Peace, or just war?
"The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace." So said Barack Obama in Oslo last month as he accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Obama's speeches are increasingly remarkable. His announcement of the 30,000 surge of troops to Afghanistan was made at West Point military academy to a near all-white audience. With shades of George Bush, he evoked visions of the US's manifest destiny and made repeated references to 9/11 as the continued justification for war in Afghanistan. He could have come straight from the pages of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.