LET’S US TALK ABOUT: OBAMA'S NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

“It’s a farce!” “It’s a joke!” “A big mistake!” “He should refuse it!” It’s too soon!” You can’t help but have heard the negative reactions to our president’s Nobel Peace Prize in the media - but in the next few paragraphs I am going to tell you “the rest of the story!” as Paul Harvey, the popular radio announcer, used to say on his daily broadcast.

The rest of the story starts with the Obama presidential campaign and ends soon after his Inaugural Address. Do recall that nominations had to be submitted to the five-member Norwegian Noble Peace Prize Committee prior to February 2009 and therefore, any and all accomplishments from February on were not considered in the evaluation. Thorbjorn Jagland, former prime minister of Norway and committee chair, stated on October 25 that the committee had, “… to look strictly to what Alfred Nobel said in his will – namely to give the prize to the person who has done most for peaceful development in the world in the last year. So we got the conclusion unanimously that it is President Obama.”

To this end, the committee praised President Obama “… for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy,” and his “… vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”

While over the years, the prize occasionally has been awarded to an individual or group recognized for their humanitarian efforts, the Nobel Peace Prize has more often been a political act. Mr. Jagland went on to say that the committee, “… must from time to time go into the realm of real politik. It is always a mix of idealism and real politik that can change the world.” We learned that among those who were previously awarded the prestigious prize for their political acts were Arafat, Rabin, Perez, Kissinger, Carter, Kofi Annan, Mandela, Hume and Trimble.

The middle of this story is simply told - after eight years of the Bush-Cheney ‘s unilateral militarism, embellished with an extra dash of arrogance and jingoism, candidate Obama emerged on the world stage proposing to turn the world into a more peaceful direction. In awarding him the prize, the committee recognized that Obama’s belief in “multilateral diplomacy” could be a catalyst for changing the direction of international relations toward creating a global environment where negotiations between and among nations is preferred to bellicosity.

The conclusion of the story resides in the question that has been asked over and over since the award was made to Barak Obama: Do the American people and Obama deserve the Nobel Peace Prize? Do we qualify as a peaceful force in the world, particularly with President Obama currently grappling with a difficult military decision regarding Afghanistan? The answers to these questions are also self-evident when one reads comments by the former United Nations Ambassador from Sweden, Pierre Schori, who wrote about President Obama’s accomplishments in the Swedish newspapers, “He inspires hope for the many dispossessed, but also to us who are worried how dangerous crises are handled … He is a new kind of American president, a cosmopolitan with the world on his mind ... with Obama in the White House, we are all better off and safer.” And as the French President Nicolas Sarkozy observed about this prestigious award, “It sets the seal on America’s return to the heart of the world’s peoples. We love you again!”

And that is simply the rest of the story - and why our president and the great majority of the American nation who voted for him earned the Nobel Peace Prize!