Liz Cheney and Tom Friedman Agree: Give the US Military the Nobel

One of the most notable developments surrounding the debate about the Nobel Committee’s 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, who, according to a recent National Journal survey of Democratic and Republican insiders, is the media personality with the single greatest influence among party elites.

Here’s Cheney on “Fox News Sunday” after denouncing the Committee’s decision as a “farce.”

“But 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.”

And here’s Friedman after expressing dismay “that the most important prize in the world has been devalued in this way” in his column published Saturday, entitled “The Peace (Keepers) Prize.” Most of the column consists of “the speech I hope he will give” when he accepts the prize in Oslo Dec 10:

“Let 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, ‘I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize.’ Therefore, upon reflection, I cannot accept this award on my behalf at all.

“But I will accept it on behalf of the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century — the men and women of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.”

There follows a series of inspirational paragraphs about the U.S. military’s heroism and sacrifice from World War II through its rescue operations “from the mountains of Pakistan to the coasts of Indonesia” (with no mention of Vietnam whatsoever) before he concludes in a long coda:

“Members of the Nobel committee, I accept this award on behalf of all these American men and women soldiers, past and present, because I know — and I want you to know — that there is no peace without peacekeepers.

“Until the words of Isaiah are made true and lasting — and nations never again lift up swords against nations and never learn war anymore — we will need peacekeepers. Lord knows, ours are not perfect, and I have already moved to remedy inexcusable excesses we’ve perpetrated in the war on terrorism.

“But 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.

“So for all these reasons — 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 — I accept this peace prize on behalf of the men and women of the U.S. military: the world’s most important peacekeepers.”

Note that there’s nothing in Friedman’s talk about “soft” or “smart power,” of which he is supposed to be a strong exponent. Nor even about the country’s voters who voted Obama into office. It’s all about the military, its goodness, and even its altruism.

To my mind, the agreement between Cheney and Friedman makes for a great illustration of the the similarity in worldview between the hard right — 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 — to put it bluntly — American militarism, a phenomenon to which Andrew Bacevich devoted an entire book after the Iraq invasion.

Here’s some of what Bacevich, a retired army colonel who teaches at Boston University, wrote as excerpted on Tomdispatch.com in 2005:

“[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.

“…Since 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.

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 in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, “looked like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. They were young, confident, and hardworking, and they went about their business with poise and élan.” A writer for Rolling Stone reported after a more recent and extended immersion in military life that “the Army was not the awful thing that my [anti-military] father had imagined”; it was instead “the sort of America he always pictured when he explained… his best hopes for the country.”

Author: Jim Lobe

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service's Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

36 thoughts on “Liz Cheney and Tom Friedman Agree: Give the US Military the Nobel”

  1. "Friedman is the media personality with the single greatest influence among party elites"

    I was wondering who actually read the guy. Now it all makes senes

  2. "..the most important peacekeepers in the world in the past century – the men and women of the U.S. navy, marines, army and air force",,

    And what a great job they've done keeping Americans safe from Canada and Mexico! Seriously had American politicians simply not broken the peace by declaring endless wars around the world the peace would have been kept just fine.

  3. Nowadys according to Americans politicians and media whores:
    War = Peace
    Lies =Truth
    Death=Life
    Occupation=Freedom
    Invasion=Libration
    Destruction of Nations=Nation Building
    ……

  4. “..But he has had time to make an impact on people such as Awal Khan, who might want to weigh in on Obama’s prize.

    Khan was serving as an artillery commander in the Afghan National Army away from his home in the eastern province of Khost on April 8, when U.S. forces came knocking. In a case of “wrong house,” they killed his 17-year-old daughter, Nadia, and his 15-year-old son, Aimal. They also killed his wife, a schoolteacher who taught villagers for free. They killed his brother and wounded another daughter.

    After she thought the dust had cleared, Khan’s cousin’s wife walked outside. She was nine-months pregnant. She took five shots to the stomach. Her fetus died, but she lived. She might have some thoughts on Obama as a man who “created a new climate,” as the Nobel committee claimed.

    U.S. military spokesman Colonel Greg Julian said the slaughtered family had no connection to U.S. enemies. “It was an unfortunate set of circumstances,” he said.

    ..There are thousands of less “important” people we could interview. We could talk to the families of 95 children reported killed in a U.S. attack on May 4 and 5 in western Farah province.

    “Washington keeps bombarding residential areas in the country without paying any attention to the objections,” said the May 7 editorial in Cheragh after the slaughter in Farah. Karzai is “sacrificing the people before the lords of the White House…. Can the US separate the people from the Taleban and Al Qa’idah, with the slogan that they are your killers and we are your saviours?! What a futile fancy and unrealizable ambitions.”

    Instead of blindly chasing hawks, Obama needs to listen to Afghan Parliamentarian Shukria Barakzai, who told the Christian Science Monitor that instead of sending 30,000 new troops, Obama should “send us 30,000 scholars… Or 30,000 engineers. But don’t send more troops — it will just bring more violence.”

    http://www.counterpunch.org/cooney10132009.html

  5. The US armed forces 'peace-KEEPers'? Only in a neocon's wettest dream.

    If they gave a Nobel prize for the application of Alfred's original idea, the US armed forces would be right up there – along with the Wehrmacht, the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces, the Red Army and to a lesser, but no less destructive extent, the IDF. America has rained death and destruction on more people since 1945 than any other 'force for good' on earth.

    If it makes Americans sleep better at night to know their sons and daughters are 'out east' disturbing the neighborhoods of people who have probably never heard of a 'neocons', then it might be time for America to get a wake-up.

