Donald Trump Asked Shinzo Abe Nominate Him For The Nobel Peace Prize: Asahi Shinbun

For all the derision, hate and attempts to erase the Presidency of Barrack Obama by Donald Trump and his army of Mini Me's. Isn't it interesting that he, Donald Trump seeks the same recognition and acceptance of world leaders, major international organizations and decision makers that was afforded President Obama.   So, the worlds most powerful political leader, a person so needed and insecure that he requires his staff to provide him with aa daily round-up of news which portrays him in the most positive manner sought out and asked Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize for his supposed diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea over the dismantling of its nuclear arsenal.  Even though no such agreement exists. 

   Acceding to a request from Washington, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominated U.S. President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize around autumn for engaging with North Korea, Japanese government sources said Feb. 16.

According to the sources, the U.S. government "informally" asked Tokyo to nominate Trump after he met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June, the first-ever summit between the two countries.

At a news conference in the White House on Feb. 15, Trump revealed that Abe gave him a copy of a five-page letter the prime minister sent to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the prize.

The deadline for nominating candidates for the prize is February every year. College professors and members of the parliament in each country, as well as former Nobel laureates, are eligible to recommend candidates.

Obama picking his targets in Iraq and Syria while missing the point

by Andrew Bacevich

Opinions Sep. 16, 2014 - 07:05AM JST 

“We are now living in what we might as well admit is the Age of Iraq,” New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks recently wrote. There, in the Land of the Two Rivers, he continued, the United States confronts the “core problem” of our era - “the interaction between failing secular governance and radical Islam.”
Brooks is wrong. For starters, he misconstrues the core problem - which is a global conflict pitting tradition against modernity.
Traditionalists, especially numerous in but not confined to the Islamic world, cling to the conviction that human existence should be God-centered human order. Proponents of modernity, taking their cues from secularized Western elites, strongly prefer an order that favors individual autonomy and marginalizes God. Not God first, but we first - our own aspirations, desires and ambitions. If there’s a core problem afflicting global politics today, that’s it.
This conflict did not originate in nor does it emanate from Iraq. So to say that we live in the Age of Iraq is the equivalent of saying we live in the Age of Taylor Swift or the Age of Google. The characterization serves chiefly to distract attention from more important matters.
To the limited extent that we do live in the Age of Iraq, it’s because successive U.S. presidents have fastened on that benighted country as a place to demonstrate the implacable onward march of modernity.
For the 20 years between 1991 and 2011 - the interval between Operation Desert Storm and the final withdrawal of U.S. forces after a lengthy occupation of Iraq - Washington policymakers, Republican and Democratic, relied on various forms of coercion to align Iraq with American expectations of how a country ought to run.

 Andrew Bacevich is a professor at Boston University and a retired U.S. Army Colonel