More on Obama's Nobel

OP-ED: The Peace (Keepers) Prize, By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, New York Times, October 10, 2009

Very nice, perspective-providing piece by Friedman.

Reminds me of the story when Time was picking its "man of the century" and decided on Albert Einstein. A key runner-up was the American G.I. for everything he did over the course of the century to conclude wars and safeguard stabilizing peace.

To me, there was no contest: somebody eventually does what Einstein did, but no American soldier and we live in a very different world.

Still, I don't have the chutzpah to tell the president what his speech should include. I think he's smart enough to know why he was chosen, and I don't seem him offering any speech that suggests he's symbolically refusing it by saying he's really accepting it on behalf of others. If there was ever a Nobel given to America as a whole, this one is it, and it's for changing course.

So, while I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment here (having repeatedly declared in my books that the U.S. military has been the greatest force for peace in human history--to much ridicule), I don't think Obama should engage in a long-winded recitation of why the world should always be grateful to the U.S. While America should be universally admired in this respect, the award was for changing course from Bush-Cheney.

Yes, almost nobody in America is comfortable in citing that reality alone, because there's a certain sense of complicit guilt in that (in effect, we all went off course by allowing Bush-Cheney to unfold as part of our intense post-9/11 anger, which was natural and naturally over-reached [hey, we're human!]), but the truth of the award is exactly that: we vastly underestimate how much we scared the world after 9/11 and how grateful that world is to see us calm down some and re-engage our global leadership in a way they find more fitting to the times.

And that's a hard message to accept, because we hate admitting that we ever do anything wrong. But we should accept that message and not try to dissemble its signal by claiming alternative rationales--however virtuous those arguments may be in the grand sweep of history.