    Militarism and 'war fighting' – their glorification, mythification, enthronement as a 'national virtue'; their remembrance, re-enactment and recreation in the modern world, are, aside from conspicuous and conscienceless consumption, the great flaws in the American character.

  6. I think it's crucial to understand that the most important alignment in the US today is not neocon versus liberal- instead, it's prowar versus antiwar.

    Forget Democrat versus Conservative- they're the war party- it's them against the rest. And of course there are very few elected politicians in the antiwar camp, but those that are display striking similarities in their speech: Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich speak of morality, honesty and the constitution; while the other side, represented by Friedman and Cheney, speak blood and nonsense.

    It's time we all discarded liberal and conservative labels and went to the core issue: all those in favor of remaking the world in the image of America at gunpoint are in that party. People who think that's insane are in ours.

    Left versus right is over. It's Death versus Life from now on.

    1. I completely agree. This whole liberal/conservative nonsense is nothing more than a sophisticated way for the leaders to control the people. They get us fighting with each other as Democrats and Republicans or "liberals" and "conservatives" while they go on their merry way. The two party system is the true opiate of the people.

  8. Give Tom Friedman and Liz Cheney the plexiglas belly-button award, so they can see where they are going, even tho' they have their heads up their wazoos.

    1. they perfectly understand that they are spewing nonsense. Don't be fooled by Friedman's Orwellian description of the U.S. military as "peace-keepers" – Mr. Friedman belongs to a class of people who lie like most people breathe and who are incapable of feeling shame for telling the biggest whopping obvious lies you could imagine. He is in the service of an agenda nothing more.

  11. Tom (“Suck on this”) Friedman and Liz Cheney are both I’ll-fight-to-the-last-drop-of-YOUR-blood chickenhawks. Neither of ’em could fight their way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.

    Friedman fights wars while standing at the cocktail bar. Liz Cheney inherited her bellicosity from her old man, the legendary chickenhawk “FIve Deferments Dick” Cheney.

  12. First Obama is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize–even as he is escalating the war against "Af-Pak" by sending tens of thousands of "support" troops there.

    And now Tom Friedman and Liz Cheney say give the US Military (the most powerful and destructive war machine in history) the Nobel Peace Prize!

    We are long past the realm of George Orwell.

    We are now entering some bizarre combination of Orwell, Bizarro World, Dr. Strangelove, the Twilight Zone, the Matrix, and your worst acid trip all mixed together.

    This is like a new unreality–something out of String Theory and its eleven dimensions of space-time.

    I always wanted to know what alternative universes and dimensions would look like.

  13. I believe that if someone took the time to research the subject, a strong correlation would be found between a decaying empire and and its pride in its military. Cheering a military parade, requires a conscious effort to disregard the associated stench of death and filth. If America’s “finest young people” are involved in slaughtering third world peasants for corporate and Zionist interests, then this speaks volumes regarding America’s goals and future.

  14. Question ought to be,why does the major media give a platform to these kooks?
    Liz Cheney is a nobody. Bush's dog could easily replace her and the general obtuse public wouldn't notice–yaap yaap yaaap!
    You would think that the media would have some shame in flogging again Tom Friedman 's B.S.

  15. The single subject that always united the librals and conservativs has alawys been their love,and loyalty for Israel above and beyond any thing else,and it is the same for Tom Friedman and Liz Cheney.

    Pakistan, Afghanistan threat to Israel: Israeli FM

    “He said Pakistan is nuclear and unstable, and Afghanistan is faced with a potential Taliban takeover, and the combination form a contiguous area of radicalism ruled in the spirit of Bin Laden.

    Lieberman is of the view that countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan are a threat not only to Israel, but to the global order as a whole”

    http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/pakistan,+afghanistan+threat+to+israel+israeli+fm-rs

  21. Friedman is a hypocrite … this is his 1999 view of how our "peacekeepers" should be used — e.g. let's use the military to terrorize a bunch of civilians.

    So, Friedman explained, “if NATO’s only strength is that it can bomb forever, then it has to get every ounce out of that. Let’s at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are ‘cleansing’ Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted.”

    He added: “Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too….”

    2. In the course of bombing Belgrade, the USAF also bombed the Chinese embassy. That's been forgotten in the USA, no doubt, but I doubt it's been forgotten here in China.

      1. It was one of the reasons Chinese students cheered when they heard about 9/11. But of course this is all lost on most Americans.

  23. “But 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…"

    A 2003 Veteran's Administration statistic found that 1 out of 3 female soldiers will be raped by their colleauges during their service. Is that one of the exceptions Friedman is talking about?

  24. "A 2003 Veteran's Administration statistic found that 1 out of 3 female soldiers will be raped by their colleauges during their service. Is that one of the exceptions Friedman is talking about?"

    If America's stormtroopers are raping their female counterparts at a 1/3 ratio, you can imagine what greater number of atrocities these rapists are committing against native Iraqi and Afghan women.

    So much for the USA advancing women's rights.

  25. Unfortunately, most soldiers are 18-19 year old boys without adult supervision, thinking mostly with the heads between their legs. Moreover, if parents tell their boys anything about sex, they sure don't tell them "when you're a soldier, DON'T RAPE THE WOMEN!"

  26. "the armed services,,,,,,looked like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life"…..

    What an obscene comment.

  27. “It was the cleverest protection racket since men convinced women that they needed men to protect them-if all the men vanished overnight, how many women would be afraid to walk the streets?
    ”
    http://tinyurl.com/6rgjwz

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