The Nobel Peace Prize does have it's share of madmen, dictators and terrorists on the list of nominees and holders. Obama is by far not the worst on that list.

Doing something for peace is not dependent on being a universally good person. You can still save more lifes than you have butchered.

Obama isn't even the worst American on that list. Henry Kissinger has one.

At least Kissinger ended a major war. Obama ended none and started U.S. involvement in more.

If anything, some winners seem to dive into bad behavior after they're awarded. Aung San Suu Kyi and Abiy Ahmed being two recent examples.

It was clearly an f-you to Bush... Obama had been in office for 9 months when he got it, he hadn't don't anything much at all.

To be fair, that was before he ordered the execution of an American citizen without trial.

> To be fair, that was before he ordered the execution of an American citizen without trial.

He'd became president January 20 and was awarded the prize on October 9 - he hadn't really had time to do anything meaningful for international relations.

The only way to interpret the prize was as a rebuke on former president George Bush for gleefully upping the ante from a localised tragedy in America into annihilating two countries, countless deaths and destabilising half a continent. It was a passive aggressive "well we can't stop you America, but we saw what you did".

There was a lot more to those invasions history-wise, but the basic message was clear.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, except that perhaps there’s a lot of younger folks here who don’t remember just how utterly despised GWB was. He was Trump before Trump — both “literally Hitler” and the dumbest man on the planet at the same time. Obama’s Nobel prize was most certainly a “congratulations on not being Bush” prize. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if Biden picks up one this year.

> Obama’s Nobel prize was most certainly a “congratulations on not being Bush” prize.

Except his legacy is arguably worse. Extrajudicial assassinations, the return of open-air slave markets, the deliberate overthrow of middle east governments that created the power vaccuum filled by ISIL, the inadvertant arming of ISIL through the deliberate arming of Jihadists in Syria (which is an ongoing civil war today)...

Edit: Just to add. Bush (really Dick Cheyney) expanded the power of the Executive with the approval of Congress. Cheyney is a monster who saw 9/11 as a chance to consolidate executive power to the detriment of his rivals and enemies.

Obama extended the power of the Executive largely through legal scheming of the DOJ, the courts abdicating their responsibility, labelling everything under the sun as "state secrets", and ruthlessly destroying the lives of whistleblowers. In fact, when using the secret courts set up by the Bush administration, Obama's still violated and exceeded its authority 5% of the time.

There's clearly one of these that looks more dictatorial than the other and it's not the answer most people want.

You're not wrong, but most of this wasn't known at the time his prize was awarded.

Yes, clearly they awarded the prize not only before he did anything to earn it but before he did anything at all.

Hopefully they consider their decisions going forward, but that seems unlikely.

Obama's pattern does not "clearly" look more dictatorial. Hitler was given absolute power via legislative processes. The prototypical dictator for life, Caesar, was granted that title by the Roman Senate.

I could say well Bush lost the popular vote, so clearly anything he did looks more intrinsically dictatorial. Or because he raised private armies. It would be misleading. It doesn't matter how power is consolidated.

> the deliberate overthrow of middle east governments that created the power vaccuum filled by ISIL

I assume you mean in countries outside of Iraq? "Deliberate overthrow", citation please?

I remember a friend in 2003 saying Bush's Iraq misadventure is going to fuck up a lot of things in the middle east... I can't believe how right he turned out to be.

As far as I understand it the Arab Spring came about due to social unrest due to food shortage brought about by climate change (a 2010 forest fire in Russia burned a lot of grain, Russia stopped exporting them, food prices shot up: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=russia+forest+fires+grain+prices+a... ).

Incredibly that has also lead to a lot of war-fleeing refugees, and the rise of right-wing populism in Europe. Also Brexit and Trump?

> "Deliberate overthrow", citation please?

Libya.

Or as the BBC referred to it, "the worst mistake of Obama's presidency".

It's already largely a settled question that US State Dept policy and actions during that administration massively contributed to the formation of ISIL.

The difference between the Bush and Obama administrations in the middle east is stark. Despite destabilizing Iraq, the US military stayed on the ground and at least attempted to create a stable transition of power (and over time largely succeeded, at least by comparison).

Obama's destabilizing actions were followed up by abandonment and power vaccuums filled up by extremists that we armed. This is no-brainer kind of shit that we stumbled our way into, Homer Simpson style.

His foreign policy disasters weren't limited to the Middle East either, considering our lack of intervention and abandonment of our southeast asian strategic allies during the Scarborough Shoal incident.

