Behind the Nobel Peace Prize for President Obama

He got the prize for what he has done," committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland told The Associated Press. Jagland singled out Obama's efforts to heal the divide between the West and the Muslim world and scale down a Bush-era proposal for an anti-missile shield in Europe."All these things have contributed to - I wouldn't say a safer world - but a world with less tension," he said.

What the two examples cited by the Nobel Peace Prize committee chairman have in common is DE-ESCALATION of the present growing polarization, confrontation and conflict between the Muslim world and the West. "Healing the divide" is no mean task, given the impetus to escalate driven by religious antagonism dating back 13 centuries.

The committee doubtlessly realizes that the world is treading along the perilous path of irreversible escalation to all-out war, the same calamitous path which led antagonists in the previous century to wage World Wars I and II. The lesson of these two wars is that once the point of no return is crossed (in this instance, the decisions to mobilize following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo), the combatants will irrationally escalate irreversibly, pouring into the fray all available resources and weapons, including nuclear bombs.

The committee also knows that all-out war in the present century means nukes -- now possessed by both Muslims and the West -- and the annihilation of the human species.

Humanity has a choice: to continue escalating past the point of no return -- irreversible escalation to all-out war and human annihilation -- or to begin the process of de-escalation to avoid the extinction of the human species and most life on earth.

I think the prize, then, was intended both as a reward for and encouragement of what may be the single-most important policy initiative a Western leader can undertake: de-escalation and rapprochement between Islam and the West.

For those who would reflexively cry out "Munich!" I would reply "Detente, Rapprochement and the end of the Cold War." What remains to be seen is whether 9/11 was the point of no return, or whether, as the committee hopes, such a milestone has not been reached.

Last week I was in Egypt, enjoying the hospitality of that Muslim country, including the services of polite, friendly and attentive tour guides and staffs of the various hospitality services, and the good-natured haggling with smiling, boisterous vendors in the markets adjoining the awe-inspiring monuments of a civilization predating ours by some three millennia. This interaction between our two cultures betrayed no hint of murderous antagonism that would unleash the destructive power of the atom against one another. The decisions underlying such a tragic outcome remains the exclusive purview of our respective leaders.

I also visited the home of a dirt-poor farmer working his two hectares on the banks of the Nile near Luxor, I broke bread with him and his 10-member family crammed into a wretched hovel on the walls of which were displayed two crude grafitti of the Ka'aba and a ship, proudly commemorating his pilgrimage to Mecca and two photographs of Barack Obama.

Pax vobiscum. Salaam aleikum.