Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize to mixed reviews

OBAMA WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

OSLO (Reuters) - President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for giving the world "hope for a better future" and striving for nuclear disarmament, in a surprise award that drew both warm praise and sharp criticism.

The decision to bestow one of the world's top accolades on a president less than nine months into his first term, who has yet to score a major foreign policy success, was greeted with gasps of astonishment from journalists at the announcement in Oslo.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." But critics -- especially in parts of the Arab and Muslim world -- called its decision premature.

Obama's press secretary woke him with the news before dawn and the president felt "humbled" by the award, a senior administration official said.

When told in an email from Reuters that many people around the world were stunned by the announcement, Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod, responded: "As are we."

The first African-American to hold his country's highest office, Obama, 48, has called for disarmament and worked to restart the stalled Middle East peace process since taking office in January.

"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," the committee said in a citation.

While the decision won praise from statesmen like Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev, both former Nobel laureates, it was also attacked in some quarters as hasty and undeserved.

The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and opposes a peace treaty with Israel, said the award was premature at best.

"Obama has a long way to go still and lots of work to do before he can deserve a reward," said Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri. "Obama only made promises and did not contribute any substance to world peace. And he has not done anything to ensure justice for the sake of Arab and Muslim causes."

"EMBARRASSING JOKE"

Issam al-Khazraji, a day laborer in Baghdad, said: "He doesn't deserve this prize. All these problems -- Iraq, Afghanistan -- have not been solved...The man of 'change' hasn't changed anything yet."
Liaqat Baluch, a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a conservative religious party in Pakistan, called the award an embarrassing "joke."
But the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, Saeb Erekat, welcomed it and expressed hope that Obama "will be able to achieve peace in the Middle East."
Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland rejected suggestions from journalists that Obama was getting the prize too early, saying it recognized what he had already done over the past year.

"We hope this can contribute a little bit to enhance what he is trying to do," he told a news conference.

The committee said it attached "special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons," saying he had "created a new climate in international politics."

Without naming Obama's predecessor George W. Bush, it highlighted the differences in America's engagement with the rest of the world since the change of administration in January.

"Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.

"Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts," it said, and the United States was playing a more constructive role in tackling climate change.

Obama laid out his vision on eliminating nuclear arms in a speech in Prague in April. But he was not the first American president to set that goal, and acknowledged it might not be reached in his lifetime.

He is negotiating arms cuts with Russia, and last month dropped plans to base elements of a U.S. anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Moscow had seen the scheme as a threat, despite U.S. assurances it was directed against Iran.

On other pressing issues, Obama is deliberating whether to send more troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, and is still searching for breakthroughs on Iran's disputed nuclear program and on Middle East peace.

Israel's foreign minister said on Thursday there was no chance of a peace deal for many years. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters: "The Nobel prize for peace? Obama should have won 'the Nobel Prize for escalating violence and killing civilians'."

At home, Obama's popularity is flagging under the pressure of rising unemployment and a divisive, sometimes bitter debate over his healthcare reform plans.

Abroad, he is still widely seen around the world as an inspirational figure.

Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, who had been tipped as a favorite for the prize, told Reuters that Obama was a deserving candidate and an "extraordinary example."

Obama's uncle Said Obama told Reuters by telephone from the president's ancestral village of Kogelo in western Kenya: "It is humbling for us as a family and we share in Barack's honor... we congratulate him."

Obama is the third senior U.S. Democrat to win the prize this decade after former Vice President Al Gore won in 2007 along with the U.N. climate panel and Jimmy Carter in 2002.

The prize worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million) will be handed over in Oslo on December 10.

(Additional reporting by Oslo newsroom, Kamran Haider in Pakistan, Mohammed Assadi, Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Mark Denge in Nairobi, Jason Webb in Spain; writing by Mark Trevelyan, editing by Janet McBride)

Republicans attack Obama on U.S. dollar


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Leading Republicans echoed Sarah Palin on Thursday in attacking President Barack Obama over the weakness of the U.S. dollar.

Analysts warn it is risky business playing politics with the U.S. currency, which has traditionally been off limits as a play to score points against political opponents.

That taboo appears to have been broken.

Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate and ex-governor of Alaska, launched her dollar criticism on her Facebook page. She linked dollar weakness to U.S. dependence on foreign oil, large U.S. deficits and questions about whether the dollar deserves to retain its vaunted status of reserve currency.

"We can see the effect of this in the price of gold, which hit a record high today in response to fears about the weakened dollar," Palin wrote on Facebook this week.

"All of this is a result of our out-of-control debt. This is why we need to rein in spending, and this is also why we need energy independence."

Republicans in Congress said the previous Republican administration of former President George W. Bush also deserved blame for dollar weakness but, since taking office on January 20, Democrat Obama was calling the shots.

"I agree with her," Senator Charles Grassley, top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said when asked by Reuters about Palin's dollar criticism.

"A lot of the recession we are in now goes back to Bush. But the extent to which we passed the $787 billion stimulus bill that is not doing any good -- this president is responsible for," he said.

"It is not the Bush administration anymore. It is nine months into this administration. You can't blame Bush anymore," Grassley added.

SENSITIVE SUBJECT

The dollar is a sensitive subject and U.S. officials who are in office will almost always decline to discuss it in public for fear of moving the market.

Dollar weakness also strikes at the very heart of America's image of itself as a world power.

"It sounds like the new frontier is the declining dollar," Darrell West, director of governance studies at The Brookings Institution said.

"It's unusual for there to be party attacks on the value of the dollar," he said. "Historically that has been a bipartisan issue because you don't want to play politics with the dollar, it's a very risky game."
The danger is that partisan attacks can drive the dollar lower because of the appearance that the country is divided, West said.

"I don't view this as a partisan thing. It is bad for America to have a policy of a weak dollar," assistant Senate Republican leader Jon Kyl told Reuters when asked about Palin's comments.

"All Treasury secretaries say, 'Oh, our policy is to have a strong dollar.' But the question is what do they do. I don't think either this administration or the Bush administration have followed the appropriate policy," Kyl said.

With the 2010 Congressional elections a year away, Republicans are seizing on opportunities to throw the Democrats off their stride. More Republicans were expected to take up dollar weakness as a tool to hammer the Obama administration, analysts said.

"It'll be a straight line, dollar equals deficit," Ethan Siegal, an analyst at The Washington Exchange, said.

"For the out party in the modern era there's nothing off limits anymore," he said. "The dollar certainly is not off limits."

STAR POWER

Palin still has star power. Her comments resonate with a good segment of the conservative Republican base and with Americans who view her as talking "common sense" in the face of the country's elites, analysts said.

Her written comments on the dollar made the front-page lead story of the Financial Times on Thursday.

Palin has successfully used Facebook to rally supporters of her viewpoint. The "death panels" term that rocked the healthcare debate during raucous summer town hall meetings sprung from a Palin Facebook post.

"She was the vice presidential candidate in the last election, that's marquee status right there. There are no other Republicans who can say that who want to be the next president of the United States," Siegal said. "So she gets a seat at the table just because of that."

A weak dollar as representing a bad economy will be one of many lines of attack for Republicans against Obama and the Democrats, Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said. "I don't think it's particularly smart."

Having Palin lead the charge on this issue rather than someone strong in international economics is "a potentially shaky way to go," he said.

But, Ornstein added, the view among some Americans that Palin reflects a more down-to-earth view was a "powerful, powerful theme."