Obama's Prize for Peace: The World Weighs In...

Okay, I really didn't want to do this, because I am torn about it myself, and I think it is news that, hardly a week after breaking, is in very great danger of becoming over-discussed and clouding out real world issues. However, I can't help myself. So if I can't avoid it all together, I'm at least going to try to take a new spin on the topic.

Generally speaking, I support Obama. This is primarily because foreign policy is the single most important political issue in my book and Obama has been very good for American foreign policy. However, I am also a big fan of protecting ideas that matter. Don't go saying "I love you" to people you don't love, because then it loses it's meaning and importance with people you do love. Don't give away to just anyone a prize that has, for decades, been globally respected and offered it's recipients additional leverage to continue their work. It might lose that global respect and weight.

In the past, the prize has been awarded for the great contributions to world peace that the recipient has already made, not that they are expected to make. The last sitting U.S. president to receive it was Wilson for establishing the United Nations, for God's sake. So let's be frank. The U.S. president does not deserve the Nobel Prize for Peace. Yet. He might, someday in the future, when and if he accomplishes all that he hopes to.

With this in mind, the response of the Americans was less than shocking. Like anything else, we turned it into a party war. The Democrats defended the award, the republicans balked and then laughed at it, and the leaders promised that it would be used as a call to action. Blah. Blah. Blah. So, I wondered: what did the rest of the world think? Our friends? Our enemies? So here's an article from Al-Jazeera (again, trying to remove myself from the boundaries of the western media) on what the world leaders and, more subtly, the international press, thought of the announcement. Happy reading.

All my love,

Caddie

Obama: I do not deserve Nobel prize

Barack Obama, the US president, has said he is "surprised and deeply humbled" after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009, less than a year after taking office.

Speaking in Washington, Obama said he did "not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honoured by this prize".

The Nobel Committee in Oslo, the Norwegian capital, said that the award recognised Obama's attempts to foster international peace and create a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama will give his $1.4m reward for winning the Nobel Peace Prize to charity, the AFP news agency reported a US official as saying.

No decision has yet been taken on exactly which organisations will benefit, the official said.

'Mutual respect'

South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, awarded the prize himself in 1984, hailed the award as "a magnificent endorsement for the first African-American president." But world reaction to the decision has been mixed, with the Taliban in Afghanistan saying it was absurd to give the prize to Obama when he had ordered 21,000 extra troops to Afghanistan this year...

Taliban criticism

The Taliban condemned the decision saying that Obama has "not taken a single step towards peace in Afghanistan".

However, Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, congratulated Obama, calling the announcement "appropriate".

An aide to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, said the award should prompt Obama to begin to end injustice in the world.

"We hope that this gives him the incentive to walk in the path of bringing justice to the world order," Ali Akbar Javanfekr, Ahmadinejad's media aide, said.

"We are not upset and we hope that by receiving this prize he will start taking practical steps to remove injustice in the world.

Yukio Hatoyama, the Japanese president, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, both said the prize should encourage everyone to help Obama rid the world of nuclear weapons.

"I think the peace prize was given with such a hope," Hatoyama told reporters on a visit to Beijing.

Merkel said Obama had shifted the tone towards dialogue in a very short time.

"There is still much left to do, but a window of possibility has been opened," she said in Leipzig.

'Extraordinary efforts'

Obama, 48, wins the award while still being the commander-in-chief of US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"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," Thorbjoern Jagland, the head of the Nobel committee, said.

"His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

"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."