Valentina Pasquali

Washington DC – The United States’ misread of Iran and its influence in the Middle East and the sometimes misplaced efforts to counter that nation’s regional ambitions were the topic of a day long conference organized by the Middle East Institute in Washington DC.

Recent offers of multi-million arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Israel by US President George Bush signal that Washington continuously worries about a rising Iran and strives to contain it. However, as Professor Gary Sick of Columbia University argued, the current administration seems to overlook the reality that other policies it pursued across the Muslim world in recent years might have actually contributed to conferring increasing centrality to Iran in the Middle East. “Iran is emerging as the leading regional power in the Gulf. The reason for that is really quite simple – it is us,” Professor Sick said.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11^th 2001, the US overthrew the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Iran’s worst enemy to the east. Then it decided to topple Saddam Hussein’s government, Teheran’s worst enemy to the west. Finally, “we were kind enough to oversee the establishment of a Shi’a government in Baghdad for the first time in history,” Sick pointed out. “At the end of that game Iran was a lot stronger than they had been before,” he said, noting that the US doesn’t seem to be aware of the consequences that its own policies have in the Middle East. A dangerous perception is emerging among the leadership across Arab states; “I think most of the Arabs actually suspect that we are in fact promoting Iran to a position of primary,” Professor Sick said.

Fundamentally, countries in the Gulf and in the Levant demand a higher consideration for their role in the region and the acknowledgment that they have national interests that are separate and independent of both the US and Iran.

The View from the Gulf

On the on hand, the Middle East is still thwarted by the struggle between the two Muslim branches of the Shi’ites and the Sunnis and the tensions between them remain at the root of the animosity generally felt toward Iran. Saudi Arabia is particularly worried that Teheran is challenging the status-quo in the Muslim world to emerge as the new predominant power. Because of the widespread fear that Washington will strike a deal with Teheran, the US approach toward the Middle East is often ill-received by leaders in the Gulf States; “They are not going to forget the Shah era when his country was the police of the area on their account,” said at the Middle East Institute Wahid Hashim, an Associate Professor of Political Science at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah.

On the other hand, the enmity of the Arab countries toward Iran is only truly hard-felt at the government level while people across the region seem to be eager to engage in a closer relationship, both economically and culturally. “There is a fever in the area, anti-America, anti-Israel, and Iran is the only knight who will stand up to America. That is why many people support the Iranians,” Professor Hashim explained.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) are preoccupied with the growing influence Iran is projecting in the region for the effect it could have on its own Iranian community – 400,000 according to the most recent estimates – and the country’s domestic stability. These concerns, mixed with the fear that the US might be looking for the opportunity to cut its losses in Iraq leaving the region to deal with an emergent Shi’a Islam, “has led the Gulf States to feel that it is better to engage Iran than to leave it to its devices,” said Ibtisam Al-Kitbi, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UAE University.

In fact there are mounting signs of a push for engagement; Ahmadinejad attended a GCC summit in Qatar and later traveled to Saudi Arabia at the invitation of the Saudi King to observe the annual hajj ritual. There have been high-level exchanges between the Iranian and Kuwaiti foreign ministries. Egypt started discussing restoring diplomatic relations with Teheran and Ali Larijani of the Supreme National Security Council recently visited Cairo. Egyptian President Mubarak met with Haddad-Adel, Chairman of the Iranian Parliament, for the highest-level contact between the two countries since 1980. In the meantime, the UAE and Iran have begun talks on a trade agreement.

The View from the Levant

A similar guarded approach marks the foreign policy of countries in the Levant, although at least two of them – Lebanon and Syria – have a traditionally closer engagement with Iran. Even these countries, however, might be ready to swing both ways depending on where they feel their demands may be more promptly met.

