Obama defends war at Nobel Peace Prize ceremony

NORWAY: A humble President Barack Obama on Thursday joined a list of revered Nobel peace laureates, but in a steely speech he warned he would not hesitate to wage war if it was “morally justified.”

Obama acknowledged the odd paradox that he was being honoured as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a week after ordering 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan, but argued that sometimes peace could only be wrought through strength.

“I’m responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed,” Obama said, during a glittering ceremony in Oslo City Hall.

“So, I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict — filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.”

Obama’s elevation to a pantheon of winners alongside the likes of Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King came before he had even spent a year in office.

A day of celebrations in Oslo saw Obama and his wife Michelle Obama wave to a crowd from behind bullet proof glass, attend a sumptuous black tie banquet and meet Norway’s King Harald and Queen Sonja. But some Norwegians were upset that Obama cut short the normal three days of Nobel celebrations, citing a tangle of political woes back home.

There were also polite protests by an anti-nuclear group which marched through Oslo holding lighted torches, and appeared friendly to Obama, who has vowed to cut US and Russian atomic weapons stocks. In a separate demonstration, peace protestors took to the streets, chanting “Yes, Yes, Yes We Can, Stop the War in Afghanistan.” OSLO, Friday, AFP