Today it is announced that Barack Obama will win the Nobel Peace Prize. I don't know what that means since Al Gore won this thing too, for educating people on Global Warming(which doesn't exist). Obviously, this committee is wildly liberal and if they could, would probably fellate the President of the United States. I say that because he's done absolutely nothing worthy of the prize. In fact, the nuclear arms race in the Middle East is more precarious than ever. I guess sitting down with Iran is the right thing to do. The explaination of why he won is mind boggling. Reaching out to befriend the Muslim community? Creating a New International Climate? Turning water into wine? Teaching them to fish for a lifetime?...oh wait...that was another guy. The media has me so confused.
This is a few excerpts from Jonathan Kay, NationalPost.com:
I am still trying to figure out why the Nobel Committee gave Barack Obama its annual peace prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” As far as it appears, the award was based on the fact that Obama is a good-natured fellow who people seem to like, and who isn't George W. Bush.
In fact, committee chairman Thorbjoen Jagland didn't really try to pretend otherwise. Consider the committee's stated reasons, and Jagland's comments this morning when reporters pressed him to justify Obama's selection:
“He has created a new international climate.”
“We are not awarding the prize for what may happen in the future but for what he has done in the previous year. We would hope this will enhance what he is trying to do.”
“One of the first things he did was to go to Cairo to try to reach out to the Muslim world, then to restart the Mideast negotiations and then he reached out to the rest of the world through international institutions.“
“Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play."
"Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations."
“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."
Translation: Obama is being given his award for mere words — for striking fashionable poses in favour of multilateralism, for making a nice speech in Cairo, for offering "hope." Months after Americans learned to dismiss Obama's 2008 presidential campaign slogans as the meaningless bromides they were, Scandinavians are still drinking his Kool-aid.
So who should have gotten the Nobel peace prize? A much more obscure and unfashionable world leader.
If you're looking to award an annual "peace" prize, it's useful to look around the world and ask yourself this: What country was beset by bloody war at this time in 2008 — but is now totally at peace?
Sri Lanka.
And the reason for that is a ruthless campaign waged by President Mahinda Rajapaksa against a militarized Tamil death cult known as the Tamil Tigers. This conflict has taken nearly 100,000 lives since it began three decades ago. But Rajapaksa ended it definitively at one stroke, killing or capturing the entire Tiger leadership. It is one of the only times in the history of modern warfare that a guerrilla/terrorist movement has been utterly destroyed in such a fashion. Overnight, Sri Lanka went from being war-torn to being at peace.
Sounds like a pretty good candidate for a "peace" prize, don't you think?
But of course, actually making peace is not what this prize is about. It's about pursuing peace in a UN-approved way. Rajapaksa has done some pretty nasty things en route to destroying the Tigers — including imprisoning and perhaps even killing pesky journalists and human-rights activists. His army, like all armies fighting guerrillas, has been accused of all sorts of abuses. And to this day, many displaced Tamils are still in camps.
And of course, Rajapaksa committed that unpardonable sin en route to victory — flouting "multilateralism," which in his case meant ignoring the Jaglandesque voices from abroad urging him to hold his fire and let the Tigers go just as he was about to administer the coup de grace.
It's so much more fashionable to honour a man like Obama, whose foreign-policy record hasn't been sullied by the moral tradeoffs that inevitably accompany doing something to create peace on the battlefield. Since the entire body of work for which Obama is being honoured consists of idealistic pronouncements, the Nobel prize committee were able to pick him without worrying that the choice may stir up controversy among umbraged minority groups, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or the UN's various institutional cheerleaders.
Today, the Nobel committee has declared itself to be a debating society — and it has given its shiny prize to the nice man who gave the best speech. It's like those beauty pageants where the MC asks contestants what they would do to promote world peace. The best answer earns applause, flowers and a trophy. But no one expects the winner to actually go out and stop people from fighting.
That job is left to head-knockers such as Mahinda Rajapaksa, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, Ariel Sharon and Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan. Their job is hard and bloody. But every once in a while, like in Sri Lanka this year, they actually defeat the bad guys.
Then they go home, and turn on their televisions, and watch men like Obama get showered with praise for their pretty words.
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