The alliance between Damascus and Teheran for example, the longest standing in the Middle East, is not free of problems. Their relationship is not, as many might think, centered on economics, or even ideology. Syria is a secular regime that views itself as the champion of Arab nationalism while Iran is a devoted theocracy. “Syria and Iran are truly the odd couple,” said Murhaf Jouejati, Adjunct Professor at the National Defense University in Washington DC. “Their alliance is interests-driven. It is truly a marriage of convenience. For Iran, Syria gives it the reach into the Arab-Israeli conflict. For Syria, Iran is the big brother on the block – a block that is a very threatening environment to the Syrians,” Professor Jouejati added. In his opinion, the alliance could end if Syria were to find the security guarantees it demands somewhere else; “Syria is trying to signal the United States that it could and would do away with its alliance with Iran if it were able to resume talks with Israel, if it were able to have ironclad guarantees that it is going to recover the Golan Heights,” Murhaf Jouejati concluded.

Iran’s interests in Lebanon are a function of Teheran’s desire to end its regional isolation. “These goals are achieved by supporting an organization struggling to recoup Arab land occupied by Israel – Hezbollah,” explained Judith P. Harik, the President of Matn University in Beirut and leading expert on Hezbollah. Iran’s strategy in Lebanon follows a dual path; Teheran provides financial and economic support to the Shi’ite community and simultaneously backs Hezbollah’s resistance against Israel. The latter has taken the form, over the past 25 years, of training, equipment and financial resources. As far as Teheran’s support to the Shi’ite community, Professor Harik, who maintains close sources in Iran and within the Hezbollah movement, reported what she was told by Iranian engineer Hossam Khoshnevis, who “would take up residence in Lebanon so as to quickly implement and manage reconstruction and rehabilitation of a wide range of institutions and infrastructure,” she said. Khoshnevis’ projects include working on 330 damaged or destroyed schools serving an estimated 700,000 students, repairing 20 hospitals and infirmaries and rehabilitating nearly 550 miles of roads.

Despite the support offered by Teheran, Professor Harik is convinced that Hezbollah works as an independent organization and that Teheran’s leaders may not have as much leverage over them as previously thought. “It appears that Iran’s Lebanese ally may thus have to be dealt with as a partner of Iran rather than its client and as such Hezbollah should be considered and addressed directly as Lebanese actors with a Lebanese agenda rather than a simple agent of Iran,” Harik explained.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the following six years of war have contributed, in the eyes of neighboring countries, to further deteriorate these already tense dynamics. Teheran has been taking advantage of the power-vacuum that the war created in Iraq. “It increased its support to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and for the military wing of that organization (Badr). It also supported all the new political elites in Iraq and established strong contacts with them while Arab states have remained outside the immediate political intervention inside Iraq,” said Fares Braizat, the Director and Senior Researcher of University of Jordan’s Centre for Strategic Studies. For Jordan, Braizat explained, the invasion of Iraq has been a major security and humanitarian problem. “Terrorists crossed the border from Iraq and three hotels in Amman were bombed,” he explained and added; “We have around 700,000 Iraqi refugees in Jordan today. That puts a lot of pressure on basic infrastructure in Jordan, in terms of health, education, water and all that.”

The View from Inside Iran

Not only is the region as a whole ridden with suspicion and antagonism, but Iran itself is shaped by complex domestic dynamics. “I have always believed that if we could somehow get Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, if we could tie him up to a chair sitting right there and pump him full of sodium pentothal and get him to speak for 12 hours about the Iranian regime, he could not tell us exactly what was going on,” said eloquently Ken Pollack – the Director of Research at Saban Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institutions - in his remarks at the Middle East Institute.

Dwelling on the intentions of the Iranian leadership can be a tricky game, at the center of which is the country’s complicated structure of power. “The question of who speaks for Iran and what are the intentions of Iran come to the point of who really runs the country,” said Hooshang Amirahmadi, Professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and founder and President of the American Iranian Council. Compared to other Middle Eastern countries where the power rests within a limited group of oligarchs, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran has a multilayered structure. Amirahmadi attributes the intricacies typical of Iranian politics to the constitution written in 1979 with the purpose of reconciling the tensions between religion and democracy that are at the foundation of the Islamic Republic. It is the constitution that gave birth to the two branches of government, the elected and the unelected ones, and their several bodies. “The struggle within the constitution is always how to maintain the dominance of Islam in a society where the population is also given some voice,” Amirahmadi said, “and the solution was that it created a series of parallel – and not just parallel but multiple – centers of power to deal with that issue.”

