The Nobel Peace Prize is a Joke

At a long-awaited press conference held yesterday evening, Barack Obama announced that he would be sending 30 thousand more troops to fight in the futile counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan.  The announcement was consistent with claims he had made during his campaign and was largely predicted by most Washington pundits, so the news didn’t come as much of a surprise to those who follow these things.  However, what the announcement did do was reinforce the belief held in some circles that the Nobel prize committee’s decision to award the 2009 peace prize to Obama, just months into his presidency, was premature.

Obama’s announcement that he will be adding to the 20 thousand additional soldiers he deployed shortly after taking office, means that he will single-handedly be responsible for the biggest escalation of US military intervention in Afghanistan since the war started in 2001.  But this is only the most recent in a string of actions by the young president that most would deem unbecoming of a Nobel peace prize laureate.  Prior to this, there was his failure to end the American policy of extraordinary renditions, his endless foot-dragging on the closing of the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, and his continued use of drone attacks in Afghanistan, which have resulted in the unnecessary deaths of numerous civilians. 

With a track record like that and no major foreign policy victories to speak of, one wonders what the Noble committee could possibly have been thinking.  I speculated at the time that perhaps the committee was hoping that the prize would put a little pressure on Obama to live up to the hype by perhaps scaling back the war in Afghanistan or even committing to a more aggressive environmental policy.

But when you look back at past laureates, it’s impossible to discern a consistent rationale behind the committee’s decision-making.  Some recipients have been extremely deserving of the accolade (Nelson Mandela and Doctors Without Borders come to mind). Others have been similar to Barack Obama, world leaders with immense power whose actions in the years following their award would affect the course of history and would save or cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives.  Still others have been unabashed war criminals, whose only trip to Europe should have been to face charges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, not to get a million-dollar prize in Stockholm.

So just to put things into perspective, the following are three examples of Nobel Peace laureates whose resumés make Barack Obama actions over the past 10 months look like the work of Jesus Christ.  Here they are in no particular order.

Yitzhak Rabin/Shimon Peres
Country: Israel
Year: 1994

In 1994, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, then-Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Israel respectively, were awarded the peace prize for their participation in peace talks that culminated in the signing of the Oslo Accords, which established a Declaration of Principles upon which to eventually build a lasting peace between Israel and Palestine.  The choice of this dynamic duo is problematic for several reasons.  First there’s the fact that the agreement was purely symbolic, as the Israeli had managed once again to stall progress by deliberately excluding any discussion of the so-called final status issues that would be a prerequisite for any lasting peace agreement. 

There is also the fact that during the combined tenure of both men (Peres succeeded Rabin for 8 months following Rabin’s assassination in 1995), the population of illegal Israeli settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories rose from 258 000 to 322 000 in a four year period.  This is a nearly 25% increase.  At no time since then has the number of illegal settlers grown so rapidly over such a sustained period.  Also keep in mind that neither Rabin nor Peres dismantled a single settlement, which, in this respect, makes them worse than hard-line right wing prime ministers such as Ariel Sharon, as well as the former Irgun commander and self-described terrorist Menachim Begin, who coincidentally received the peace prize in 1979.

Prior to their prolific contributions to the systematic theft and settlement of Palestinian land, both Rabin and Peres served in the Haganah, which was the precursor to the modern Israeli Occupation Forces and is believed by many to have been a terrorist organization.  During the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Rabin was the deputy commander of a force that carried out the ethnic cleansing of the Arab cities of Ramle and Lydda, in a operation against unarmed, defenseless civilians.

A few years later, as the Director General of the Ministry of Defense, Peres secretly brokered a deal with the French that resulted in the creation of the Dimona Nuclear reactor, which was established outside the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and which would become the source of Israel’s extensive nuclear arsenal.

However, of all of the insidious transgressions racked up by both men, my personal favorite came just months before their selection by the Nobel Committee was announced.  In February of 1994, an American-born Israeli physician and radical Jewish terrorist name Baruch Goldstein, entered the Cave of the Patriarchs in the West Bank city of Hebron wearing his Israeli army uniform and carrying a machine gun.  For the record, according to Israeli law, nothing about this was illegal, as settlers are allowed, and even encouraged, to carry automatic weapons, whereas Palestinians are prohibited from owning weapons and can be shot on site if caught holding one.

Once inside the cave, which at the time was serving as a mosque and was filled with hundreds of worshipping Muslims, Goldstein proceeded to open fire on the crowd, killing 29 people and injuring 150.  He only stopped after someone was able to distract him with a fire extinguisher and wrestle the gun from him, at which point those in the crowd whom he hadn’t managed to shoot, beat him to death.  The massacre was followed by riots on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides, and Rabin’s response to the unrest was very telling.  Most expected the progressive (by Israeli standards) prime minister to evict the 400 radical Israeli settlers who had illegally taken up residence in the middle of this Palestinian city of more than 120 000 people.  This seemed like a no-brainer since the settlers required round-the-clock military protection which effectively meant that the Palestinians, who had lived there lawfully for thousands of years and who had just lost 29 of their neighbors in the massacre, were being held hostage to the security needs of the settlers.  But rather than comply with international law and evict the settlers, Rabin instead placed the 120 000 Palestinians under a curfew, while allowing the settlers to move freely throughout the city.

Henry Kissinger
Country: USA
Year: 1973

In one of its most controversial selections to date, the Nobel committee awarded to the 1973 peace prize to the US secretary of state and former national security advisor, Henry Kissinger.  Kissinger was being recognized for his efforts in negotiating a peace treaty with North Vietnam that called for the withdrawal of American forces from Southeast Asia and was believed to mark the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War.  What made this selection so reprehensible was Kissinger’s well-known and extensive contribution to aggressive American imperialism including several actions that many experts believe amount to war crimes.

It was well known even back then that Kissinger fiercely advocated for strong diplomatic relations with right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America.  In fact, he had been tapped by Nixon to spearhead the CIA’s covert campaign to assist in the violent overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende by the right-wing dictator and genocidal tyrant Augusto Pinochet.  Years later, the former national security advisor would be heard on audio tape bragging matter-of-fact-ly about America’s role in the coup. 

Yet for all his indiscretions in the New World, Asia is where Kissinger would make his mark and cement his legacy as a mass murderer for the ages.  Ironically, the most deadly of these forays would occur in the course of the war Kissinger was later credited with ending.  In 1969, President Nixon charged his newly appointed national security advisor with the task of laying the groundwork for a new offensive in Cambodia.  What resulted was one of the deadliest bombing campaigns in human history.  Under the combined leadership of Kissinger and Nixon, the US unleashed B52 bombers on the countryside of Eastern Cambodia – a country they weren’t even at war with - indiscriminately killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

In 1975, Kissinger proved decisively that the Nobel Prize can’t be used to turn bad leaders good.  In that year he personally gave the green light the Indonesian president to go through with the invasion and annexation of newly-independent East Timor.  Within 3 months of the invasion, more than 60 000 East Timorese had been slaughtered.

Let’s hope the committee (and humanity) has better luck with Obama.