Rice County Republicans

In what can only be called a surprise move, the Nobel prize committee awarded President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. Even NPR comments were mixed, as the show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me poked fun at the physicist who worked decades to get his prize in physics when all Obama had to do was talk about peace.

An astute reader sent us the following introduction to some more reasoned comments on this item.

Hi Folks! As I suppose was the case in many American households, when we heard this morning that Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, we were dumbfounded as to how a president who has been in office not quite 9 months could be even considered for such an award, let alone be given it over all the others in the world whose accomplishments are worthy of such an honor. Especially since we have learned that the nominations for this award closed shortly after he took office this year. Then a couple of editorials appeared this morning also and to us it became clear what the Nobel committee’s purpose was.

The first is by Charles Krauthammer, a columnist for the Washington Post who obviously wrote it and published it before today’s Nobel announcement. It clearly spells out the quandry in which President Obama finds himself with regard to Afghanistan, primarily of his own doing. It gives the background and the reasons for his apparent hesitation on what policy to follow.
From The Washington Post via RealClear Politics: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/10/09/young_hamlets_agony_98640.html
October 9, 2009, Young Hamlet’s Agony, By Charles Krauthammer

The second is an op-ed by C. Edmund Wright, who writes for The American Thinker. He clearly states, “The award is a not so veiled attempt to make it psychologically impossible for Obama to now send 40 thousand more American troops to Afghanistan. To do so would be to spit in the face of his most adoring audience in his favorite venue, the vague and undefined world stage.” In light of all the recent controversy over the statements of General McChrystal regarding troop levels in Afghanistan, it becomes perfectly clear what the Nobel committee was doing when they decided to award the honor to him at this point in time.
From The American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/10/obama_afghanistan_and_the_nobe.html
October 09, 2009, Obama, Afghanistan, and the Nobel Peace Prize, C. Edmund Wright

Read and thoughtfully consider!
Doug Ferguson
Mankato, MN

The bottom line is that we need to remember that the Nobel prizes, like many other such awards, serve the awarder more than the awardee. At the same time, we must admit that there is a movement within the Republican party to get back to our less interventionist way of international life, with calls to end the war because we have no compelling concern with the people in those countries. Certainly from the humanitarian perspective there are heinous tribal wars all over the planet that find innocent women and children being abused every bit as much as in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we were there for humanitarian reasons we should consider other venues that might be more responsive to our help. If even some Republicans are having trouble seeing the value in killing Afghanis, perhaps this is a time to reconsider whether sending more troops makes sense.

—————

As an aside, in a conversation with a friend I commented that the difference between (R) and (D) was that (D) thought you had to have peace first, while (R) think you have to have liberty first. This may be simplistic, but it does shed some light on how the two sides view the issue of wars to deliver freedom (Civil War, Second World War, to name a couple of well known examples of democracies waging wars of liberation in lands not their own, per Victor Davis-Hanson in The Soul of Battle)