President Barack Obama next to a large Nobel Peace Prize Medal plate
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to17 year-old Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai in 2014 stirred murmurs and grumbles in several quarters, with many claiming that she was gifted the global “holy grail” simply because she was shot by the Taliban.
Long before and after the awarding of Malala, whose case was an example of thousands of others in Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza, there have been calls from some conservative quarters to the Norwegian Nobel Committee to strip US President Barack Obama of the Nobel Prize he won in 2008 given the bloody wars that his regime has spearheaded across the globe.
In fact, many have argued, the committee went against the will of the award founder Alfred Nobel who categorically declared that the prize should be granted to “someone who has made very outstanding achievements for the promotion of world peace in the previous year”.
Barack Obama was barely in office for eight months and the only global peace he had promoted in the year preceding his being awarded were just colorful campaign speeches and being the first African American to win a US presidential election.
But the reality of the Nobel Prize Committee goof would be manifested a few years later after the newly hailed “angel of peace” spearheaded wars that ended bombing six Arab nations, killing and maiming tens of thousands of civilians the process.
Those clamouring for Obama’s award revocation have claimed that he is the only Nobel Peace Laureate to have spilled the most blood after being declared winner.
While the Nobel Committee said that during his consideration “emphasis was also given to his support-in word and deed-for the vision of a world free from nuclear weapons”, Obama’s regime have been increasing the nuclear development budget throughout his eight-year reign against a backdrop of protests from the opposition and global peace lobby groups.
Last year, The New York Times reported that the Obama administration was planning to spend $1 trillion dollars, a conservative estimate according to experts, to upgrade the country’s nuclear weapons capabilities. The authors of the analytical article clearly indicated that America was slowly preparing for a possible future nuclear war, especially given the rise of Russian and Chinese influence in the global arena.
“With Russia on the warpath, China pressing its own territorial claims and Pakistan expanding its arsenal, the overall chances for Mr. Obama’s legacy of disarmament look increasingly dim,” the Times article proclaimed.
Expected to spend at least $355 billion in the first ten years according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the plan focused on developing and deploying nukes that are more powerful and reliable but smaller than the current warheads. While this was meant to far serve Obama administration’s public rhetoric of reducing nuclear tonnage in US stockpiles, the system would yield more destructive warheads in terms of targeting capabilities and delivery systems.
But President Obama is not alone in this club of leaders who clung to the Alfred Nobel medal with bloody hands.
Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States and the first head of state to be awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize, triggered a lot controversy with the Norwegian Left branding him a “military madman” and imperialist who furthered the bloody American conquest of Philippines.
The awarding of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who have advocated and led a bloody military campaign against Vietnam, in 1973 led to the resignation of two Nobel Committee members in protest.
But the fact that these individual’s names still remain engraved among the list of other “angels of peace” like Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Junior is enough to make Obama rest easy in retirement, assured that regardless of the number of countries he bombed as the Commander-in-Chief his legacy as a peace maker is already cast in gold.