As President Obama drops bombs on a record-breaking seventh country, let’s look back to 2009 and remember what the Nobel committee said when it bestowed a Peace Prize upon him for simply existing. You’ll need a heart of stone to get through the second paragraph without laughing out loud.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.
Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.
Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.
For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”
Besides serving as an object lesson in the dangers of lowering your standards for nakedly political reasons, Obama’s Peace Prize illustrates the dangerous folly of his entire world-view. The real reason he got that prize is because the Nobel committee wanted to stick its thumb in George Bush’s eye. Five years later, after a series of disastrous blunders that set the world on fire, many of them based on Obama’s arrogant messianic view of himself, and his boundless faith in the power of his speechmaking, he’s come around to embracing Bush’s policies. In fact, he’s embraced something closer to the Left’s caricature of Bush’s policies. Bush most certainly was not a unilateral warmaker, but Obama absolutely is – he doesn’t even go through the motions of securing congressional approval, and his “international coalition” is a joke. And while the jury’s still out on nuclear proliferation – we’ll have to see what concessions are made to Iran to keep them in the right place on ISIS and Iraq – isn’t there more use of chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction than ever, what with ISIS and Bashar Assad gassing each other’s troops and civilian populations, and “red line” a phrase that can no longer be used in anything but a satirical context?
At great cost to America’s security and prestige around the world, Barack Obama finally grew up. I wonder if the Nobel committee has learned anything.
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