Obama got his Nobel for just a down payment

By Brian Greenspun (contact)

Sunday, Oct. 11, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Some would say the decision was dynamite.

Many others would say the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama was explosive. Whatever the adjective used to describe last week’s announcement, which put our president in the company of Woodrow Wilson in 1919, Henry Kissinger in 1973, Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 and Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin in 1994, the reactions are all the same. Mixed.

I can tell you my reaction early Friday morning when I saw the news crawl across CNN — huh? That’s right, I didn’t understand not only why but also how the Nobel Committee could award such a prestigious prize to a man who seemingly hadn’t accomplished much of anything to deserve it.

I could understand President Bill Clinton receiving the award for bringing peace to Northern Ireland and his incredible work to save continents from the ravages of AIDS and hunger. But Barack Obama? Frankly, I was baffled.

And then I did what I encourage all Americans to do before they act or act out — not that very many people listen — and, that is, to think about it for awhile. What I concluded was this:

Alfred Nobel invented a way to detonate nitroglycerin in the 1860s. Before that, black powder was the explosive of choice. It was clumsy, dangerous and not so easy to use. By mixing nitroglycerin and silica, Nobel was able to form a workable paste that could be shaped in a way that made blasting rocks far easier and much more efficient. Dynamite, though, opened up an entirely new way for people to blow each other up, which was not, I believe, Nobel’s intent.

Almost 150 years later, the reaction to Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is running the gamut between the peaceful and constructive blasting of rocks to make way for progress to the destructive blasting of people to make way for — different people?

This confusion we see and hear is not as easily explained as some would suggest — that whether or not people agree with the Nobel Committee’s choice has more to do with whether they agree with Obama than it does the criteria used to select the recipient. No, there is something more visceral in the works because people who support the president are just as vocal in opposition as the usual suspects who relish the chance to bash the president.

I remember when the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize was announced. I was shocked that the Nobel Committee could ever conceive of awarding Yasser Arafat — a murdering terrorist who carried the blood of so many innocent men, women and children on his hands — such a prestigious and credibility-conferring honor.

Even though I never did fully accept the choice, I came to understand it in light of the words Prime Minister Rabin used to describe his intention to sit down with Arafat and make peace. He said, “You don’t make peace with your friends.”

That meant that the people on both sides of the table — whatever the facts really were — looked at the other as the source of their own grievances. Hence, the need to talk and do peace with one another in what might seem like alternative realities.

I also understood the Nobel Committee’s thought process, which could, at times, have more to do with a person’s words and actions than with his accomplishments. How else could anyone explain the Arafat choice unless it was in the context of his “handshake” for peace on the White House lawn rather than the pictures of a bloodthirsty terrorist in search of a bus full of innocents?

I also thought about the hope the Nobel Committee must have felt when it looked at and listened to Obama in contrast to the previous eight years of watching and listening to former President George W. Bush.

If you are in any way trying to square the invention of dynamite for peaceful uses with the horrible and deadly consequences that such an invention spawned, it is easy to impose the same balancing act between one U.S. president’s words and deeds and the promise of a new kind of leadership.

For certain, the award can justifiably be criticized as being awarded too early in this young president’s term, for what has he to show for all the rhetoric and good thoughts? But the opposite position is equally compelling and, perhaps, more Nobel-like. And that is where I come down.

None of us knows what will happen on any number of global fronts — the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war against global warming and the war to eradicate global hunger.

What we do know, even at this very early date in the Obama presidency, is that Obama talks a different kind of talk — as much as I disagree with his kowtowing to the Muslim world at Israel’s expense — that might lead to a safer and saner world. Whether that happens is yet to be determined.

What we know today, though, is that there is an internationally recognized peace prize committee that has gotten it right far more times than it has gotten it wrong, And, if we can step away from our self-limiting political partisanship, we may be able to accept the fact that the president may be onto something that could make the world a much safer place.

At least that is his intention. And good intentions, as inadequate as it sounds, were probably enough in today’s world to warrant a Nobel Peace Prize.

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.