BBC: Nobel Secretary Regrets President Obama's Peace Prize.

Nobel secretary regrets Obama peace prize

Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama in 2009 failed to achieve what the committee hoped it would, its ex-secretary has said.

Geir Lundestad told the AP news agency that the committee hoped the award would strengthen Mr Obama.

Instead, the decision was met with criticism in the US. Many argued he had not had any impact worthy of the award.

Mr Lundestad, writing in his memoir, Secretary of Peace, said even Mr Obama himself had been surprised.

"No Nobel Peace Prize ever elicited more attention than the 2009 prize to Barack Obama," Mr Lundestad writes.

"Even many of Obama's supporters believed that the prize was a mistake," he says. "In that sense the committee didn't achieve what it had hoped for".

He also reveals that Mr Obama considered not going to pick up the award in Norway's capital, Oslo.

His staff enquired whether other winners had skipped the ceremony but found this has happened only on rare occasions, such as when dissidents were held back by their governments.

"In the White House they quickly realised that they needed to travel to Oslo," Mr Lundestad wrote.

Mr Lundestad served as the committee's influential, but non-voting, secretary from 1990 to 2015.

He has broken with the tradition of the secretive committee, whose members rarely discuss proceedings.

Well, no shit; at the time it was obvious he wasn't win it on merit, making a mockery of the prize.

So OT how did you felt at the time about the committee bestowing the price upon The Chosen One so suddenly? How do feel about it now in retrospect?

Who

Yeah, the whole thing was dumb.

Kanye West should receive the award too.

The Peace Prize should be awarded to President Putin for liberating Crimea peacefully and with zero casualties.

The Nobel Prize is a fancy circlejerk and always has been. Nobel produced all types of guns in sweatshop factories, and sold them to ANYONE with the cash. He was known as the merchant of death, and only created the Nobel Foundation as a piece of pr spin when newspapers started to talk more about how much of a world burner he was. He patented dynamite, and thought it would lead to world peace, because no country would risk having so much of their sons killed at once.

Further hammering the point home, Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize after bombing Cambodia to hell for shits and giggles.

The U.S. is involved in five wars - Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya - some started during the Obama Administration with all of them with no end in sight.

There have been many mistakes during the Obama Administration but this takes the cake.

Who cares. Awards are a joke anyway. It's more a popularity contest than anything. meh....

It was no more outlandish than any other participation trophy.

Seems odd for the committee to complain now when meaningless feel good awards are handed out to all the kids.

uhhh...USA isn't involved in any wars right now. Maybe you can count syria but that is limitted mainly to drone strikes. We also aren't doing much in Iraq, except providing advice to their army to take back control from ISIS. Obama didn't deserve the peace prize in 2009 and he doesn't deserve it now either, but he has pulled us out of every war that Bush got us in. We may have some "presence" in those countries you mentioned to help with stability, but thats about it.

What a stupid move. Ruins any future credibility in your organization if you're going to "regret" certain awards.

The Nobel Prize for Literature is dope though. Introduced me to so many authors I wouldn't have known of before.

Libya thats why. Still a country left in a hellhole/

Wait, don't they award these things for achievements? Yet they gave Obama the award to motivate him or strengthen him? That's kind of putting the cart before the horse.

I still believe the theory about it only being given to him because Mr Jagland wanted to talk with the guy.

Didn't Alfred Nobel create this whole charade as a way to assuage his guilt for making TNT, something he intended to use as a tool but ultimately ended up as a weapon?

I mean it's a nice acknowledgement and I am sure many people that win some of the awards are deserving, but it seems like many...not so much.

I thought Clinton got one too.