the apocalypse. If the Israelis attack, they may leave Israel alone. They have a plan, I'm told, to target instead only US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their bases in the Gulf and their warships cruising through Hormuz. They would leave Israel alone. Americans would then learn the price of kneeling before their Israeli masters.'

As I don't know who told Fisk this, it may or may not be accurate. I HOPE that the phrase 'kneeling before their Israeli masters' comes from the Iranian source, and is not Fisk's own view; but it might have been better to clarify.

'For the Iranians know that the US has no stomach for a third war in the Middle East. Which is why Mr Obama has been sending his generals thick and fast to the defence ministry in Tel Aviv to tell the Israelis not to strike at Iran. And why Israel's leaders – including Mr Netanyahu – were blowing the peace pipe all week about the need for international negotiations with Iran. But it raises an interesting question. Is Mr Obama more frightened of Iran's retaliation? Or of its nuclear capabilities? Or more terrified of Israel's possible aggression against Iran?'

Well, Fisk has been complaining throughout the article about Obama not having enough peace-related achievements; if he has been pursuing, and influencing Israel to pursue, a more diplomatic policy toward Iran, surely that *is* an achievement!

the re-actionaries have got an ace up their sleeves re Israel. They will end life on earth before they're done. If it's any consolation, the reactionary rightwing is thick brained, dull witted ubergoofs, skinheads with hardons, and they simply will not see that 'nothing fails like success when you're working for the devil'
They're allied with the repukkes, the 'conservatives' and the loud mouth boors in every gathering on earth. They (the reactionary right) are a spiritual darkness unto everything, including themselves. I think Jesus meant them when he warned mankind about sin 2000 years ago- it's the easy way outta every goddam mess, aint it! One doesn't have to be a spiritual genius to recognise that a self serving philosophy, which rightwinging is (leftwing means the needs of the many go before the priviledges of the few- whilst rightwing means you go around in circles) must by nature and logic lead to death, because, obviously, no one can argue with the gods (scratch a rightwinger and that's what yells, a 'god' with at least one devoted worshipper)

There isn't a single point in Fisk's piece that is untrue. One can disagree with his conclusions, but not the facts he stated.

we waste our powder shooting at all the vile snakes crawling about the world of politics? The enemy is the reactionary right. Iow, there's one Anaconda, hiding in plain sight, playing with the kitty cats, isn't that sweet! (until the cameras are off, when the kitties become kibble) and Fisk points at them w/out recognising; these are the guys who cheered when JFK was murdered, who gloated over the 2k fraudulent election (after USA went to bed, the rightwingers pulled the wabbit outta the hat, and someone named junior bush was, omg, crowned president!) and who intentionally have ruined the USA by exploiting its patriotism and determination to do the right thing. Israel is only one aspect of the problem. Notice how it all fits together! They'd throw Israel to the dogs in a minute, if that served their stupidity.
item: if Obama is the 4th president to win Nobel prize, and the US war machine is as costly as the rest of the world, then why doesn't media point out that the 'peace prize' is already so tainted it's worthless? Instead, they ACT as if we think as they want us to think, as if we either nod in agreement or scream in outrage at the wonderful....thing that's been done. BIG NEWS! But.. They're liars. And it cost them nada -kissinger won the fukkin peace prize! Obama is carrying weight few men in history has-he has to maintain power, or he'll lose it, and...god knows. Sara palin will be President next time. And that stooge is a killer