Writes a friend: Obama strangles the Goldstone report, sides consistently with the colonizer (see, for example, the cave on settlements and silence on Gaza), and gets the Nobel Peace Prize nine months into office. He’s given some reasonable speeches and not been George W. Bush. It doesn’t make good sense to me.
The committee said he was, in part, being awarded because of his support for nuclear disarmament. Yet as Mondoweiss reported, when Helen Thomas asked him about Israel’s nukes he said he didn’t care to speculate. And more recently they indicated they were going to let it ride (Eli Lake has reported on this site). That’s not leadership. It’s taking the path of least resistance.
They had to sneak it in before he sends 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Clausewitz should have said peace is the continuation of war by other means.
The prize clearly had nothing to do with Obama. Manifestly, it’s purely and simply an as-loud-as-possible repudiation of George Bush.
The awarding of the peace prize this early in the game is based on hope: hope that he won’t escalate the war in Afghanistan, hope that he’ll persevere in his attempts to bring peace to Israel-Palestine. They know the warmongerers have his ear and are twisting his arm in the direction of perpetual war; they are appealing to his idealism by demonstrating that the people of the world are expecting great things from him. It’s an attempt to influence his decision-making in the right direction.
Exactly.
But it will fail and in the process brand the Nobel Peace Prize as a travesty.
I was suprised as well. He doesn’t have significant accomplishments yet.
Its a sign of how few accomplishments in reconciliation are occurring in the world these days, very few actual accomplishments.
Wow. I’m finding myself in agreement with you.
I think the prize was a misguided attempt to encourage the president to do more for peace, not to reward him for anything he did. To work for peace, the president will have to do more than simply commission flowery speeches. It’s just so incomprehensible that an administration that is thinking of expanding one war and wading into another can be awarded a Peace Prize. I’m going to need a few days of therapy and Scotch.
But, on the judgement of Obama’s “failures”, they are premature.
It is a “GO” game. You can’t tell confidently, even sometimes at the end.
This is funny:
Why Obama Deserves the Prize: Wangari Maathai and Muhammad Yunus
link to news.yahoo.com
=Inspire Africans to emigrate to the US?
Hey they have given the prize to M Begin, Y Arafat and our own H Kissinger, that architect of secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia who opened the door for the Kmer Rouge. It don’t mean a thing.
The Nobel Peace Prize has long been used as an attempt to shape outcomes – usually to no avail. It is no different this time. The European intelligentsia is seeking to keep Obama on his stated path putting diplomacy first. Of course it is a repudiation of the neocon policies of Bush.
Which would be nice if, you know, Europeans maybe noticed that Obama isn’t the embodied repudiation of the neocon policies of Bush. Gitmo is still open and Baghrim is still going strong; Obama claims we no longer torture but won’t pursue the criminals who have, which basically puts us right where we were when Bush stated boldly that America doesn’t torture; the Patriot Act is in full effect; Predator drones still routinely slaughter civilians at a rate of dozens or more for every militant we actually kill; our puppets in the provisional Iraqi and Afghani governments still receive our support, above board for sure and quite possibly under the table as well; Haliburton, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, KBR and Xe-formerly-Blackwater still collect billions in government money to perpetrate all manner of crimes and frauds; and Israel still gets to bulldoze homes, build Jewish-exclusive gated communities and trample any Palestinian who gets in the way, and there’s no crime against humanity too heinous that we aren’t willing to shield.
So what’s changed, effectively?
Too bad George Orwell is dead! You’d think a person has to at least attempt to make peace with someone in order to win the Nobel Peace Prize! I guess the golden child’s lifelong practice of failing upwards continues. They might as well have given him the prize for economics at the same time. Is it just me, or is Obama’s life starting to take on a Forest Gump quality?
This is starting to become more like the Nobel Booby Prize, isn’t it?
Just to clarify, I said “stated path” and as many have pointed out, there’s been a lot of talk but he yet walkin’ the walk
So finally – Barack Husein Obama did beat Dr. Ahmadinejad on this not “so noble” plateform, eh! However, Ahmadinejad may take pride in the praise he recieved from the son of one of the two founders of the state of Israel – Gilad Atzmon:
“It is pretty much impossible to deny the fact that Ahmadinejad’s take on the holocaust and Israel is coherent, consistent and valid. He seems to have three main issues with the narrative:
1. Around sixty Million died in WWII, the vast majority of them were innocent civilians. How is it, asks Ahmadinejad, that we insist to concentrate on the particularity of the suffering of one ‘very’ specific group of people i.e. the Jews?
2. The Iranian president rightly maintains that this historical chapter must be historically examined. This would mean as well that every event in the past should be subject to scrutiny, elaboration and revision. “If we allow ourselves to question God and the Prophets, we may as well allow ourselves to question the holocaust.”
3. Regardless of the truthfulness of the holocaust, it is not a trivial fact that the suffering of the Jews in Europe had nothing to do with the Palestinian people. Hence, there is no reason for the Palestinians to pay for crimes committed by others. If some Western Leaders feel guilty for crimes committed against the Jews by their ancestors, which they seem to claim, they better allocate some land for the Jews within their territories rather than expect the Palestinians to keep upholding the Zionist murderous burden. ”
link to rehmat1.wordpress.com
The prize as seen by Italian cartoonist Vauro: link to ilmanifesto.it
Just an interesting parallel on another site to the Nobel won by Gorbachev: will Obama also preside over the disintegration of an empire?