An award based on hope and vision.

THE NOBEL Committee's decision to award this year's Peace Prize to Barack Obama has unleashed a savage storm of media criticism. For Robert Fisk in the Independent, the American President has received the prize, "for achievements he has not yet achieved and for dreams that will turn into nightmares." In this paper today, columnist Gwynne Dyer muses, "Still, there is no doubt that Obama's intentions are good. So are mine. Where's my prize?"

It's "the worst decision in Nobel Peace Prize history" for Alexander Downer, UN Special Envoy for Cyprus, writing in a column in his native Australia -- "a hideous display of cynical politics"; a decision that an editorial in the Financial Times puts down to "a Nobel Committee trapped in an adolescent adulation of Mr Obama that, if once shared by many, most have put behind them."

All point to the President's stalled initiative to revive the Middle East peace process, to his failure to extract even a suspension of Israeli settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territories -- the most basic precondition for any resumption of talks; they point to the fact that one of his first decisions as Nobel Peace laureate may be to order more American troops into Afghanistan; to the realisation that, for all his overtures, the Iranian nuclear showdown remains as frightening as ever. They simultaneously criticise him for being weak in the Middle East, for being too tough on the Taleban and too soft on Iran.

Yet as the Financial Times itself concedes, most of those critics themselves shared that "adolescent adulation" barely a few months back (though it's probably safe to assume that Mr Downer -- who as Australian foreign minister enthusiastically committed troops to George Bush's invasion of Iraq -- did not). They cheered his campaign, they cheered his triumph, they cheered the wind of change he had brought into the White House and the world after the leaden years of George W. Bush. And today, they sink back into a mantle of cynicism at his 'failure to achieve anything' -- although as world-weary commentators 'they could have told you so' from the beginning.

Let's go back to the actual statement of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. It states that the prize is to be awarded to President Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" with special mention to his vision of for a world free of nuclear weapons.

"Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central positionC*. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflictsC* Thanks to Obama's initiative, 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.

"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."

Yes, it's an award based on hope and vision, rather than concrete achievement. Is that such a bad thing? When we cheered President Obama, it was precisely hope and vision that we cheered, values that had become such a rare commodity in our cynical world. We cheered a candidate and then a President who was not afraid to appeal to our better sentiments, and we cheered a people who embraced that vision.

We cheered, not just because of the feel good factor, but because rhetoric matters. It mattered under President Bush, when the politics of fear dragged America into years of foreign policy aggression and isolation, fuelled by a cynically peddled paranoia of America under attack.

To have traded the politics of fear for the politics of hope, to have inspired not just a people but the world, to have taken America from the rogue state it had become back into a position of leadership, to openly privilege dialogue over threat, these are all huge achievements, no less valuable for the fact that they are not evidenced by the flourish of a signature. They may not secure peace in the Middle East, and they may not end the war in Afghanistan, but they may avoid other conflicts and they may restore the badly damaged credibility of freedom, democracy and human rights, so battered for being so cynically invoked by Mr Obama's predecessor in the White House.

And there is a final irony in the wave of criticism. Barely a day passes by without journalists bemoaning the disconnection between the public and their politicians, the disillusionment with a cynical political elite grown fat on the manipulations of power. Surely the Peace Prize also recognises a man who has reconnected politics with public aspirations, a man who has worked from the bottom up, starting off as a community activist in Chicago and winning highest office through an improbable connection with the people he has been elected to represent.

Copyright Cyprus Mail 2009

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