The Peacenik Prize?

Obama’s Nobel rewards political correctness and the absence of action

ASHOK MALIK

Illustration: NAOREM ASHISH

SHOULD BARACK Obama send a thank you note to his predecessor in the White House, George W. Bush? After all, there’s a persuasive argument that, more than applaud Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize committee has only acknowledged his status as mascot of the ‘Anyone but Bush’ movement.

When the Nobel Prize nominations closed on February 1, 2009, Obama was 10 days old as president. His principal achievement had been to run on an anti-Bush ticket and win an overwhelming mandate. If one accepts the Nobel committee broke its own deadlines and recognised Obama’s words, deeds and genius between February and October, the credentials become somewhat more robust, but only just.

For a start, Obama is not the first to wish for a world free of nuclear weapons. Rajiv Gandhi presented a structured plan to the United Nations (UN) in 1988. Twenty years later, four Washington, DC, veterans — including two of America’s most respected secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz — jointly authored an article that called for banning the bomb. Neither of these initiatives got anywhere, though it could be argued that Obama’s nuclear curtailment call at the UN in September — which hasn’t even had time to get anywhere — built on the Kissinger-Shultz statement. Second, the resolution of conflict between the Islamic and Christian civilisations has been a cherished quest at least since Richard the Lionheart reportedly offered his sister’s hand to Saladin the Kurd. The wedding did not take place; Richard didn’t win the 12th century equivalent of the Scandinavian Honourable Schoolboy Medal.

Obama has been more fortunate. His speeches in Istanbul and Cairo made no concrete proposals. There was nothing resolute beneath those delicate but ultimately anodyne words. Yet, his speech-writer has won his boss the biggest bauble of them all.

What is Obama’s essential appeal? He is the Designer Liberal: of African and Muslim descent, a walking trophy of multiculturalism, opponent of the Iraq invasion, with every politically correct opinion you can hope to hear in one human lifetime. To the lib-left, he’s the closest capitalism will come to producing the New Man.

Liberals are entitled to their alternative universe, even their monopoly of the Nobel Peace Prize committee. But do they represent the real world? In Obama’s case, this poses another compelling question. How does one define peace? Is it merely the absence of action? In rewarding Obama, a president who hasn’t yet taken a firm decision on anything substantial, has the Norwegian Parliament not rewarded the line of least resistance? If Obama ceases hostilities, walks out of Afghanistan and leaves ordinary citizens there to be ruled by the Taliban, is he serving the cause of peace or its opposite? Is a Peace Prize the same as a Peacenik Prize?

In the liberal construct of moral relativism, these are issues to ignore. Yet, there was a time when the Nobel committee itself was on surer ground. At least once earlier, a Nobel Prize has been given for, essentially, speeches. In 1953, Winston Churchill won the Prize for Literature “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”.

As with Obama, the Churchill citation fooled no-one. His Nobel was a lifetime achievement award for saving Europe from the Nazis. Churchill’s prose was dazzling, but it was politics and not literature that was his true calling. It would have been no surprise if he had instead received the Peace Prize for “defending exalted human values”. Peace was still recognised as a quality forged in a crucible. Today, it is a beauty contest.

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