Obama defends US wars as he accepts peace prize

OSLO – President Barack Obama entered the pantheon of Nobel Peace Prize winners Thursday with humble words, acknowledging his own few accomplishments while delivering a robust defense of war and promising to use the prestigious award to "reach for the world that ought to be."

A wartime president honored for peace, Obama became the first sitting U.S. president in 90 years and the third ever to win the prize — some say prematurely. In this damp, chilly Nordic capital to pick it up, he and his wife, Michelle, whirled through a day filled with Nobel pomp and ceremony.

And yet Obama was staying here only about 24 hours and skipping the traditional second day of festivities. This miffed some in Norway but reflects a White House that sees little value in extra pictures of the president, his poll numbers dropping at home, taking an overseas victory lap while thousands of U.S. troops prepare to go off to war and millions of Americans remain jobless.

Just nine days after ordering 30,000 more U.S. troops into battle in Afghanistan, Obama delivered a Nobel acceptance speech that he saw as a treatise on war's use and prevention. He crafted much of the address himself and the scholarly remarks — at about 4,000 words — were nearly twice as long as his inaugural address.

In them, Obama refused to renounce war for his nation or under his leadership, saying defiantly that "I face the world as it is" and that he is obliged to protect and defend the United States.

"A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida's leaders to lay down their arms," Obama said. "To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism, it is a recognition of history."

The president laid out the circumstances where war is justified — in self-defense, to come to the aid of an invaded nation and on humanitarian grounds, such as when civilians are slaughtered by their own government or a civil war threatens to engulf an entire region.

"The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it," he said.

He also spoke bluntly of the cost of war, saying of the Afghanistan buildup he just ordered that "some will kill, some will be killed."

"No matter how justified, war promises human tragedy," he said.

But he also stressed the need to fight war according to "rules of conduct" that reject torture and other methods. And he emphasized the need to exhaust alternatives to violence, using diplomatic outreach and sanctions with teeth to confront nations such as Iran or North Korea that defy international demands to halt their nuclear programs or those such as Sudan, Congo or Burma that brutalize their citizens.

"Let us reach for the world that ought to be," Obama said. "We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace."

In awarding the prize to Obama, the Nobel panel cited his call for a world free of nuclear weapons, for a more engaged U.S. role in combating global warming, for his support of the United Nations and multilateral diplomacy and for broadly capturing the attention of the world and giving its people "hope."

But the Nobel committee made its announcement in October when he wasn't even nine months on the job, recognizing his aspirations more than his achievements.

Echoing the surprise that seemed the most common reaction to his win, Obama started his 36-minute speech by saying that others who have done more and suffered more may better deserve the honor.

"I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage," the president said. "Compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize ... my accomplishments are slight."

The list of Nobel peace laureates over the last 100 years includes transformative figures and giants of the world stage. They include heroes of the president, such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and others he has long admired, like George Marshall, who launched a postwar recovery plan for Europe.

Earlier, Obama had said that the criticism might recede if he advances some of his goals. But, he added, proving doubters wrong is "not really my concern."

"If I'm not successful, then all the praise in the world won't disguise that fact," he said.

The timing of the award ceremonies, coming so soon after Obama's Afghanistan announcement, lent inspiration to peace activists.

The president's motorcade arrived at Oslo's high-rise government complex for Obama's meeting with Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg as a few dozen anti-war protesters gathered behind wire fences nearby. Dressed in black hoods and waving banners, the demonstrators banged drums and chanted anti-war slogans. "The Afghan people are paying the price," some shouted.

Greenpeace and anti-war activists planned larger demonstrations later that were expected to draw several thousand people. Protesters have plastered posters around the city, featuring an Obama campaign poster altered with skepticism to say, "Change?"

The debate at home over his Afghanistan decision also followed the president here. He told reporters that that the July 2011 date he set for the U.S. withdrawal fromAfghanistan to begin will not slip — but that the pace of the full drawdown will be gradual and conditions-based.

"We're not going to see some sharp cliff, some precipitous drawdown," Obama said.

Obama's first stop in Oslo was the Norwegian Nobel Institute, where the Nobel committee meets to make its decisions. After signing the guest book, Obama told reporters he had penned thanks to the committee and noted the pictures of former winners filling the wall, many of whom gave "voice to the voiceless."

