The Nobel Peace Prize should be withdrawn, otherwise it is travesty of the five-member prize committee in Oslo, Norway.
The world was largely surprised when President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. The prize was thought to be preemptive and encouraging for a leader who had ambitious global plans for scaling down a militaristic American foreign policy.
Six years later, even many of Obama’s supporters might question whether the award was deserved. In a recent memoir, Geir Lundestad, the non-voting Director of the Nobel Institute until he retired last year, wrote that awarding the prize to Obama “was only partially correct.”
“Many of Obama’s supporters believed it was a mistake,” he wrote. “As such, it did not achieve what the committee had hoped for.”
Earlier in the week, some media outlets reported that Lundestad wrote that he regretted awarding Obama the prize. The reported claim went viral and was picked up by mainstream news organizations, as well as many on the right. The retired director, however, said he was misinterpreted.
“Several of you have written that I believe the prize to Obama a mistake, but then you cannot have read the book,” Lundestad said according to Norwegian news outlet VG.
Lundestad said that the award had placed pressure on Obama and it quickly became clear he wouldn’t be able to achieve what the committee had hoped of him.
Obama’s drone program is regularly criticized for a lack of transparency and accountability, especially considering incomplete intelligence means officials are often unsure about who will die.
“[M]ost individuals killed are not on a kill list, and the government does not know their names,” Micah Zenko, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations told the New York Times.”
He’s also been unable to fulfil a campaign promise to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and is often blamed for a failure to act decisively with regard to the Syrian crisis.
Obama has still achieved some successes though while in office. His securing of the Iranian nuclear deal, while widely opposed by Republicans, has been praised by experts in security, diplomacy, and nuclear power. He’s also wound down the war in Afghanistan and withdrawn most American troops from Iraq — though the latter action is also mired in controversy.
https://thinkprogress.org/the-truth-about-obamas-nobel-prize-dcafb8e9d521/
Nobel secretary regrets Obama peace prize
Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama in 2009 failed to achieve what the committee hoped it would, its ex-secretary has said.
Geir Lundestad told the AP news agency that the committee hoped the award would strengthen Mr Obama.
Instead, the decision was met with criticism in the US. Many argued he had not had any impact worthy of the award.
Mr Lundestad, writing in his memoir, Secretary of Peace, said even Mr Obama himself had been surprised.
"No Nobel Peace Prize ever elicited more attention than the 2009 prize to Barack Obama," Mr Lundestad writes.
"Even many of Obama's supporters believed that the prize was a mistake," he says. "In that sense the committee didn't achieve what it had hoped for".
He also reveals that Mr Obama considered not going to pick up the award in Norway's capital, Oslo.
His staff enquired whether other winners had skipped the ceremony but found this has happened only on rare occasions, such as when dissidents were held back by their governments.
"In the White House they quickly realised that they needed to travel to Oslo," Mr Lundestad wrote.
Mr Lundestad served as the committee's influential, but non-voting, secretary from 1990 to 2015.
He has broken with the tradition of the secretive committee, whose members rarely discuss proceedings.
Barack Obama has been told that he must return the Nobel Peace Prize he won in 2009 following allegations that he funded terrorists abroad.
