[THS] The Speech Barack Obama Won`t Deliver

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24141.htm

Top Secret

The Speech Barack Obama Won’t Deliver

As dictated to Daniel Simpson

December 08, 2009 "Information Clearing House" --

EMBARGOED UNTIL DECEMBER 10, 2009

(Check against delivery)

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Excellencies, Distinguished members of the
Norwegian Nobel Committee, Dear Friends around the world, My fellow Americans.

I stand here today humbled, more than ever, by the task before us, grateful for the
honour you’ve bestowed, and mindful of the sacrifices we must make to do it justice.

Twenty Americans before me have lent their names to this most eminent of prizes,
among them three presidents, two sitting. Though challenged by the upheavals of
fractious eras, their skill and vision hewed faithfully to the spirit of our forebears, who
travelled across an ocean to seek sanctuary, and declared all who made their home
there to have been created equal. Where possible, they worked to stem those tides in
humankind that would drown us in the storms of violent conflict. And so we recall
these efforts, and their fruits, praising Theodore Roosevelt for brokering peace, not
chiding him for wielding his trademark stick to subjugate Cuba and the Philippines.

Others were inspired by a higher calling, rising above themselves to speak truths we
shirk from hearing. Of these transformative figures, none was more righteous, more
perspicacious, than Dr Martin Luther King, who accepted this award 45 years ago. I
was surprised to be asked to follow him, and shared with you my doubts that I
deserved to be doing so. But I’ve come here on the understanding that this
ceremony is a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the challenges of the
21st century, and for America to lead.

Putting America first should not require us to put the lives of other peoples second.
When our nation became mired in Vietnam, sacrificing millions to its quest to contain
Communism, Dr King called us “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. A
year to the day after speaking those words, he was murdered.

As I was raised in his shadow, whirlpools of destructive logic sucked Americans ever
deeper into worldwide battles. From Vietnam, the fog of war spread. We laid waste
to Cambodia from the skies, before Pol Pot’s brutal forces tilled its killing fields. And
for the sake of defeating the Soviet Union, we armed Islamic extremists in
Afghanistan, spawning a terrorist menace that defined the first decade of this
century.

I do not seek to defend these actions here, or those of an earlier September 11th,
when a coup hatched in Washington robbed Chile of its elected president, because
he was a Marxist. Thousands “disappeared” under the market-friendly despot we
supported, like so many other enemies of freedom, before and since, from the Congo
to Cairo, Central Asia to Latin America, always in the name of a greater good. Ours.
Whatever thwarts those who might challenge us, we can live with.

We armed Saddam Hussein to fight the Islamic Republic of Iran, ignoring his use of
poison gas while it suited us. But once he’d threatened our interests by invading
Kuwait, this became grounds for deposing him, though the weapons we claimed to
fear no longer existed. As the last head of the Federal Reserve said, “it is politically
inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Whether we control it, or prevent others from doing so, this is why we care about the
Middle East. Since the British Empire fell, we’ve guarded what our State Department
called “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material
prizes in world history.” As every Iranian schoolchild knows, but Americans rarely
recall, we once overthrew their government, to ensure it kept pumping oil to our
satisfaction. So hated was the regime we installed in Tehran, and so vicious its secret
police, that we helped to foment an Islamic Revolution. And so we conjured enemies
anew.

Rather than remain trapped in the past, I want to move forward. We are not alone to
blame for the world’s problems; and for all that’s wrong with America, much is right.
But our delusions make us a menace to ourselves, and even the civilised order we say
we’re defending. Americans aren’t alone in being hypocrites. Nor are we by any
measure the worst. Our reference points for wickedness are the tyrannies of Stalin
and Hitler. However, when senior Nazis were tried at Nuremberg, it was the
American chief prosecutor who said: “While this law is first applied against German
aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn,
aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment.”

For much of this past American century, as in others bestridden by Empires that
came before ours, the morals guiding relations between states have been those of
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. To quote the murderer Raskolnikov: “he who
can spit on what is greatest will be their lawgiver, and he who does the most will be
rightest of all.” It’s ugly, so we prefer to cover it up and tell ourselves stories, most
often about our benevolence, or “the shining city upon a hill” we call our homeland.

When the Spanish-American war brought us to primacy, Mark Twain surveyed our
impact on the Pacific. “We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried
them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and
orphans out-of-doors,” he observed. “And so, by these Providences of God – and the
phrase is the government’s, not mine – we are a World Power.”

But without our cherished myths, or the lies that led us into Iraq and Vietnam,
there’d be fewer conflicts. No one welcomes war, and Americans aren’t by nature
belligerent people. Even our “Greatest Generation”, among them my grandfather,
was reluctant to join World War II until Pearl Harbour. And their fight in the name of
a larger freedom has served us since as a rallying call.

There’s always an axis of evil that needs vanquishing. And as Hermann Goering
chillingly warned: “the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.”
It’s easy, he explained: “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and
denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It
works the same way in any country.”

