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Comment by yohannesk | Hacker News Reader

As an Ethiopian man, I view this new Nobel Peace Prize with profound skepticism, a feeling rooted entirely in the disastrous outcome of Abiy Ahmed's utterly undeserved award. The premature praise he received for peace-making quickly evaporated, leading instead to a catastrophic war and the fragmentation of our nation. His prize has been followed by widespread conflict, massive displacement, and an alarming return to authoritarian rule. For us, the entire Nobel Peace Prize now feels meaningless, a hollow symbol given its failure to prevent—or perhaps its role in emboldening—such terrible suffering in Ethiopia

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For me, that skepticism began when Obama received the award. To his credit, he did not think he deserved it. But I have never viewed it in the same light since.

I mean I think you can go back well before that. At least to when Kissinger received it, while his co-laureate Le Duc Tho refused it on the basis that no peace had been achieved.

Barack Obama is the only two-term President in US history to be at war every day of his Presidency. The only one.

The two first wars that come to mind were not started by him though.

To his credit: he didn't start any of those wars. But yes, I agree that the Nobel prize was unfounded.

He started a number of color revolutions though out MENA?

And let us not forget his assassination of an American citizen by drone strike for visiting the place of his fathers death, also assassinated by drone strike.

And if we want a “fun fact,” he is the only Nobel Peace winner to bomb and kill another, as commander and chief his forces bombed and killed innocents in a Doctor’s Without Borders outpost in Afghanistan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike)

I think there's a very high bar of proof to "Americans are responsible for a popular revolution" when in practice there was a huge amount of effort by individuals on the ground, for example in Tahrir Square.

Obama did not make Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire.

Can we please stop propagating the flimsy conspiracies about the 2011 revolutions? They started entirely organically, but some unfortunately devolved into wider conflicts.

At worst, this conspiracy infantilizes Arab populations by removing their agency. At best, it’s false marketing for the CIA and other agencies.

He surely started Libyan War by bombing the hell out the government forces and creating power vacuum. The war is still ravaging the country to this day

You seem to have come from another timeline, where that's reality. Wikipedia says:

> On 19 March 2011, a NATO-led coalition began a military intervention into the ongoing Libyan Civil War to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 (UNSCR 1973). The UN Security Council passed the resolution with ten votes in favour and five abstentions, with the stated intent to have "an immediate ceasefire in Libya, including an end to the current attacks against civilians, which it said might constitute 'crimes against humanity'

but I guess that's fake news...

But I'm more interested about how you can travel between timelines. Is it with a portal gun like in Rick and Morty?

The UN mandate which NATO were given to use military force only to protect civilians was used as a figleaf to pursue a regime change operation instead.

In the context of that regime change operation they killed many civilians and left a humanitarian catastrophe in their wake. The country is beyond fucked but Hillary did get to say "we came, we saw, he died" afterwards, underscoring the lie. So mission accomplished?

For some reason the UN security council stopped approving NATO "humanitarian" operations after that and Russia started treating NATO expansion as an imperialist, existential threat.

What are you saying exactly? Military intervention is not a war? Obama did not play a decisive role in starting it (mainly to sway away attention from the dragging Afghanistan war which he promised to end)? Or UN mandate makes it somewhat ok, considering NATO broke conditions of the UN resolution already in the first weeks of bombing (which was promptly objected by UN security Council members). Make no mistake. Obama started this war for PR reasons. Had it not been for NATO bombing Libya would still exist as a state instead of a failed entity it is now.

"ongoing Libyan Civil War".

If I'm joining an ongoing party, did I start the party?

By this logic Russia did not start Ukraine war but merely joined the internal conflict started by Ukraine in 2014.

It was hardly a civil war before NATO bombing, but rather protests which were brutally squashed by Gaddafi forces. Opposition lacked any means to wage a way before NATO started supplying them with arms too.

So in the timeline you're from, the Crimean invasion also was an internal conflict... interesting!

Also there, civilized societies should look away and just let it happen when people fighting oppression is being slaughtered. Well, that's quite similar to this timeline, because that's what's happening in Gaza and being ignored by "The West".

Well, oppression is exactly what people in Crimea and Donbass viewed Maidan events and did not want to have anything to do with this new Ukraine. Go do a research on Crimea referendum or gallups done by Pew or such and you will find out that secession was and still is the most popular option. And sure as hell people of Crimea do not want to be part of Ukraine again.

