Much as I respect and admire President Obama, I cannot agree with the Nobel Peace Prize committee (or whatever name they go by) this year in awarding Obama this year's Nobel Peace Prize. According to news articles, he received this award because of his aims and direction. This just makes a laughing stock of the whole process. Imagine a physicist receiving a Nobel Prize in physics because he was "aiming" to find the Grand Unification Theory" or GUT which has so far evaded detection. Or a doctor receiving the Prize for finding (well, meaning to anyway) a cure for the common cold. There are many more good intentions than there are successful achievments.
There may have been no one else for the award. Big deal, don't award it this year.
I posted this on Jessica's Facebook, but I'll put it here too.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we're looking at it wrong. The pease prize was given to Yasir Arafat and Yitzak Rabin for no longer fighting each other. A similar one went to Mandela and de Klerk the year before.
The point I'm trying to get at is that I think we underestimate how frightening Bush's policies were to the rest of the world. For the most part we all saw ... Read Morethis from a U.S. perspective where we believed our wars were justified, but from an international perspective we were a superpower without any restraint. We bombed who we pleased and didn't care what anyone else thought about it. There was no clear sign of where that would end (we briefly invaded Turkey, one of our allies) and no clear idea of who would stand up to us if we decided Europe was a threat. The international community may not have simply hated Bush, they may have been terrified of him. And from Stolkholm his administration may have seemed like the scariest thing since the cuban missile crisis.
In that light, a new president who makes efforts to work through diplomacy and put limits on our unilateral actions may honestly seem like the biggest step towards peace in a long time. So while I tend to agree that the prize is at least premature from an American viewpoint, it may look much less so from a Swedish one.
Very well stated, Arnold.
ReplyDeleteThen should not have prize gone to the American people? Then again if he donates to the Treasury then it did.
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