Miss Universe Next Nobel?

I MUST admit, as an American, when I saw that our President Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I asked myself the question that millions of people around the world asked, ‘For what?’ Reading Cuana Angula’s letter in The Namibian last Friday (30 October), I wanted to point out a couple of errors in that letter and provide a counterpoint or two.

Angula rightly notes that Obama had been in office for nine months before receiving the Nobel. However, I don’t know if Angula realises that the Nobel committee has a strict deadline of 1 February each year for receiving nominations. That means that someone nominated President Obama for this award only nine days after he entered office. Just nine days.Further, Angula notes that ‘extremist conservative critics and enemies’ of Obama cried foul once it was announced he was awarded the Nobel. But it wasn’t only such people that were surprised. Many in the left-leaning American media outlets rightly pointed out that by awarding this Nobel Prize to someone who has really done next to nothing, takes some of the lustre off the award, when in the past it was granted to far more deserving people who had done far greater things than just talk. Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela actually did something. Even the award recipient from last year, Martti Ahtisaari, was given the award for ‘important efforts on several continents over three decades.’ And Obama was nominated after nine days in the Oval Office!Angula thinks Obama deserves the award for ‘the promise [Obama] holds out for doing good things like nuclear disarmament.’ But this isn’t some beauty pageant where all the contestants hope for world peace, or some hippy, flower-power rock concert. We live in the real world. Can Angula be serious in believing that a do-nothing president should be awarded a peace prize for pie-in-the-sky dreams and mere talk? While rogue states like North Korea and Iran are building nuclear weapons capability and Obama is doing nothing about it, should we really hold on to this ‘promise of hope’ in a nuclear-free world? Somebody pinch me now, I need to wake up from this nightmare lack of logic.Did the Nobel committee forget that Obama is overseeing two wars, and that he has escalated one (he increased troop levels in Afghanistan by 30%) while continuing the other? It is noted that his campaign promise of immediately withdrawing troops from Iraq once he entered office has gone unfulfilled and there are still over 100 000 American soldiers in that country nine months after he entered the White House. This is why not just conservative critics have spoken up about Obama winning this award, but liberal critics have as well. When is the last time the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a warmonger, liberal critics rightly ask?Of course, once the Nobel committee awarded a peace prize to Al Gore two years ago for his efforts on global warming, I realized that this award wasn’t what it used to be. It was nothing more than a political stunt to grant this award to Barack Obama. And I wonder who will get it next, perhaps Miss Universe. Victor KuliginWindhoek