How Obama Can Earn the Peace Prize

Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize was more of a nudge toward peace than a recognition of his accomplishments in pursuit of it. Juan Cole of Salon offers some ways Obama could live up to the award:

• Get out of Iraq on time. We’ve done what we can, and the sides there are more likely to compromise without us.
• Don’t bomb Iran. It would make them rush to build a nuclear weapon at all costs; our only option would be full-scale war.

• Stop the CIA drone assassinations. “It is illegal and shameful.” If the US military isn’t in charge of defending the country by force, then we’re a police state.
• Get the Palestinians a state, even if you have to recognize them unilaterally. “Palestinian statelessness is the biggest human rights scandal in the world.”
• Stick to the plan and get out of Afghanistan in 2011. Karzai and the generals will try to keep us there for decades. Let them, and this award is meaningless.

(More Barack Obama stories.)