Can you let Obama know Libya wasn't his fault and he bears absolutely no responsibility? He seems to be living in that alternate reality - you'd think he would be a better judge of what reality existed, but alas not everyone is as observant as you. Surely the US cannot be held responsible for any action of NATO, they have no relation with that organization at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/barack-obama...

While you're there you should also let Hilary Clinton know that she wasn't a war hawk either, and the no-fly zone just spontaneously appeared with no US involvement at all.

Did Obama start the Afghanistan war? or the Iraq war?

Yes, he could exit those countries hastily. But that has its own cost. Getting in wars is the easy part. Getting out of one is the hard part. Ask Putin who went into Ukraine on a 3-day limited special military operation.

Bush Jr. got us into multiple wars and unlike his father did not limit the scope of them. His father did get us into a war with Iraq but was smart enough to keep it limited in scope.

Also, under Obama, the "wars" were not real wars like the Russia/Ukraine war where both sides are losing hundreds of people every week. But they were more like peacekeeping operations that occasionally ran into skirmishes.

If you ask me, Putin is welcome to end the Ukraine war at any time he wants! Getting out of a war is actually easy if you don't care what happens after that, e.g. in the case of Afghanistan accept as "sunk costs" the billions of dollars and thousands of lives that were lost during the 20 years that NATO was involved there.

> like the Russia/Ukraine war where both sides are losing hundreds of people every week.

Every week? If we just look at the Russian casualties numbers, its around 1000+ casualties PER DAY.

There was a recent leak of the death toll and the most active area's had a 2/5 dead rate, 1/3 "missing" rate, and the rest was wounded.

If we only count the death + "missing" over the entire front for Russia, its 500+ PER DAY.

Ironically, the Russian->Afghanistan invasion was WAY less deadly then what we see today in Ukraine.

Your point still stands about the US evolvement in Iran/Afghanistan, but darn your numbers really way below the actual body count in the Russian "3-day limited special military operation". Those are numbers from the first year, not the daily of the third year.

> Every week? If we just look at the Russian casualties numbers, its around 1000+ casualties PER DAY.

You are likely correct. I have heard of the high casualty estimates, but wanted to keep it conservative to not have someone complain about the estimate being too high.

> more like peacekeeping operations

Peacekeeping is like the UN sending troops in to monitor a ceasefire. These were wars. 35,000+ civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Overthrowing Gaddafi. Tens of thousands of airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Drone strikes killing thousands of civilians in Pakistan. US foreign policy has equated “peace” and “stability” with its own military hegemony, being almost constantly at war to further its hypocritical ideology. It’s been a cash cow for the defense lobby.

Fun fact, the 2 longest periods of peace in history are called the Pax Romana and Pax Mongolica. The Mongolians and the Romans are known for fighting wars, lots and lots of wars. The only prolonged periods of peace in history are when one country or empire gets much stronger than the rest.

Another fun fact, the lowest per capita worldwide war deaths in a specific year in world history occurred in 2019.

And finally, when the US goes isolationist, the rest of you animals start killing each other instantly. So keep it up if you want a lot more "history" to happen in your lifetime.

Both the Pax Romana and Pax Mongolica saw their share of violence - plausibly comparable to 19th century Europe, or the Han and Tang dynasties, which which were not unipolar. We just don’t have good numbers for any of these cases. The long-history basis of your argument is flimsy at best.

The US itself only began resuming mass offensives with the decline of the USSR. But a world collapsing into unipolarity should lead to less conflict according to your view, as there would be less incentive for inter-state violence. The other pole was undergoing collapse, and the US sent soldiers, and continued to do so for decades.

But strictly speaking 2019 is part of a longer term downtrend in violence between nations after World War 2. That’s a trend that preceded American hegemony - a hegemony which is frankly a shadow of its former self. The real risk today isn’t multipolarity, it’s that the US is denial of multipolarity. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Israel. The US just doesn’t have the money to hemorrhage out to military disasters any more. It’s a house of cards growing taller and taller. What has no limit is the foolish arrogance of our leaders. The way to stop war is rarely escalation (anathema to the defense lobby).

And we are all human beings, US and non-US alike, not animals. It’s the capacity for compassion that makes us human, not the ability to kill.

Obama was very explicitly promising to get out of the middle east wars.

Of course it's hard, but if that's true, then why is he making those promises, or worse, why is he being given a peace award based on those promises?

Are we going to pretend that a president not keeping promises from the campaign trail is somehow exceptional?

No, the awarding of a prize for promises is the exceptional part.

Do you have something showing that the committee awarded presidents based on their campaign promises?

