Obama Wins The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009

Okay, so Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. What does it mean and why did he win it?

According to wikepedia: The Nobel Peace Prize is one of five Nobel prizes by the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel. According to Nobel's 1895 will, the Peace Prize should be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." The prize consists of a medal, a diploma and a money award.

According to Nobel’s wishes, unlike the other Nobel prizes that are awarded by Swedish Institutions, the Peace prize is to be given out by a five member committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament. At the time of his death, Norway and Sweden were united under the same crown. Since its inception the committee has taken a rather wide interpretation of the guidelines set forth by Alfred Nobel, recently expanding the prize well beyond simple peace mediation to include efforts to combat global climate change, poverty and disease.

Nominators include former laureates; current and former members of the committee and their staff; members of national governments and legislatures; university professors of law, theology, social sciences, history and philosophy; leaders of peace research and foreign affairs institutes; and members of international courts of law.

It is not currently known who nominated Obama.

According to the 5 member committee who selects the winner, Obama was awarded the prize because of ‘his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’ citing his outreach efforts within the Muslim world and his attempts to curb nuclear proliferation.

Barrack Obama is the third U.S. President to receive the honor. President Theodore Roosevelt won the award in 1906 and President Woodrow Wilson won it in 1919. Jimmy Carter, former U.S. President, won in 2002 ‘for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development’. In 2008, former Vice President Al Gore, shared the prize with the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, otherwise known as the IPCC, ‘for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change’.

How much will Obama get, you might ask? In 2007 the Nobel Peace Prize awarded 1.5 million dollars to the shared recipients, the IPCC and Al Gore. Obama’s prize is an expected 1.4 million U.S. dollars.

Obama himself said this morning that he did not deserve it. But lets examine for ourselves what he has said and done in his efforts to mediate peace to warrant this nomination:

The nomination deadline was February 1st, a full eight months before the winner is announced and a mere 12 days into Obama's presidency at the time the final nominations were submitted. What had he done at that point that would mitigate such an honor? What has he done in the 8 months since?

• He promised to end the war in Iraq and Afganistan by 2012, but in fact he is considering amping up the war in Afganistan with additional troops and no real end in sight.
• He promised to close Guantanomo Bay, but it hasn't happened yet and his own administration has expressed doubts about his January 2010 deadline to meet that promise.
• He promised to end torture interrogations, while allowing what he considered past errors in judgement to go unpunished, but has since changed his mind on that allowing proceeding to go forward towards prosecution.
• He talked about reducing carbon emissions, but no significant efforts have been made to date.
• He spoke about nuclear proliferation and reducing nuclear stockpiles, but little effort has been made to accomplish this task.
• He said he wanted a nuclear free world, but has found that while it sounded good in a speech he made in Pague in April, it's another story to unite other nations and lawmakers behind the efforts and processes to make that a reality.
• He stated that battling climate change was a top priority but his own legislation is stalled in the Democratically controlled Congress and it looks as if the negotiations set for Copenhagen in December won't be a picnic for his administration.
• He is pushing for new efforts to make peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, but has received little cooperation from either side.

Judging by the timing of his nomination and the undisputed fact that he has not actually accomplished anything that could warrant the nomination since, it certainly appears as though this years recipient has been recognized not for achievements or accomplishments, but for what the prize winner might be able to achieve in the future. Based on the arguability of merit from some past recipients, the Nobel Peace Prize seems to have evolved more into a Humanitarian of the Year Award, with the 'humanitarian' aspect being very loosely defined, afterall it includes the likes of Arafat and Kissinger.