Barack Obama is said to have written his acceptance speech before the Nobel Prize committee himself. It was a masterful delivery by a great orator. And though he used some of his well crafted words to slam America and George W. Bush, some think he adopted the 'Bush Doctrine' in his speech.
According to MyWayNews his discussion of his role as commander in chief was pretty clear:
Obama refused to renounce war for his nation or under his leadership, saying defiantly that "I face the world as it is" and that he is obliged to protect and defend the United States.
"A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida's leaders to lay down their arms," Obama said. "To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism, it is a recognition of history."
The president laid out the circumstances where war is justified - in self-defense, to come to the aid of an invaded nation and on humanitarian grounds, such as when civilians are slaughtered by their own government or a civil war threatens to engulf an entire region.
"The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it," he said.
He also spoke bluntly of the cost of war, saying of the Afghanistan buildup he just ordered that "some will kill, some will be killed."
"No matter how justified, war promises human tragedy," he said.
The publisher of StopTheACLU.com thinks that Obama's speech should cause the left to stop bashing President Bush:
I’ll give him credit for saying it. ‘Bout time. Let’s HOPE it’s not “just words.” Now, how will the left receive this? Will they at least for a brief moment stop and regret their attacks of the last 8 years? Because Obama just articulated the “Bush Doctrine.”
He might be right:
The Bush Doctrine is a phrase used to describe various related foreign policy principles of former United States president George W. Bush. The phrase initially described the policy that the United States had the right to secure itself from countries that harbor or give aid to terrorist groups, which was used to justify the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.
Later it came to include additional elements, including the controversial policy of preventive war, which held that the United States should depose foreign regimes that represented a potential or perceived threat to the security of the United States, even if that threat was not immediate; a policy of spreading democracy around the world, especially in the Middle East, as a strategy for combating terrorism; and a willingness to pursue U.S. military interests in a unilateral way. Some of these policies were codified in a National Security Council text entitled the National Security Strategy of the United States published on September 20, 2002. [Wikipedia]
Comments