In the evening, Obama is expected to wave to a torchlight procession from his hotel balcony and stroll with Norwegian royalty to a dinner banquet. He will offer comments a second time there and cap his brisk jaunt to Europe.

The president and his wife, Michelle, arrived here in the morning, coming off Air Force One holding hands and smiling. Having left Washington Wednesday night, Obama was due back by midday Friday.

The Nobel honor comes with a $1.4 million prize. The White House says Obama will give that to charities but has not yet decided which ones.

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Associated Press writers Matti Huuhtanen and Ian MacDougall contributed to this report.

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Barack Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

By Debbi Wilgoren and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 9, 2009 10:19 AM

President Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for his work to improve international diplomacy and rid the world of nuclear weapons -- a stunning decision to celebrate a figure virtually unknown in the world before he launched his campaign for the White House nearly three years ago.

In honoring Obama, 48, the Norwegian Nobel Committee echoed a global embrace of the U.S. president that has seen his popularity overseas often exceed his support at home. Though Obama's name surfaced early among contenders, the announcement astonished observers -- drawing gasps from the audience in Oslo -- in part because Obama assumed office less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 deadline for nominations.

The committee praised Obama for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" during his nine months in office and singled out for special recognition Obama's call for a world free of nuclear weapons, the subject of major speech April 5 in Prague.

Heralding Obama as a transformative figure in U.S. and international diplomacy, the committee said: "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His 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."

Obama is the third sitting U.S. president -- and the first in 90 years -- to win the coveted peace prize. His predecessors won during their second White House terms, however, and after significant diplomatic achievements. Woodrow Wilson was awarded the prize in 1919, after helping to found the League of Nations and shaping the Treaty of Versailles; and Theodore Roosevelt was the recipient in 1906 for his work to negotiate an end to the Russo-Japanese war.

In contrast, Obama is struggling with two wars -- weighing whether to increase the number of U.S. troops fighting to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and overseeing the withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq. He is mired in domestic struggles over health-care reform and economic recovery efforts, and searching for ways to build momentum to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and to assemble an international effort to stop Iran's nuclear program.

In choosing Obama from among 205 nominees, the committee appeared to be continuing its rebuke of the Bush administration's go-it-alone approach to world bodies and alliances, including its decision to go to war in Iraq without U.N. approval. In 2007, for example, former vice president Al Gore won for raising awareness on global warming after the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon emissions, arguing it would take too great a toll on the U.S. economy. Obama has worked to distance himself from Bush's policies since his first day in office, abolishing the use of torture in interrogation of terrorist suspects and promising to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by Jan. 22, 2010.

In response to questions from reporters in Oslo, who noted that Obama so far has made little concrete progress in achieving his lofty agenda, committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said he hoped the prize would add momentum to Obama's efforts. At the same time, Jagland said, "We have not given the prize for what may happen in the future. We are awarding Obama for what he has done in the past year. And we are hoping this may contribute a little bit for what he is trying to do."

Jagland specifically cited Obama's speech about Islam in Cairo last spring, as well as efforts to address nuclear proliferation and climate change and use established international bodies such as the United Nations to pursue his goals. The committee -- made up of luminaries selected by the Norwegian government -- noted a profound shift in U.S. policy and said Obama had "created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play."

The announcement did not mention Obama's status as the first black U.S. president.

Reaction in the United States and around the globe included a degree of amazement from across the political spectrum, followed by praise from Obama's admirers and, often, disdain from his opponents.

In Washington, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele heaped scorn on the award.

"The real question Americans are asking is, 'What has President Obama actually accomplished?' " Steele said in a statement. "It is unfortunate that the president's star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights." Obama "won't be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action," he added.

"Think about it, it's so post-modern: a leader can now win the peace prize for saying that he hopes to bring about peace at some point in the future," sniped Wall Street Journal deputy editor Iain Martin in an online post. "He doesn't actually have to do it, he just has to have aspirations. Brilliant."

In Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, where raised expectations about the peace process have been followed by little tangible progress, most political leaders were skeptical.

