Obama should lose Nobel Peace Prize

MOSCOW/NEW YORK. — US President Barack Obama should be stripped of his Nobel Peace Prize if the United States carries out a military strike on Syria, Alexei Pushkov, head of the Russian parliament’s International Affairs Committee, said yesterday.“If the United States attacks Syria without UN approval, the global community should demand that the Nobel Committee strip Obama of his peace prize,” the senior lawmaker wrote on his Twitter page.

He added that the United States did not have the right to speak on behalf of NATO or the global community.
“The United Kingdom’s refusal to support aggression against Syria is a serious blow to the arguments of (armed intervention) supporters in both Nato and the US,” Pushkov wrote.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron suffered a historic defeat in a vote on Syrian intervention on Thursday, when the UK parliament voted down a motion calling for a “strong humanitarian response” to the two-year civil war. Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” according to a statement on the prize’s website.

Activist site RootsAction.org has gathered nearly 24 000 signatures on a petition to revoke Obama’s peace prize because “his increasing intervention in Syria promises the loss of even more than the nearly 100,000 lives already needlessly sacrificed.”

Meanwhile, United States Secretary of State John F. Kerry made a forceful case yesterday for US military intervention in Syria, saying that US intelligence has information pinning responsibility for last week’s chemical weapons attack squarely on the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

In a speech at the State Department, Kerry said that for three days before the August 21 attack, the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons personnel “were in the area, making preparations” for the strike. He also said that “regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks” and taking other precautions.

And he said US intelligence knows that the rockets containing the poison gas were launched only from “regime-controlled areas.”
The attack killed more than 1,400 Syrians, including 426 children, Kerry said.

“The American people are tired of war,” Kerry said, adding that he is also. “But fatigue does not absolve us of our responsibility.” He said that “history would judge us all extraordinarily harshly” if the United States does not respond to the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government.

Kerry spoke after French President Francois Hollande said yesterday that his country is prepared to act in Syria despite Britain’s surprise rejection of military action, potentially making a nation that turned its back on Washington during the war in Iraq the primary US ally in a possible strike against Syrian forces. — RIA Novosti/Washington Post.