The Nobel Committee can certainly be forgiven for throwing the Peace Prize at Obama in a fit of post-Bush euphoria.  When the decision was announced many of us rationalized it as an attempt on the part of one of the world's most civilized nations to welcome back into the fold one that had been flirting with savagery.  All punning aside, it was a noble gesture.

Having lived in Europe for the better part of a decade I can tell you one thing about Europeans:  they have some funny ideas about Americans.  No funnier than our ideas of ourselves, really.  But one of their funnier ones is that, though well-submerged, we must have a sense of the continuity of history.  In their American narrative — as, briefly, in some Americans' — Obama's election was a moral, rather than a political triumph.  Even the less romantically-inclined were inclined to equate Obama with the demographic seachange he represents — something for which, again, we can all be forgiven.

Personally, I never was and still am not satisfied that Obama is objectively a great intellect.  I remain utterly unconvinced that he is a great orator.  And I'm skeptical of claims of exceptional moral character.  But I won't argue, along with most of the rest of humanity, that compared to his immediate predecessor he is a giant in all of these respects.  By the same logic, when in his Nobel speech he calls his achievements "slight" compared to Schweitzer and King, Marshall and Mandela, he's still giving himself a lot more credit than he deserves.

In this speech, as in the typical Obama speech, the real flashes of insight come from others.  Here he uses the words of Kennedy and King (surprise, surprise) to add heat and light to what is, in the final analysis, a cold, dark rationalization of war.  There is real audacity in his bold appropriation of King, especially, for this cause. To hear King's magnificent line about "isness" and "oughtness" next to greeting card calliber palaver from Obama like "Let us reach for the world that ought to be — that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls" should clue us into the heights of banality and depths of cynicism of which the newest Nobel Laureate is capable.

The Nobel speech touches — very briefly — on nuclear disarmament, for which Obama earns easy points knowing that it's the intention and not the end result that counts.  No one honestly expects the elimination of nuclear weapons in our lifetime — or ever, actually.  Still, it's no small gesture.  But the bulk of the speech is an apology for war.  And more specifically, for Obama's war in Afghanistan, one which may once have had a rational justification, but can no longer be just.

To borrow from King: continuing — indeed, escalating the war in Afghanistan will not bring permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.
 
To use his Nobel speech as a cloying rationalization of his surge in Afghanistan is as obnoxious in the here and now as it will appear tone-deaf to history.  It paints him as less the pragmatist many of us saw as the best-case scenario than the political opportunist we hoped he would not be.  To use the occasion as a cynical staging ground for what I'm sure his people hope pundits will be calling "the Obama Doctrine" makes a bigger mockery of the Nobel than the original baseless decision to award it to him did. 

If it's good for anything, it will serve as a wake-up call.  Obama is his own man — and he's no Mandela.