President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize: Strange, Surprising, In A Way Premature

PRESIDENT OBAMA SPEAKS AT THE UNITED NATIONS

As prestigious international awards go, the Nobel Prize is about as political as they come, and no more so than the Peace Prize, which is often more of an indicator of who is hip in Oslo than whatever good works they might have done. And so it is with the strange and surprising awarding of the 2009 prize to a guy by the name of Barack Hussein Obama.

Mind you that Obama has restored international diplomacy and multi-lateralism to its rightful place in the American canon and that is no small thing after eight years of bellicosity being the tool of choice.

The Nobel committee cited Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." But after only eight months in office what does he have to show? Yes, he has told some hard truths, but there's little of substance unless you consider public-opinion polls indicating that people around the world are feeling better about the old US of A to be important.

The president himself soft pedaled his selection and used it as a call to action, saying that "I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations."

For collectors of irony, this is a treasure trove:

How ironic that the president is likely to order thousands more U.S. troops into a war zone any day now, something that denizens of the We Hate Obama fever swamp and the stenographers at Faux News already are noting amidst their mass tachycardia. Oh, and there still are 124,000 American troops in Iraq.

And how ironic that it could be seen as a rebuke to those selfsame bashers and others who demean the office of president and America's all but forgotten responsibility to be a moral compass. Perhaps this year's award should have been renamed the Nobel Prize For Not Being George Bush. Just like 2007 when Al Gore was the winnah.

In any event, the Peace Prize already has been considerably diminished.

While Albert Schweitzer (1952) Martin Luther King Jr. (1964) and Mother Teresa (1979), among others, would seem more than qualified as winners, how to justify war criminal winners like Henry Kissinger (1973) and Yassir Arafat (1994)?

I suppose that at the end of the day, my big takeaway is that giving Obama the prize is both premature and deserved. But I do have to wonder whether next year's Nobel for chemistry will go to the guy who invented Mentos.

Top photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times