The Iranian government is not only multifaceted but is also undergoing important transformations. President Ahmadinejad himself has started a trend toward progressive decentralization, which is slowly empowering the provincial governors against the government ministers. Amirahmadi believes that the power structure in Iran is experiencing a process of securitization and militarization, causing the rise of the military establishment in the form of the National Security Council, the Army, the IRGC, the Qods Forces, the Basiji forces and the police forces. “Of course this is the byproduct of the United States’ counterproductive policies toward Iran because the environment around which Iran now lives is a military/security environment,” the President of the American Iranian Council told the audience at the Middle East Institute.

These trends are destined to accelerate exponentially while Iran also experiences a generational change in its leadership, a culminating moment being the general elections of 2009. The current elite is an aging circle of people who has ran the country continuously for the past 29 years and is now facing two new constituencies trying to get their hands on power, explained John Limbert, a former Ambassador and hostage of the Iranian government during the Iran hostage crisis that lasted from 1979 to 1981. On one side “there are the veterans of the Iran-Iraq War and of the fierce political battles of the 1980s,” Limbert said. On the other there are “what the Iranians call gheyr-e-khodi, the outsiders,” among which for example are the huge numbers of newly educated Iranian women. These groups are challenging the traditional power centers and, in the opinion of Limbert, are destined to reshape the political landscape of the country.

In focusing solely on the institution of the Presidency and in viewing Iran as a political monolith united behind Ahmadinejad, the US is missing out on the country’s several and conflicting centers of power and on the fundamental evolutions that are taking place within the political system. Where exactly Iran is headed is very hard to tell. Ambassador John Limbert said; “I look at Iran today and to me the 29-year-old revolution is like a train. It has gone into a tunnel and it is still there. It has not come out yet. Maybe it has not come out because the engineers and the passengers are still arguing about its ultimate destination.” It easier instead to predict that, unless the US stops assuming that Iran will simply stay as it is and unless it begins to gain a better understanding of the many conflicting dynamics that traverse the region, counterproductive policies will keep flowing from Washington to the Middle East.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington DC – 17,500 people lined up outside the Comcast Center of the University of Maryland since the early morning hours on Monday, one of the coldest days of the year in College Park, a suburb of Washington DC. They brought foldable chairs, food and decks of cards, but they weren’t going to miss Democratic candidate Barack Obama speaking on the eve of the so-called Potomac Primary, when voters in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia went to the polls.

“This election is about a vision,” Shawn told me. He was the first one to arrive at the gates just past 5 am. While he spoke, he was wrapped in a few layers of thick blankets to try defeating the freeze. “Barack Obama is a very inspiring leader that can take this country in a new direction,” the student in Economics and Anthropology said.

Joyce, an African-American government worker in her mid-fifties, confessed to have fallen for Barack Obama the day he spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. On Monday, Joyce queued up since 6 am at the doors of the Comcast Center, wearing a bulky, carroty winter coat, wide sunglasses and Obama buttons pinned all around a black woolen hat. “I don’t like her attitude,” she told me referring to Senator Hillary Clinton, “she speaks of the election like it’s her birthright.”

As every prediction leading up to Tuesday’s primary projected, the District metropolitan area turned out to be Barack Obama’s private backyard. The Senator from Illinois swept through the Chesapeake Bay with hefty margins, winning DC 75% to 24% against Clinton. After all, the demographics of the US capital are precisely those where Mr. Obama has the strongest showing; a large African-American population mixed with the affluent, highly educated white democrats.

More surprisingly, the mid-Atlantic vote on Tuesday showed that Mr. Obama is slowly winning the favor of the rest of the democratic electorate, reaching out to all demographics, including those – white women and lower income democrats – that have so far stuck to Hillary Clinton’s side.