I don’t need to remind you that we were attacked, on American soil, eight years ago.
At that moment we faced a fateful choice: whether to seek justice, or debase it. The
armchair warriors won. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have died, in the name of
avenging three thousand of our own. We don’t even count how many we’ve killed.

I’ve said before I don’t oppose all wars. I supported the pledge to hunt down and
root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance. But can we
do that by killing more innocents? Where would we need to send troops? Saudi
Arabia? Pakistan? Somalia? [How about Texas? -ths] And how many corpses might convince a hostile horde to
change its thinking? Before we rained destruction on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Americans firebombed dozens of Japanese cities. Up to half a million were slain, and
millions more lost their homes before surrender was so much as discussed.

As I said at the start of the decade, let’s finish the fight with Bin Laden and al Qaeda,
through effective, coordinated intelligence, and shutting down the financial networks
that support terrorism. It’s work for policemen, not soldiers; our armed forces should
defend us, not attack. War by the one percent doctrine of pre-emption is aggression.

To repeat, I’m not here to look backwards. We’re here to remember the urgency of
now. This is no time to indulge in the narcissism of self-flagellation, or to take the
tranquilising drug of mass denial. A nation that believes its hype is heading for
disaster. Now is the time to rise from the valley of hubris, to walk the sunlit path of
accepting limits. Now is the time to obey the same rules we impose. Now is the time
to admit that our actions have consequences, that we’ve been al Qaeda’s top
recruiter.

Our pursuit of “full spectrum dominance”, our ambition “to hold unquestioned
power”, has not made the world any safer. We started a nuclear arms race, and
doused it in gasoline. We helped Pakistan get the bomb, and looked away while it ran
a weapons hypermarket. Now we’re helping India break the rules, just as Israel has
for decades while it stockpiled warheads. Exactly how many isn’t clear, because Israel
denies access to foreign inspectors.

Iran is the only oil-rich state in the Middle East that’s beyond our influence. Together
with Israel, we keep threatening to attack it. But while we talk up “the Iranian
threat”, our intelligence agencies say Iran halted its weapons programme years ago,
and wants nothing more than the option to reactivate it. The idea it could wipe Israel
off the map is absurd. The Israeli nuclear arsenal guarantees that. Israel’s prime
minister calls Iran an “apocalyptic cult” that “glorifies blood and death, including its
own”. But for years the two countries were allies, and Israel accepted the rhetoric
was mostly for show. Its priorities only changed when Iran became the region’s
number two power. And that only happened when we invaded Iraq, and installed a
pro-Iranian government.

So what do we do now to solve these problems? Bombing Iran would not bring us
closer to a world without nuclear weapons. It also wouldn’t make Israel more secure.
I rule it out categorically, and withdraw all plans for a nuclear first strike on Iranian
bunkers. Destructive power can only be tempered by restraint.

There’s no longer a technological difference between the process that generates fuel
and the process for building bombs. Once you can enrich uranium for reactors, it just
takes time and investment to enrich it for missiles. If we’re serious about
disarmament, we also need to restrict enrichment by everyone, outsourcing it to an
international agency. This alone makes nuclear power no answer to climate change.

It’s no less misguided to pretend we can clean up coal. Plans to bury carbon dioxide
are unproven, and they won’t work any time soon. The global demand for energy will
be hard to meet without making radical changes. If we carry on insisting that “the
American way of life is not negotiable“, we can hardly expect others to think
differently. But we all have to, immediately, or there won’t be a future to get rich in.
If everyone consumed like Americans, we’d need another half dozen planets. And if
the one we live on heats up as scientists forecast, much of it will be uninhabitable this
century. Ice caps and glaciers will melt, seas will rise and crops will fail. Billions of
people will struggle to find food and water, and the world will be full of refugees.

We’re almost past the point of no return. Long-term targets are irrelevant. The gases
we’ve emitted already will heat up the atmosphere for a century. Unless we stop
adding to them quickly, we’re committing ourselves to a runaway warming process,
unlike any this Earth has seen for millions of years. Faced with that prospect, and the
deadlocked talks on a climate treaty, there’s no alternative left but to act unilaterally.

I’ve signed up to a British initiative called 10:10, and promised to reduce my personal
emissions by ten percent in 2010. I’m also committing to bolder executive action. I
pledge the United States will cut output of carbon dioxide, and other heat-trapping
gases, by a tenth next year from current levels. The year after, we’ll cut another
tenth, and again, and again, for ten straight years, until we’re free of fossil fuels by
2020.

To achieve this, we need to transform our economy, on a scale unseen since the start
of World War II. Converting our factories to rearmament was what finally dragged us
out of the Great Depression. To support our transition to a less destructive paradigm,
America will turn itself over to sustainable energy. Trillions of dollars will be spent on
a new Manhattan Project; only this one won’t build an atom bomb. Instead it will
share clean technology through the United Nations. There can be no solution to
climate change that doesn’t include such partners as India and China. Even if they
burn coal, we should stop, and help them cut their carbon output however we can.