Depends what you mean by "be at war". For example, the Russo-Ukraine war has been going since February 2014. Through both Trump presidencies.

Yeah two unpopular wars he did not start and spent a lot of effort figuring out how to get out of. He ended one and his vice president later ended the other.

The notion that the Nobel prize is of any moral value, whatsoever, is faulty.

The Nobel Foundation is an attempt to make amends for the harms done by its founders invention of explosive materials - which subsequently birthed the military-industrial complex.

Its use of its material wealth to invest in index funds derives a great deal of wealth from weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon Technologies .. In that sense, it has only been since 2017 that it has exclusively attempted to avoid profiting from investments in the Wests' military-industrial complex. However, there is a growing voice of discontent which claims that the Foundations' policy change to "avoid investing in controversial weapons systems" is a PR move, and not a real force for change.

Don't you think making amends is of value, and should be encouraged?

Awarding the "Peace Prize" to a US' President who went on to drop more bombs per minute on innocent human beings than his predecessor, is not making amends.

No, I do not think that the Nobel Foundation is making amends. I think it is functioning as a propaganda tool of the very military-industrial complex from which it derived its wealth.

Duplicity is not making amends.

OK. I was looking narrowly at "The Nobel Foundation is an attempt to make amends for the harms done by its founders invention of explosive materials", but that was not in fact the issue.

Any well-intended organisation can have its purpose subverted, easily enough.

All it takes is for its capital investments to be handled by a third party.

Henry Kissinger got it. He should have been tried at the Hague instead.

Unlike the other Nobel prizes, the peace prize does not seem to be given as a reward for past achievements, but as an encouragement to continue current political engagement.

He won the award for his excellent ability of not being George W. Bush. In fairness, he really is quite good at this. I haven't really followed his career post-presidency, but reportedly he continues to not be George W. Bush to this day.

The Nobel Peace prize has been a joke ever since it was awarded to Kissinger in 1973.

There's a long tradition of the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to weirdly undeserving people, capped off by Henry Kissinger.

Giving it to a crazy genocidal Communist like Lê Đức Thọ was worse.

I got downvoted so perhaps I should teach some history:

The North Vietnamese Communists were not freedom fighters. They were a criminal gang (with widespread but nowhere near total support from the population) who conquered North Vietnam and in the process killed many, raped many, tortured many, displaced many, made agriculture suffer, caused starvation, etc.

The conquest of South Vietnam also destroyed agriculture there, leading to mass starvation that killed at least 100,000 people.

He was a lot worse than Kissinger. There was a reason why the US fought against those bastards.

There's a "curse" in Nobel peace prize for sure. Not long after Obama got it, he got US dragged in to Libya and Syria. Merely 2 years after EU got it, Crimea was annexed during Ukraine trying to get closer to EU (and EU really did nothing about this).

Not to the fault of the people per se, but I see too much "awarded for effort, then oops turns out the complete opposite happened" with the peace prize.

Norwegians are known for their oil and salmon. not knowledge, but being spoiled. so maybe the committee are just painfully incompetent to the level we should now bet that Venezuela should expect big turmoil in the coming years

> we should now bet that Venezuela should expect big turmoil in the coming years

That much is obvious, given that:

- There are ongoing sanctions against the country by USA

- USA has a portion of its fleet just off Venezuale's shore, killing people in boats

- USA has an active $50 million reward for information leading to arrest of Venezuela's current president

- Current president's main rival is being internationally propped-up in the midst of all of the above, most recently by having the Nobel peace prize awarded to her

- That main rival has publicly supported US imperialism, promises privatization of Venezuela's energy resources, has called for US regime change in Venezuela, and is strongly Zionist and supporting a genocide

So, yes, Venezuela should expect big turmoil in the coming years.

It's probably best to see the prize more as encouragement rather than endorsement of everything the person has ever done. Abiy Ahmed won the award "for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea". His actions in the last few years notwithstanding, he did do that. And insofar I can follow Ethiopian politics, his other actions from the early years were also generally in the spirit of the Nobel Peace Prize. At least in theory, celebrating and rewarding this kind of thing is good? I don't see how it would embolden him, or anyone else?

I apologise in advance for making light of the situation in your country, but did you find the peace awards more meaningless than Hinton's award for PHYSICS?!!

I won't deny some of the recipients are questionable, but I don't see how someone receiving the award or not would help prevent - or embolden - suffering in a country? I'm not familiar with what happened in Ethiopia, so apologies if this is obvious.

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