Nobel Peace Prize to Obama - Peace Prize Becomes a Travesty

Long before the Nobel Peace Prize was debased and trivialised into an episode of American Idol, the failure beneath the soaring rhetoric of Barack Obama had been exposed. Even the secretary of the Nobel committee sheepishly admitted on Friday: ''Nominations for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize closed just 11 days after he [Obama] took office.''

Since then, the US President has knowingly propped up a corrupt and violent regime in Afghanistan led by a lying fraud. He has achieved nothing to prevent the continued building of Israeli settlements on the Palestinian West Bank. To hand the Nobel prize to someone whose credentials are in the potential rather than the execution confirms that the prize has degenerated into a beauty pageant.

Three times in the past eight years the starry-eyed progressives who run the prize have given it to leaders of the US Democratic Party - Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and now Obama. One of them, Carter, actively sowed the seeds of what would become a global jihad.

Why is it that US governments continue to support corrupt, violent and dysfunctional regimes? The Obama Administration has locked straight into this pattern. Young American soldiers are again being asked to fight and die for a duplicitous foreign leader. You can throw in Kevin Rudd, who has committed Australian troops to fight in the pointless cause of preserving the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, and his warlord allies.

A flaming arrow through the front door of this pretence arrived on September 28, courtesy of George Packer, of The New Yorker, who accompanied the US special envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, on a recent trip to Afghanistan. Packer's reporting, with its high-level access, made a mockery of the charade of democracy in Afghanistan. ⇒