The Want a Hero

Odd, isn’t it that when the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to a leader of government or governmental organization, it’s intent is to try to swing in one direction or another the motives of a dictator or disliked figure who presents themselves as being able to be persuaded to change their ways. Past nominees of the Nobel Peace Prize have included Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

In light of this, the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Barack Obama for having made a few statements here and there on things he is unlikely to act on comes as something of a surprise, unless you look at it as a measure taken by members of that committee to influence the internal politics of sovereign nation states. The problem here is that the US is not a dictatorship. The award is a telegraphing of political opinion which may have been more venal and reactionary than ‘aspirational’, spending heavily the capital of it’s past legitimacy.

The recent trend in Europe, the region where the likes of the Nobel Committees imagines as representing world opinion, has been to a rejection of leftism, and this award may me a sort of political influence “twofer” in opposition of those societies who voted to make it that way.

Sarkozy was elected with a firm mandate, Merkel was re-elected, Cameron seems like a practical shoe-in, and so forth. So the message transmitted from the rarified air of that northern latitude to democratic practitioners of their own choices is to fall into line. It’s sad to see that they have mounted this kind of effort on the pluralistic societies of the world to the willful ignorance of places like Belarus and the racketeer-like leadership succession practices of Russia.

As to the pretext of reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles, and channeling the dream of a world without peaceful deterrents, you have to wonder if they are really giving it to the right guy:

On the eve of this week's summit between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin, negotiators from both countries huddled in New York Sunday to hash out a plan to substantially reduce their arsenals of nuclear warheads.

Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.S. arms specialists and their Russian counterparts were trying to work out details of how to make deep but uneven cuts in their stockpiles of nuclear arms in the next 10 years or more.

Putin arrives in Washington Monday night and will meet with Bush Tuesday to continue discussions over ways to reduce the number of offensive nuclear weapons. The two leaders are simultaneously working out a weapons negotiation blueprint that may allow Bush to proceed with his plans for a missile defense system.

"We see the capability to negotiate on the U.S. side and we have the same capability, but we want to know what we'll be negotiating about, in military and technological terms," Putin told a group of American journalists at the Kremlin in Moscow before departing for the U.S.

The two leaders begin their summit in Washington, but White House officials have suggested they would announce any agreements later at Bush's ranch near Crawford, Texas.

Bush is hoping to announce cuts of about two-thirds, from 6,000 warheads to about 2,000 on the U.S. side, when he and Putin meet. The reductions would be verified under guidelines established under previous nuclear treaties.

The entire affair was derided by those passionate about arms reduction as Putin and Bush playing a child’s game of cowboys and Indians on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, but the arms control ‘achievement’ being attributed to Mr. Obama, something he announced too shortly after entering office to have actually accomplished with his shambolically under-organized early administration, was not his at all, but a statement by a man they seek to turn into a Manchurian Candidate for their world view is sufficient for their Prize and their admiration.

In a summit that was said to "end a long chapter of confrontation," Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and George W. Bush of the United States met in Moscow on May 24, 2002, where they signed the Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions. Hailed as the beginning of a new relationship between the former Cold War foes, the Treaty calls for each state to reduce its deployed strategic nuclear weapons to approximately one third of the current level.

Which is all Obama will ever get, however much anybody believe that a few words from his lips will start a decades-long love parade leading to the Russians and Americans having NO nukes, while India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, France, and the UK will likely serrupititiously retain theirs’, despite what they say when their lips are moving. No-one will be making arms verification trips to Pierrelatte.

Among the very dependable ‘known knowns’ of those who pretend to speak for the larger opinion of the world, is that the more they dislike America and Americans, the greater a need they feel to support Barack Obama. What the Nobel committee seeks is a conformity of opinion on the part of world leaders, even if they are accidental ones, to limit the diversity that makes man who he is, and the tension in opinion that maintains the breadth of ideas that keep us all safely in check.