Barack H. Obama delivered his Nobel Lecture on 10 December 2009 at the Oslo City Hall, Norway. He was introduced by Thorbjørn Jagland, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.  Credits: Norsk Rikskringkasting AS (production)

Copyright Nobel Media AB 2009

Les Payne

December 13, 2009

The best Nobel speech out of Oslo Thursday, and the least ironic, was delivered not by President Obama but by the Norwegian Committee chairman who introduced him.

Not only did Thorbjoern Jagland make a better case for awarding Obama the Prize, he also struck the clearer note for peace. And it was peace in the Nobel Prize tradition, bracketing the easing of both the nuclear threat abroad and human rights abuse at home. Jagland’s clarion call went unheralded by those who remain tone deaf to race and hot-wired chiefly for noise.

Professor Obama, however, did not sleep through the chairman’s sharp lecture. “I thought it was an excellent speech,” the U.S. President said at the banquet later. “I was almost convinced that I deserved [the Peace Prize].”

For his part, Obama opened his Nobel acceptance speech with apologies to previous winners, then turned hard-eyed intellectual to dress his Afghanistan efforts in the cloak of a “just war,” a cloak that simply does not fit his belated troop escalation.

“Compared to some of the giants of history who’ve received this prize—Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela.” he said, “my accomplishments are slight…I cannot argue with those who find these man and women…to be far more deserving of this honor than me.”

And then, almost as if winking at the Academy to say, no thanks but thanks, suckers, Obama conducted a clinic, and a brilliant one, on how, though “we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetime,” war can be justly employed in not achieving this evasive peace. Beautiful. So goes the political expediency for the intellectual and judiciously fit 44th U.S. President whose predecessor was a blank-shot cowboy, with a cowardly, vice-president War Bucks, who stranded the country in two wars with a third one brewing nearby.

Even so, Chairman Jagland offered President Obama a pass. “In the long run, however, the problems in Afghanistan can be solved only by the Afghans themselves,” he said. “This is also the basic logic behind the President's new strategy there.”

It is likely that the matters of Pakistan and Iran, and not so much nuclear-free Afghanistan, are what moved the Nobel Prize committee to vest its hope in President Obama. They are counting on him to convince his superpower nation to act more in accordance with his assumed goodwill for global peace.

“We cannot get the world on a safer track without political leadership.” Jagland said in his introduction. “And time is short. Many have argued that the prize comes too early. But history can tell us a great deal about lost opportunities.”

A nuclear weapons-free world is very much on the agenda of the Nobel Committee. “Under Obama's leadership,” Jagland noted, “the U.N. Security Council gave its unanimous support to the vision of a world without nuclear weapons.” The Obama Administration was also credited with easing U.S.-Russia tensions by reconsidering the deployment of the missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. The chairman also laid out his global case, not for a “just war” in Afghanistan, but for Obama’s broader impact on the international issues of peace and war.

“Obama has achieved a great deal,” he said. “Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Former Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld said that "the U.N. was not created to take humanity to heaven, but to save it from hell". The U.S.A. is now paying its bills to the U.N. It is joining various committees, and acceding to important conventions. International standards are again respected. Torture is forbidden; the President is doing what he can to close Guantanamo. Human rights and international law are guiding principles. This is why this year's Laureate has earned the praise of the leaders of international institutions. New opportunities have been created.”

Then there were the old scores of human and civil rights abuses, two long-running Nobel concerns.

“Many have been awarded the Peace Prize for their courage,” Chairman Jagland said. “even when the results for a long time seemed modest: Carl von Ossietzky, Andrej Sakharov, Lech Walesa and the Dalai Lama, to name a few. When Albert Lutuli received his Peace Prize, the struggle against apartheid was in its infancy: there were few results to point to.

“When Martin Luther King, Jr., received his award, he had proclaimed his dream that "my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character", but there was still a long way to go from dream to reality.

“Mr. President, we are happy to see that through your presence here so much of Dr. King's dream has come true.”

It was indeed Dr. King who made President Obama possible—“give us the ballot,” the Nobel laureate said often, “and we will change America.” It is likely that the Peace Prize was awarded Obama not as a slap at President Bush, as suggested, but as a salute to his consummation of King’s civil rights struggle. Obama returned the salute “as someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work.”

The acknowledged beneficiary of the non-violent struggle of a determined minority cleared his throat at the Nobel podium, threw back his Prize-winning shoulders and pressed the case as the elected Commander-in-Chief for a “just war” in recognition of current events in the world, “the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

It is not clear what Dr. King would have made of his beneficiary in Oslo this week.