A Typical Nobel
A columnist in the Times of London had a thunderous reaction to the news of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama last week.
"Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent," wrote Michael Binyon. Stating that the Norwegian Nobel Committee clearly intended one last slap at George W. Bush and hopes Washington will "re-engage" with the world, Binyon went on to say that "the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronizing in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace."
Except for that mysterious word "re-engage," and with one other point, THE SCRAPBOOK is entirely in agreement with Michael Binyon. The other point is Binyon's fundamental premise which, in THE SCRAPBOOK's view, is mistaken: that the Nobel Peace Prize is to be taken seriously. No, it isn't.
Begun at the turn of the 20th century as penance for his invention of dynamite, Alfred Nobel's peace prize has missed the mark as many times--perhaps more--than it has hit it. To be sure, by definition, there have been occasional statesmen who deserved recognition (Theodore Roosevelt, Gustav Stresemann, George C. Marshall, even Mikhail Gorbachev) and private citizens who have done more good than harm (Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi, Norman Borlaug).
The prize has often gone to earnest do-gooders (the Red Cross, Georges Pire, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, Fridtjof Nansen) and popular humanitarians (Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer, the Dalai Lama). But there have also been some surprising omissions: Gandhi, for example, and any number of people whose particular actions or long careers did considerably more to ensure global peace (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan) than the long list of professional pacifists and League of Nations/U.N. bureaucrats routinely honored in Oslo.
In recent decades, moreover, the prize has been awarded to people who have arguably done more harm than good in the world (Mohamed -ElBaradei, Jody Williams of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Oscar Arias Sánchez) or can only be described in cynical terms (Rigoberta Menchu, Jimmy Carter). And sometimes the prize takes a sinister turn, awarded--presumably for ideological purposes--to people or organizations that not only fail to practice peace but actively promote ill-will, bad faith, and violence. For every Lech Walesa, Shirin Ebadi, or Andrei Sakharov there is a Yasser Arafat, Le Duc Tho, or International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
Where President Obama stands in this spectrum it is difficult to say. The prize is sometimes hastily awarded to politicians whose efforts ultimately fail (Henry Kissinger, Shimon Peres, Willy Brandt) but the remarkable thing about the Obama award is that nearly everyone--critics and admirers alike--agrees that it is based exclusively on hope and expectations, not achievement. Which is another way of saying that, like many famous decorations and awards, the Nobel Peace Prize is largely devoid of meaning--and has very little, if anything, to do with peace.
Who Necklaced Haiti?
It got awkward last weekend when Bill Clinton, the special U.N. envoy to Haiti, was addressing a group of investors invited to the island to promote job growth. Because it was Clinton who, on coming to power, spearheaded a U.N. economic embargo that destroyed hundreds of thousands of Haitian jobs, and Haiti's fledgling middle class along with it. Haiti had more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs at the time. It now has (according to the State Department) 17,000. The goal of the embargo was to restore to power the radical demagogue Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose rule--sometimes direct, sometimes indirect, but always violent--lasted from the invasion Clinton ordered in 1994 until an uprising in 2004.
"I hated it," Clinton said of the embargo, "but when you have people being burned to death with tires around their neck, that's important too. We had to bring an end to that."
Whoa! The grisly practice Clinton describes, known as "necklacing," originated among anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. It was imitated in Haiti, where it was rechristened "Père Lebrun," after the biggest tire dealer in Port-au-Prince. It was Aristide--Clinton's guy--who exhorted the armed mobs of his ruling Lavalas movement to use it. A speech he gave in late September 1991 extolling Père Lebrun, helped trigger the coup a few days later. The military junta that removed him was no parliamentary democracy. But it did not practice Père Lebrun.
What happens when a democratically elected government aspires to become an undemocratic tyranny? Is it ever permissible to remove it? In the present, tragic case of Honduras, the Obama administration is answering no. The Clinton administration gave the same answer in Haiti 15 years ago, and put the U.S. Marines at the beck and call of an anti-American dictator.
Whether the abuses of Aristide were worse than those of the junta that replaced him is a question that may divide reasonable people. (THE SCRAPBOOK's view is that Aristide's was by far the crueler dictatorship.) About necklacing and the embargo, though, there is no ambiguity. Clinton did not destroy the Haitian economy to prevent people burning others to death with tires around their necks. He destroyed the Haiti economy in the name of people burning others to death with tires around their necks.
Book 'em, Roger
The news coming out of publishing is all doom and gloom these days--doom and gloom about the future of publishing, that is. How nice to report that the news coming from Encounter Books is about something much more important: American society. The firm has just this week kicked off a series of Encounter Broadsides: 48-page pamphlets, produced in a matter of a few weeks--that's light speed by publishing world standards--to allow an expert commentator to make a substantial contribution to a debate while it is still going on. With so many institutions of American life under assault from the left, we need muscular arguments and as Encounter's publisher (and WEEKLY STANDARD contributor) Roger Kimball notes, "Sometimes the best defense is a broadside." The broadsides are a fine bargain at $5.99, and that they are intended to be read in a single sitting fits THE SCRAPBOOK's idea of a good time.
The series kicks off with three titles: How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections by John Fund, Obama's Betrayal of Israel by Michael Ledeen, Why Obama's Government Takeover of Health-Care Will Be a Disaster by David Gratzer. These will shortly be followed by Andy McCarthy on the politicization of the Justice Department, Stephen Moore on the economic crisis (hold on to your wallets, folks), Victor Davis Hanson on the Obama administration's foreign policy, and, we're told, Michael Barone on immigration policy. We're somewhat biased in believing that publishing these folks puts you on the side of the angels--as a quick search of this magazine's archives will show. A tip of THE SCRAPBOOK's homburg to Kimball and Encounter.
Sentences We Didn't Finish
"Gender politics is always just beneath the surface in this town, because the inequality in power is stubborn and persistent. Even on Capitol Hill, only . . . " (Dana Milbank, Washington Post, October 9).