Barry's Booby Prize

While the media look at the significance of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize being awarded both to Indian children's rights activist Kailash Satyarthi and to Malala Yousafzai, the brave Pakistani girl who campaigns for the right of women and girls to an education, I am looking back at the 2009 recipient of that prize . . . that would be our current President.  

You know, the one who just brought the U.S. Air Force into the Islamic State War.

Awk-ward!

Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize because he came to office promising to end the Iraq War and to end the war in Afghanistan, and to try to use diplomacy, not military might, to settle international differences.  But even as combat troops are preparing to leave Afghanistan (where they finally have a new president as well as a national manager, not unlike the setup in a municipal government in the U.S., after negotiations between the two chaps who vied to succeed Hamid Karzai) , and even though the war in Iraq ended nearly three years ago, the Islamic State has started a new war by seizing territory for a new caliphate, and Obama has had to resort to bombing people to stop it.  It reminds me of that old Monty Python line about starting a war for peace, only it's not very funny.  As much as people are tired of having the nation on a permanent war footing, Obama has recommitted the United States to it.  The next President will either be a Republican or Hillary Clinton, so we can forget about Obama's successor getting us out of permanent war.

In fact, after seeing all of these underground security and military bunkers and high-tech training centers on "60 Minutes" in their War on Terror stories, I don't think I'll ever live to see such a lofty, admirable, and impossible objective.

After all, as Obama himself said (on "60 Minutes"), when the world needs help to fight bad guys, they call us, not Moscow or Beijing, and certainly not London or Brussels.  You think the European Union has subterranean anti-terrorist defense command centers the size of several football fields with big computer screens and data processing systems under freakin' Brussels?     

Like it or not, we're the world's police department.  Because we're the ones with all the weapons.

Not exactly a formula for peace.  I don't even think we need all of this weaponry to be safe.  But it's obvious that we're not going to get much peace for awhile. :-(