Ah well, I can clearly see you've got the "I hate Obama, he's responsible for everything bad" goggles on. But I guess I say that through my "He was trying his best" goggles.

> Or as the BBC referred to it, "the worst mistake of Obama's presidency".

Is that in this article where Obama admitted that himself? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36013703 . Unlike Bush/Cheney who never admitted anything? (But we're not judging these men for their honesty at the moment, are we).

> Despite destabilizing Iraq, the US military stayed on the ground and at least attempted to create a stable transition of power (and over time largely succeeded, at least by comparison).

Huh.. and you're asserting that Obama didn't continue that policy? Sorry but Iraq didn't turn to a peaceful and solved problem in 2008.

Seems like you're just throwing sweeping generalizations and one word answers to complex problems ("Libya"), and sadly I don't know the whole issue in depth either.

I'm not really all that partisan. I'm mostly center left. For the most part I'm convinced that all politicians are self-serving idiots. All of these criticisms I'm levelling have come at this administration from both sides.

If there's any blinders, its the fawning treatment he received form the press for largely doing nothing or worse than nothing. Notice how much more criticism has come at him from the left since leaving office.

He's an adored president with an abysmal legacy. I voted for him, by the way. I'm vocal with the criticism because I feel I share in the responsibility for what happened.

> Huh.. and you're asserting that Obama didn't continue that policy? Sorry but Iraq didn't turn to a peaceful and solved problem in 2008.

I'm not saying that it was, but we and our allies already had troops committed in the region. If we'd left, we would have been leaving our allies holding the bag.

I was comparing Iraq to Libya, where after we removed Gaddafi, we didn't do shit. That situation created all of those other things that I mentioned.

Heh, to defend Obama on Gaddafi, it's not like he's got crystal balls. And if he had done an Iraq War II deployment into Libya, the American public (presumably you too) would've screamed for his head, after suffering 8 years of the clusterfuck that is Iraq (and 10 of Afghanistan), which was started and kept in "fucked" state for 5 (7 for AF) years by people like Rumsfeld and Cheney.

Even at the time most people thought his removal was a bit odd and unneccessary.

Later on with the leaked cables, we found out that it was largely because he was trying to create a gold-backed pan-African currency that would have harmed French central banking interests in the region.

One of the first things the "revolutionaries" that ousted Gaddafi did was create a central bank. While they were still fighting for territory.

Trump has done precious little in the war department, so I don't think Biden will pick one up without actually doing something this go around.

Maybe he can shoot for the Medicine category instead.

Not sure why this is downvoted either. GWB was viewed the same way as Trump by social media (I agree the mass media was more muted than under Trump). He was regarded as “dumb” much more than Trump with every minor gaff amplified as evidence “our president is mentally handicapped”.

Rinse and repeat with Trump, who arguably has a better track record at least in terms of starting wars.

If you take a step back from how US politics works in the media (mass media and social media) you realize it’s just a complete clown show. Any one who gets their “news” from those sources is just along for the ride.

> both “literally Hitler” and the dumbest man on the planet at the same time

I never got how Bush was supposed to be both an idiot and a mastermind.

The narrative I remember is that Bush was an illiterate chimpanzee who was a puppet of Dick Cheney, the mastermind.

Edit: I am recounting the narrative as I remember it, not endorsing it.

Being good at acquiring power seems at this point fully a function of intelligent PR which divorced from the myriad skills required to govern effectively. Neither Bush nor Trump did much good with the great power offered them.

Ehhh, he also "modernized" the US nuclear arsenal right before he won the award, too.

Nukes have have been the biggest force for peace since ww2, so I don't really see a problem with that.

They have been, and will continue to be, until they aren't.

Obama did not modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal. He promised to modernize it in exchange for Republican support in the Senate to pass the New START arms control deal. But he let the nuclear enterprise fall into such disrepair that a major scandal emerged in 2013, leading to a major DOD effort to repair the enterprise after a review in 2014: https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-19-29. He kicked the can down the road on modernization of the arsenal itself until the very tail end of his administration, so that it was up to Trump in 2017 to follow through on the promise Obama made back in 2010. All of this occurred after Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

"Nuclear arsenal" doesn't typically evoke images of power generating nuclear reactors, but instead the nuclear warheads.

Why would it matter for the Nobel peace price committee if he killed foreign or US citizens?

