Barack Obama should return his Nobel Peace Prize

To begin, the Nobel Peace Prize was delineated in Alfred Nobel's will as an award to honor "the person who shall have done the most or the best for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace conferences". The deadline for submission of potential candidates in any given Nobel year is February, despite the prize not being awarded until December. The advisory and review portions of the short list of contenders is from June through August. Therefore, any potential laureate's merits for the prize are only considered from actions before August of that year. In the case of Barack Obama, this would be July of 2009 or earlier. Not a single one of Pro's arguments apply to that time period. In addition, Thorborn Jagland (chairman of the Nobel Committee) expressly stated "We have not given the prize for what may happen in the future. We are awarding Obama for what he has done in the past year. " Secondly the merit listed for President Obama's award was, as Pro quoted previously, "efforts to support international bodies and nuclear disarmament". None of Pro's arguments are against those criteria. So by definition and by criteria of the award, none of Pro's arguments show that Obama has gone against the spirit of his Nobel. Further, Obama has indeed lived up to the criteria for which he was nominated. One of the major incidents sparking the Committee's decision was a speech Obama gave in Cairo in June of 2009 reaching out to the Muslim world in the hopes of building "a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect". The other important factors included the President's efforts towards nuclear nonproliferation and his commitment towards pursuing foreign policy goals through established international bodies such as the United Nations. Obama's acceptance of the award, he stated "I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments but rather an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations" and that historically the Peace Prize has been given to "give momentum to a set of causes". He also, in his acceptance speech discussed the idea of peace as not necessarily being pacifistic, and mentioned the philosophical concepts of a "just war": "To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason". So it seems both the Committee and the recipient himself viewed the award as a recognition of a promising start to foreign policy damaged under previous American leadership and hoped it would give a boost to future policy- not that the President would never undertake another action that could be considered counter to a pacifistic notion of peace again. Therefore, it is spurious to suggest he should reject an award given in 2009 for policy undertaken years later. This is rather akin to telling a student he should give up his top ranking on the first examination of the semester because he got a C on the following exam. Finally, there have been a number of Nobel Peace Laureates and nominees who have been controversial world leaders or were not even engaged in the matters of peace-keeping by profession. Nobel himself became interested in the issue because of his inventions in the field of weaponry. Should we call the entire Peace Prize a mockery because the Nobel Company flourished by selling arms during the Crimean War? Three Laureates were under arrest at the time of the award. Joseph Stalin was nominated TWICE and made the short list both times for his efforts to end World War II. Just a few of the controversial awards of the Peace Prize include: Liu Xiaobo (2010)- had a history of supporting American invasion of other nations, despite his work on human rights in China. Wangari Maathai (2004)- stated that HIV was engineered by Western scientists to depopulate Africa. Yasser Arafat (1994)- a member of the Committee resigned in protest over this one, calling Arafat a "terrorist" and many former laureates decried his long history of promoting violence. Nelson Mandela (1993)- never renounced political violence and was a founder member of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress; it was classified as a terrorist organization by both South Africa and the US and subsequently banned, due to use of urban guerilla warfare and civilian bombings. Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama (1989)- received funding from the CIA to stage a violent coup d'etat in Tibet. Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin (1973)- Begin was involved in a failed plot to assassinate German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Cordell Hull (1945)- FDR's Secretary of State during the SS St. Louis Crisis. This ship sailed from Hamburg containing 950 Jewish refugees; FDR showed some willingness to take them in initially, but Hull vehemently objected, threatening to withdraw support in the 1940 election. The ship was eventually denied entry and forced to return to Europe, where over a quarter of the refugees died in the Holocaust. And let's not forget one of the most controversial- Henry Kissinger in 1973, for the Paris Peace Accords which brought a cease-fire in the Vietnam War. Kissinger's non-peaceful legacy includes the secret 1969-1975 bombing campaigns against North Vietnamese Army troops, Operation Condor, alleged involvement in the death of French nationals by the Chilean junta, and support for the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus. Two Committee members resigned in protest over this nomination and the arguments were still ongoing at the time of the award. By claiming Obama makes a "mockery" of the award when a great many other Laureates also proved to have some actions that went against a blanket pacifistic definition of "peace", Pro seems to wish to make a special case out of a politician with whose policies he does not personally agree. To sum up this rebuttal, the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded for a very specific action or time period, unrelated to future or past actions of the Laureate in the matter of "peace" and therefore need not be given up. Of course, these awards are not "given up" to begin with, they are either accepted or declined when the Laureates are announced, making the suggestion of Pro even more unreasonable.