Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Speech To Note Irony Of Award During Wartime December 10, 2009 | posted by Nigerian Muse (Archives)

 

 

 

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President Obama -- fighting wars in two countries -- will arrive in Norway on Thursday to accept the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.  The president will spend 26 hours in Oslo meeting the royal family, accepting the Nobel at an afternoon ceremony and attending an award banquet that evening. At the ceremony, Obama will accept a $1.4 million prize check, a gold medal and a diploma. He also will speak at the ceremony, which will be streamed live on CNN.com starting at 7 a.m. ET. He will touch on the war in Afghanistan, for which he last week announced a surge of 30,000 U.S. troops, said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.

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The Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony 2009

The Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony takes place in the Oslo City Hall, Norway, on 10 December every year – the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.

 

Watch the live webcast from Oslo!

The Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony 2009

Watch Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack H. Obama receive the Nobel Peace Prize at the Oslo City Hall in Norway.

10 December, 1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. (CET).

 

Watch the live webcast »

 

[CET - Central European Time.  1-2.30pm CET today  is 7 - 8.30 am EST]

 

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http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/09/obama.nobel/index.html

Obama to spend 26 hours in Norway, pick up Nobel Peace Prize

December 9, 2009 11:34 a.m. EST

 

CNN) -- President Obama -- fighting wars in two countries -- will arrive in Norway on Thursday to accept the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.

The president will spend 26 hours in Oslo meeting the royal family, accepting the Nobel at an afternoon ceremony and attending an award banquet that evening.

At the ceremony, Obama will accept a $1.4 million prize check, a gold medal and a diploma.

He also will speak at the ceremony, which will be streamed live on CNN.com starting at 7 a.m. ET. He will touch on the war in Afghanistan, for which he last week announced a surge of 30,000 U.S. troops, said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.

Obama's day will begin with a trip to the Nobel Institute, where he will meet for the first time the five-member panel that unanimously picked him for the prize, said Mette Owre of the Norwegian Foreign Affairs Ministry.

The president and first lady Michelle Obama will then meet with Norway's King Harald V and Queen Sonja before heading to the award ceremony.

"Then he goes to the hotel where he is staying. He will have some downtime. He is governing America at the time," Owre said.

In the evening, the president will be the guest of honor at a banquet where the king and queen and the Norwegian prime minister will be among 250 attendees, Owre said.

Obama's Nobel Prize win, announced in October, elicited swift reaction -- some hailing the choice; others asking what he had accomplished to deserve it.

Nominations for the prize had to be postmarked by February 1, only 12 days after Obama took office. The committee sent out its solicitation for nominations last September, two months before Obama was elected president.

The Nobel committee said it recognized his efforts at dialogue to solve complex global problems, including working toward a world free of nuclear weapons.

"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," the committee said.

The president said he saw the decision less as a recognition of his accomplishments and more as "a call to action."

Some analysts have speculated that the prize could give Obama additional clout as he forms a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan and attempts to engage Iran and North Korea.

The domestic political consequences are unclear. Obama's supporters hope the prestige associated with the prize will strengthen the president's hand in the health care reform debate.

Obama, the first African-American to win the White House, is the fourth U.S. president to win the prestigious prize and the third sitting president to do so.

The ceremony honoring the winners in the other Nobel Prize categories also will be held Thursday, but in Stockholm, Sweden. Those winners were picked by a committee separate from the one that determines the Peace Prize winner.

December 10 is the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and founder of the prizes.

CNN's Saeed Ahmed contributed to this report.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/09/obamas-nobel-peace-prize-_n_386660.html

Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Speech To Note Irony Of Award During Wartime

BEN FELLER | 12/ 9/09 07:54 PM | 

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is accepting the world's best-known peace award as a wartime president, an incongruity that he will directly speak to when he receives the Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday, White House officials say.

The president departed Wednesday to Oslo in an overnight flight, in time to be there for the award ceremony and banquet, and not much more. His minimalist approach reflects a White House that sees little value in touting an honor for peace just nine days after Obama announced he was sending 30,000 more troops to the war in Afghanistan.

The contrast has been stark for weeks. Obama won the award in early October, just as his review of a revamped war plan was intensifying. He and two speechwriters pivoted attention to the Nobel address the very day after Obama announced he was escalating the U.S. forces in Afghanistan to their highest levels.

So Obama, honored for strengthening international diplomacy, will use his speech to discuss what goes into the decision to expand a war.

Asked if Obama was excited about the award, national security aide and speechwriter Ben Rhodes responded: "I think he feels as if it places a responsibility upon him."

"It's the company that you keep as a Nobel laureate that I think makes the deepest impression upon him," said Rhodes, who is helping craft the president's speech. "That kind of adds an extra obligation to essentially extend the legacy."

The president is expected to outline his vision of American leadership and emphasize the responsibilities of all nations to advance the cause of peace.

He was considering lots of ideas for the speech and was likely to winnow them and hash out a final draft aboard Air Force One on the flight to Norway, where the peace-award-in-wartime irony hasn't gone unnoticed.

Peace activists in the Norwegian capital plan a 5,000-person anti-war protest on Thursday. Protesters have plastered posters around Oslo featuring the image of Obama from his iconic campaign poster, altered with skepticism to say, "Change?"

Demonstrators plan to gather in sight of Obama's hotel room balcony – where he is expected to wave to a torchlight procession in his honor – and chant slogans playing on Obama's own slogans, foremost among them: "Change: Stop the War in Afghanistan."

Obama's selection for the award by the Norwegian Nobel Committee was such a stunner that even the White House had no idea it was coming. Obama quickly said he didn't think he deserved it, and that it was really meant to boost a new U.S. approach to world affairs.

The list of Nobel peace laureates over the last 100 years includes transformative figures and giants on the world stage. They include heroes of the president, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, and others he has long admired, such as George Marshall, who launched a postwar recovery plan for Europe.

"The president understands and again will also recognize that he doesn't belong in the same discussion as Mandela and Mother Teresa," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said while discussing the president's speech Wednesday.

Obama is writing much of the speech himself. He has been reading the Nobel speeches by past winners to help shape his thinking.

Amid the enormous worldwide reaction to Obama's win, the prevailing response was almost confusion: He won for what, exactly?

The Nobel panel cited Obama's work toward freeing the world of nuclear weapons, combatting global warming, embracing international institutions and leading based on values shared by most of the people around the world. On that front, he was deemed nothing less than "the world's leading spokesman."

But back home in a nation struggling with war and recession, the White House is respectfully but quietly viewing this as a one-speech trip, in and out.

Obama will not do a full-scale news conference or a traditional post-ceremony interview with CNN.

As part of the festivities, Obama will offer remarks at a formal dinner banquet, where he will be joined by Norwegian royalty. Yet Obama leaves Oslo on Friday and will be long gone by the time an elaborate concert featuring celebrity musicians takes place in his honor.

The Nobel honor comes with a $1.4 million prize. The White House says Obama will give that to charities but has not yet decided which ones.

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Associated Press writer Ian MacDougall in Oslo contributed to this story.

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