My thoughts on Obama’s Nobel are simple. It is all about Israel/Palestine and it is a good thing. It is an effort by the northern Europeans to give Obama political capital to put pressure on Israel. Period. Is it premature? Who cares. The Nobel people are trying to effect history. I hope they are effective. Obama secretly believes what Walt and Mearsheimer and Brzezinski and Carter say. He doesn’t have the political ability to say so. The Israel lobby has him chained to a radiator.
The Prize’s political resonance as an Israel/Palestine event can be glimpsed in two media responses yesterday. First, Andrea Mitchell (who is Jewish and married to Alan Greenspan, who said the Iraq war was about oil, which is very misleading) said on NBC Nightly News that the Nobel had been given to controversial figures in the past, including Jimmy Carter. This is an outrageous statement, and a smear. It makes me wonder whether Mitchell is a closet Zionist. (Yes I know, I wonder that about everyone.) Jimmy Carter won the prize, in 2002, partly because of the greatest achievement in peacemaking in the Middle East by the U.S., the Camp David accord of 1978. Yes it sold out the Palestinians, and Carter would make up for that problem through later efforts. Still, it was an international break through. To say he was controversial is pure slimeball reflection of the lobby’s rage at Jimmy Carter for his recent books in support of Palestinian human rights.
The second appearance was by David Brooks on NPR’s All Things Considered. I think David Brooks is a wonderful columnist. He’s smart and comfortable and insightful. He also hides the strength of his Jewish attachments. I have never heard him so angry as he was on this occasion. He mocked Obama, saying he should have gotten all five prizes this year, and said the prize was a "travesty." Then words to the effect that no one cares what "five guys in Norway" say about our foreign policy. The use of the street language, "five guys in Norway," from a columnist who is usually more dignified in his prose, was jarring.
Brooks said twice that the prize should go to the Iranian dissidents. The Iranian dissidents, who have even less of a track record than Obama (but yes more bravery, a lot of them).
Why is Brooks injecting Iran into this, repeatedly? Because he knows this is about pressure on Israel. He wants us to look at the real enemy, Iran.
This is a primal struggle in our politics, that the media never cover. It was what the McCain-Obama race was all about, whether we would put any pressure on Israel.
Brooks is, as he uncharacteristically admitted some months back, "gooey-eyed" about Israel, a country he has visited a dozen times. This is sorrowfully the essence of the neoconservative engagement in our politics, concern about Israel. And it was this as much as anything that the Nobel committee was recognizing: Obama ran as an antiwar candidate, having struck an anti-Iraq stance in ’02, and defeated two powerful inside pro-war candidates, both of them supported by neocons and their cousins the liberal hawks. That was a revolution in American politics, the end of the neocons. It is slow to be felt here, yes, because the Establishment is still possessed by the likes of David Brooks and Andrea Mitchell.
