President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a stunning and unexpected event, but one that provides the president with a unique opportunity to reverse the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and to rally the world against the rising evil in Tehran. If the president uses the platform which the award will give him, both in the next few days as the chattering class absorbs its surprise and when he accepts the war, he can reclaim the missed opportunity of his moment at the United Nations and demand of the world a real commitment to peace and human rights which means a commitment to vanquish the Taliban and its al Qaeda parasites while also obliging the fanatics running Iran to accept the world's demand to abandon its nuclear ambitions and its genocidal rhetoric.

The Washington Post summarized the surprise the announcement created today :

Heralding Obama as a transformative figure in U.S. and international diplomacy, the committee said: "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. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

Obama is the third sitting U.S. president--and the first in 90 years--to win the prestigious peace prize. His predecessors won during their second White House terms, however, and after significant achievements in their diplomacy. Woodrow Wilson was awarded the price in 1919, after helping to found the League of Nations and shaping the Treatise of Versailles; and Theodore Roosevelt was the recipient in 1906 for his work to negotiate an end to the Russo-Japanese war.

In contrast, Obama is struggling over whether to expand the war in Afghanistan, preparing to withdraw from Iraq, and searching for ways to build momentum to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and assemble an international effort to stop Iran's nuclear program.

The Nobel Committee was clearly caught up in the expectations of transformation that the new president campaigned on last year, not the realities of his often shaky and confused first nine months of his tenure in office. Continued...