Nobel Committee Secretary: Obama's Peace Prize Was a 'Mistake'

Jeffdunetz | September 17, 2015
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​Geir Lundestad who was the secretary of the Nobel Peace Prize committee for a quarter-century says the 2009 award given to President Barack Obama was a mistake. In a book released on Thursday September 17th, Mr. Lundestad wrote that the committee had expected the prize to deliver a boost to Obama. Instead the award was met with derision in the U.S., because many felt Obama had not been in office long enough to have earned the Peace Prize.

"Even many of Obama's supporters believed that the prize was a mistake," Lundestad wrote in excerpts of the book read by The Associated Press. "In that sense the committee didn't achieve what it had hoped for."

Lundestad, who stepped down last year after 25 years as the non-voting secretary of the secretive committee, noted that Obama was startled by the award and that his staff even investigated whether other winners had skipped the prize ceremony in Oslo.

That has happened only on rare occasions, such as when dissidents were held back by their governments.

"In the White House they quickly realized that they needed to travel to Oslo," Lundestad wrote.

Speaking to AP on Wednesday, Lundestad said he didn't disagree with the decision to award the president but the committee "thought it would strengthen Obama and it didn't have this effect."

When Obama was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009 even the mainstream media believed it was undeserved:

At Time magazine, Nancy Gibbs argues, "The last thing Barack Obama needed at this moment in his presidency and our politics is a prize for a promise."

Tweets ABC News's Jake Tapper, referring to a controversy earlier in Obama's presidency: "apparently the standards are more exacting for an ASU honorary degree these days."

(An Arizona State University spokesperson in April explained a decision to invite the president to give the commencement address without also giving him an honorary degree by saying, "His body of work is yet to come. That's why we're not recognizing him with a degree at the beginning of his presidency.")

The Post's David Ignatius also weighs in, explaining that the prize validates America's return to popularity in the court of world opinion: "The Nobel Peace Prize award to Barack Obama seems so goofy -- even if you're a fan, you have to admit that he hasn't really done much yet as a peacemaker. But there's an aspect of this prize that is real and important -- and that validates Obama's strategy from the day he took office.... America was too unpopular under Bush. The Nobel committee is expressing a collective sigh of relief that America has rejoined the global consensus. They're right. It's a good thing. It's just a little weird that they gave him a prize for it."

According to Mr. Lundestad perhaps the most surprised was President Obama himself, who almost didn't go to Oslo to pick up the award.

The book cover's the twenty-five years Lundestad worked as the non-voting secretary of the selection committee and included many other anecdotes including the story of the 1994 award ceremony when Yasser Arafat won the award along with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. According to the BBC, the ceremony was delayed because Arafat was "watching an episode of the Tom and Jerry cartoon in his hotel with other Palestine Liberation Organisation members. 'It was made very clear that they intended to watch until the end,' he [Lundestad] said." 

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