Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize could stun George W. B. into again start hitting the bottle big time while in retirement on his Texas ranch. One can picture the man in an alcoholic haze demanding of Laura, ‘What the hell did I do different to be denied the prize for eight long years?’, and simpleton wifey vainly attempting to sober him with what she imagines is a dose of reality: "It’s your prize that’s been given to Barack, darling, because its your war that he’s made his own!" [So George now drinks to that, an outcome Laura hadn’t quite anticipated.]

History confirms this was not the first time the Nobel Committee made the horrible mistake of seeing the Commander-in-Chief of the largest single military force on Planet Earth as a ‘global peacemaker’. Let’s take a moment to consider the circumstances surrounding this latest ‘mistake’.

Obama took office on January 20, this year. The cut-off date for nominations for the Nobel was February 1, this year, or just twelve days after the first African American sat in the Oval Office. So someone had to be working overtime to slip in the name of an untried and untested greenhorn Prez to the Nobel Committee. [Politicians, sans borders, are never lacking of hangers-on ever willing to cozy up and do the needful in such circumstances.]

Canadian Professor Michel Chossudovsky, editor of the GlobalResearch website notes that, apart from the diplomatic rhetoric, there has been no meaningful reversal of US foreign policy in relation to the George W. Bush presidency, which might have remotely justified the Prize. "In fact quite the opposite," he asserts. "The Obama military agenda has sought to extend the war into new frontiers. With a new team of military and foreign policy advisers, the Obama war agenda has been far more effective in fostering military escalation than that formulated by the neocons."

From the very outset of the Obama presidency, in Chossudovsky’s view, this global military project had become increasingly pervasive, with the reinforcement of US military presence in all major regions of the world and the development of new advanced weapons systems on an unprecedented scale. Consequently, both the Obama Administration and NATO are directly threatening Russia, China and Iran.

Indeed it can be argued that Obama in the course of his campaign carefully laid the foundation for making the utterly spurious distinction between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ wars, shrewdly catering to the central need of public opinion to have a ‘just cause’ for successfully waging war – on moral, religious or ethical grounds. [Remember the Crusades? Yes, it’s sad but true that man’s propensity to wage bloody war goes back a long, long time. Don’t ask the Pope about that. "Ah, those, they were just wars against the infidel," he’d claim; Obama’s justification now is supposedly ‘national security’ endangered by the same infidel.]

The official Nobel Press Release noted that Obama’s diplomacy "is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population." What exactly does that mean? In a word: unadulterated BS, a conclusion amply borne out when comparing the performance of current world leaders against the Nobel yardstick. Eerily echoing the wildly held belief on November 8, 2008 that Obama represented the Second Coming, the Nobel Committee claimed Mr. O had "given the world hope for a better future". As for the Committee attaching "special importance to his vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons", one can do no better than recall what John Pilger said in Hidden Agendas: "When Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to ‘peace’ in Vietnam, the great American satirist Tom Lehrer said he was retiring because, clearly, satire was now obsolete."

The members of the Nobel Committee had clearly decided not to be influenced in their decision-making by current geopolitical developments, especially any in which their potential choice plays a central role. [Which reminds me of a cartoon where a woman juror whispers to her juror colleague in the midst of court proceedings, "I never listen to the evidence. I like to make up my own mind."]

Those ‘developments’ include Obama’s recent kick-starting of Ronald Reagan’s mad-hatter ‘Star Wars’ project while appearing to reject with much fanfare that other mad-hatter GWB’s missile-shield encircling Russia to ostensibly protect America from an Iranian attack using missiles that existed only in the neocon imagination. Other significant geopolitical signposts: a spiraling defense budget under O with increased allocations for both Iraq and Afghanistan; an escalation in the Central Asian Middle East war with Pakistan the target for a new aerial-cum-ground assault under the rubric of the Global War on Terror in direct violation of Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty; increased military aid to Israel, and outright rejection of the exhaustive Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes in Gaza; setting up new military bases in Latin America (Colombia) in close proximity to Venezuela.

The most delightful tongue-in-cheek essay I’ve read on Obama’s Peace Prize was by CounterPunch’s Alexander Cockburn. He launches forth into the subject with the observation that Obama "only had slightly less than nine months to discharge his imperial duties, most concretely through the agency of high explosives in the Hindu Kush whereas laureates like Henry Kissinger had been diligently slaughtering people across the world for years." [Indeed, cartoonist Dwayne Booth – ‘Mr. Fish’ – portrayed Henry K whining: "I think the Nobel Committee jumped the gun a bit – I didn’t get my Prize until AFTER four million people died in a pointless quagmire." Don’t discount a second award in the next three years, by when Henry K will have fulsome praise for Obama’s unrivalled ability to ‘kill for peace’.]

In Cockburn’s view, US President Teddy Roosevelt was awarded the Peace Prize in 1906 "as reward for sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the Philippines. TR was given the peace prize not long after he’d displayed his boundless compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of Filipino ‘monkey men’ in the 1904 St Louis World Fair as ‘the missing link’ in the evolution of Man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible if necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly dispatched the Great White Fleet (sixteen US Navy ships of the Atlantic Fleet including four battleships) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle Sam’s imperial credentials, anticipating by scarce more than a century, Obama’s award, as he prepares to impose Pax Americana on the Hindukush and portions of Pakistan."

Cockburn reminded readers that the next US President to win the Nobel was Woodrow Wilson in 1919, "the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, having brought America into the carnage of the First World War."