There are generally accepted rules about what constitutes the differences between extrajudicial assassination by the state ("it's not illegal if the president does it"), judiciary-based civilian execution ("capital punishment"), wartime combat that results in death, and plain ol' cold blooded murder between parties not state-sanctioned in any way.

I personally don't distinguish much between these (I'm basically in agreement with Einstein's stated views on the matter) but to pretend that our global human society doesn't believe in these distinctions is somewhat silly.

The US president can mass murder hundreds of children (Obama did just this) and not be seen as a criminal, even by that group, provided it falls into the correct category listed above.

Calling Obama a mass murderer is not a fair take on the matter. Obama didn't murder hundreds of children in one go. It was a few here, a dozen there, and so on. So he is more aptly called a mass serial murderer than a plain mass murderer.

Obama was also a shameless mass surveillance-er. He grew the NSA/CIA snooping like crazy because he was uncomfortable with the very public wars Bush was running. So he (and many others who still have positive images or direct power in the US) massively expanded the scale of the intelligence community and significantly moved it to secret courts.

Of course it all started with the Patriot Act. But even looking at who keeps voting for that and keeping it alive and you can't just blame Bush either.

It's like there's no options for Americans politically which doesn't involve massive "black budgets" and secret courts doing who knows what. It's bipartisan and even plenty of the worst Iraq war supporters all have had career revivals in recent years because the media + social media decided that only one thing was bad, the current president. All bad deeds in the past were forgotten for the old set.

Endless "Secret Wars" seem terribly undemocratic and dangerous to me - for the obvious complete lack of public courts, true due process, or war crimes laws that normally are adhered to.

And I also see no proper reckoning in the relevant future either as long as these same "good guys" are back in power.

So I guess we're stuck with it.

Check out the Wikipedia definition of "mass murder" [1] and then compare that list to [2]. Many of his approved drone strikes' civilian deaths exceed the "mass murders" on the wikipedia list of mass murders.

Quote from Obama [3]: "Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_murder

[2] https://www.cfr.org/blog/obamas-final-drone-strike-data

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/obama-said-hes-really-good-a...

There's also a difference between an assassination and collateral damage.

Is there a process for revoking the prize?

Yes. A certain group of people chat amongst themselves and decide what will give themselves and the award the most prestige. If you want the right kind of people to show up at your cool awards party, you have to give the right kind of person the award. That's not sarcasm, that is literally the process. There's no objective measures or anything.

After reading Obama's recent biography, it comes to be that Obama saw that as a push for him to be able to achieve results that merits the medal.

Then after a series of complicated political decision making, he started more. And there are always perfect legitimate reasons, as judging from Obama's perspective and described in the book, that make those things happen.

After a while reading the book, I started to see how futile it has been for US to truly behave as the nation aspires to. Without a equal counter weight, there seems no possibility for the nation's political machine to follow common sense, it's always enemy or ally, and dealing with enemy always involves military power.

Some will say it was just to spite George Bush, but I remember the atmosphere at the time and that wasn’t it. Back then, being the first black president was a big deal, and Obama’s campaign inspired a lot of hope for the future in many Americans and the world. Hopium levels were still high when he was awarded the prize and the doomsday clock I believe even went backward a bit, remember that when Obama was a senator he worked to secure loose nuclear weapons around the globe.

Unfortunately, things started taking a more sinister turn as the years went on, so it seemed the prize had been given too prematurely.

Obama was a good speaker but his actions were quite a bit different... maybe that's why. At least with Trump, you know what you're getting because he appears to be brutally honest.

> because he appears to be brutally honest.

Being ignorant and loud at the same time, does not make someone honest.

For a politician he was honest about what he wanted to accomplish.

Being honest about doing terrible things is not a virtue.

It's better than being dishonest about doing terrible things, though...

Comparing him to horrible doesn't make him great.

I'll never get used to people reading more into what I said than what I said. No, they're both horrible, but one is slightly more horrible than the other.

If all you have is horrible, then less then horrible is better (not saying that it is the case) ...

Only HN thinks Trump is the savior. It's frankly sickening.

That's far from accurate. I think you may be falling prey to the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

I post about that extremely often (sorry), but it's because it's so important. It's probably the single biggest factor causing problems here.

Nobel invented high-yield explosives, so there's a bit of poetry there.

Peace, Through Superior Firepower

by being black?

Especially since Trump actually brokered more peace deals/treaties.

This committee is Norwegian, actually.