In anticipation of President Obama's pending Afghanistan announcement tomorrow, should the Nobel committee reconsider its decision to award President Obama with the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize? The rich irony of escalating the conflict in Afghanistan nearly thirty years to the day marking the last Russian intervention is poetically supreme.
When I first learned that President Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize I admit I was as shocked as the next American. My initial reaction was that it was a nice gesture whose symbolic significance should easily be understood and appreciated by most clear thinking, rational Americans. I say this in spite of the obvious premature nature in which it was being awarded.
However, I was somewhat taken aback by the rabid response from the far right who objected in a manner more often associated with that of a child than of a concerned body of sophisticated intelligentsia. It’s not as if they were awarding the prize to Dr. Henry Kissinger again after all. Yet only in the post Viet Nam/Watergate era however could the awarding of such a prestigious award to an American president elicit such consternation in certain circles of American society.
One could argue quite convincingly that the reaction from the far right says a great deal about the extreme nature of our politics today. To be fair however, the far right is certainly not alone in perpetuating the obscene zero sum game too often presented to the American people as civics these days. In fact, if the behavior exhibited in recent years by elected members of both persuasions in Washington is an indication of our civic virtue, then please excuse me, for I have a fiddle to go play while Rome burns.
With all that said, I feel the Nobel committee must consider rescinding its decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, if that is even possible. I propose this in light of two recent policy decisions that should now disqualify the president for consideration of this year’s prize.
To begin, the recent decision not to reverse course with the Bush administration’s refusal to join 156 other nations in joining the global treaty banning landmines is tremendously disappointing. The refusal to sign the treaty, and therefore to remain in the company of Russia, China, India, and Pakistan, nations who have to yet sign the 12 year-old treaty, is not change we can believe in but rather more of the same. Some will argue that in recent years the US military has strongly deemphasized the use of land mines, or that since 1993 we as a nation have spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion to help eradicate land mines in post-conflict areas, nevertheless I am unimpressed.
The decision to sign the treaty should have been a no-brainer for anyone concerned with the ethical and moral implications any such refusal would present. For someone who has been unfairly criticized as an empty suit, possessing only a tremendous gift for oratory, the opportunity to act with good deeds, and not just beautiful words, has escaped him.
The second reason for consideration before the Nobel committee has to deal with the decision to send another 34,000 U.S. combat troops to Afghanistan. Setting aside the obvious irony of awarding a peace prize to a man on the verge of escalating an eight year-old war, but is this really the extent of our imagination in addressing the very difficult and troubling question that is Afghanistan today?
I expected better, I expected a reasoned, well thought out approach to our foreign policy challenges post the Bush administration. The decision to escalate the war there however is baffling as one only needs to Google the words "Afghanistan and foreign inventions" to discover that the Greeks, the Brits, and the Russians never succeeded in accomplishing what we aim to achieve there. The rich irony of escalating the conflict in Afghanistan nearly thirty years to the day marking the last Russian intervention is poetically supreme.
If the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan is the best we can come up with, if it merely represents conventional thinking in Washington, and if the decision to retain the potential use of landmines in some future misbegotten foreign adventure is the product of the "Hope" and the "Change" we voted for last November, then I hope the Nobel committee will change its mind and rescind the offer to bestow the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama.