I am not convinced that the Peace Prize has to do, in the end, with a summation of life achievement regarding the goal of peace. It seems to have more to do with specific points in a life. Gandhi excepted, perhaps. An example:

Poor Arafat! The kings of the earth trotted the poor fellow out, over and over, to acquiesce in the oppression of his people, and call it peace. Surely he knew the settlements in Palestine were unconscionable, the pretensions of the Israelis hypocrisy. But he appeared at the so called negotiations and signed the documents many times.

Palestinians were left stateless, penned largely in refugee camps, and hemmed in, prevented from free movement by Israeli checkpoints and settler shootings. But he was lauded for his statesmanship.

Within a few years the Israelis trapped him in a building and shelled it for weeks on end. I guess his laudable statesmanship and visionary status as a Peace Prize laureate were insufficient to shield him from the IDF, shelling a building on non-Israeli soil in violation of treaty, with total impunity.

Back in northern Europe, the Peace Prize committee was trying to train both sides the way you train a pigeon. Make a positive move, get a reward. Make a move otherwise, get none. Skinner could tell you how it's done. After a while, the pigeon pulls the little cart or rings the little bells to make the notes of La Marseillaise.

If anyone needs the pigeon treatment, it's Obama. He has already accomplished some significant things, despite the repeated claims of the punditry, especially in the realm of diplomacy. But there are many things he has failed to learn, and we do not yet hear La Marseillaise. Maybe the Prize will do some Skinnerian work, some 'positive reinforcement.'

Sorry, I retreated to cynicism. The left snipes at Obama because he is not a progressive, but he never looked like one.  During the campaign his opponents labeled him The Most Liberal Senator and I guess progressives must have believed them.

Obama, at base, believes in Empire. No President for decades has been otherwise. Hell, most Americans, no matter how much Empire has cost them personally in blighted aspirations and reduced circumstances, believes in American empire, American hegemony over the world at large.

It was the same with the British Empire. That one was very expensive indeed, and impacted British citizens daily, but they supported it all the same, so long as it lasted.

We all, in school, saw the maps in the history books. I refer to the ones with the large colored areas on them:

The Mongol Empire at its greatest extent

The British Empire at its height

The Roman Empire at the time of Augustus Caesar

The Third Reich at its greatest extent

The Assyrian Empire in the time of Hammurabi

Alexander's Conquests

and so on. In each case, one saw a map with a large colored-in zone.

The Mogul Empire in the Reign of Aurungzeb

The Conquests of Tamurlaine

French Colonial Possessions Worldwide

Islamdom in the Age of the Gunpowder Empires

If maps meant anything to you, as a child, you came away from this with the idea that the true measure of greatness in a civilization was the size of the colored-in zone on the world map which it could boast of.

The texts with thw world maps in them never mentioned the expense of those empires to the citizens of the home country. But, in fact, overseas empires uniformly cost the home country prohibitively. It's only the land-based empires, like Russia's, which have persisted. America spread to take over large tracts of the Spanish colonial area, and the French one, and still holds onto them, effortlessly, today. We have New Mexico, Arizona, Missouri, Louisiana, Texas and California. Russia has Siberia and so forth. But the overseas empires all fail under their own weight.

Not daunted by history, America has embarked upon an imperialistic course, and an overseas empire, at that. We seem to think that American ideas about what goes on in every far flung station of the world should govern. The military embodies this idea implicitly, and every government of whatever party has endorsed it.

Obama is no different. He wants to continue to punish Cuba, to 'have a presence' in the Middle East, to influence events in central Asia, Haiti, Venezuela, Mexico, Honduras, Brazil, the Philippines, and on and on. Congress and most Americans accept this idea with no cavil or serious question. War is indeed Peace. Freedom is Slavery.

 But the righties snarl at Obama over this because he removed the American right from overt power.  And, of course, because he's black.  Even by the time nominations closed, he had done that much, and during the committee's decision making, his administration did more.  You can't expect the American right to agree that such an accomplishment merits a prize, but I should have expected that the left would have thought so.  America was rolling down a very dangerous track when he slowed its momentum.  The financial crisis could have tipped the country into fascism, as the Depression did to so many societies in the last century.  Much of the political structure to take advantage of it is already in place here.  We owe him.