It's official:  the Nobel Prize for Peace has been awarded to US President Barack Obama, making him the fourth U.S. President to win the award, and the third US Democrat to win the award in the past decade.  The previous winners were Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, who brokered a peace treaty ending the war between Russia and Japan, and Woodrow Wilson, who helped broker the peace treaty that ended World War I, Jimmy Carter, and former Vice President Al Gore.

According to the official website of the Nobel Prize, the prizes are "awarded for achievement in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and for peace" [emphasis added].  Yet in its announcement of President Obama's win, the Nobel Committee said that he had achieved the award "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" [emphasis added].

In naming President Obama as this year's Peace Prize Laureate, the Nobel Committee has chosen effort over achievement.  Rather than giving the prize to someone who has stood up to tyranny, like Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai — who challenged brutal dictator Robert Mugabe, and whose wife was killed for it — or dissidents in Cuba, North Korea, or even Venezuela, or for womens' rights activists in Muslim countries like Afghanistan, the Committee has chosen to award someone for giving a speech.

True peace can not coexist with tyranny — true peace requires individual liberty; to claim otherwise is to equate peace with slavery or oppression.  Those who stand against oppression, against tyranny, are true peacemakers.  People like previous winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who continues to stand against the military dictators in Burma, or the Dalai Lama who fights against the Chinese dictators for political and religious freedom in Tibet:  those are true peacemakers.  These are people who, even if they don't accomplish their goals, make sacrifices for their ideals and for the good of others — for the idea of freedom and peace.  No speech, no matter how eloquent, equates with this sacrifice, and no speech made by the President has freed a single person from the shackles of oppression.  But, according to the Nobel Committee, merely his effort is enough.

President Obama's win is the ultimate triumph of symbolism over substance, and of effort over achievement.