SIKANKU: Why Obama’s Nobel is not such a bad thing

By: Etse Sikanku Published: October 11, 2009 9:14 PM CDT

It seems everyone except the Nobel Prize committee is upset that Obama won the Nobel Prize for Peace? Around the blogosphere, twittersphere, facebooksphere, and elsewhere in cyberspace, status updates/posts show folks are quite miffed that a man who many admit has altered the landscape of global politics is being given a pat on the back.

What is even surprising is that the normally reasonable New York Times and Time magazine have joined in drugging mud over what is supposed to be a noble achievement. Is it just me or are people just missing the larger picture?

Yes, I understand that he’s been in office for less than a year. The corollary for this argument is that, his nomination was done less than a month after his inauguration. Surely, only the supernatural could have achieved anything so “significant” so quickly. Yes there might not be anything tangible to point to but therein lies the point.

The value of Obama’s recognition lies in the intangibiles. To be specific, the palpable dawn of a much nuanced, less hawkish administration that believes not in domination but collaboration.

Indeed if the overriding goal of the Peace prize is the “promotion of peace” and “fraternity among nations” it’s hard to imagine that anyone would be nonplussed about this award. After all, most people anywhere will tell you that one of their greatest desires in life is a peaceful world.

To the extent that the stakes for nuclear proliferation are at its highest in contemporary times; that America is engaging rather than pontificating, Obama deserves the award because only heaven knows what even one more day of neo-conservatism could have brought the world to. That is why I find the cynicism from people like Gibbs (TIME) and surprisingly CNN’s Ed Henry very worrisome. (Most especially Henry because he’s my hero and I thought reporters were not supposed to interpret the news but that will be a matter for another day).

For those Americans who’re skeptical about anything “non-American” (clue: think John Bolton) including—gasp— the United Nations or the Nobel Peace Prize for that matter, I’d like to say that there’s nothing embarrassing or ridiculous about your president promoting global “efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples". And for those who quip that this is an award for “aspiration rather than achievement” I’d like to say that sometimes preemption rather than reflection is the way to go.

Conservatives of all people should know this: after all it was preemption that took them to Iraq – “to preemptively neutralize the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of a rogue leader” (referring to Saddam Hussein) were Donald Rumsfeld’s words for justifying the invasion.

To be honest, I’m not a starry-eyed follower of Barack Obama but what the Nobel committee has done is to offer us the rare benefit of hindsight by encouraging global peace because as they taught us in elementary school, “a stitch in time saves nine”.