Obama’s ‘Premature Canonization’ by Nobel Panel Draws Criticism

The five Norwegian politicians who awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack ObamaBarack Obama faced criticism for selecting the U.S. president before he converts promises of nuclear disarmament, Middle East peace or better East-West relations into reality.

While the Nobel committee has been faulted in the past for making political statements with its choice of laureates, the Obama award marked the first time it honored a head of state for laying out a vision rather than for practical accomplishments.

The honor is a “premature canonization,” said Fred Greenstein, a historian at Princeton University. “It seems to me that it is an embarrassment for the Nobel process.”

The deadline for nominations for the prize, which includes $1.4 million in cash, was Feb. 1, less than two weeks after Obama took office and before he launched initiatives on nuclear non-proliferation and rebuilding U.S. ties to the Muslim world.

“The prize is coming a little bit early,” Guenther Oettinger, leader of the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, told reporters in Berlin. “He’s at the beginning of his work, not the end.”

Two previous sitting U.S. presidents won the accolade: Theodore RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt in 1906 for brokering peace between Japan and Russia, and Woodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson in 1919 for founding the League of Nations after World War I.

The five-member Norwegian committee, led by former Prime Minister Thorbjoern Jagland, hailed Obama for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation.” It also cited a “new climate” in world politics and the restoration of “multilateral diplomacy” -- the very things that George W. BushGeorge W. Bush was accused of neglecting.

‘Rather Worrying’

“If they needed to choose a symbol, a hope rather than someone who has already accomplished peace with results, it’s rather worrying,” said Nicole Bacharan, a researcher at France’s National Foundation of Political Sciences. “It means there has been little done for peace in the world.”

Obama has barely made his first foreign policy moves. He sent 21,000 extra U.S. troops to Afghanistan and is weighing a further escalation, embarked on diplomacy to end the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program, junked a Bush-era plan for missile- defense sites in eastern Europe, and failed to persuade Israel to halt settlement construction on the West Bank.

In rare accord, both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute questioned the award, saying the 48-year-old president has yet to fulfill his promise as a conciliator.

“Nothing has changed in the Obama administration’s policies from previous U.S. governments, except statements, promises and hopes,” said Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas, the Palestinian faction that runs the Gaza Strip.

For Efraim Inbar, a politics professor at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, the prize shows that “the Nobel judges are unable to distinguish between words and deeds.”

Afghan Debate

The award was announced as Washington is consumed by a debate over Afghanistan, with leading Republicans urging the dispatch of additional troops and opponents warning Obama against plunging deeper into what they see as an unwinnable war.

Obama’s foreign policy “so far has brought a mixed result in Afghanistan,” said Ahmed Nader Nadery, a member of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. “Afghans worry that his pragmatism may lead him to reduce the U.S. commitment as it becomes more politically difficult.”

Past honors to active politicians have come back to haunt the Nobel Committee. U.S. Secretary of State Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger and North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho shared the 1973 prize for negotiating a peace treaty that collapsed two years later when North Vietnam’s forces overran South Vietnam.

The Nobel Committee keeps its deliberations secret, disclosing only that it received a record 205 nominations for the 2009 peace prize, of which 33 were for organizations.

It may, however, “permit access to material which formed the basis” for the selection of Obama -- in the year 2059