assisinating the Nobel Peace Prize

Remember when Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize right after taking office. It was true that Obama becoming president, many of the words he spoke during the campaign, and the movement of people who wanted 'Change' all inspired dreams of peace. After Bush terms of war, Peace, was the change most of the world was looking for.

Of course Obama never promised peace (although many of his speeches implied it) but few predicted he would move us into the territory we are now in. I think he has basically been taken advantage of. He was a bit of an outsider and he kept much of the old guard in charge, which meant they knew how to get what they wanted. A perfect example I heard of this week was Obama's sale of deep penetrating bunker buster bombs to Israel. These were wanted for an attack on Iran and the Bush administration had refused to sell them to Israel. The Obama administration sold them the weapons six months after Obama took office. You know he wanted to be seen as supporting Israel and the powers to be saw the opportunity to act.

So I suspect the same has happened with Obama's massive expansion of the drone assassinations - including the one just today of an American citizen. The President ordering an execution of an American without a trial is new territory. We got mad at Bush for DETAINING Americans without a warrant and not Obama is ordering fools assassinated. That smacks of authoritarianism. Now Obama has already been ordering assassinations of non Americans. And these assassinations are happening is countries where we are not officially at war. To me there is no difference where a person is from, assassinating them is wrong. But as far as the law in this country goes, there is a big difference and Obama is pushing the limits beyond what Bush/Cheney did.

Now of course the targets of these assassinations are often clearly 'enemies' of this country. Our argument for killing this guy today is that he influences people to attack America. Well by assassinating him are we really convincing his followers that we should not be attacked? OF course not, with every drone attack we make more enemies. Our "war on terror" is a war of terror and the more people we kill and homes we destroy the more 'terrorists' we create. It makes me sick and while I think things are largely out of Obama's control, it is sad that he was given the Nobel Prize for Peace, for he is commander in chief over an expanding war of global scale that is pushing the rule of law as well as that of morality.