Mazel Tov to the wizard of words Barack Obama for winning the Nobel Peace prize! He is a nice guy, a good speaker, and I do like him.
But what a terrible timing to earn a Nobel Peace Prize: just a week after announcing the dispatch of extra 30,000 troops to Afghanistan (thus bringing the US total to 100,000, close to the number of Soviet troops in the country during the 1980s).
Well, I wish Obama all the best but, frankly, I think that all this Nobel Peace Prize business is, at this stage, a bit premature and, in fact, I am pretty sure that the perspective of history will regard Obama as war president. I hope, though, that the scenario I describe in This is how we’ll get out of Afghanistan will never materialize.
We should also recall that the Middle East Peace Process was high on Obama’s list of priorities. Do you remember “Remarks by the President on a New Beginning”, which was Obama’s speech at Cairo University on 4 June 2009? Well, let me just tell you that, in spite of huge efforts by Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell, thus far the verdict is: zero results.
And as I commented on Obama and the Middle East peace process in one of my previous post: “Words are easy and many, while great deeds are difficult and rare”.