The decision to award President Barack Obama with this year's Peace Nobel Prize is incomprehensible, irrational, wrong and against the spirit of the prize as stipulated by Alfred Nobel.
A sitting president, barely 10 months in office, has set out an ambitious agenda, impaired and overshadowed by a global financial crisis that has cost millions of jobs at home and abroad, led to an explosion of Federal debt to $2 Trillion and assures that at least 2 generations of Americans will have to work (and pay higher taxes) to make up for the fiscal sink hole.
Mr Obama has now received $1.4 million as a windfall profit thanks to the Prize committee in Oslo. More importantly, as a peace award recipient, the President will in future have to weigh the duties and expectations of an obscure group of Dr Strangelove's in 'peacenik' Norway with the duties and challenges of a Supreme military commander.
Predictable was the reaction from Iran - the world's gravest threat to peace - which expressed hope that the president "will take the award to heart" and to stop the push for Iranian dismantling of their nuclear armament ambition. As a winner of the Peace Prize, Mr Obama will inevitably be coaxed into a neutralist, rather than effective approach to deal with the Iranians (and North Koreans). The Nobel Prize committee has castrated the US president, unless he refuses to accept the prize for the duration of his presidency (leaving open the option he might refuse it altogether if he has to look back on a dismal record, or had been forced to go to war in the meantime).
The idea of an award is to laud someone's effort that has been crowned by universally accepted success. The Norwegian Santa Clauses grossly violated this principle, and rather resorted to a political pre-emptive strike to neutralize the US.
In my view the President, for whose agenda I have great respect and hopes - tempered by the bleak realities, has the obligation to reject the award.
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