Sylvia and Bella fit perfectly the profile of the typical Clinton’s supporter. They are middle-aged white women who work in the public school system in Maryland. Nevertheless they too woke up before sunrise to go listen to Barack Obama on Monday. “He can be a fresh start for the US,” Bella said. “I’m done with the Bush-Clinton-Bush pattern,” echoed Sylvia.

On Primary-day I visited a few different polling places inside the Beltway where people were flocking to throughout the day despite the below-zero temperatures, one of the many signs of the higher-than-usual excitement with which politics-possessed Washington DC was bustling. Thanks to an incredibly tight race on the democratic side this year, this is the first time that anyone paid any attention to the vote in the nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs and, as Charles Babington of the Associated Press pointedly wrote last week, people in DC finally had “a rare opportunity to help decide a presidential election rather than just obsess about it.”

The tour I took on Tuesday, although not statistically representative in itself, showed similar trends to the ones highlighted by the results of the vote in Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC, and moods comparable to those I witnessed among the tail of people lined up in College Park on Monday, fans captured by Mr. Obama’s rockstar-like appeal and charming oratory.

“It’s time for change,” an older African-American woman told me. The Obama campaign hired buses to drive lower income residents to the polling places on Tuesday, and it was stepping onto one of them that I met her. She gave me her home address but refused to identify herself by name. She also showed absolutely no quandary in voting against a female candidate; “I don’t think a woman should run the country,” she said. “We’ve gotten smarter but not that smart.”

Despite the mounting wave of enthusiasm, Barack Obama still has many phone-calls to make and doors to knock on if he wants to bite into Hillary Clinton’s traditional base of support and winning final approval especially from Latinos, who were only a minor percentage of the voters in the Potomac Primary. Jose’ is registered in Maryland and he would only vote later, he told me while we were talking on a sidewalk of Northwest DC. He will cast his ballot for Clinton, or “Miss Hillary,” as he called her. “Me gusta mucho,” Jose’ said in Spanish.

“They don’t know yet who Obama is,” a Latino union organizer from East Los Angeles told me later Tuesday night at an event held by the Obama campaign in downtown Washington. “It seems that the better Latinos know him, the more they like him,” he said as supporters of all ages and ethnic make-ups were gathering in the blue, red and white balloons-filled ballroom of the Madison Hotel. Wine glasses in hand, people cheered at the incoming returns of the day’s vote on big screen TV and at DC Mayor Adrian Fenty’s live appearance and speech in support of Mr. Obama.

Name recognition is a serious challenge that Barack Obama faces in the Latino community, which has a longstanding history with the Clinton family and great appreciation for the former first-lady, an icon of the glorious 1990s when the benefits of the economic boom extended beyond white Americans well into their own communities. Matilde is a Latino woman who works in a hair-salon in Dupont Circle, one of the more upscale neighborhoods in Washington DC. “I haven’t decided yet,” she told me late last week when I asked her who she would vote for. “I like Hillary. I also like the other guy though. My son wants me to vote for him. But what’s his name?” she remarked.

The Latino vote will remain a key issue until the nomination is decided and Hillary Clinton’s most important asset. Barack Obama is expected to end the month of February on an upswing, having won the last eight consecutive contests and being projected to succeed in next week’s vote in Wisconsin and Hawaii. But when delegate-rich Ohio and Texas go to the polls on March 4^th, he will have to prove that he can appeal to the more diverse population of the larger states (so far Hillary Clinton has won almost all of them, including California, New Jersey and New York) and that he has found the way in with Latino voters, particularly in Texas, if he wants to grab the bigger share of the 370 delegates at stake that day.

On the Republican side, John McCain came increasingly closer to sealing the nomination on Tuesday, winning the vote all across Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, and although the most socially conservative wing of the GOP voters still clung to Mike Huckabee, especially in Virginia.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington DC – The game of brinkmanship between the United States and Iran over Teheran’s uranium enrichment program continues amidst Washington’s persisting effort to veer the UN Security Council toward the approval of new sanctions and Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s renewed pledge to resist any pressure to stop his country’s pursuit of nuclear technology. In an attempt to shed light over the unresolved contention, a pool of experts gathered Wednesday in Washington DC at a roundtable organized by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) to discuss the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, which unleashed at the end of last year a heated debate about the future of US relations with Iran.

