Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, said today that President Obama “really ought to consider” returning his Nobel Peace Prize Medal immediately, including the “really nice” case it came in.
The party that marched American troops into Meuse-Argonne, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Inchon and Khe Sanh is back with a vengeance under President Barack Obama, who has taken to overseas war-making like a duck to water.
This must have the Nobel Prize committee scratching its collective head.
Obama, who less than nine months after his inauguration won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” while fostering “a new climate” in international relations, especially in reaching out to the Islamic world, has the U.S. engaged in conflicts in six Muslim nations. Today Mr. Obama has more troops in Afghanistan than when he took office. He has widened the use of drones. (The U.S. now has 8,000 of the unmanned remote control planes.) He involved the U.S. military in an undeclared war in Libya, and waged covert wars in Yemen and Somalia. Perhaps most alarming, he is the first U.S. president to authorize the assassination of an American abroad (the New Mexican born Anwar al-Awlaki).
Overseas belligerency is one thing, but Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder has stated that the president has “under extraordinary circumstances” authority to use drone strikes to kill Americans on U.S. soil.
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