Obama Wins Nobel Liberal Popularity Contest

United States President Barak Hussein Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, a once prestigious prize that has been reduced to a popularity contest for European liberals. Along with some more worthy awardees, Obama joins a gallery of fools, phonies, violent communists and even a terrorist who have won the prize in recent decades.

The selection by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee of the new U.S. president also reflects a trend toward awarding recipients in the hope that they will achieve peace, instead of awarding those who have already achieved it.

The Nobel Committee’s announcement that it was awarding the Peace Prize to Obama was unusual because it contained numerous criticisms of another individual, namely former President George W. Bush, and by extension, the United States, none of which were necessary if Obama’s accomplishments were worthy of the award on their own merit. Instead, it appears as if the Committee awarded the Prize to Obama for representing a break with Bush’s policies, with which it sometimes did not agree.

In selecting Obama, the Nobel Committee pointed to Obama’s emphasis on diplomacy and his acceptance of the primacy of the United Nations. It welcomed Obama’s policies as changes from those of Bush, as if he did not support diplomacy or the U.N. Apparently, the fact that Bush did what the U.N was unwilling to do in order to enforce its own resolutions was interpreted by the Nobel Committee as a rejection of the primacy of the U.N.

Bush did, in fact, engage in diplomacy – through the U.N – in regard to Iraq. He had obtained a unanimous vote from the UN Security Council threatening Iraq with war for failing to fulfill its obligations under previous U.N resolutions to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction programs. I doubt that opponents of the Liberation of Iraq who complain about a lack of sufficient “diplomacy,” like the Nobel Committee, mean diplomacy between the U.S. and Saddam Hussein. They more likely mean diplomacy with the French and others at the time who lacked the willingness to back up their words and enforce U.N resolutions. In other words, these supporters of “diplomacy” mean that the U.S. should have agreed with those opponents who favored continuing weapons inspections upon which Iraq was cheating, while continuing economic sanctions, upon which Iraq was also cheating. Neither act, however, would have represented diplomacy, let alone resolved the crisis. For many liberals, especially European ones, the process is more important than the result. Moreover, Bush attained numerous diplomatic agreements with other states in regard to cooperation in the War on Terrorism. But when it better served U.S. interests, he bypassed the U.N and instead diplomatically gained unanimous support from NATO, such as in Afghanistan.

The Nobel Committee remarked that a leader only has authority when his leadership is based on the views of a majority, which is a typical liberal European view. A policy is neither right nor wrong based upon popularity, but upon whether it is moral and effective. Furthermore, majority vote of U.N. members would mean two things that hardly confer legitimacy: 1) weighing the vote of each member, no matter how small, as equal to that of the greatest powers and 2) weighing the votes of dictatorships that violate human rights as equal with those of representative democracies that respect human rights.

The Committee cited Obama’s encouragement of another round of negotiations between the Israelis and the Arabs even though no agreement is expected from the latest round. Apparently, the Committee, which never awarded the Peace Prize to President George W. Bush, gave Bush less credit for successfully mediating an end to the long, bloody civil war in Southern Sudan and successfully mediating a quick end to the Macedonian civil war before it escalated into a major regional conflict than to Obama for only initiating the latest round of peace talks on the Palestinian Question – something that every recent U.S. president has done.

Obama had expressed the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, which the Nobel Committee cited as a factor worthy of the Peace Prize. Every recent U.S. president has expressed similar thoughts. Apparently, President George W. Bush received less credit from the Nobel Committee for successfully negotiating nuclear weapons cuts with Russia than it gave Obama for only announcing his goal.

Finally, the Nobel Committee again contrasted Obama’s support for climate change policies with Bush’s policies. Liberals believe that climate change will lead to conflict. Apparently, Bush’s extraordinarily successful humanitarian efforts in Africa did not merit consideration.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been given to a number of undeserving awardees over the last quarter century:
Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu won the Peace Prize for his opposition to apartheid in South Africa, even though he refused to condemn the violent practices towards other blacks of the communist African National Congress; Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet dictator who tried to rescue communism, was awarded the Peace Prize for not invading Europe after the overthrow of communism there, as if he would have been reasonable to have done so; Terrorist Yassir Arafat shared the Prize with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after having made an agreement with Israel that he failed to keep and reverting to terrorism; Rigoberta Menchu, the Marxist opponent of the pro-American Guatemalan government, won the Prize based upon her autobiography, which was later exposed as containing false accusations of atrocities against that government, and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize for his support for human rights that has largely been unsuccessful, and for the deal he made on behalf of President Bill Clinton with North Korea’s Communist regime to eliminate its nuclear weapons program in return for generous aid, a deal it began to violate not long after Carter’s appeasement.

Conversely, George W. Bush is in good company with some of the people the Nobel Committee never deemed worthy of a Peace Prize, such as Ronald Reagan, who, as the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, “won the Cold War without firing a shot,” or Pope John Paul II the Great, for his successful nonviolent opposition to communism. The Nobel Committee would never have considered Bush for the Peace Prize for combating the scourge of terrorism.

Thankfully, the Nobel Committee made no mention of Obama’s role as a wartime president in Iraq or Afghanistan. To his credit, Obama defended his support for the Afghan War in his speech announcing his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, citing the danger to world peace represented by the enemy the U.S. is fighting there. It is a concern that the award will alter Obama’s decision-making as Commander in Chief in order to live up to the reputation – a result that some have speculated was the Committee’s purpose. We conservatives must continue to encourage Obama not to reject his generals’ proposal to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan in order to win the counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban so that they do not take that country over again and turn it back into a safe haven for al-Qaeda and other terrorists, or not to avoid the last-resort option of military force against Iran if it is necessary to prevent that terrorist-sponsoring regime from acquiring nuclear weapons.