President Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize – for being recognized for yet another one of his non-accomplishments – that is:
“the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.
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. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.
Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.
For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”
yes – Extraordinary indeed – on a level of prior Nobel Peace Prize recipients like Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa, Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King? Ok – maybe not those – but I have complied a list of Nobel Laureates that President Barack Obama is perhaps closer in achievement levels. To wit:
1906 Theodore Roosevelt who mediated peace between Russian and Japan, which paved the way for the Japanese aggressive pacific expansion.
1919 Woodrow Wilson for his work in establishing the League of Nations which the United States refused to join
1925 Split
US Vice President Charles Dawes for his work on the Dawes Plan, which was a replacement for the failed repayment scheme in the Treaty of Versailles. It had the United states providing loans to Germany to repay her war debts. It failed after four years.
Sir Austen Chamberlain (yes- Neville Chamberlain’s half brother!) for his work on the Locarno Treaties which allowed the redemption of Germany from its WW I sins and paved the way for its encroachments into the Rhineland, Sudetenland and the Polish Corridor, and ultimately, World War II. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
1926 Split
Gustav Stresman for his work on the above-mentioned Locarno Treaty
Aristide Briand for his work on the Kellog–Briand Treaty, which prohibited the use of war – the record speaks for itself on this success.
1929 US Secretary of State Frank Kellog for his work on the Kellog Briand Treaty
1931 Columbia University President Nicholas Butler for “promoting” the Kellog–Briand treaty
1933 Sir Norman Angell – author of the book The Great Illusion which suggested that no European nation would make war since their economies were so intermeshed. Or not…
1934 Arthur Henderson, for his work chairing the Geneva Disarmament conference, which produced no results. Its also notable that President Franklin Roosevelt tried to set the tone of the conference by stating in a letter: “If all nations will agree wholly to eliminate from possession and use the weapons which make possible a successful attack, defences automatically will become impregnable and the frontiers and independence of every nation will become secure.” Maybe Obama is channeling FDR!
1945 Cordell Hull for his work in establishing the United Nations. The UN -there’s a body that gets things done!
1950 Harvard Professor Ralph Bunche for his work in mediating the 1949 Arab-Israeli Armistice Agreement, which only ended the fighting but accomplished nothing for peace
1957 Lester Pearson for his work in the 1957 Suez Crisis…no word if Ralph Bunche returned his medal
1973 Split
Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for the 1973 Vietnamese Peace Accord, which led to 1975 invasion of South Vietnam by North Vietnam, whereupon the United States did little to aid its former ally, and millions of South Vietnamese were slaughtered. Le Duc Tho declined the prize – maybe he knew what was coming…..
1994 Split
Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhaz Rabin for their “efforts” to make peace under the Oslo Accords which the PLO refused to follow.
2000 Kim Dae Jung for his work in establishing reconciliation with North Korea (following the 2000 summit which it was later revealed that millions had been paid to North Korea in a PAYGO scheme)
2002 Jimmy Carter, “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”
No comment necessary for former President Carter!
2007 Al Gore for his climate change arguments – soon to be a billion dollar business opportunity under his Carbon Credit trading scheme
I didn’t even bother to mention the many awards given to the League of Nations and United Nations over the years……
So you see, Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize award is neither special nor surprising – the Nobel foundation has been giving losers with failed efforts these awards for many years.
Cross Posted to The Cassandra Effect