When the unclassified summary of the report was released to the public in December 2007 it was by large interpreted as a retraction of previous assessments by the intelligence community. The NIE begins by stating; “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Intelligence analysts were thus seen as correcting the widely-held belief – especially among the members of the Bush Administration – that Teheran was covertly pursuing the development of nuclear weapons in spite of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and a long list of UN resolutions.

The experts who congregated at the USIP showed, for the most part, a negative evaluation of the quality of the report criticizing it on several grounds. The estimate was received as showing either no understanding of the field of intelligence or a political agenda.

According to Avner Cohen – Senior Fellow at the USIP – the first problem arises with the opening statement. Attached to the NIE’s declaration that Iran had interrupted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, there is a footnote that clarifies that by “nuclear weapons program” the analysts mean “Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work.” This excludes any judgment on Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment. From a non-proliferation standpoint this distinction between civil nuclear energy and military nuclear energy is at best inaccurate and at worst seriously misleading, Dr. Cohen commented. “There is no such thing as two nuclear energies, one for weapons and one for piece,” he said. In Cohen’s opinion, the truth of the matter is that if Iran continues to enrich uranium, even if officially only for civil purposes, it becomes increasingly closer to the moment when it will be able to transfer the technology to building an atomic bomb.

A few panelists disagreed also with the idea that the estimate had brought to the surface new important and positive evidence. “This NIE wasn’t a major change of the position of the US intelligence community,” Dr. Paul Pillar said, an Associate Professor at Georgetown University and former National Intelligence Officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. In Dr. Pillar’s opinion, the report doesn’t add much to the knowledge the US already held that the enrichment program in Iran continues, that the timeline for Iran’s potential development of nuclear weapons is to be set for the middle of the next decade and that the Iranian leadership has been lying about only pursuing nuclear technology for civil purposes. If anything, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies’ Senior Fellow and former IAEA/UNSCOM Chief Nuclear Weapons Inspector Dr. David Kay echoes, the most startling revelation of December’s NIE is that it confirms that there was indeed a covert uranium enrichment program going on in Iran, a longstanding suspicion of which there was no available evidence prior to this estimate.

David Kay also attacked the NIE on another ground, expressing the belief that the analysts wrote the report with an agenda in mind, which defies the purpose of intelligence all together. In his opinion, the estimate shows a tremendous drive for compromise, to broaden the support for it. “I believe that people writing this were mostly trying to correct a past mistake,” Dr. Kay added referring to the intelligence failure that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2002. Paul Pillar of Georgetown disagreed with David Kay on this point; “I think it is wrong to assume that the NIE had a political agenda and that these intelligence officers wrote it with the specific intent of influencing the public debate,” he said. According to Pillar, these people are not communication professionals, don’t normally write for the media and as such doubtfully are aware of what impact their work might have on the public opinion.

The most dissonant voice at the panel on Wednesday was that of Jeffrey Lewis the Director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at New America Foundation, who commented; “Overall I judge the NIE to be pretty good.” Dr. Lewis also added, “One thing that drives me nuts is that the policy-making community seems to have an expectation that it has a right to perfect intelligence, which I find to be an unreasonable demand.”

Aside from the discussion over the December’s NIE, what seems more poignant is the question of what the US and the international community should do now. In fact, while experts debate among themselves in Washington, the stalemate continues unbroken. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reportedly declared on Wednesday that Teheran is approaching the peak of its nuclear program and that it has no intention of giving in to Western demands and abandoning its pursuit of nuclear technology. Ahmadinejad was speaking in the southwestern town of Busherh, home to the country’s first nuclear power plant that’s being built by Russia, and did not elaborate. In the meantime the UN Security Council began discussing on Friday a proposal for a new round of sanctions that was drafted by six major powers including China and Russia. The plan, softened in its tones from previous stances in order to gather a larger support from Council members, calls for a travel ban and asset freeze on Iranians most closely involved with the nuclear program.

