President Barack Obama gave a masterful speech in Oslo last week, addressing head on a major contradiction — that a war president was accepting the world's premier peace prize. But he worsened another contradiction. Commerce, he suggested, is a powerful antidote for war. In addition, he noted that commerce has helped lift billions from poverty.

He could not be more right — and more wrong. Commerce may indeed help fuel and sustain some conflicts. But far too many are actually caused by it, particularly in Africa. The tragic reality is that millions are essentially being killed by Western consumers. This happens as Western corporations remain complicit with the tens of thousands carats of diamonds and gold being mined under slave labor conditions.

Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech focused too much on the evils of war, and much less on the massive suffering and casualties caused by commerce-driven conflict. The speech focused primarily on the war against terrorism while conveniently staying away from conflicts, particularly in Africa, where Western capital is making a killing. In Africa, it is clear that conflict is driven by commercial greed and the profits of Western corporations that sell violently extracted high value minerals, resulting in tragic consequences.

While the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are driven in large part to defend and protect commercial interests, the wars in Africa are different. These African wars rank much lower in U.S. strategic and national security purposes and have received much less high level attention than the oil interests in Iraq and Central Asia.

Yet, these African conflicts have resulted in an estimated 5 million deaths since the late 1990s in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone.

In short, there has developed a two-tiered global response to conflicts. In the first tier, Western countries led by the United States have instigated wars to pursue governments and terrorists who threaten their access to vital resources like oil, particularly in the Middle East and in Central Asia. By contrast, the United States and most Western countries have stayed away from responding to resource conflicts in Africa, including those in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, even as Western companies continue to profit hugely from these wars. This has in effect created a second tier of responses that shows neither the resolve nor determination that has defined wars to ensure access to vital resources like oil in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The West benefits from this tepid response to African conflicts as much as it benefits from its aggressive use of force in the Middle East and Iraq. The primary beneficiaries of these conflicts are western companies, such as private military and security companies, banks, insurance companies and airlines, which are the pipeline of valuable minerals like diamonds to retail outlets in the West. Nascent efforts to regulate the market for blood diamonds, such as the Kimberley Transparency initiative, pale in comparison to the massive use of brute force against terrorism that is being conducted against the likes of al-Qaida in places like Afghanistan.

Obama's speech reflected the choices made by international institutions that allow commerce to continue to thrive in African conflicts while causing massive suffering, dislocation and wanton loss of life. This view of commerce as an antidote to war and conflict fails to address how illicit commerce is itself a threat to the very values that the President so vigorously and eloquently defended in his speech. For commerce to play the same role it has played to lift people out of poverty, more attention and resources must be devoted to the manner in which it has become an engine for resource wars in Africa.

James Gathii is an associate dean and professor of international Commercial Law at Albany Law School is author of "War, Commerce, and International Law.''