Domestically, we won’t just scrap subsidies for fossil fuels. We plan to nationalise and
liquidate our oil companies, and switch the nation’s cars to electric power. They’ll be
charged from a network of wind and solar farms, hooked up to a direct-current smart
grid. And we will pay for this by ceasing to arm the world.

America spends almost as much on weapons as every other nation combined. The
Pentagon gets more money today than at any time since World War II. And our
exports dwarf those of our rivals, creating the opponents of tomorrow. As President
Eisenhower warned: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket
fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.”

It is time to start changing priorities. Next year, we will cut military spending in half,
and shrink it as we scale back our presence. Over the coming decade, this will free
up trillions of dollars. So far we’ve been tentative, scrapping a few costly weapons
while increasing the total we spend. But an overhaul of energy policy will enable us
to shut down bases overseas. No longer will we need hundreds of foreign outposts to
protect resources, or the shipping lanes and pipelines that ferry them. We can leave
that work to regional powers, and resume our rightful place in our own backyard.

Every last soldier will leave Iraq next year, and our bases there will be bulldozed. We
will also withdraw at once from Afghanistan. A generation ago, Mikhail Gorbachev
said he wanted to do the same, but he first raised troop levels above 100,000. As a
result, 1985 was the deadliest year of the Soviet occupation. We will not repeat the
same mistake. I’m reversing last week’s announcement of escalation, and our draw
down will begin from tomorrow. We can’t just arm warlords and pay off the Taliban.
All the money and blood we spill achieves nothing. We can only destabilise Pakistan,
and the government there won’t help us do that. The only constructive way forward
is to face our impotence.

We cannot provide security without peace, and we cannot impose that by will, or
force of arms.

We cannot build abstractions like good governance. We can only pay reparations and
send aid. Afghans have to shape their own future.

We cannot defend against terrorism by bombing civilians. And even the most surgical
air strikes can’t stop terrorists plotting in Europe, or training in Florida.

We cannot privatise war by funnelling taxpayer dollars to mercenary contractors.

Our suicide pact with militarism has to end before it bankrupts us, strategically,
financially and morally. We cannot keep stalking the world creating new enemies.

No, we cannot.

Half a century ago, Eisenhower warned us what was happening. To win World War
II, he said, we created “a permanent arms industry of vast proportions”, and “only
an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge
industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals.”

This is a challenge we’ve ducked until today. And make no mistake: it will not be
easy. The military-industrial complex has no fixed address. Arms companies spread
production nationwide, so Congressmen and women defend their business, for fear
lost jobs will cost them votes. Other lobbies complicate things further, like those
pressing Israel’s case in Washington. To underline our resolve to curb the arms
trade, all military assistance to Israel will be scrapped, and no sales allowed until it
retreats within its 1967 borders, and dismantles illegal settlements on Palestinian
land.

Capitalism has been at war with democracy, and winning. We’ve blown trillions in the
banking casino, privatising its gains and socialising the cost. Not for nothing is
Goldman Sachs called “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of
humanity.” For a more sustainable world, we have to dismantle the structures that
shape it.

I can’t achieve that alone. We all have obligations to prevent our national priorities
being perverted, as Martin Luther King understood. “A nation that continues year
after year to spend more money on military defence than on programmes of social
uplift,” he said, “is approaching spiritual death.”

The day after Dr King was killed, Robert F. Kennedy spoke of “another kind of
violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night.
This is the violence of institutions, indifference and inaction and slow decay.”

In words as relevant now as then, Kennedy said we “tolerate a rising level of violence
that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilisation alike. We calmly
accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on
movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all
shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they require.”

Weeks later, he was assassinated too, campaigning for the presidency, and an early
retreat from Vietnam. Instead, the war dragged on, and Cambodia was mercilessly
bombed. For that, and other crimes, a previous winner of this prize should face
prosecution. But if Henry Kissinger stands trial some day, he shouldn’t be alone in the
dock. Cases can be made against presidents too, and I plead no special immunity
ahead of time. I should be held to account like anyone else.

The press should never become the president’s men, and the public need to organise
against him, to force his hand like Martin Luther King, to collectively make change we
can believe in. Together we’ll enact these commitments. In themselves, they won’t
end violence, they won’t end lawlessness and they won’t end disorder either. But
they’d warrant the faith you’ve placed in my work, and they’d leave our children a
legacy of justice. And for that small measure alone, we can be thankful.

God bless us all. Thank you.
Daniel Simpson has worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and The New
York Times. He lives in London, where he's writing a book about the love-in on Big
War Island: http://danielsimpson.wordpress.com/2003/07/14/echo-festival/  He can
be contacted on daniel.simpson at gmx.net