A Fitting Prize, in a Way

by the Editors

Well, that didn’t take long. But it was almost inevitable: the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama. As “the world” hated Pres. George W. Bush, “the world” loves President Obama.

What do we mean by “the world”? We mean the editors of Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian. The faculty at Brown University. The secretariat of the United Nations. We mean Lord Malloch-Brown, not Václav Klaus. When President Bush visited Iraq for the last time, a foe of his threw a shoe at him. The shoe-thrower was taken to be “the world.” Hugo Chávez even made laughing reference to him recently at the U.N. Many Iraqis admire and appreciate President Bush. They do not count as “the world.”

Very much counting as “the world” is the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. They practically define it. Every year since 1901, the peace prize has been given by a committee of five Norwegians. They are appointed by the Norwegian parliament, the Storting. The Nobel Peace Prize always reflects the consensus of Norwegian politics. And that consensus is, in a word — a word the Norwegians might well choose — “progressive.” Others might call it left-wing.

In any case, the Nobel Peace Prize almost never disappoints the editors of Le Monde, the faculty at Brown, etc.

The committee has said, “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. In the past year Obama has been a key person for important initiatives in the U.N. for nuclear disarmament and to set a completely new agenda for the Muslim world and East-West relations.”

That is true (at least in part). The Nobel Committee appreciates Obama for his repudiation of all things Bush. The new president has frozen out America’s allies in Eastern Europe, causing great consternation among them. He has put “daylight” between America and its No. 1 Middle Eastern ally, Israel. He kept almost mum when Iranian democrats massed in the streets to demand a more decent life — the American focus is on negotiating with the regime. He gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson, the U.N. official who presided over Durban, that hate-Israel jamboree.

He yukked it up with Chávez, giving him a soul-brother handshake and calling him “mi amigo.” He went along with an invitation to Cuba to rejoin the Organization of American States — this despite that fact that the OAS is supposed to be for democracies, not police states. He had America rejoin the U.N. Human Rights Council, which, under Bush, we bowed out of: because it was dominated by such lovely regimes as the ones in Cuba, Zimbabwe, China, Syria, and Sudan; because it existed almost solely to defame Israel.

All these moves of Obama, the Nobel Committee appreciates immensely. This is an American president in their own image, the kind of president they will cheer and honor. For them, Obama is a dream president, just as Bush was a nightmare president. He is the first “post-American president,” as John Bolton and others have said. For “the world,” that is a dream president...   Read the whole article.