A Nobel Peace Prize for Obama - The Nerve

What’s to be done about the descent into the world of non-sequiturs in which so many on the right and some on the left engage? The amount of time dissecting every issue great and small only diminishes the ability of most people to make sense of their world and the politics that surround it.

One of the more outrageously eye-popping discussions occurred between Bill O’Reilly and Brit Hume of Fox News during which they skewered the NY Times for being biased. That requires a heady dose of chutzpah since the members of the Fox team are gifted right-wing shills and “fair and balanced” seems to embrace every possible nuance of Republican thought and the most conservative aspects of the party’s agenda. O’Reilly emphasized the paper’s leftie editorial slant even though David Brooks is one of its columnists and, for one painful year, so was the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol.

And adding to the clamor over the recent award of a Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, conservative writer Ross Douthat added his critical analysis in a Times editorial, just the other day - - 10/12/09. He said Obama should refuse the award, and cited others he felt would be more deserving, a list that included dissidents in Vietnam, China and Zimbabwe. Who, in any case, would care if he snubbed “five obscure Norwegians?” So the “leftie” NY Times editorial pages actually allowed the relatively obscure Douthat to have at the president for accepting the award.

The flap about the Peace Prize has elicited opinions from Liz Cheney to Tom Friedman and consumed lots of newsprint and talk-show chatter. Cheney, her father’s female clone, claimed that the people of America aren’t concerned about how the rest of the world perceives us; they care about being strong and developing policies that advance this country’s interests. She thinks the mother of a fallen soldier should accept the award. As one of those American people, she doesn’t speak for me.

In a similar vein Friedman opined that the president’s acceptance should be on behalf of “the men and women of the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps - - the most important peace keepers in the world for the last century,” NY Times, 10/10/09. One is inclined to ask whether our incursions into Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan actually qualify as peace-keeping missions or, as they are usually described, wars.

Similarly Face the Nation’s Bob Schieffer said the Nobel Committee had done Obama “no favors” by awarding him the medal in advance of any substantive accomplishments. But perhaps the most virulent and over-the-top comments were those of Peggy Noonan, former presidential speech writer and current Wall Street Journal columnist who called the prize “a wicked and ignorant award, this mischievous honor...” Noonan, who always has an odd take on things, detailed the accomplishments of American inventors, pretty much leaving the impression that this country’s creative genius had empowered the world and that by killing the killers in wartime we promoted peace in the long run.  She was right about one thing, though, one of the compelling reasons for choosing President Obama to receive its Peace Prize might have been the fact that he isn’t Bush.

The thing is that, while President Obama hasn’t achieved middle-east peace, brokered agreements with Iran and North Korea or ended world hunger, he has begun to develop coalitions and relationships among other international leaders who will play important roles in addressing many of the world’s most critical issues. The change in tone from the government in Washington is a welcome sign to allies who had become used to the bellicose, go-it-alone policies of the former president. Still the saber-rattling approach is favored by many of the same war-minded enthusiasts that dragged us into our current Middle- East muddle and they are hard at pressing their points once again.

There seems to be some confusion about what is meant by the words Peace and War. They are not the same thing. Liberating Europe and defeating Japan after its attack on Pearl Harbor sent us to war and ended in the signing of peace treaties. Today’s conflicts should not be confused with peace-keeping events, they are just war. We may be stuck in the unenviable position of having to keep on keeping on in some instances, but the president is bent on exploring diplomatic alternatives. He deserves some credit for trying and that is perhaps what the Nobel Peace Prize Committee had in mind.