Mr Obama and the Nobel Prize for Peace

Mr Obama said he was humbled by being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. If he was being genuinely humble about it he would have taken the view that he did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize and would have refused to accept it. That would have been the honourable way to act.

After all, he has been in office only since late January of this year and although he may have done that indefinable thing of setting a better tone for peace after the rather bellicose George Bush Junior, he has not, as far as I am aware ended any wars or prevented any wars or done anything concrete for which he deserved the honour.

It may be that by the time he leaves office Mr Obama might well merit, genuinely, the Peace Prize, but in my judgement he does not deserve it now. His acceptance makes me wonder about his own judgement.

Presumably Mr Obama must have felt (and/or been advised) that he did deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr Obama could not or did not want to see that he did not deserve the prize. Does he really hold the view that he has, after the time in office equivalent to the gestation period of a human from conception to birth he has made the world more peaceful? If he holds that view he lives in a different world from me, presumably in that strange world inhabited by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, who awarded the Prize to President Obama,

The rest of us will simply have to struggle in the real world. It is a world where wars are still fought and blood is still being shed; a world where it takes a week to start a prison in Guantanamo for people uncharged with any offence but several years to dismantle that prison, a world where humans from different nations struggle for dominium over their neighbours’ lands and resources and a world where ignorant armies clash by night, to the same extent as the day upon which Mr Obama took his oath of office.