"We congratulate him for this," said Ahmed Yousef, deputy foreign minister of Hamas, the Islamist group that runs Gaza and remains isolated by the United States because of its refusal to recognize Israel. But "we believe he has been rewarded or judged based on good intentions towards peace but not on his achievement. It was too early to award him. He has not done that much yet."

Danny Danon, a member of the Israeli Knesset from the ruling Likud Party who opposed U.S. efforts to freeze construction of Jewish settlements, also said Obama's record is thin. "This is the first time the award is given for wishful thinking," Danon said.

But Hagit Ofran, of Israel's dovish Peace Now movement, credited Obama for pushing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to endorse creation of a Palestinian state and consider settlement curbs. "He is being respected for his belief and determination to get things going," she said. "It is not peace and it is not enough, but his rhetoric did change many things."

A spokeswoman for the European Commission told reporters in Brussels that the award "is an encouragement for engagement by all those who can contribute to bring about a safer world."

Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who won the prize in 1984, said the award "speaks to the promise of President Obama's message of hope," the Associated Press reported. Tutu said the prize is a "wonderful recognition" of Obama's outreach to the Arab world.

Obama was awarded the prize just a week after the International Olympic Committee rejected his personal appeal to hold the 2016 Summer Games in his hometown of Chicago.

Jagland told reporters that Obama had not been notified in advance of the announcement, which was made at 11 a.m. in Oslo (5 a.m. in Washington).

Staffers working overnight in the White House Situation Room saw the news on the wires and called press secretary Robert Gibbs, who telephoned the executive residence just before 6 a.m. to wake Obama and tell him.

"It's an honor, certainly nothing that anyone expected, certainly not the president himself," senior adviser David Axelrod told MSNBC a short time later. He said the president "is not interested in individual honors" but that "the point is to rededicate ourselves to the causes that the president has brought forth."

Obama and his aides have described the tenets of his foreign policy as emphasizing "mutual interest and mutual respect" and the idea that global diplomacy functions on the principles of "rights and responsibilities" of sovereign nations.

He has delivered four major foreign policy addresses explaining these themes -- his nuclear nonproliferation speech in Prague; his outreach to the Muslim world in Cairo; his offer of U.S. support to the developing world (tempered with a reminder that nations are responsible for their futures) in Accra, Ghana; and his call for global cooperation at the U.N. General Assembly last month.

At the United Nations, and in multilateral talks, Obama received tentative support from Russia for additional sanctions against Iran if it does not stop enriching uranium. Russia's support, which had been sought by the Bush administration as well, is one of Obama's most tangible achievements. He also led a United Nations discussion of ways to combat climate change and chaired a U.N. Security Council session in which that body unanimously approved a resolution that called for a world without nuclear weapons.

"Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts," the committee said in its statement announcing the award. "The USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened."

After recent years in which the prize went to environmentalists such as Gore, as well as luminaries in the fight against poverty, the committee's rationale for selecting Obama seemed in some ways to strike closer to prize's original mandate.

In his 1895 will, Alfred Nobel, founder of the award, had directed committees selected by the Swedish president to reward "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses."

At the same time, environmentalists welcomed the award and said they hoped it would spur progress at the U.N.-sponsored international climate talks, which have stalled this year but will culminate in Copenhagen in mid-December. In December 2007, Gore and U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri flew straight to climate talks in Bali after accepting their peace prize, and an impassioned speech by Gore helped break a deadlock.

"We congratulate President Obama on winning the Nobel Peace Prize," said Keya Chatterjee, director of climate change for the World Wildlife Fund-U.S., adding that if Obama travels to Oslo for the awards ceremony Dec. 10, he could follow Gore's example and head from there to Copenhagen, where the climate talks will be underway. "We hope that he will apply the same diplomacy skills and effort to passing domestic legislation and achieving a global deal to address climate change, which will bring us all a more secure and peaceful planet," Chatterjee said.

In addition to Obama, Wilson and Roosevelt, former president Jimmy Carter also won the peace prize. Carter was honored in 2002, more than two decades after leaving office, for his "untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development."

Correspondents Anthony Faiola in London and Howard Schneider in Jerusalem, and staff writer Juliet Eilperin in Washington, contributed to this report.

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