It is stretching the truth to say that “America has never fought a war against a democracy”. Invasion of Grenada comes to mind. Training and support for the Contras is not USAs war but ……

And the repeated mantra about how important the “American people” and “America” are.

From reading his books, I think that he, himself, would be disappointed with his speech. He had an enormous opportunity to stand for the ideals of peace and justice and he produced a speech watered down with compromises

Could he have done this? Yes he can/could. He blew it.

I would agree completely with Ira’s position that President Obama needs to give another speech on nuclear disarmament, but it is difficult for me to see real progress on these issues with this Administration if it adheres to the “national security” perspective that suffused the published text of his remarks in Oslo. I find it alarming that in the wake of his decision to escalate in Afghanistan, the President is now presenting a benign view of the history of American military and foreign policy that could have come out of my Cold War “American History” textbook, or for that matter, the speechwriters of George W. Bush:

“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.”

Sorry, but I view the foregoing, and much of the speech as a rather Orwellian recitation of “War = Peace,” which departs notably from the tone and content of Obama’s previous unprecedented opening to the world’s Muslim population, and which completely whitewashes the U.S. historical legacy of global military interventionism and being the main arms supplier to dictatorships around the world (all artfully eluded in his statement “America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens”) that enforce the dread conditions conducive to a particularly American (and Western European)sense of entitlement to the cheap consumer goods that until the recent downturn constituted the obvious correlates of “freedom and prosperity.”

Unfortunately, I see Obama’s speech as little more than a clear announcement of this Administration’s dedication to the bipartisan commitment to the “Long War on Terror,” for which the hundreds of billions of dollars of resources needed to mitigate/adapt to climate change, etc., etc, will likely be squandered. Obama’s statement that “NATO continues to be indispensable,” similarly bolsters a military alliance structure that remains provocative to Russia and hence diminishes the chance for disarmament towards abolition, is primed for further interventions to secure fossil fuels in the Mideast and Caspian, and which remains a significant contributor through small arms sales to dictatorships and insurgents that provoke untold human rights abuses and general misery throughout the world.

If we’re looking for real change on issues of WMD or related issues, it will have to be much more than promised in this speech. Just yesterday, the U.S. announced that, contrary to some expectations, that it would not support strengthening the inspection and verification protocols of the Biological Weapons Convention—a six year effort that was upended by the Bush administration in July 2001 in deference to U.S. pharmaceutical company proprietary rights and U.S. ambiguous “biodefense” programs that have been in likely violation of the BWC by permitting the development of novel agents and bioengineered organisms evocative of an offensive program that continues to ignite a biological arms race. This is another worrisome sign that real global security is being once again redefined by the U.S. as “our national interest”—with important consequences when anticipating “deals” such as keeping a viable U.S. nuclear establishment going (“Stockpile Stewardship”) for the sake of a CTBT that in such a context will do little to curb further horizontal proliferation in the name of other national “interests.”

I guess I could say that this speech was a disappointment, but in the wake of Obama’s decision to spend our remaining blood and treasure in
Af-Pak, not really a surprise. Bob.