Obama's Win Fits With Nobel History

WASHINGTON (Oct. 9) -- Mother Teresa. Nelson Mandela. Elie Wiesel. The Dalai Lama. Barack Obama.

The stunning decision to add Barack Obama to the pantheon of Nobel Peace Prize laureates is the latest head-scratcher from the Nobel committee, a secretive five-member panel appointed by Norway's Storting, or parliament. This year's committee, which leans left in a distinctly Scandinavian fashion, consisted of four women and a chairman, former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland.

"If you look at the history of the Nobel Peace Prize," Jagland said, "we have on many occasions tried to enhance what many personalities are trying to do.”

Few would mistake recent Nobel winners with beauty pageant contestants aspiring to bring world peace. Yet University of Minnesota political scientist Ronald Krebs said the Nobel committee does reward good intentions by "seeking to promote peace by giving the award to those they thought were going along the right path. Barack Obama represents the extreme end of that element."

Others aren't so sure. The reaction of Lech Walesa, who won the 1983 Peace Prize for founding Poland's Solidarity union and defying the Iron Curtain, was typical: "Who? What? So fast?"

Critics called the honor an embarrassment.

"Outrageous," said Jay Sekulow of the conservative American Center for Law and Justice. "Who gives awards to a president in office for nine months?"

In Norway, the local chapter of Amnesty International said the prize shouldn't go to a sitting American president overseeing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But Stein Tønnesson of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo noted, "The Nobel Peace Prize has always been politicized. It was once even given to President Teddy Roosevelt."

Roosevelt was the first of three sitting U.S. presidents to win the prize, taking the honor in 1906 for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War. He is better remembered for charging up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War and sending the U.S. Navy around the world in a show of military might.

More than a century has passed since Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, endowed his fortune to start a prize for peace in his name. According to his will, the Peace Prize was to reward those who had "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Over the years, the emphasis shifted. The first winners were often organized peace group activists. Later, politicians seeking peace were chosen. More recently, the idea of peace has been broadened to include promoting democracy and fighting climate change.

Since 1901, when the first award was given to the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the head of a French peace organization, winners have ranged from the iconic -- U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. -- to the obscure -- Carl von Ossietzky, an anti-Nazi German journalist whose 1935 prize was meant as a message to Adolf Hitler.

Obama is the 21st American to win the Peace Prize and the third African-American, after United Nations official Ralph Bunche and King.

He isn't the youngest -- Northern Ireland peace activist Mairead Corrigan was 33 in 1976 when she won.

He's not even the first Chicago community activist. That honor went in 1931 to Jane Addams, who ran Hull House to help the city's poor and immigrant community.

The president's resume of accomplishments may be short, Tønnesson said, but this year's prize is meant to "encourage his further work for peace" and finish initiatives he started. Among them: a "return to respect for civic and human rights," rapprochement with the Muslim world, Iran and North Korea and withdrawing troops from Iraq. "Then a big question is if he can find a way to be peaceful also with relation to Afghanistan."

Obama was chosen over 204 other nominees, including 33 organizations, the highest number ever. He didn't help end a Cold War like Mikhail Gorbachev. He didn't topple apartheid like Nelson Mandela. Nor did he launch a "green revolution" in agriculture that saved millions from famine like American plant scientist Norman Borlaug, who died last month.

What he did bring, said J. Paul Martin, director of human rights studies at Barnard College in New York, is a change from George W. Bush and a diplomacy that often saw America go it alone on the world stage.

"It's a vote for peace and a vote of confidence," Martin said. "The view of Obama outside the United States is not appreciated inside the United States."