Obama’s Afghanistan Policy?

Nobel Committee awards posthumous Nobel Peace Prize to Lyndon B. Johnson; also considers posthumous Peace Prize awards to Nixon and Stalin

After its recent decision to award the Nobel Prize to President Barack Obama for saying many peaceful things and then escalating an inherited war, the Committee undertook the enormous task of investigating which world leaders engaged in similar efforts may have been overlooked. This new program, entitled “Recognizing past heroes of peace,” recently announced that its first posthumous Nobel Peace Prize would be awarded to Lyndon Baines Johnson, for his valiant efforts to say peaceful things while engaged in an inherited war, and for his courageous, peaceful decision, in the face of mass protests, to continue throughout his term of office to escalate that war.

In support of this decision, the Committee noted how helpless then-President Johnson was in that he inherited a war not of his own making, and how he continued to say many things about wanting the war to end, and about how much he regretted sending young men off to die. The Committee also interviewed various family members and household employees to gain a sense of “Lyndon Johnson, The Peacemaker,” to ensure the integrity of the award. They have documented this investigation via such resounding testimonials as this one from the Johnson’s former personal secretary: “I can confidently say that I know of no instance in which Mr. Johnson ever beat his wife.”
Also on the list of prospective awardees are Richard Nixon, who inherited the same war and ultimately ended it after attempting valiantly to secure domestic peace by suppressing particularly raucous college student protests (such as the one at Kent State University in 1970), and Joseph Stalin, who, according to former Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, was a “great lover of peace, a man of giant stature who moulded, as few other men have done, the destinies of his age.” [March 6, 1953]

submitted by Ruth Kastner, rkastner@verizon.net