President Barack Obama’s willingness
to confront the lawlessness and the calumnies
of the Bush administration makes him a worthy
and obvious recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Nobel Prize has been given in the past to
those who fight oppression and restore hope.
President Obama has repaired much of the scarred
reputation of the United States and restored
the hope of Americans and people everywhere
who opposed the antidemocratic and authoritarian
acts of the Bush administration. In less than
a year, he has personally revived the indispensible
role of the United States to renew multilateral
diplomacy, arms control and disarmament, and
human and civil rights.
The Bush administration created a strategic
nightmare for U.S. interests at home and abroad
over the past eight years. The Iraq War remains
the center of this nightmare, and President
George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney
worked assiduously to create and employ a strategic
disinformation campaign to convince Congress
and the American people of the need for war.
Their manipulation of the American people (and
the international community) is still not fully
understood, but their lies and disinformation
became conventional wisdom to the mainstream
media, falsely linking Saddam Hussein to the
9/11 attacks and Iraqis to al-Qaeda.
How many Americans gave their lives in Iraq
actually believing the propaganda about these
links as well as the outright lies and fabrications
about Iraq’s enriched uranium, aluminum
tubes for nuclear testing, and mobile biological
laboratories. The CIA incorporated these lies
into a speech for Secretary of State Colin Powell,
which was delivered to the United Nations just
several weeks before the start of the Iraq War.
The Bush administration’s misuse of the
intelligence community to make a phony case
for war was matched by the politicization of
virtually every agency in the national security
arena. In addition to politicizing intelligence
to make the case for war, the Central Intelligence
Agency was brought into a world of secret prisons,
torture and abuse, and extraordinary renditions.
In an act of raw cynicism, President Bush gave
the President’s Freedom Award, the highest
honor that can be bestowed on a civilian in
the federal government, to CIA director George
Tenet, who directed these policies.
The National Security Agency developed an illegal
intrusion into the privacy of Americans with
a program of warrantless eavesdropping that
was far more comprehensive than we were led
to believe. (The New York Times covered-up this
story for more than a year.) The developer of
the policy was NSA director Michael Hayden,
who was then confirmed as director of CIA with
nary a question from the Congress on his role
in warrantless eavesdropping.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation used the
Patriot Act to issue more than 30,000 “national
security” letters every year to individuals
and businesses, which required telecommunications
companies and financial institutions to illegally
disclose private information about their customers.
The FBI also conducted an aggressive campaign
of ethnic profiling against Arabs and Muslims
that led nowhere.
The Pentagon played a major role in the campaign
of politicization, creating the Office of Special
Plans and the Counter Terrorist Evaluation Group
to circulate phony and worthless intelligence
to make the case for war. The Pentagon also
created the Counter Intelligence Field Activity
to conduct illegal surveillance against American
citizens near U.S military facilities or in
attendance at antiwar meetings.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created
an illegal fact-gathering operation called TALON
(Threat and Local Observation Notice) to collect
“raw information” about “suspicious
incidents.” Readers of “Animal Farm”
will not be amused. President Obama certainly
wasn’t; he has ended secret prisons, torture
and abuse, and depoliticized the Department
of Justice to make sure that renditions (and
there have been none since his inauguration)
are accompanied by judicial review and that
the military respects the sovereignty of American
citizens.
President Obama has methodically taken on these
departments in an effort to demilitarize national
security policy. The military will find slower
growth in its inflated defense budgets, genuine
arms control and disarmament with Russia, and
a rejection of General Stanley McChrystal’s
demands for 40,000-50,000 more troops in Afghanistan.
Fortunately, the president recognizes the physical,
financial, and emotional costs of the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan. On Saturday, the president
pledged to end President Bill Clinton’s
hypocritical policy of “don’t ask,
don’t tell,” which increased the
hazing of gays in the military and abruptly
ended the service of nearly 13,000 fighting
men and women.
The CIA has had to accept the release of the
Justice Department torture memoranda as well
as the investigation of those CIA officers who
conducted torture and abuse in excess of Justice
Department guidelines. President Obama dismissed
the objections of seven former CIA directors
to this investigation. The CIA’s strategic
intelligence may continue to have shortcomings,
but not because the White House is demanding
politicization of the intelligence product.
President Obama also inherited the numerous
false representations of the Bush era, which
damaged U.S. interests. The almost forgotten
“axis of evil” speech of January
2002 illustrates the harm that the policies
of President Bush did to our vital interests.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United
States and Iran engaged successfully in secret
talks to deal with the chaos in Afghanistan
in the wake of the overthrow of the Taliban.
The Iranians were elated to cooperate with
us and to bolster the new Afghan government
led by Hamid Karzai. Fortunately for our interests,
Iran was holding under house arrest former Afghan
Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the
most brutal mujaheddin leaders and a major recipient
of U.S. assistance throughout the 1980s. Hekmatyar
and his followers represented a major threat
to the Karzai government, and we wanted him
moved from house arrest to real arrest and eventual
transfer to Afghan custody.
Following President Bush’s “axis”
speech, however, which absurdly linked Iraq,
North Korea, and Iran, the Tehran government
released Hekmatyar and returned him to Afghanistan,
where he resumed his leadership of the Hezb-i-Islami
organization that is one of the deadliest insurgent
forces in eastern Afghanistan. U.S. troops are
taking their highest casualties in eastern Afghanistan
since the invasion in eight years ago. President
Obama’s new opening with Iran allows the
United States to return the bilateral dialogue
to the period after 9/11.
In less than a year, President Obama’s
actions have significantly reversed the increased
anti-Americanism and the decline in American
influence that took place in the wake of the
U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Nobel Peace Prize
will enhance his credibility as well as the
credibility of U.S. diplomacy. Troglodyte editorial
writers may accuse the Nobel Committee of being
“trapped in an adolescent adulation of
Mr. Obama” (Financial Times) or describe
a “certain cluelessness about America”
(Washington Post), but the mere promise of Obama’s
international agenda has led intransigent nations
that seemed frozen in time to try to join the
dialogue that Obama has started.
In the past few months, leaders in Iran, North
Korea, Cuba, and even Burma have taken steps
to enhance their international credentials.
On Saturday, Turkey and Armenia, which had been
prodded by the Obama administration, restored
their diplomatic relations and reopened borders
that had been closed since 1993. The Nobel Peace
Prize gives moral weight and credibility to
those who fight to end oppression and to energize
international conciliation.
What in the world do the critics of the prize
think that President Obama is trying valiantly
to do?
Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the
Center for International Policy and adjunct
professor of government at Johns Hopkins University,
is The Public Record’s National Security
and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years
with the CIA, the National War College, and
the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of
Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
Copyright 2009 The Public
Record
