Peace Porridge

President Barack Obama's premature Nobel Peace Prize has catalyzed a useful debate, in which the real question is less the timing of the award than what, exactly, he has won. How are we to reconcile the Nobel's erratic list of laureates, ranging from corrupt terrorist Yasser Arafat to Soviet dissident and human rights champion Andrei Sakharov?

The explanation goes deeper than the tilt of the left-leaning Norwegian Nobel Committee's five members, who pick the winners. The prize itself was devised and endowed by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, a wizard with explosives and a deft hand at marketing. But, like a number of big-time philanthropists today–George Soros and Ted Turner come to mind–Nobel was a man of fundamentally muddled thinking about geopolitics and the real foundations of peace.

Born in Sweden in 1833, Nobel spent his formative years in St. Petersburg, then the capital of Czarist Russia, where his father ran a factory that turned out war materiel, such as land mines. Trained primarily as a chemist, Nobel developed a strong interest in the explosive power of nitroglycerin, which led to his invention of dynamite. In some ways, this cost him dearly; an explosion in 1864 at the Nobel factory in Stockholm killed his brother, Emil. But Nobel marketed his inventions with great success, amassing the fortune that enabled him to endow the Nobel prizes, dripping with money and pomp.

Nobel laid out the criteria for his prizes in his will, signed at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris in 1895, the year before he died. For the peace prize, the basics are spelled out in three clauses. However well intended, they make no mention whatsoever of such staples of peace as freedom and human dignity. Nobel directed that the peace prize would go “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Crammed into those clauses is a welter of fallacies and contradictions about what actually produces peace. The first clause, about working for fraternity among nations, is a catch-all so broad that as a guide to peace it is a recipe for disaster. Thus did Europe travel a Nobel-bedecked road to World Wars I and II. Or recall the 1973 Nobel for the Paris Peace Talks over Vietnam, two years prior to North Vietnam's brutal conquest of the South (Henry Kissinger accepted the prize; Hanoi's Le Duc Tho, then preparing to collect the more practical prize of Saigon, declined).

Today, Iran and North Korea favor fraternity among nations, as long as it comes on terms preferred by the Iranian and North Korean governments. These nations' fraternal cooperation on weaponry continues to make news, and their youth leagues just last year signed a memorandum of friendship and cooperation.

The second clause, about the abolition of standing armies, succumbs to one of the chronic failings of peacenik philosophies: In the name of morality, it is morally blind, making no distinctions among the aims of the world's many and various armies. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in the best piece he's written in years, suggested Oct. 10 that Obama in his Nobel acceptance speech pay tribute to the world's most important force for keeping peace: the U.S. military. This is no contradiction in terms. It a reflection of realities that Alfred Nobel did not foresee, and which his heirs appear not to understand, even as they luxuriate in the pleasures of more than 60 years of Western European peace–won, and long patrolled and protected, by American military might.

Finally, there is Nobel's third clause, arguably the most pedantically absurd of the lot: The prize is to go to those most accomplished in “the promotion of peace congresses.” Thus did the Nobel go to former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, as founder of the League of Nations–which then collapsed in the process of its failure to prevent World War II. The project was resurrected in 1945 as the United Nations (with more Nobels slathered on over the years), with the difference that the U.N. was structured to survive almost any amount of internal rot, with a framework more firmly wedded to demands of tyranny and bureaucracy than to freedom and human dignity (the U.N.'s endlessly self-discrediting human rights forum, currently known as the Human Rights Council, being one of many examples). The U.N.'s finest hour in relatively recent memory involved not peace, but war, with the military coalition assembled to drive Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait in 1991.

There are countries which fraternally report for duty at almost every major U.N. conference. Cuba is a prime example. Iran, these days, is another. If these regimes are working for peace, then what kind of peace is it? The tranquility of a smothered press? The murderously enforced calm of repressed populations? The serene ideal of bargains struck among political systems that would rather jail and murder their critics than tolerate dissent?

Peace, at least in its desirable incarnation, is a function of freedom in a framework of decent and functional law. Those who lead the way in pursuing and defending it are too often rewarded at the time not with prizes, but with censorship, prison, exile, epithets, “peace” protests and hurled shoes.

There was no peace on D-Day at Normandy. But the Allied troops who assailed the French coast did more for peace than anything that happened in the conferences of Versailles and the League of Nations, the parleys of Neville Chamberlain, or, for that matter, the endless Middle East “peace process” conferences of modern times, including in Oslo.

The most brilliant picks of the Nobel Committee have involved winners who, en route to the desired ideal of peace and brotherhood, have fought the battles that really matter–against tyranny and the debasement of individual human dignity. That was the heroic labor of Soviet dissident Sakharov's stand for freedom; that has been the message of Elie Wiesel's calls to remember the Holocaust; that is the campaign of the Dalai Lama for Tibet; that is why Aung San Suu Kyi remains hunkered down in Burma. That is why Lech Walesa braved the jackboots of Soviet-satellite communists and that was why the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. marched for equality. Individual dignity was the gift of Mother Teresa to the abandoned and dying of Calcutta–she treated them not as collective trash, but as individual human souls.

The worst failures, most obscure awardees and weirdest recent winners have been those who won it for starry-eyed deals, multilateral ventures, peace conferences and such novel projects as presuming peace will be promoted by waging collective war on the weather. Thus, for instance, have these peace prizes been collected by Kofi Annan (head of U.N. peacekeeping during the Rwandan genocide), Jimmy Carter (during whose presidency the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Iran suffered its Islamic revolution) and Al Gore (for weather).

The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave Obama his peace prize for multilateral diplomacy and nuclear disarmament. Obama himself described his freshly minted Nobel as an award not for deeds done, but as a “call to action.” In charting that action, Obama has–as modern diplomats like to say–a choice.

He can line up with the Nobel Committee's long list of pacifist, multilateralist loser laureates. Or he can stand with the Nobel's much shorter list of true winners, whose distinction has not been the achievement of a flimsy “peace” at all costs, but unrelenting battle for what happen to be also America's core principles: individual human dignity and freedom.

Claudia Rosett, a journalist in residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.