previous peace prize winners were astonished

[lostinblue 1,989]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/...article1318102/

America's new president Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this morning for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples."

Mr. Obama is the fourth U.S. president to win the peace price but the first to win for - in the words of the Norwegian selection committee - providing "hope for a better future" rather than any particular accomplishment.

Awarding the world's most prestigious prize for peace to a president in office less than nine months came as a surprise.

But Mr. Obama has galvanized the world, proving himself wildly popular around the globe, especially in comparison to is predecessor George W. Bush.

A White House official said this morning that Mr. Obama feels "humbled" to receive the Peace Prize.

It seems Mr. Obama learned about the win through his staff, since he did not get the customary phone call from the Norwegian Nobel Committee to tell him he had won this year’s prize.

"To wake up a president in the middle of the night is not something you should do,” the committee’s chief Thorbjoern Jagland told reporters.

Usually, the laureate is telephoned from Oslo an hour or so before the announcement at 9 a.m. GMT or 5 a.m. Washington time.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it attached particular ``importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.''

At times, the citation seems to focus on Mr. Obama's global popularity - currently higher than his approval ratings at home - rather than any specific achievements.

"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention,'' the selection committee said, adding "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.''

The award - which includes a cash prize of $1.4-million U.S. - was welcomed by some prominent peace groups.

"We trust that this award will strengthen his commitment, as the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, to continue promoting peace and the eradication of poverty," the Mandela Foundation, named for the former South African president who spent decades in prison, said in a statement.

Some other previous peace prize winners were astonished.

The Polish dissident Lech Walesa, who led the decade-long Solidarity movement in the 1980s that eventually toppled Soviet rule and set in motion the whole series of Eastern European revolutions said Mr. Obama has yet to do anything.

“Who? What? So fast?” Mr. Walesa, who eventually become Poland's president, said when told the news.

“There’s hasn’t been any contribution to peace yet. He’s proposing things, he’s initiating things, but he is yet to deliver,” Mr. Walesa said

Mr. Obama, among only a few U.S. politicians who opposed the 2003 war to topple Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq is currently in the middle of intense negotiations on re crafting a war strategy for Afghanistan.

More than 200 people were nominated for the 2009 peace prize. The Nobel committee received a record 205 nominations for this year's prize.

Nominations closed barely two weeks after the president had taken office.

Mr. Obama is the third senior U.S. Democrat to win the prize this decade after former Vice President Al Gore won in 2007 along with the UN climate panel and former president Jimmy Carter in 2002. Mr. Carter's prize came nearly two decades after he brokered a Middle East peace between Israel and Egypt.

The last two sitting presidents awarded Nobel Peace Prize were Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Mr. Wilson won for his efforts to create the League of Nations - a forerunner of the United Nations - in the wake of the First World War. However, the Senate refused to ratify American membership and the league eventually failed to prevent the Second World War.

Mr. Roosevelt won for brokering a peace after Japan soundly defeated Russia in a war in 1905.

Previous Nobel Peace Prize winners have included Mother Theresa, Yassir Arafat, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Mikhail Gorbachev and Elie Wiesel. The prize has also - and increasingly in recent decades - been awarded to organizations including: Médecins Sans Frontières in 1999; the International Campaign to Ban Landmines in 1997; United Nations Peacekeeping Forces in 1988; the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 1981; and Amnesty International in 1977.

In his 1895 will, Alfred Nobel stipulated that the peace prize should go “to 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.”

Unlike the other Nobel Prizes, which are awarded by Swedish institutions, he said the peace prize should be given out by a five-member committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament. Sweden and Norway were united under the same crown at the time of Nobel's death.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

[Kevin and 10]

Woodrow Wilson was a racist.