In spite of the general dislike for the NIE that emerged at the USIP roundtable, by the end participants came to an agreement that, by taking the military option off the table, the report “has created a gentler environment where a dialogue with Teheran might take place and we should take advantage of it,” as Leonard Spector put it, the Director of the Washington DC office of the Monterey James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Furthermore the release of the estimate appears to have had positive, although probably unintended, consequences on Iran’s domestic debate. Barbara Slavin, Fellow at the USIP and Senior Diplomatic Commentator for USA Today, highlighted this development speaking from the audience during the Q&A. The Iranians, now feeling liberated by the threat of an American military intervention and hence less pressured to unite indiscriminately behind President Ahmadinejad, already appear willing to embrace a more open internal debate over the actual performance of their government.

The fact that the use of force against Iran has become a less reasonable option after the NIE was published might have taken some pressure off of Mohamed ElBaradei, the Head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “His role will be fundamental,” George Perkovich, Vice President for Studies of the Global Security and Economic Development at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said. Dr. Perkovich noted how ElBaradei’s apparent reluctance to investigate deeply in Iran might have been caused by his worries that any finding could have led to war. Now that the NIE excluded that eventuality, “he should feel free to dig deeper,” Perkovich added.

Some experts, nevertheless, remain worried that the NIE significantly complicated the position of the United States and made it much more difficult to keep the pressure on Iran. Among them, David Kay believes that the release of the report made it harder to sustain sanctions against Teheran and that it corroded the foundations for dialogue by detracting from the US’ leverage. Leonard Spector is convinced that, independent of any positive finding the NIE might have contributed to the policy-making process, the US should prepare “for the worst-case scenario rather than hoping for the best.” However, he simultaneously acknowledges that “we’re at a moment when we might soon be able to work with Iran more effectively.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington DC – On the 12 of October 2007, Professor Ole Danbolt Mjøs, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, announced the Peace Prize winners at a press conference in Oslo. Speaking in the hall of the Nobel Institute crowded with journalists, Mjøs said; “The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared in two equal parts between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold Gore Jr., for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” The prizes were awarded, as tradition prescribes, on December 10^th, on the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, founder of the Institute.

“I was really surprised by the Gore’s prize,” said Helge Pharo, Professor of International History at the University of Oslo and one of the only four advisors to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, referring to the politics behind the selection of the laureates. “There is such a strong strain of anti-Americanism in Norwegian left wing politics that I didn’t expect it to go to an American,” he continued. Professor Pharo spoke on Tuesday at an event organized by the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies of the George Washington University in Washington DC.

The Nobel Peace Prize is meant to recognize the outstanding work of an individual or organization that promotes good will among nations and the brotherhood of men, organizes peace conferences, and/or advances an agenda for the reduction of standing armies. It is the responsibility of the Norwegian Nobel Committee to interpret these criteria and to select the laureates. In any case there has to be a direct link between the activism of the awardees and world peace, although “sometimes the distance between these two points is quite considerable,” Professor Pharo noted, as it might have been in the case of Al Gore, and even in that of Mother Theresa, who won the prize in 1979 for the work she did with the poor and the sick in Calcutta, India.

The Nobel Peace Prize was first awarded in 1901 to Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, and Frédéric Passy, a leading international pacifist of the time. They shared a prize amount of 150,782 Swedish Krona (approximately $24 US). Today the sum is of 10 million Krona, or about $1.6 million US. Since the days of Dunant and Passy, 95 individuals and 20 organizations have won the prize. The Red Cross was awarded it three times, in 1917, 1944 and 1963, more than anyone else. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees won it twice, in 1954 and 1981.

The most controversial peace prize was probably the one that went to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973 for having contributed to bringing to an end the War in Vietnam. “Many people think that that choice was outrageous,” Herge Pharo pointed out. The “missing Laureate” is certainly the Mahatma Gandhi, who never received the prize despite being considered possibly the most powerful advocate for peace in history. He was nominated several times, in 1937, 1938, 1939 and 1947, and also in 1948, just a few days before being assassinated. The official website of the Nobel Prizes writes that “the omission has been publicly regretted by later members of the Nobel Committee; when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was ‘in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi.’” However the members have never offered any official explanation as to why the Mahatma was not selected.

