The Norwegian Nobel committee is getting ready to award its peace prize on Oct. 9, and my hopes are on GI Joe.
How about recognizing the American soldier — GI Joe, GI Jane — as the noblest force for peace on the planet for the last century?
Even though the idea’s been around for a while — embraced even by The New York Times’ Tom Friedman — no one is expecting the prize to go to said soldiers. The smart money’s on Pope Francis, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany or even Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian diplomatic doppelganger, Mohammad Javad Zarif.
By my lights, though, they don’t hold a candle to the young men and women of the American armed services. Decade after decade, they’re sent overseas and into harm’s way not to conquer but to liberate — or simply protect.
That is, to bring peace.
The Peace Prize idea was first advanced by Neil Kressel, a professor in New Jersey, in a 1993 op-ed piece in the Jewish Forward newspaper.
The logic is certainly plain. Never before in human history has there been a soldier quite like the American GI. And never has honoring the GI seemed more timely — more poignant — than in this season when the world is witnessing the consequences of American retreat.
How much more peaceful things would be today had we kept our GIs at the front in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we’ve had to do for so many decades in, say, Europe and Korea.
Kressel’s idea was widely picked up from the start. The American Legion magazine reprinted the piece, and the New York Sun repeated the call almost annually.
Neil Cavuto endorsed it on Fox News. And so, essentially, did Thomas Friedman, in an October 2009 Times column.
That year’s Peace Prize winner had already been announced: America’s new president, Barack Obama.
Obama wasn’t the first American president to win the Peace Prize. That was Theodore Roosevelt, who copped it in 1906 for negotiating a peace in the Russo-Japanese war.
Woodrow Wilson won it in 1919 for his role in establishing the League of Nations; Jimmy Carter won the prize in 2002, for decades of human-rights, humanitarian and diplomatic work, largely after his presidency.
Obama was unusual because his award was for achievements that hadn’t yet been — and may never be — made.
For that reason, Friedman suggested the president accept the prize in the name of the “men and women of the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps,” whom he proposed that Obama describe as the “most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century.”
The columnist wanted Obama to name, among others, “the American soldiers who landed at Omaha Beach” and the “airmen who broke the Soviet blockade of Berlin,” as well as those who were still at the Korean demilitarized zone and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the event, Obama’s words in Oslo won praise by commentators on the left and right. This newspaper called it “a speech that both the president’s liberal base and his global admirers needed to hear.”
Obama, though, spurned Friedman’s advice. It was “incumbent” on “all of us,” he said at one point, “to insist” that Iran doesn’t “game the system” — a bizarre foreshadowing of his deal with the ayatollahs.
There was a hint of Friedman’s theme: “Somewhere today, in the here and now, in the world as it is, a soldier sees he’s outgunned, but stands firm to keep the peace,” Obama said. But he failed to mention whose uniform that soldier might be wearing.
Historians may never explain Obama’s reluctance to reflect the glory of his prize onto the GIs of whom he serves as commander-in-chief. But it sure looks like they’ll find that peace is further away now than it was when he won the medal.
All the more reason for a change of focus by the Nobel Committee. Its award to Obama was for the hopes he had instilled. Why not recognize the men and women who have already redeemed hope, time and again?