Why Barack Obama Does NOT Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize

By
Peter Baofu, Ph.D.

What exactly has Barack Obama achieved for world peace to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009?

Polish President Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1983, bluntly said when asked about the decision to award Obama the peace prize: “So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far.” Rick Moran asked, in a news update by Charles Babington for the Associated Press (Oct. 09): “What's Obama done? What peace has he negotiated?”

The Economist, published in the U.K., also asked, in the Oct. 09 issue: “But is the award premature? Although the prize may be given in the spirit of encouraging Mr. Obama’s government, it might have been better to wait for more solid achievements.” Even Obama himself tried to calm down the gasps when he later confessed at the White House: “Let me be clear: I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments….To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be…honored by this prize.”

So why should the Nobel Peace Prize Committee award such a prize to a man who has made no concrete contribution to world peace so far (and has become the President of the United States only for the last few months)? And why should Obama accept the prize at all, if he sincerely believes that he does not deserve it as he said so himself?

The award decision is all the more shocking, when one realizes that some supporters of Obama secretly submitted the nomination application to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee sometime before the mandatory February 1, 2009 nomination deadline, that is, either even before Obama officially became the President of the United State or even before he had the chance to settle down in his job as the President of the United States, let alone any “concrete achievements in peacemaking” to claim, as Karl Ritter and others revealed in the Oct. 09 AP news update.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has its “official” explanation, however, in that the decision was made not on the basis of Obama’s concrete achievements in peacemaking (which he has none) but because of his rhetorical “inspirations” for a more peaceful world, as “Aagot Valle, a lawmaker for the Socialist Left party who joined the Nobel committee this year, said she hoped the selection would be viewed as 'support and a commitment for Obama'” - as reported in Ritter’s news update.

This official explanation by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, sadly speaking, is very disturbing, for two major reasons; the first is that Obama remains a war-making president, and the second is that the decision also raises serious questions about the ideological politics of the Norwegian Nobel Committee (and its dangerous consequences for world peace). Let me explain these two points below.

Firstly, the first point about the unconvincing official explanation by the Norwegian Nobel Committee is that Obama, in his presidency so far, is responsible for persistent violence (by the U.S. military) to Muslims in the Middle East, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Pakistan, just to cite four major examples - and, of course, the continued U.S. support of Israel against the Palestinians, especially in relation to the Hamas and the Hezbollah. I already went to great details to explain this in my previous article titled “The Silent Violence Behind 'Smart Power' in U.S. Foreign Policy.”

Many do not know that, as The Economist (published in the U.K.) pointed out in the Oct. 09 issue about the award decision, “Obama…remains a war president,” because of his policy for a “surge” in Afghanistan, his decision to remain occupying Iraq (with massive support troops stationed in numerous permanent U.S. military bases throughout that country, even after some U.S. troops are to leave, as part of the agreement arranged during the Bush administration), and his support of more “deadly counterterrorism strikes in Pakistan and Somalia” (with countless civilian deaths on a daily basis), as reported in Ritter’s news update.

It is no wonder that “the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki called the Nobel decision 'hasty'” and added that “the appropriate time for awarding such a prize is when foreign military forces leave Iraq and Afghanistan and when one stands by the rights of the oppressed Palestinian people” - and “Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi in Afghanistan condemned the Nobel committee's decision, saying Obama had only escalated the war and had 'the blood of the Afghan people on his hands,'” as reported in Ritter’s news update. And Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh for the Hamas thus said, in response to the award decision: “We are in need of actions, not sayings. If there is no fundamental and true change in American policies toward the acknowledgment of the rights of the Palestinian people, I think this prize won't move us forward or backward.”

The Nobel committee also cited Obama’s inspiration for a “nuclear-free world,” but this is also questionable, as Obama has been trying to stop Iran’s nuclear program while allowing Israel, the U.S. (and other allies) to possess most destructive nuclear weapons. His talk with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on the reduction of nuclear weapons does not diminish the American dominance in nuclear weapons, nor it is even clear when either side will “act on the reductions” of the nuclear weapons (many of which, by the way, are redundant and useless in the post-Cold War era), as reported in Ritter’s news update.