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 Barack Obama has conceded he is an unworthy recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and he appears determined to make the least of the award, surely one of the world’s most prestigious. Obama, who accepted the award today in Oslo, Norway, reportedly angered a good many Norwegians by canceling many of the appearances the Nobel Laureate traditionally makes on the day the prize is formally presented. According to the British newspaper, the Guardian, “Norwegians are incensed by what they view as (Obama’s) shabby response to the prize by cutting short his visit.”
According to a poll published in the daily newspaper VG, 44 percent of Norwegians believe it was rude of Obama to cancel a scheduled lunch with King Harald, while 34 percent said it was acceptable. Other events cancelled by the White House include a dinner with the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a press conference, a television interview, appearances at a children’s event promoting peace, a concert and a visit to an exhibition in his honor at the Nobel Peace Centre. The president is still scheduled to meet Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and the Norwegian royal family before receiving his medal at a midday ceremony. He will deliver his acceptance speech at a banquet tonight.
"Of all the things he is cancelling, I think the worst is cancelling the lunch with the king," said Siv Jensen, the leader of the largest party in opposition, the populist Progress party. "This is a central part of our government system. He should respect the monarchy," she told VG. Obama will see the king on his visit to the royal palace.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the peace prize, dismissed the criticism. "We always knew that there were too many events in the programme. Obama has to govern the US and we were told early on that he could not commit to all of them," said Geir Lundestad, secretary of the committee.
Obama, who was said to be working the final draft of his acceptance speech on the flight to Norway, planned to address the irony of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize while escalating the war in Afghanistan with the addition of 30,000 troops, the White House said. In fact Obama receives the prize at a time when he is waging war in three countries — Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — that have not attacked the United States. While he inherited the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the latter spilling over into Pakistan, when he took office in January of this year, Obama announced the increase in troop level in Afghanistan just last week. He announced plans to begin drawing down forces by mid-2011, but it remains uncertain just how long, U.S., British and NATO forces will be fighting al Qaeda, Taliban and other insurgents in that country. Unmanned U.S. bombers, known as predator drone planes, have been striking at suspected rebel targets in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, frequently killing innocent civilians in the process.
Obama was an early critic of the Iraq War, launched by President George W. Bush in March of 2003. Obama, then a state Senator in Illinois, began speaking out against the Bush war plans in 2002, opposing the idea of going to war with the Iraqi nation, then ruled by Saddam Hussein over that nation’s alleged cache of “weapons of mass destruction” and its violation of numerous United Nations resolutions. The U.S. and allied invasion succeeded in short order in defeating Iraq’s defense forces, overthrowing the government and establishing a new regime, subject to democratic election. But the alleged weapons of mass destruction were never found.
Compared to the Iraq invasion, which many of its supporters conceded was a “war of choice,” Obama has called Afghanistan “the necessary war,” begun in response to the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. The al Qaeda perpetrators had bases and training camps in Afghanistan and the Taliban government then ruling the country was harboring and giving safe haven to al Qaeda, U.S. officials said. A U.S.-led invasion, begun in October, 2001, ousted the Taliban regime and has waged war for the past eight years on both the Taliban and al Qaeda. Most of the al Qaeda that have not been killed or captured have apparently fled the country. According to some seemingly knowledgeable sources, there are now no more than 100 al Qaeda left in the country.
Perhaps the greater irony, however, is that the Nobel committee elected Obama as this year’s recipient within days of his taking the oath of office as President of the United States on January 20 of this year. In May, when Obama delivered the commencement address at Arizona State University, the school declined to award the commencement speaker the usual honorary degree because, said a university spokesman “His body of work is yet to come.”
Only three other sitting U.S. Presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was awarded to Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, the year after he brought Japanese and Russian officials together at a peace conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire to negotiate a treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War. Woodrow Wilson received the prize in 1919, following the end of World War I and the Treaty Of Versailles, neither of which made the world as safe for democracy as the president had prophesied. Former President Jimmy Carter received the award in 2002 for his many peace missions and humanitarian works.
Many politically controversial figures have been winners of the prize, including civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who won the award in 1964, when King’s crusade for desegregation and racial equality was still a hotly contested issue in America. But King, who later became a vocal critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, preached non-violence in civil rights boycotts, protests and demonstrations. Others who have received the award, including Yasser Arafat in 1994, have not noticeably been apostles of non-violence. Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho were named co-winners in 1973, after they negotiated a peace agreement to end the Vietnam War. Tho, however, respectfully declined the honor, pointing to the inconvenient but undeniable fact that the fighting was still going on in South Vietnam, the peace agreement notwithstanding.
When the award was announced in October, the White House said the president would donate the $1.4 million cash prize to charity. Obama, who has described the award as “a call to action” may yet prove the Nobel committee prophetic in its choice. But in promoting peace, as in other endeavors, his “body of work” is as Arizona State University declared, “yet to come.” The president apparently agrees. In what should win some kind of prize for understatement, the Guardian noted the following:
“A White House official said that it was not necessarily an award that Obama would have given himself.” Still one can at least imagine a stranger award. The Nobel committee could have, back in the mid-1960’s, awarded the prize to President Lyndon Johnson while he was fighting a war in Vietnam and invading the Dominican Republic. Then what would the antiwar demonstrators have said?
“Hey, hey, LBJ! What peace prize did you win today?”
Jack Kenny is a freelance writer living in New Hampshire. Send him an email at jkenny2@netzero.com.
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