Pallmeyer: ‘Nobel Committee’s gamble became an embarrassment’

“The Nobel Committee gambled and lost,” says Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, assistant professor of justice and peace studies at the University of St. Thomas. President Obama’s speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize was “a defense of war and militarism. … With this speech the Nobel Committee’s gamble became an embarrassment.”

Nelson-Pallmeyer speculated that “when [members of the Nobel Committee] made their decision they recognized how the stars had alligned in one of those rare moments in history in which crises converge with opportunities.”

In October when the announcement came that the prize would go to Obama, Nelson-Pallmeyer told the Minnesota Independent the choice was “deeply problematic. … One can only hope that receiving the prize will encourage Obama to fundamentally change the direction of U.S. foreign policies under his watch.”

But after Obama’s speech in Oslo this week, Nelson-Pallmeyer told MnIndy by email he agrees with David Cortright of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, who told The Nation Obama’s address was “disappointing. … To use the Nobel dais to justify the use of military force is unseemly.”

Nelson-Pallmeyer elaborated:

A new president was elected on a rhetorical platform of hope and change at a time when the world deperately needed, and a majority of the U.S. citizens and the world’s people longed for, authentic hope and real change. Those hopes were further shredded in Geneva.

With this speech the Nobel Committee’s gamble became an embarrassment. Last year the United States, the most militarized country in world history, accounted for nearly half of all global military spending and 67% of global weapon’s sales.

The Committee, it turns out, awarded the Peace Prize to a President who in his first months in office: increased military spending to record levels; acclerated wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan while continuing the bloody occupation of Iraq; and, maintained many Bush era foreign policy planners, rendition practices, and war-on-terror ideological foundations.

His arrogant claims of U.S. exceptionalism (we don’t occupy countries for their resources but for noble purposes) trample truth and ring hollow to much of the world. His references to and dismissal of King and Gandhi were condescending.

His lack of knowledge and his abuse of just war theory were stunning. Most troubling was his continued faith in the utility of violence and war as the means to peace despite all the contrary evidence.

Nelson-Pallmeyer, who conceded the DFL endorsement for U.S. Senate to Al Franken at the party’s 2008 state convention, also contrasted the United States’ fiscal commitment to environmental threats with its military budget, in light of the Copenhagen climate-change conference.

“It is revealing to note that the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize has submitted a proposed budget to congress for next year which allocates 83 times more money for war than to address climate change,” he observed. “This is pathetic.”