It is amusing hearing disaffected liberal Democrats struggle to understand how President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize squares with his Afghan war strategy, which entails sending 30,000 more troops to the troubled region. These detractors seem to think that there is an inherent contradiction between fighting for peace and waging war against violent extremists.
This false paradox is emblematic of the Nobel Prize Committee's sophomoric world view: war is never justified and peace is achieved through handshakes, smiles and concessions. According to this world view, Neville Chamberlain should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938 and Winston Churchill should have been denounced as a war monger.
Over the course of history, hundreds of millions of people were slaughtered (and continue to be slaughtered) by tyrants. In cases where these tyrants were finally stopped, war, not peace, was the primary instrument of deterrence. It is staggeringly ignorant to uphold pacifism as an absolute good, for pacifism in the face of violence being waged by a tyrant is tantamount to sanctioned mass suicide.
The merits of the Afghanistan War are debatable, but what is not debatable, is that war is sometimes necessary to achieve peace. Free and noble men have for centuries taken up arms against tyrants and murderers, thereby saving and liberating millions of people. Had they instead chosen peace and compromise, men like Hitler would have slaughtered masses with impunity. It is therefore intellectually naive to contend that any leader who escalates a war is by definition not advancing peace, and any leader who veers away from armed conflict is a peacemaker.
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Did you hear anyone talk about Nobel Peace Prize when Obama attacked Libya? How about when he decided to keep Gitmo open? or how about when he shot an unarmed bin Laden (unless you think torturing "innocent, untried" terrorists is worse penalty than death)
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