{"id":6255,"date":"2009-10-13T08:37:54","date_gmt":"2009-10-13T16:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=6255"},"modified":"2009-10-13T08:37:54","modified_gmt":"2009-10-13T16:37:54","slug":"liz-cheney-and-tom-friedman-agree-give-the-us-military-the-nobel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/13\/liz-cheney-and-tom-friedman-agree-give-the-us-military-the-nobel\/","title":{"rendered":"Liz Cheney and Tom Friedman Agree: Give the US Military the Nobel"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most notable developments surrounding the debate about the Nobel Committee\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s decision to award Obama its peace prize has been the apparently spontaneous agreement by both Tom Friedman and Liz Chene<\/a>y that the president should make the occasion a celebration of the U.S. military. It speaks volumes about the ideological anchorlessness of Friedman, who, according to a recent National Journal<\/em> survey<\/a> of Democratic and Republican insiders, is the media personality with the single greatest influence among party elites.<\/p>\n

Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Cheney on \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Fox News Sunday\u00e2\u20ac\u009d after denouncing the Committee\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s decision as a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153farce.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153But I do think he [Obama] could send a real signal here. I think what he ought to do frankly is send a mother of a fallen American soldier to accept the prize on behalf of the U.S. military and frankly to send the message to remind the Nobel committee that each one of them sleeps soundly at night because the U.S. military is the greatest peacekeeping force in the world today.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Friedman after expressing dismay \u00e2\u20ac\u0153that the most important prize in the world has been devalued in this way\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in his column published Saturday, entitled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Peace (Keepers) Prize<\/a>.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Most of the column consists of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the speech I hope he will give\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when he accepts the prize in Oslo Dec 10:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Let me begin by thanking the Nobel committee for awarding me this prize, the highest award to which any statesman can aspire. As I said on the day it was announced, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcI do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been honored by this prize.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Therefore, upon reflection, I cannot accept this award on my behalf at all.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153But I will accept it on behalf of the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the men and women of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There follows a series of inspirational paragraphs about the U.S. military\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s heroism and sacrifice from World War II through its rescue operations \u00e2\u20ac\u0153from the mountains of Pakistan to the coasts of Indonesia\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (with no mention of Vietnam whatsoever) before he concludes in a long coda:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Members of the Nobel committee, I accept this award on behalf of all these American men and women soldiers, past and present, because I know \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and I want you to know \u00e2\u20ac\u201d that there is no peace without peacekeepers.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Until the words of Isaiah are made true and lasting \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and nations never again lift up swords against nations and never learn war anymore \u00e2\u20ac\u201d we will need peacekeepers. Lord knows, ours are not perfect, and I have already moved to remedy inexcusable excesses we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve perpetrated in the war on terrorism.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153But have no doubt, those are the exception. If you want to see the true essence of America, visit any U.S. military outpost in Iraq or Afghanistan. You will meet young men and women of every race and religion who work together as one, far from their families, motivated chiefly by their mission to keep the peace and expand the borders of freedom.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153So for all these reasons \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and so you understand that I will never hesitate to call on American soldiers where necessary to take the field against the enemies of peace, tolerance and liberty \u00e2\u20ac\u201d I accept this peace prize on behalf of the men and women of the U.S. military: the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most important peacekeepers.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Note that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nothing in Friedman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s talk about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153soft\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153smart power,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of which he is supposed to be a strong exponent. Nor even about the country\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s voters who voted Obama into office. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all about the military, its goodness, and even its altruism.<\/p>\n

To my mind, the agreement between Cheney and Friedman makes for a great illustration of the the similarity in worldview between the hard right \u00e2\u20ac\u201d I think Liz is actually more of a neo-con in her strong feelings about Israel than her dad ever was) and liberal interventionists like Friedman. And that worldview, of course, not only implicitly extols American exceptionalism, but also \u00e2\u20ac\u201d to put it bluntly \u00e2\u20ac\u201d American militarism, a phenomenon to which Andrew Bacevich devoted an entire book<\/a> after the Iraq invasion.<\/p>\n

Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s some of what Bacevich, a retired army colonel who teaches at Boston University, wrote as excerpted on Tomdispatch.com in 2005<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153[M]ainstream politicians today take as a given that American military supremacy is an unqualified good, evidence of a larger American superiority. They see this armed might as the key to creating an international order that accommodates American values. One result of that consensus over the past quarter century has been to militarize U.S. policy and to encourage tendencies suggesting that American society itself is increasingly enamored with its self-image as the military power nonpareil.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6Since the end of the Cold War, opinion polls surveying public attitudes toward national institutions have regularly ranked the armed services first. While confidence in the executive branch, the Congress, the media, and even organized religion is diminishing, confidence in the military continues to climb. Otherwise acutely wary of having their pockets picked, Americans count on men and women in uniform to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. Americans fearful that the rest of society may be teetering on the brink of moral collapse console themselves with the thought that the armed services remain a repository of traditional values and old fashioned virtue.<\/p>\n

Confidence in the military has found further expression in a tendency to elevate the soldier to the status of national icon, the apotheosis of all that is great and good about contemporary America. The men and women of the armed services, gushed Newsweek <\/em>in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153looked like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. They were young, confident, and hardworking, and they went about their business with poise and \u00c3\u00a9lan.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d A writer for Rolling Stone<\/em> reported after a more recent and extended immersion in military life that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Army was not the awful thing that my [anti-military] father had imagined\u00e2\u20ac\u009d; it was instead \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the sort of America he always pictured when he explained\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 his best hopes for the country.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most notable developments surrounding the debate about the Nobel Committee\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s decision to award Obama its peace prize has been the apparently spontaneous agreement by both Tom Friedman and Liz Cheney that the president should make the occasion a celebration of the U.S. military. It speaks volumes about the ideological anchorlessness of Friedman, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-6255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6255"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6256,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6255\/revisions\/6256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6255"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=6255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}