Time to earn some change

By Kris Garriott

I think the first sentence of a CNN.com article posted yesterday adequately summed up the irony in President Obama’s trip to Oslo this week: “President Obama—fighting wars in two countries—will arrive in Norway Thursday to accept the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.”

Arriving on the heels of the long awaited announcement that the US will be sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, this awards ceremony gives the impression that had George Bush been president one year longer, he would in fact be the one receiving coveted medal. It certainly is an odd day in the world when someone who continues two wars from a previous administration and escalates one of them can be given an award for peace.

It’s understandable that the Nobel Prize Committee would want to bestow the honor upon Obama. When he was nominated to receive it he had just been inaugurated as the 44th president after heading a campaign marked by throngs of fervent supporters at home and in unprecedented amounts abroad. It was his calls for diplomacy in dealing with tense situations like nuclear standoffs with Iran and North Korea that piqued the international community’s interest in him. It also probably didn’t hurt to be the son of a Kenyan.

The point is that Obama possessed the power to unify and bring hope to citizens the world over and this point wasn’t lost on the Nobel Prize Committee. What was lost on them, however, was that after Obama laid out his plans for diplomacy, he also laid out his plans for Iraq and Afghanistan, in which he clearly stated that Afghanistan was the “war of necessity” and that his administration would focus its efforts there.

And he didn’t disappoint. We now find ourselves heading into the ninth year of occupying a country that by some estimates has only 100 al Qaeda operatives left in it, perpetuating the same mistake that Alexander the Great, the British, and the Soviets made before us with no end in sight save for a tentative July 2011 date to begin to withdraw. I love the guy but I don’t see how this passes for Peace Prize material.

That isn’t to say that I don’t think Obama has peace as his primary goal. On the contrary, I am quite confident that he has the best of intentions at heart, but the immense pressure he faces at home from the left and right seems to push him into taking a stance that places him somewhere in the middle of it all.

Hopefully this won’t prove to be his Iraq (or dare I say it, his Vietnam) but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. His words at the ceremony are a bit encouraging; Obama seems to readily accept the criticism of his winning, yet still thinks the Afghanistan war is justified but at the same time recognizes that his list of accomplishments is just beginning and by no means has he finished.

So now that he's accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, I’d like to echo the sentiments voiced by the protesters outside the awards venue: “Obama: You won it. Now earn it!”