Suffer the little children...

[bobquasit]

Here are a couple of photos of some of the grateful young beneficiaries of our new Nobel Peace Prize President's policies:





They must feel very honored.

Found these via Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.

Comments

[bobquasit.livejournal.com]

A liberal (or semi-liberal) on Askville said she could look at the photos and say that they did not keep Obama from deserving the prize. She said that we were fighting an enemy who attacked us, and collateral damage was inevitable (you can read all the posts in full on the thread, via the link). My response:

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When did Afghanistan attack us? If you're talking about the 9/11 hijackers, 15 were from Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Egypt and one was from Lebanon. Why didn't we attack any of those countries?

And if you're talking about the Taliban, we drove them out of power within the first year. Now they're coming back, arguably in part due to our continued presence and our continuing support of a puppet government. What are we accomplishing there, apart from destroying our economy, maiming and killing thousands of our troops, and maiming and killing tens of thousands of civilians? It's been eight years. What have we accomplished?

If you say "Democracy", I might scream!

[klyfix.livejournal.com]

Ehhh....we attacked Afghanistan because the Taliban was harboring Al-Qaeda and Bin Ladin, and to some extent Al-Qaeda was at the least influencing that country's policies. The home countries of the hijackers were not, although to be sure some of Saudi Arabia's policies and some of its princes were indirectly helping them.

And, hmm, collateral damage is part of war.

Having said that, well, it's by no means clear that the current policy in Afghanistan makes much sense. To a great extent this is the fault of Bush; had he not pulled troops from there for the Iraq war but instead focused on capturing Bin Ladin and destroying the Taliban when we were in a position to do so we likely would have been able to withdraw and largely leave the Afghans to their own devices beyond giving some economic aid.

And having said that, well, the "collateral damage" as I called it hurts our relations with the Afghan common people and gives the insurgents (who aren't necessarily all Taliban) recruiting material. And we can't win this thing with just military force.

My guess is that we're going to see a pull-out rather than a build-up because the American people are opposed to the war, people in the Administration (Joe Biden as I recall, for instance) want a different policy, and because the real problem is in Pakistan as far as a threat to the US.

And having said all that, well, if the Taliban were to actually retake the country people will still be dying, but now they'll be women who dare to, well, do much of anything, people who listen to music, ect., ect.. And there will likely still be war; civil war and possibly something with Iran (almost happened before 9/11) or another Afghan neighbor.

One could argue with some legitimacy I think that the fault for all this really goes back to another Nobel Prize winner, Jimmy Carter (to be fair, he got it for his post-presidency activities). If he'd not elected to start the policy of supporting the mujihadeen (holy warriors) against the Soviets we'd likely not had the current situation, or perhaps even 9/11 (recall that Bin Ladin got his start back in that Afghan war). Hmm, well, then again Reagan would probably have supported them, or Congress might have forced the issue.

And as for Obama's Nobel; not to sound like a Republican apologist ('cause I'm no GOP'er) but my impression is that the Nobel committee's point was really to say "Up yours!" to Dubya.

Also occurs to me that the other sitting Presidents who got the prize didn't necessarily have positive results from their actions.

Teddy Roosevelt got it for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese were not terribly thrilled with what they got out of it, and that was a factor toward their later aggressive behaviors and ultimately the WW2 disaster.

Woodrow Wilson got it in part for helping create the League of Nations; uhh, yeah, that worked really well.