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 Posted: Sat Oct 10, 2009 7:14 am |
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news.google.com
Nobel Prize seen as reward for not being Bush
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
ANALYSIS:
Five Norwegian politicians sent a surprising but unambiguous message
Friday, bestowing one of the world's most coveted honors on President
Obama as a signal of the Western world's repudiation of the presidency
of George W. Bush and its embrace of a softer but still untested
American foreign policy.
As word of the stunning Nobel Peace Prize selection began to take hold
Friday, Americans struggled to digest the news that some first mistook
for a prank and others saw as an overreach, given that the president
had been in office only 12 days when he was nominated for the award.
The award was "a sigh of collective relief that George Bush is no
longer here," said Aaron David Miller, an adviser on Middle East
issues to six presidents. More than any concrete contribution Mr.
Obama has made to world peace, the prize embodies "the international
community's love affair" with a young, charismatic president who
"listens, not lectures," he added.
Caught off guard by the award, the White House scrambled Friday
morning to strike the right tone in accepting the honor. Mr. Obama
tried to appear grounded in reality, explaining that after being
awakened with news of the honor, he was immediately confronted with
more immediate family concerns, including the news of his dog's
birthday and a daughter's observation that they were on the cusp of a
three-day weekend.
"It's good to have kids to keep things in perspective," he chuckled.
Despite some early speculation that perhaps the president would
politely decline the honor, Mr. Obama sent an e-mail to supporters
explaining his decision to accept it.
"To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so
many ... transformative figures," he wrote.
"But I also know that throughout history the Nobel Peace Prize has not
just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a
means to give momentum to a set of causes," he said, describing the
award as "a call for all nations and all peoples to confront the
common challenges of ch value\=\"226 128 147\"/=
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the 21st century."
After his embarrassment at the hands of the International Olympic
Committee, which rejected Mr. Obama's personal pitch for Chicago as an
Olympic host, the Nobel award represents a clear return to the
prevailing narrative of Mr. Obama's campaign for the White House and
the central theme of his early presidency - that he is attempting to
"re-set" relations with the rest of the world after an icy eight years
under Mr. Bush.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country's bitter opposition to
the Iraq war came to embody the diplomatic breakdown between the U.S.
and Europe under Mr. Bush, was among the first to explain how the
award was being viewed overseas. The Obama choice, he explained, "sets
the seal on America's return to the heart of all the world's peoples."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon agreed that the Nobel announcement
represented a symbolic welcoming of the new American approach.
"President Obama embodies the new spirit of dialogue and engagement on
the world's biggest problems - climate change, nuclear disarmament and
a wide range of peace and security challenges," he said.
The president's political supporters welcomed such sentiments as a
sign that Mr. Obama was delivering on his promise to rekindle
relations between the U.S. and its top allies. To others, though, the
shock of the announcement came in seeing so esteemed an award handed
out before Mr. Obama even had time to build a tangible record of
accomplishment that might justify it.
Mark Salter, an author and longtime adviser to Sen. John McCain,
Arizona Republican, called the decision "morally reprehensible," even
if Mr. Obama himself was not at fault.
"No president's statecraft, whether you agree with its direction or
not, can be expected to bear fruit in less than nine months," Mr.
Salter said. "I think the morally correct and politically shrewd
response from the White House would have been to refuse the honor."
What struck an especially ironic chord with some Republicans was the
Nobel committee's suggestion that Mr. Obama's call for a nuclear
weapons-free world "has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms
control negotiations." It was Mr. Bush, they said, who persevered with
dramatic reductions in the world's nuclear arms stockpiles begun under
President Clinton.
From 1992 to 2000 the world's nuclear arms stockpiles fell from nearly
53,000 to about 31,500, according to the Clinton Presidential Library.
Nuclear stockpiles fell another 8,000, to 23,375 during Mr. Bush's
eight years in office, according to the Federation of American
Scientists.
The basis for the Nobel committee's praise was likely Mr. Obama's
speech in Prague earlier this year, where he began to lay out his
vision for eliminating nuclear arms. He is also working to beat an end-
of-year deadline to write a new arms control agreement with Russia.
Non-proliferation groups said those negotiations led Mr. Obama and
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to refocus the world on a real
problem.
"This award reflects a new international consensus that whatever
stability nuclear arsenals may have provided during the Cold War is
now outweighed by the growing risks of proliferation and nuclear
terrorism and that the only way in the long term to eliminate the
nuclear threat is to eliminate all nuclear weapons," said former
Ambassador Richard Burt, the chief U.S. negotiator for the Strategic
Arms Reduction Treaty.
But the praise for Mr. Obama's efforts struck many as premature at
best.
Denver talk-radio host Mike Rosen compared the honor to awarding Major
League Baseball's Most Valuable Player to a promising rookie after he
draws a walk in his first game. He suspected this was the Nobel
committee's way of thanking Mr. Obama for ousting the Republican Party
from the White House.
"It's obviously a slap in the face to George W. Bush," Mr. Rosen said.
John R. Bolton, Mr. Bush's ambassador to the U.N. and before that the
Bush administration official on nuclear arms proliferation, said at
the very least it was tough to make the case that Mr. Obama had
already earned the award.
"Ronald Reagan also called for a world without nuclear weapons - where
was his Nobel Peace Prize?" Mr. Bolton said. "The problem on the
proliferation side is the same with the problem, I think, more
generally, and that is we have traditionally understood the Nobel
Peace Prize to be a record of accomplishment, and there isn't a record
of accomplishment here yet."
Mr. Bolton, who was among those calling on Mr. Obama to decline the
prize, said he found the president appropriately "gracious and modest"
in the way he accepted it. But he also found it striking that the
committee has recognized former President Carter, former Vice
President Al Gore and now Mr. Obama, but not Mr. Clinton.
"They want to reward a particular kind of American - an American who
thinks like Europeans do," he said. |
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