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Barack Obama’s poisoned shirtThe Nobel Peace Prize is intended to encourage the United States president to consolidate the great intentions of his first year in office. But it may do him more harm than good, writes Godfrey Hodgson.
A Greek myth preserved in the Roman poet Ovid's "Metamorphoses" is a tale for the times. Nessus is a centaur – half man and half horse – shot by Hercules for his abuse of Deianeira. The centaur revenges himself by giving Deianeira, and through her Hercules, a poisoned shirt. When, years later, the strongman comes to wear it, his flesh is consumed. It takes an Olympian god to restore his superhuman vigour.
The Nobel peace prize awarded to Barack Obama on 9 October 2009 could become a shirt of Nessus for the United States president. The presumed intention is to recognise the generous and pacific tone of his speeches in Prague (on www.opendemocracy.net/article/america-russia-and-a-nuclear-free-world) and in Cairo (on building a new relationship with the Muslim world), and to encourage him in his search for world peace.
However, the prize's timing and its political context means it is also unavoidably yet another political pressure, with consequences that could undermine its authors' wishes.
For the award is given at a very delicate moment, when the president is attempting to make up his mind how he can free America from the trap it has walked into in Afghanistan. After an agonising debate among his advisers, he has to decide whether to send the additional 40 000 troops his Afghan warlord, General Stanley McChrystal, has asked for; or move in the direction of a more limited counter-terrorist role, relying on raids by unmanned drones controlled in remote Nevada, to kill the families of Al-Qaeda suspects.
In this light, the Nobel Prize mightily complicates Obama's task. It exposes him to renewed charges of softness just when he can least afford them; its paradoxical effect could be to tip the balance into making him expand a complex and arguably doomed war.
A problem of timing
The Nobel Peace Prize is a mixed beast of its own. It has been given to genuine heroes (Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu, among them) as well as to a variety of American presidents (including the super-macho Theodore Roosevelt, the super-exceptionalist Woodrow Wilson, as well as Jimmy Carter). Henry Kissinger – for all his gifts, no peacenik – was another co-recipient.
In 1939, it only just avoided the ultimate discrediting. The two leading candidates that year were Neville Chamberlain and... Adolf Hitler. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was also nominated. In the event, no prize was awarded. It is doubtful if it would have recovered, had it been awarded.
By a strange chance, I was once peripherally involved in a campaign to give the prize to someone I thought absurdly unsuitable as a recipient. The truth is that the prize is awarded as a result of a process that is at once political and provincial. Norwegian notables acquire status by successfully promoting a candidacy that would find favour with an audience in which an admixture of ignorance of world affairs and anti-American prejudice can run strong. Many Norwegians understandably enjoy a ritual that draws international attention to their highly successful but globally peripheral nation.
In this case, the Norwegians have not helped the object of their favour. For the US president is in a difficult position on a range of fronts, even aside from the Afghan imbroglio.
The anniversary of his election is only three weeks away, yet his achievement so far is meagre. The rescue of the economy, the essential precondition of all the other reforms he promised to achieve, is still in doubt. The dollar is falling. The public-insurance company that was at the heart of his healthcare reform, the highest priority of his domestic policies, is dead in the water. He cannot even close the prison-camp at Guantánamo Bay – the very first thing he promised to do when he entered the White House. And all around, he is assailed by reviving Republicans and cocky conservatives baying for his blood.
The pattern of abuse and insinuation directed at Obama from the more febrile of his adversaries began to take shape in the opposition to his healthcare proposals, and was further fuelled by his unwise (if understandably angry) response to the arrest of his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr, the Harvard University scholar, for breaking-and-entering his own home. Now the same galoots are loose again – on the net, on the airwaves and even in Congress.
Even by the standards already set, some of the local reactions to the news of the president's prize have been pretty extreme. Bloggers vied with one another to abuse the Norwegian committee as socialist ideologues and America-haters.
The hireling ravers of "Fox News" excelled themselves. The former United Nations ambassador John R. Bolton – who admitted to fantasies of a virtual 9/11 of his own when he said "If you lost 10 storeys today [from the United Nations building in New York], it wouldn't make a bit of difference" – denounced the prize as "preaching" to the US.
An ominous precedent
There is a more moderate version of the critique of the peace prize on the grounds that it is simply premature: the president has not yet achieved enough to deserve it.
It is true that Obama's overtures and strategies are facing rejection and frustration across a wide front: most significantly, from the Israeli prime minister (snubbing Obama's demand for a freeze on West Bank settlements) and the Iranian president (intensifying nuclear plans and missile tests, and brutally repressing critics of a fraudulent election).
There are plenty difficulties elsewhere, from Iraq to North Korea to the Caucasus. But the absolutely critical theatre at the moment is Afghanistan – or what Washington insiders, with their tendency to reduce the world's complex realities to a knowing slogan, now call "AfPak".
There too an election, the presidential vote on 20 August 2009 that saw the incumbent Hamid Karzai declared victor, was rigged. But in this case, the US is vitally involved, and it has accepted the outcome (notwithstanding the resignation on 30 September 2009 of the leading US diplomat Peter W. Galbraith as deputy special representative to the UN Secretary-General).
A serious military predicament reinforces this political setback. It looks as though Obama's original thought was that he could deflect right-wing anger over the withdrawal from Iraq by offering the conservatives a military victory in Afghanistan, in part by following General David H. Petraeus' "surge" strategy that allowed the (dubious) claim of "victory" in Iraq. But it is not clear that even this semblance of victory is available in Afghanistan.
Petraeus' protégé Stanley McChrystal has, to his great credit, avoided offering up to his president the usual Pentagon mélange of optimism and euphemism. Instead, he has given his judgment with the bark off: in effect, 40 000 more troops – or the war is lost.
For my generation, this is the "Westmoreland moment". We cannot forget that it was the realisation that half a million troops were not enough to win in Vietnam which doomed the bright hopes of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration.
A key decision
It may be that the balance of forces in Washington will be unaffected by the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama is both resilient and brave. His replacement of the Clinton administration's cautious "don't ask, don't tell" rule on gays in the military with open tolerance is the latest example.
The problem is that at this supremely tricky moment, the Nobel judges have chosen to provide fresh ammunition for the toxic charges levelled against the president.
The damage is also to the relationship between America and Europe. Many Americans today do not trust Europe to be their ally. They seriously underestimate Europe's economic importance: few have any idea that the European Union's economy is larger than that of the US, or for example that Europe is a bigger trading partner with China than America is. Many believe the absurd neo-conservative propaganda about how Europe's population will soon be Muslim.
The Nobel committee – even if it must have been the last thing it intended – has done nothing to dissolve, and indeed will have consolidated, negative American stereotypes about Europe.
Nessus intended his shirt to harm his enemy. His Norwegian imitators meant to help a friend. If Obama sends thousands more troops to Afghanistan, we will know that he was not deterred by their clumsy gesture. But we will also know that he did not deserve the prize.
This article was first published on 12 October 2009 on http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/united-states/barack-obama-s-poisoned-shirt
