Obama in Oslo

I heard nothing in Obama’s Oslo speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize that undermines my prior conclusion—that the Nobel is ours for throwing out Bush.

It’s not unprecedented for the Nobel committee to award the PP to a sitting head of state, nor for the recipients to be less than admirable personages. We forget that joining Martin Luther King, Jr., were Henry Kissinger, Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat and Teddy Roosevelt.

De Klerk, the last apartheid ruler of South Africa, won the prize, too, despite the system he stood for, along with Nelson Mandela.

The point of the prize is not that the recipient is a nice person but that he or she did something to advance peace, and sometimes it’s nothing more than putting an end to gross abuses with which they had been entirely complicit.

Our triumph was reflected in Obama’s call to restore the idea of ‘standards that govern the use of force’, the ones that Bush and Cheney told the world to put up its collective rectum.

Obama spoke of multinational institutions and UN peacekeeping forces and reminded us that he ordered the prohibition of torture and the closure of the Guantánamo prison camp. (Good to be reminded since the latter hasn’t happened yet, and I have serious doubts about the former.)

He had a lot of balls accusing Iran of provoking a nuclear arms race in the Middle East while remaining silent on the country that introduced those weapons there (Israel). But of course he couldn’t have said that without triggering a mudslide of epic proportions back home.

Also hard to swallow was the line about the U.S. as a ‘standard-bearer’ in the conduct of war. Let’s recall that phrase when the commission of inquiry on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is eventually empaneled.

But the boilerplate in his speech was tempered by decent ideas, like strengthening international cooperation to avoid war, re-raising the profile of human rights, economic development to undermine the causes of war, recalling the special case of genocide. Et cetera.

Obama the president is becoming a little annoying with his penchant for those hold-hands-and-sing moments in his speeches. He’s not really saying anything all that new, nor saying it all that terribly well. But the fact that he’s not hurtling the planet towards the apocalypse is, by contrast, modestly reassuring.