Helping Obama Earn his Nobel

There is a danger that in focusing on the justification of force in Afghanistan, President Obama will sacrifice working toward a world free of nuclear weapons, writes William Hartung, Director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, reflecting Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech in a TPM opinion piece. “We need to aspire to eliminate wars, not to manage them better,” says Hartung.  Peace Action Director Kevin Martin adds, in an OpEdNews piece, that Obama's pledge to eliminate nuclear weapons was the central motivation for the awarding of the prize. Martin points to two of Obama's promissory notes, which mentioned in the committee's award citation his call for a world free of nuclear weapons and his promotion of "multilateral diplomacy . . . with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play." He can redeem these notes if, by next May, he has taken actions demonstrating his realization that averting nuclear disaster can only be achieved by international, not national or even bi-lateral actions, writes Martin.

 

TPM, OpEdNews