Prizes All Around
Good friends sent this news clipping from Norway recently (see main image).
We can’t read Norwegian, but think we get the message…
We infer the obvious reference to Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu writing to the Nobel Peace Committee, nominating Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Our friends regard that as risible. So do we, perhaps for different reasons.
What we don’t get is that the Norwegians fear the Nobel Peace Prize might be trashed. Surely, it’s been a joke for ages. It wasn’t always that way: evidenced by the awards to Nelson Mandela and Elie Wiesel, for example.
But since 1990, the selections have been ever more tendentious: Yasser Arafat (a terrorist and KGB asset); Kofi Annan (a Eunuch); Jimmy Carter (a twit); Mohamed ElBaradei (a nuclear disarmament ditherer); Al Gore (a
lunatic and climate catastrophist); Barack Obama (a cipher); Rigoberta Menchú (a fabulist); Ellen Sirleaf (a corrupt nepotist); and the European Union (a silly undemocratic abstraction), for instance.
As Dominic Green, reviewing “Betraying the Nobel: The Secrets and Corruption Behind the Nobel Peace Prize” by Unnio Turrettini, with a foreword by Michael Nobel, Alfred’s great-grandnephew, observed: “If the
prize really followed Alfred Nobel’s wishes, 2020s winners should have been Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Zayed of the UAE. That this seems comically impossible shows how far the Nobel has
drifted into partisan theatre.”
(The Swedes are as bad: A good case can be made for weighted and freighted leftish-leans in the prizes for Literature and Economics: e.g., Toni Morrison; Günter Grass; Elfriede Jelinek; Doris Lessing; Paul Krugman.)
Actually, an objective look at U.S. Presidents of the last 40 odd years shows the following track records in the wars for world peace:
President William Jefferson Clinton bombed Kosovo, and sent troops into Somalia, Rwanda and Haiti, which merely inflamed those situations.
(If you want a dramatic version of just one aspect of the epic fail in Somalia, watch “Black Hawk Down.”)
President George Walker Bush initiated horrific and feckless invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (with the full backing of many, including Hilary Clinton, Tony Blair and John Howard) that profoundly damaged those
countries, as well as destabilizing the Middle East.
President Barack Hussein Obama tried to bribe Iraq to cease a nuclear weapons programme. The Iranians got their $300 trillion dollars but kept on enriching uranium to 90%, well above domestic levels, and in facilities
well below the earth’s surface, which makes no sense, other than in exercise of deceit.
Then the President said for Bashar al Assad ( https://www.thevarnishedculture.com/on-the-vigil/ ) to use chemical weapons on his own people would “cross a red line,” prompting a substantial retaliatory response. Assad
went ahead anyway, and the President did nothing.
Finally, after the West had pressured the tyrant Gaddafi to cede a nuclear weapons programme, President Obama bombed Libya anyway, leading to the ouster of Gaddafi, and Libya’s descent into what foreign policy analyst
Doug Bandow described as a real-life Game of Thrones scenario. But I’m sure the President deserved his Nobel Peace Prize. As Rod Liddle observed (on 4/9/2021), “…there are no people in the world quite so right-on as
the Nobel prize Committee members. A bunch of affirmative-action hand-wringing Scandies, desperate to prove that they are woker than thou. This mindset brought the Nobel peace prize to Barack Obama before he had
actually done anything, if you remember. He later brought peace to nowhere.”
President Joseph Robinette Biden: need we say more?
Here’s a list of 105 foreign policy fails of whomsoever was handling Joe’s administration: https://polaris-us.org/updates/the-top-105-foreign-policy-failures-of-the-biden-presidency/
At least the Evil Orange Man is not a neo-con like the men above, or Mrs. Clinton, or Republican Senator Lindsay Graham. In fact, he’s a transactional type who regards wars as bad for business, and is especially skeptical
of “regime change” and the “exporting of democracy.”
“It is possible to isolate the precise moment that Trump permanently alienated the Republican establishment in Washington: February 13, 2016.There was a GOP primary debate that night in Greenville, South Carolina, so
every Republican in Washington was watching.Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had said out loud.“We should never have been in Iraq,” Trump announced, his voice rising.“We
have destabilized the Middle East.” Many in the crowd booed, but Trump kept going: “They lied.They said there were weapons of mass destruction.There were none.And they knew there were none.”*
President Trump threatened Putin sufficiently in his first term to make him check his ambitions in Ukraine. He wrought the Abraham Accords, the most critical progress in the Middle East for half a century. He effectively
ended ISIS, including ordering the strike on the world’s then most dangerous terrorist, Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. He shook hands with, and shook the confidence of, Kim Jong Un at the DMZ. He started construction
on a border wall to staunch the flow of illegal immigration, and with it, Chinese fentanyl . He began negotiations for an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan. He took out Iraq’s secret nukes without starting a war. He boxed the
ears of Bibi and Hamas to achieve a cease-fire. In June 2025, he achieved a peace treaty between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, ending a thirty year war. And now he might be helping to sort out a decades-long stoush between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
As for the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump has as much chance of being so awarded as I have of getting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Then again, Bob Dylan got one….
“Vi kan ikke gjøre dette, kan vi vel?”
[*Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools (2018).]
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