Obama

President Obama speaks at the U.N. General Assembly in September. September 23, 2009

/Stan Honda / AFP/Getty Images)

President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for Diplomacy 
12 Videos: President Obama Inside the Oval Office today.

The stunning choice made the Hawai'i-born Obama the third sitting U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize and shocked Nobel observers because Obama took office less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 nomination deadline. Obama's name had been mentioned in speculation before the award but many Nobel watchers believed it was too early to award the president.

"Only 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. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

The committee said it attached special importance to Obama's vision of, and work for, a world without nuclear weapons.

 

"Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play," the committee said. /AP


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The Nobel committee notes 'his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.'

 

Reporting from Washington — President Obama, who has pledged to place diplomacy ahead of confrontation and reached out to a skeptical world with offers of mutual understanding, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today for what the committee called "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

Obama is only the third sitting U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize -- President Theodore Roosevelt won the award in 1906, President Woodrow Wilson in 1919.

In awarding the prize today, the Nobel committee hailed the president's creation of "a new climate in international politics.''

Ironically, the award arrives at a time when Obama is weighing the recommendation of the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan to deploy tens of thousands of additional troops in a war now 8 years old. At the same time, the president, who campaigned with a promise to withdraw American forces from Iraq, is drawing down forces there, planning to pull out combat forces by next year and all troops by 2011.

The Nobel committee had criticized Obama's predecessor, President George W. Bush, for engaging in largely unilateral military action in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With the backing of Congress, Bush quickly invaded Afghanistan and ousted the Taliban, and in spring of 2003 launched a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq intent on removing Saddam Hussein from power. /LA Times