Take Nobel Peace Prize Away from Warmongers

The 2008 Nobel Peace laureate Obama became a war president in 2009 and this year’s winner allows the police to beat demonstrators with billy clubs. It would be best to give the peace award only to retired politicians when they can do no further harm.

Demonstrators were beaten, some fatally, by police during recent Libyan presidential elections. Just business as usual in Africa? Not for a country whose president had just been awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

In all fairness, it should be said that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf didn’t get the award for her treatment of demonstrators; no one questions the fact that she won because of her “non-violent struggle for the safety of women.” But despite that, the award should consider the entire person: A murderer, for example, doesn’t deserve an award even if he later saves thousands of lives.

Over the last three years, this principle hasn’t applied to awarding the peace prize. It began in 2009 when it went to Barack Obama, America’s first African-American president, messiah and corrector of mistakes made by that accident of history, George W. Bush.

Preferably Reward Political Granddads

At the same time, Obama was the bearer of a hope so large that it was inevitable that he collapse under the weight of it just as, say, a racehorse would buckle under Helmut Kohl’s weight. He was already burdened enough by the time he was inaugurated: Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, millions of people unemployed at home and potential terrorists no one wanted in Guantanamo.

That all these challenges still lay before him didn’t appear to faze the Nobel committee in the least. Or perhaps no one had a spare five minutes to reflect on what might follow. If they had done so, they might have come to the conclusion that they might be better off giving the prize to a politician in his 80s or 90s; someone whose political career was already over and done with.

Now they’re left with someone between Martin Luther King and Albert Schweitzer who has thousands of terrorists shot to death from the air; sometimes they hit the bad guys and sometimes they hit their women and children. It’s all justified by the principle that politicians sometimes must do terrible things to prevent even worse things from happening.

But that shouldn’t apply to the Nobel Peace Prize because it exists to honor those people with the highest moral principles. When good wartime presidents get on that list, it reduces the principle of a peace prize to the ad absurdum level.

Scrap the Political Reasons

Such conditions beg the question of who will be next in line for the award? Vladimir Putin? Iranian dictator Ahmed Ahmadinejad if he drops his nuclear program? Politically, it might make sense to crown dictators and that’s precisely why it shouldn’t happen with the Nobel prize.

The politically motivated award to Johnson Sirleaf obviously gave her campaign for the presidency a boost, but even before her election it was common knowledge that she had dirty hands from political trench warfare and because she financially supported mass murderer Charles Taylor.

That alone should have been enough to remove such candidates from consideration for all time and instead give the award to those whom her police troops beat senseless.