What do I think? It doesn’t matter what I think. As a fairly militant supporter of President Obama, I’m biased. Has he racked up a term’s worth of accomplishments? No. Has he changed the tone of world diplomacy radically for the better? Yes.
So I’m happy this news annoys rightists who’ve been painting Obama as Hitler-Stalin-Satan. I’m also happy it annoys leftists who’ve been painting him as a warmongering Bush-lite. Both views are equally nonsense, as the Nobel committee seems to have recognized.
Of the mounting pressure on Obama not to escalate troop levels in Afghanistan, I’m not sure what to say about it all. It could certainly be a quagmire, and I can see the argument that increased militarization doesn’t equal greater stability, perhaps far from it. On the other hand, the opposite of a troop surge is not “peace.”
CNN reporter Michael Ware noted not long ago on Bill Maher that the Taliban is not Al Qaeda, that it is not out to establish a transnational caliphate or anything of the sort. True enough, but it is trying to impose its will on Afghanistan and Pakistan and turn those countries into medieval dungeons. Such an outcome would in fact represent a security threat to the United States, in a way that Vietnam never, ever did. So enough with that cliché.
The Taliban, by the way, has officially taken responsibility for Monday’s bombing of the World Food Program in Islamabad. Today they continued their depravity with a mass slaughter of Muslims in a Peshawar market.
3 Comments
I'm a pretty die-hard Obama supporter myself, but I'm on the fence about this too. It's awfully hard to measure his accomplishments against those of, say, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, or even the presidential Nobel trifecta of TR, Wilson, and Carter, and not come up short.
But guess what? Here's the rare example wherein my opinion, yours, or anyone else's in America about what the president's done — and what he's thus earned — doesn't matter. It's Nobel and Norway's award to give, and their perceptions that matter.
Good to have some sound international responses on the issue of Obama and the Nobel prize. The crazyness displayed by the N-committee the last years with money to treeplanters and microfinance bankiers has been shifted towards the core concern of Nobel: Who has contributed the most to world peace the last year? comittee chair Jagland asked, and none could come up with a better name than the committee itself: Obama.
Outstanding is his speech and ACTION at the UN security councel when the vision of a nuclear-arms free world.Has been mentioned also: His dramatic changing of the international climate for negotiations, culture-relations, his meeting with the arab nations.
Yes, he is an orator. yes, he addresses dreams and hopes. But if you think that it doesn't matter who heads the mega state called the US of A, you must have been sleeping the last 9 years, if not 17.
I do take exception to the idea that only leaders of "mega states" merit the prize – it's precisely small, humble operators like Muhammad Yunus who are contributing a great deal with innovations like microfinance. To stabilize a developing economy is to help stabilize world politics, thus contributing to world peace. It's to the credit of the Nobel committee that they're alert to these connections.