Is Obama's Nobel a shade premature?

Fri, Feb 10 2012

Fri, Oct 09 2009 13:45 CET byGabriel Hershman 6567 Views 18 Comments

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US president Barack Obama passes by a battered United Nations flag that flew over the bombed Canal Hotel in Iraq at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, September 23 2009.

Photo: Kevin Lamarque

US president Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. In its citation, the Nobel Jury said that the US president had won the award "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples".

The committee added that "Mr 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," the committee said.

In other words, Obama won because his name is not George W Bush. In nine months in office, Obama simply has not had time to effect major changes, hence the intangible nature of the woolly-worded salute.

Other top contenders for the prize – the Nobel committee received a record 205 nominations this year – included French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Zimbabwe's prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai. French-Colombian activist and ex-hostage Ingrid Betancourt, Jordanian interfaith dialogue advocate Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, Colombian peace broker Piedad Cordoba and Afghan rights activist Sima Samar had also been in the running.

The last American president to win such an accolade was Jimmy Carter in 2002, having helped broker the Egypt-Israel peace deal in 1978 while he was president. The actual winners that year (1978) were president Sadat of Egypt and prime minister Menachem Begin of Israel. Begin was a rather controversial choice (the anti-Zionist lobby used to relish describing him as "a terrorist" who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem).

Perhaps even more controversial was PLO chairman Yasser Arafat's victory in 1994, shared jointly with Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres and Israel prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. (Sadly, Rabin was assassinated the following year). Given Arafat's natural proclivity towards violence, that raised a few eyebrows. Some people joked at the time that the way the Nobel Peace Prize was going, you had to be a murderer first in order to win it!

Obama's victory may not reap much kudos at home, where his health reforms are proving controversial and the 's' word is being freely bandied about. (In America for a politician to be considered a socialist is a living death).

We all project onto Obama what we want to see. It's like when we fall in love, we have a tendency to invest in that person all kinds of qualities we imagine they possess. It's only later that we come to reflect on whether this paragon of virtue was real or imagined. What is for sure is that people so far have liked Obama's softer rhetoric, conciliatory tone and nice smile.

It's also too early to say how this translates in real turns. Although Obama has held preliminary talks with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, the Middle East is still a quagmire. Iran and North Korea still have nuclear aspirations and America still occupies Afghanistan and Iraq.

I've already noted that the last president to win this award was Jimmy Carter. Although Carter's period out of office has been hailed by the political establishment as a model of reconciliation and decency, Carter's presidency itself was seen as incompetent and lacklustre. He was also a one-term president. No doubt Obama will be hoping that he can avoid the same fate. But let's remember the old adage: One man's peacemaker is another man's appeaser.