Alfred Nobel’s will, which also set up the Nobel prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and the Prize in Economics, instructed that Norway was to appoint five members to the committee for the Peace Prize. Since its inception, the selection process developed along lines of secrecy and elitism that seem surprising for an award that is meant to promote peace and the equality of all men.

The Storting (the Norwegian parliament) elects the five committeemen to a 6-year renewable term, in proportion to the political composition of the running legislature. The nominations are staggered so that this year, for example, three members will be replaced. The members have always been exclusively Norwegian and for a long time they were simultaneously standing members of the Parliament. This changed in 1977 when a rule was adopted barring members of the Storting from election to the Nobel Committee. “Today they are mostly former fairly top level politicians,” Professor Pharo explained. “The appointment has now become a recognition for services these politicians rendered in the past,” he continued.

The committee receives about 200 proposals each year, from professors, politicians and organizations around the world, advocating the viability of different candidates. Out of those hundreds of names, the members draw a short list of around 30. The advisors, and among them Helge Pharo, are then tasked with conducting extensive research on these finalists and with writing a report for the use of the committee profiling each of the contestants. The advisors are, normally, historians and political scientists and their role is that of “preventing committee members to make fools of themselves,” Professor Pharo joked as he explained that “committeemen are seasoned politicians but by no means international affairs experts.”

Contacts between the members and the advisors are kept to a minimum. Other than receiving their research assignments, the advisors don’t interact with the committee and are rarely even given any feedback on their work. This is part of the secrecy that characterizes the working of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. No minutes of the meetings are recorded and the members are not allowed to keep diaries and never have (with the two famous exceptions of Halvdan Koht, who was a member from 1919 to1937, and of chairman Gunnar Jahn in the period 1945-1966). The names of the candidates other than the winners are never published and the reports of the advisors are classified for 50 years after they are submitted.

Hence, the selection of the laureates is strictly guarded in the hands of a few, which can explain why there has never been any major leak on the names of the winners, but only many more or less successful speculations. The secrecy is also meant to shield the work of the members and of the advisors, especially when they must research and discuss openly aspects of the various candidates that might be controversial and politically incorrect. “They don’t keep minutes so that whatever one member says in a meeting can’t be held against him the night after,” Professor Pharo explained.

Supposedly, in deciding the year’s Laureate, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has to reach an agreement among its members, or the prize amount is reallocated to the Nobel Prize fund. However the last time this happened was in 1972, “although I doubt this is because the committeemen have since then always unanimously agreed,” Helge Pharo said. According to the Professor at the University of Oslo, the reasons behind the uninterrupted selection of laureates might be two others; “the committee has embraced a more activist approach and wouldn’t give that activist role up by renouncing to award the prize.” Furthermore, the Nobel Peace Prize has become such an important annual happening worldwide, with several side events and the media hype that accompanies it, that “by now, the prize simply cannot not be awarded…It’s a machine that’s impossible to stop,” Pharo noted.

The increased activism of the Nobel Committee emerges in another major change that has taken place in the last two decades. The prize used to be awarded in recognition of previous achievements on the part of the candidates, whereas more and more laureates today are engaged in ongoing efforts involving current conflicts. It is a departure that, in the opinion of Pharo, mirrors developments in Norwegian foreign policy, as the country has chosen to become a more active participant in international conflict resolution. The risk of this excessive activism is that the prize might lose its credibility as an independent recognition; “there is a real danger that they might overdo it,” admitted the University of Oslo Professor.

In any case, “if one wants to try to predict who will win the Nobel Peace Prize, one must know who sits on the committee,” Helge Pharo told the audience in Washington DC. It is important to take into consideration the members’ political views. The committee, after all, cannot depart excessively from the mainstream political landscape in Norway, which can be characterized as international liberalism, a left-of-center view of international affairs. Which is why, Professor Helge Pharo suggested, “It is not farfetched to think that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 was given to Al Gore as a way to hit someone else in the United States.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism