The Affirmative Action Nobel Prize Winner versus the Actually Worthy One — the Latter’s Principled Warning about Doing Evil in America’s Name

25 June 2012

This essay makes two points

These are:

(1) President Obama is doing evils in America’s name that a worthy Nobel Peace Prize winner would not do.

(2) This kind of thing happens, when ethics-based strategy is lacking or falls victim to aimless pragmatism and day to day tactics.

If one wants to see ethical strategic principle abandoned in favor of short-sighted tactical gain, we need look no farther than President Obama’s Administration — a moral parable that should warn us

The instructive story begins by contrasting two recent Nobel Peace Prize winners:

President Obama (2009)

and

former President Jimmy Carter (2002).

President Obama was awarded the prize on the basis of no significant accomplishments in peace-furthering. President Carter won it on decades of ethically upstanding action.

The reasonable conclusion must be that Sweden’s Nobel Committee gave President Obama the prize on the basis of hope and/or affirmative action. Neither was proper motivation. Events since have shown why.

President Obama has contributed more to actively undermining American moral principles in the field of international relations and war than any other recent president — including the man whom President Obama’s most uncritical supporters love to despise, President George W. Bush.

In short, we have a Commander in Chief and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who is (probably inadvertently) doing virtually everything he can to undermine the principles that the Prize stands for.

The point to this essay is not to slam affirmative action, which I support — but to critique the kind of well-intended moral short-sightedness that conceals truth and leads to doing emboldened harms

One of my chief criticisms of the Obama Administration has been its willingness to conceal the harms that it does under the guise of doing the opposite. Metaphorically holding the Peace Prize aloft, while subverting its principles exemplifies this quality.

I do not accuse the President of making this unseemly juxtaposition on purpose. We have the well-meaning imbecility of the Nobel Committee to thank for that.

Nevertheless, a worthy Peace Prize winner would not have engaged in the activities the President routinely has.

Today, former President Jimmy Carter, also a Peace Prize winner, made the moral case against the current Commander in Chief.

That the two men held the identical office and come from the same political party makes President Carter’s points worth considering.

The case against the Peace Prize pretender

President Carter wrote:

The United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.

Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended.

This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public.

As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.

America’s moral morass

President Carter used 1948’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the ethical basis for his criticism of current American policy.

Of the Declaration, he wrote:

This was a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people, and it established equal rights of all people to

life,

liberty,

security of person,

equal protection of the law

and

freedom from torture, arbitrary detention or forced exile.

Carter listed the ways that the United States violates the human rights that it had a major hand in formulating:

(i) indefinite detention of suspected terrorists and their “associated forces”

(ii) warrantless wiretapping

(iii) racial and cultural profiling as bases for detention

(iv) deadly drone attacks in the absence of a state of war

(v) a priori (evidence-lacking) classification of any man killed by a drone attack, as having been a terrorist

(vi) torture

The former president concludes:

America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends.

As concerned citizens, we must persuade Washington to reverse course and regain moral leadership according to international human rights norms that we had officially adopted as our own and cherished throughout the years.

Indulging day-to-day tactics at the expense of ethically based strategy — the President emulates his predecessors in high gear

President Obama’s alleged shortcomings do not come from bad or weak character.

I have written before that his chameleon-like qualities appear to derive from the various roles he has had to play in achieving rank in a racist society. Had he been the outspoken and principled leader that America needs, he would never have been allowed to make the History that he has.

The Shakespearean irony is significant.

The tragedy lies in the President’s politically-tuned pragmatism. This was certainly a critically necessary trait that permitted his rise to the office of Commander in Chief. However today, President Obama’s morality-lacking reactivity causes the behavior that former President Carter has implicitly critiqued on moral grounds.

President Obama — who apparently lacks an inner moral compass to guide him in applying an overall human rights strategy — consistently succumbs to doing what makes short-term tactical sense. He has taken rights-transgressions that originated under his predecessors to genuinely surprising new heights.

It is easier to embrace broadening the power of the Executive, at the expense of human rights — than it is to formulate a politically riskier, but ethically and geopolitically sounder long-term geopolitical and human rights strategy:

Ever the politician and canny survivor, President Obama recognizes that ethically principled actions are often costly in a political theater that leaves him vulnerable to being attacked by the Brainless Right on the grounds of international weakness.

And, every political and economic force in our plutocratic society pushes our presidents in the direction that President Obama has much strengthened.

Acting on President Carter’s moral criticism is going to take an unusually strong and persuasive leader. Someone who is willing to knock heads together in a way that President Obama is (understandably) not.

The moral? — President Carter’s admonitions warn us that we are losing hold of what once made America culturally significant

Fear, cultural bigotry, and a lack of appreciation for America’s traditional legal and ethical principles are turning the United States into just another maliciously self-interested great power.

Reversing this trend will require either a leader of exceptional moral and political skill or an ethically engaged public.

Neither of the 2012 presidential candidates has the necessary qualities. And the American voting public appears not to care about anything that does not affect it directly:

What’s a few dead associated terrorists between friends?

I’ve got nothing to hide, so why should I care about your privacy?

I’ll worry about due process, when someone hauls my sister off.

The buck stops with each of us.

Which way are we going to lean?

PeteFree.com

The Affirmative Action Nobel Prize Winner versus the Actually Worthy One — the Latter’s Principled Warning about Doing Evil in America’s Name