Tunisian Nobel Peace Prize an Indictment of US Intervention in the Arab Spring

A quartet of peace negotiators has won the Nobel Peace Prize for its role in preserving the Tunisian Revolution. That 2011 event kicked off the wave of uprisings known as the Arab Spring. The Tunisian Revolution is widely seen as the one bright spot of the Arab Spring, which has otherwise brought war, tyranny, and chaos to every country it has touched.

But that should not be considered a mark against popular sovereignty itself. It was outside interference from the U.S. empire that poisoned the Arab Spring and turned it into a catastrophe.

Tunisia was the one Arab Spring country to escape this fate simply because it went first. Caught by surprise, Washington was not able to ruin things until the revolution had already run its course.

In every other country, the United States heavily intervened in one of two ways.

When the Arab Spring threatened or overthrew U.S.-backed dictators or royal despots, Washington sponsored counter-revolutions.

On the other hand, when the Arab Spring reached independent “rogue” regimes, the U.S. and its allies co-opted the uprisings. They radicalized the opposition by pouring money, training, and weapons into it and sponsoring radical jihadists who came to dominate the insurgency.

Egypt’s Arab Spring developed too early and quickly for the U.S. to be able to save then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “family friend ” General Hosni Mubarak from losing power. And so an election was held which was won by a mildly Islamist administration under Mohamed Morsi.

But this was short-lived, as a counter-revolution sanctioned by the United States and bankrolled by U.S. ally Saudi Arabia then overthrew the elected government, installing a new military dictator.

The revolution was completely reversed, with Mubarak to be released from prison and Morsi taking his place there. He and hundreds of his supporters have been sentenced to death.

John Kerry, Hillary’s successor at State, hailed the coup d’etat as “restoring democracy.”

The restored dictatorship is now back to business as usual: brutal repression and human rights violations, helping Israel keep the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip trapped and miserable, and receiving $1.5 billion a year in U.S. foreign aid.

By the time the Arab Spring reached Yemen, the United States was ready enough to engineer an election in which there was only one candidate on the ballot. And so one sock puppet dictator?—?Ali Abdullah Saleh?—?was merely replaced by another: Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.

Secretary Clinton praised the rigged election and inauguration as “promising steps on the path toward a new, democratic chapter in Yemen’s history.”

And after this replacement dictator of Yemen was overthrown by the local “Houthi rebel” movement, the U.S. backed a savage war by Saudi Arabia on that impoverished country that still rages today.

Adding to the vast collateral damage wrought by America’s drone war on Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Saudis have been bombing the Houthis, who are AQAP’s chief enemies, resulting in ever greater conquests for the terrorist group.

Among innumerable other attacks on civilians, the Saudis bombed two weddings in ten days. And its total blockade has brought Yemen, already the poorest country in the Middle East (it imports over 90% of its food), to the brink of starvation.

As for Bahrain, as Amanda Ufheil-Somers wrote :

Back in 2011, for instance, just days after Bahraini security forces fired live ammunition at protesters in Manama?—?an attack that killed four and wounded many others?—?President Barack Obama praised King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa’s commitment to reform. Neither did the White House object when it was notified in advance that 1,200 troops from Saudi Arabia would enter Bahrain to clear the protests in March of 2011.”

But when the Arab Spring reached Libya, under the relatively independent Arab nationalist dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi, the United States took the side of the insurgents, arming jihadists and waging an air war that overthrew the government. This has sent the country spiraling into chaos.

And when the Arab Spring reached Syria, under the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad, the United States again took the side of the insurgents and again sponsored jihadists, along with regional allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf monarchies.

As a released U.S. intelligence report revealed, Washington did so fully realizing that the insurgency was dominated by Islamic extremists and that supporting it would likely result in the rise of a “Salafist principality.” As it turned out, this Salafist principality was ISIS. And it is rivaled for leadership of the insurgencyonly by Syrian Al Qaeda. Both have ended up with a large amount of American weapons.

The American-fed Arab Spring war in Syria has claimed the lives of a quarter of a million and has displaced millions.

Tunisia has been a success — although not an unqualified or a necessarily permanent one — because it had the one Arab Spring that Washington did not get its bloody mitts on. The Nobel Peace Prize granted in its honor should also be seen as an indictment of the empire that stood in the way of millions of other Arabs from achieving the same success — and that turned their dreams of freedom into nightmares of tyranny and war.


Originally published at theantimedia.org.

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Bradley Manning: Nobel Peace Prize Nomination 2012

I can anticipate all the objections. Regardless, keeping Bradley Manning’s name in the press increases the chances that some justice, somewhere might be served.

From Birgitta Jónsdóttir and Margrét Tryggvadóttir, Members of the Icelandic Parliament:

We have the great honor of nominating Private First Class Bradley Manning for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Manning is a soldier in the United States army who stands accused of releasing hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The leaked documents pointed to a long history of corruption, war crimes, and imperialism by the United States government in international dealings. These revelations have fueled democratic uprising around the world, including a democratic revolution in Tunisia. According to journalists, his alleged actions helped motivate the democratic Arab Spring movements, shed light on secret corporate influence on our foreign policies, and most recently contributed to the Obama Administration agreeing to withdraw all U.S.troops from the occupation in Iraq.

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Nothing “Purist”—Just Everything Hypocritical About Awarding Nobel “Peace” Prize to Promote Western Militarization

During the last 4 years the dispute over the implementation of Nobel´s prize for the “champions of peace” has come to a head. The Norwegian awarders seem to reinterpret Nobel´s wishes and award the prize for whatever in their judgment is good and valuable, based on “a broad concept of peace.” A Norwegian peace researcher and lawyer, Fredrik S. Heffermehl, in his book: The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted (Praeger 2010) claims to have proved that Nobel had specific recipients in mind, that Nobel wished to support what he called the “champions of peace,” meaning those who promote global law and demilitarization. His book led, in January 2012, the Swedish Foundations Authority to open an investigation into the mandate and whether Norwegian parliamentarians entrusted with the stewardship/management of the prize are misappropriating it for other purposes than Nobel had in mind.

The Nobel Peace Prize Forum in Minnesota is an annual event proudly claiming to “inspire peacemaking…for students and other citizens to become active participants in peacemaking efforts around the world. For 23 years it has been the Norwegian Nobel Institute’s only such program or academic affiliation outside of Norway.”
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Petition: Investigate Betrayal of the Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Prize Foundation and other Nobel Prize Awarding Institutions should be thanked for their century-long efforts to educate and hopefully bring about more peace in the world. At the same time, however, these institutions must be made aware that their efforts are increasingly undermined, and deeply perverted by their growing departure from the original criteria set forth in Alfred Nobel’s will for selecting the recipient of the Peace Prize. Such continual disregard of the original intent of the “Peace” Prize actually serves to enable the waging of war, fulfilling Orwell’s prediction about how propaganda works in making people believe that “war is peace”. Obviously the majority of officials and people involved with the various Nobel Organizations and Nobel Peace Forum sponsors are not intending to do this, to help the cause of war and militarism. They simply have not conducted the self examination necessary to realize how seriously off-track the Peace Prize has gone. Similarly it took a lot for Alfred Nobel himself to see the light, that his invention of dynamite would be used for violent wars and murder. So it’s understandable how so many organizers and sponsors could simply be oblivious to the underlying problem.  The purpose of our on-line petition is to get more Nobel Peace Prize officials to critically think!

Petition: Investigate Betrayal of the Nobel Peace Prize
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