A Nobel Peace Prize Awarded in spite of a Troop Surge

In December of 2009, Barak Obama was the first sitting U.S. president in 90 years and the third ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet he did so under the long shadow of the war in Afghanistan, where he was ordering 30,000 more troops into battle.  Could Truman’s decision to drop the A-bomb on Japan be along the same logic because it was meant to preempt the loss of life that would have come had the US invaded Japan?  President Reagan’s peace through strength logic was that a military build-up would forestall or prevent war from breaking out (hence no loss of life would be involved even in the forestalling).   The logic of awarding a surge President with a peace prize seems more dubious.  

The full essay is at "A Nobel Peace Prize amid a Troop Surge."

Knee-Jerk Reactions: On the U.S. Government Enabling Dictators

While in the U.S. Senate, Paul Kirk, the interim U.S. Senator who took Ted Kennedy’s seat, said, “Without a legitimate and credible Afghan partner, that counterinsurgency strategy is fundamentally flawed. The current Afghan government is neither legitimate nor credible. . . . We should not send a single additional dollar in aid or add a single American serviceman or woman to the 68,000 already courageously deployed in Afghanistan until we see a meaningful move by the Karzai regime to root out its corruption.” 

The full essay is at "Enabling Dictators."

Murdoch in Europe: Newsprint Wielded as a Personal Political Weapon

Testifying in Europe on June 11, 2012 about the influence of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers—and thus Murdoch himself—over the state government of Britain, Gordon Brown accused The Sun of having undermined the state’s contribution to the war in Afghanistan. The newspaper caused “huge damage to the war effort,” he said, by suggesting that Brown’s administration “didn’t care about our troops.” The coverage was oriented, Brown contended, to his supposed lack of care about the troops rather than to what the troops were doing in Afghanistan.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, which is available at Amazon.