If Shimon Peres Received the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama Can Also!

Barack Obama is the CEO of the biggest corporation for war and control in the world, and as president and head of the American armed forces he is conducting, at this very moment, numerous wars, overt and covert, throughout the entire globe. First and foremost in Afghanistan, where each month tens of innocent civilians are killed by the American military and its local mercenaries. Also in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers continue to sow destruction and death and Obama's desire to get his forces out of there will be fulfilled, in a best case scenario, in more than a year while this will entail an additional two thousand dead. To this must be added the less overt wars in Latin America, the ballistic weapons system in Europe, an increase in the defense budget and more.

Barack Obama is no Mahatma Gandhi, and not even Konrad Adenauer, but the leader of a superpower interested in preserving and strengthening its political, military and economic hegemony throughout the world.

The election of Barak Obama indeed signals the end of the neoconservative era and its strategy of an ongoing, preventative global war, and Obama's speech in Cairo negated the racist ideological concept of a clash of civilizations that was so dear to George Bush and his gang, and of course we should not minimize the importance of such a change. However, to transform the American president into "one of us" is a stretch; in actuality, there is no chance he will make it, at least as long as he is in an operational position inside or near the government.

The Middle East is a comfortable example for confirming this contention: although there was the Cairo speech and a call to freeze Israeli settlement building, these are mere words and when one wants to alter the policies of a colonial power such as Israel, words have little weight and only actions will alter the situation. Actions, i.e., heavy pressures—economic, political and security. President George Bush Sr. can provide Obama with an example: when he wanted to receive a commitment from the Israeli government to freeze settlement construction, he was forced to freeze US$13 billion in bank guarantees and to threaten that the military agreements in process were likely to be delayed. These pressures resulted in the fall of the Shamir government, the election of the most left-wing government in the history of Israel and the beginning of open negotiations with the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

It is doubtful whether Obama will employ this same necessary pressure in order to force the Netanyahu government to freeze the settlements, not to mention begin real negotiations to end the Israeli occupation. Some perceive the provision of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama as a means to pull him out of the hesitancy characterizing his policies in the Middle East, as if he received advanced payment and now has no choice—because he is an honest man—but to produce the goods. Oh believers…

It is difficult not to get angry when reading the Israeli commentators ridiculing the awarding of the prize to Obama "for intentions only," as they call it: where were these same holier than thou commentators when the Nobel committee awarded the prize to Shimon Peres? On the entire earth there exists no person less worthy than Shimon Peres for the Nobel Prize: a serial warmonger, father of the Israeli nuclear strategy, senior public relations figure for rendering every Israeli military action acceptable, including the recent Lebanon War and the slaughter in Gaza this winter. Even more so than Yitzhak Rabin or Ehud Barak, Peres is the war strategist of Israel, and despite this he can brag about the Nobel Prize. Just like Henry Kissinger, another serial murderer who destroyed an entire country with bombings and poisons, and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

The moral: the concept of "Nobel Peace Prize" belongs to the Orwellian language, and means a prize for warmongers. Every person who by chance or accident receives the prize must say "no thanks”—as did Le Duc Tho, Foreign Minister of North Vietnam, who refused to share the prize with Kissinger, and as Yasser Arafat should have done when he shared it with Shimon Peres.