The Nobel Prize, with an asterisk
Excerpt:
Despite the graciousness of his speech at the White House last Friday, President Barack Obama's acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize did have an air slightly reminiscent of Abe Lincoln's story about the man who was tarred, feathered and ridden out of town on a rail -- if it weren't for the honor of the thing, he'd just as soon walk.
Majority of Nobel jury 'objected to Obama prize'
Excerpt:
In a surprise move last Friday, the Nobel committee attributed the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama less than nine months after he had taken office.
The committee, appointed by the Norwegian parliament, honoured Obama for "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."
"The committee was unanimous," its influential secretary Geir Lundestad told AFP on Friday.
But Inger-Marie Ytterhorn, who represented the right-wing populist Progress Party on the committee, led the way in objecting to the choice of Obama because she questioned his ability to keep his promises, the newspaper said.
It also said the representative of the Conservative Party, Kaci Kullmann Five, and Aagot Valle, the representative of the Socialist Left, had objections.
The choice for Obama was however strongly supported by committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland and Sissel Roenbeck, both representatives of the Labour Party.
The Last Thing Obama Needs Is the Nobel Peace Prize
Excerpt:
At this moment, many Americans are longing for a President who is more bully, less pulpit. The President who leased his immense inaugural good will to the hungry appropriators writing the stimulus bill, who has not stopped negotiating health-care reform except to say what is nonnegotiable, whose solicitude for the wheelers and dealers who drove the financial system into a ditch leaves the rest of us wondering who has our back, has always shown great promise, said the right things, affirmed every time he opens his mouth that he understands the fears we face and the hopes we hold. But he presides over a capital whose day-to-day functioning has become part travesty, part tragedy; wasteful, blind, vain, petty, where even the best-intentioned reformers measure their progress with teaspoons. There comes a time when a President needs to take a real risk - and putting his prestige on the line to win the Olympics for his hometown does not remotely count.
Compare this to Greg Mortenson, nominated for the prize by some members of Congress, whom the bookies gave 20-to-1 odds of winning. Son of a missionary, a former Army medic and mountaineer, he has made it his mission to build schools for girls in places where opium dealers and tribal warlords kill people for trying. His Central Asia Institute has built more than 130 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan - a mission which has, along the way, inspired millions of people to view the protection and education of girls as a key to peace and prosperity and progress.
Want Peace? Give a Nuke the Nobel
Excerpt:
During the 31 years leading up to the first atomic bomb, the world without nuclear weapons engaged in two global wars resulting in the deaths of an estimated 78 million to 95 million people, uniformed and civilian. The world wars were the hideous expression of what happens when the human tendency toward conflict hooks up with the violent possibilities of the industrial age. The version of this story we are most familiar with is the Nazi death machinery, and we are often tempted to think that if Hitler had not happened, we would never have encountered assembly-line murder.
The truth is that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I, when Hitler was just another corporal in the Kaiser's army. By World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge that the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million or 78 million — somewhere in there.
So when last we saw a world without nuclear weapons, human beings were killing one another with such feverish efficiency that they couldn't keep track of the victims to the nearest 15 million. Over three decades of industrialized war, the planet averaged about 3 million dead per year. Why did that stop happening?
Is it because people no longer found reasons to fight? Hundreds if not thousands of wars, small and large, have been fought since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Is it because nations and tribes found a conscience regarding mass death? Clearly not — the slaughter in China during the Cultural Revolution, in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and in Rwanda between Hutu and Tutsi all offer bloody proof. Is it the U.N.? Um, no. Is it globalism and the web of commerce that increasingly connects the interests of the major powers? Yes, that certainly has an impact. But the global economy is a creation of the nuclear age. Major powers find ways to get along because the cost of armed conflict between them has become unthinkably high.
A world with nuclear weapons in it is a scary, scary place to think about. The industrialized world without nuclear weapons was a scary, scary place for real. But there is no way to un-ring the nuclear bell. The science and technology of nuclear weapons is widespread, and if nukes are outlawed someday, only outlaws will have nukes.
Commentary: Obama's prize doesn't 'feel right'
Excerpt:
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned or just plain old, but when I awoke this morning to news that Barack Obama had been selected to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, something didn't feel right.
Having worked for six secretaries of state and four presidents and watched them struggle with a cruel and unforgiving world, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, it occurred to me that today's announcement was seriously out of whack.
A young president, barely in the 10th month of his first year in office, is receiving an internationally sanctioned peace prize when the vast majority of his predecessors, some of whom actually achieved extraordinary success in foreign policy (Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush), did not.
Teddy Roosevelt, who was the first American president to receive a Nobel in 1906, actually brokered a Russo-Japanese treaty; Woodrow Wilson, whose search for a League of Nations got him the prize in 1919, probably accelerated his later stroke and death in a heroic effort to realize his dream. Even Jimmy Carter, who eventually got his prize in 2002, didn't get it when it was warranted in 1979 for brokering an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.
What was happening here? Was this the Nobel committee's down payment, in an effort to encourage the president to actually achieve something in foreign policy?
Was it a not-so-subtle slap-down of the Bush administration's war presidency in favor of the Obama administration's "we can fix things and be loved by the world" strategy? Or was I just missing something? Had the president's accomplishments merited the award?
Nobel Committee's Decision Courts Controversy
Excerpt:
"So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far," former Polish President Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, said Friday. "He is still at an early stage."
Issam al-Khazraji, a day laborer in Baghdad, said of Obama: "He doesn't deserve this prize. All these problems -- Iraq, Afghanistan -- have not been solved ... man of 'change' hasn't changed anything yet."
Liaqat Baluch, a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a conservative religious party in Pakistan, called the award an embarrassing "joke."
...
"It would be wonderful if I could think why he won," said Claire Sprague, 82, a retired English professor as she walked her dog in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. "They wanted to give him an honor I guess, but I can't think what for."
