I’m sorry, there’s a lot I admire about Barack Obama, but he doesn’t deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

Not while he’s waging a war in Afghanistan, which he’s already escalated, and may be about to escalate again.

Not while he still hasn’t pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq, nor while he’s going to keep tens of thousands of private military contractors there indefinitely.

Not while he endorses Bush’s heinous policy of “extraordinary renditions.”

Not while asserts the right to indefinitely detain people without habeas corpus rights at Bagram Air Base.

Not while he fails to successfully prod Israel to give up the Occupied Territories.

And not while he keeps our nuclear arsenal on hair-trigger alert.

The Nobel committee actually praised him for his position on nuclear weapons, but he hasn’t taken this first, crucial step toward making the world a safer place.

The Nobel committee rewarded Obama’s rhetoric.

I love Obama’s rhetoric, too.

I loved his speech on the nuclear issue.

I loved his speech where he unambiguously renounced torture.

I loved his speech in Cairo, which marked a huge break from George Bush, by showing respect to the Muslim world and owning up to some of the past crimes of U.S. foreign policy.

And I loved his speech at the Summit of the Americas, which promised a noninterventionist approach to this hemisphere. That would be quite a departure from 100 years of U.S. imperial policy.

But he doesn’t deserve the Nobel Peace Prize just because he isn’t George Bush.

And he doesn’t deserve the Nobel Peace Prize just on the basis of rhetoric.

No, the Nobel Peace Prize should reward a career of bold peace activism.

And, to say the least, the jury is still out on Obama on that one.

How we laughed when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize. It was like giving a man a gong for helping to put out a fire that he himself had been stoking up.

It was almost as funny as the news in 2007 that Tony Blair had been appointed a special peace envoy to the Middle East — yes, the Middle East — on behalf not just of the United States and Russia but also of the United Nations and the European Union. For those who enjoy gallows humour, the regular appointment of mass murderers and kleptocrats to the UN’s human rights commission is also quite amusing.

How do all these circles get squared? What makes these international bigwigs put together all these preposterous deals? One thing is reasonably clear, through the fog of war and diplomacy, and it is that there is nothing reliably noble about the Nobel prize. Many of the people who ought to have won it didn’t. Several who certainly shouldn’t have won it did, such as Yasser Arafat and Le Duc Tho of communist North Vietnam.

So I should not have been surprised to hear that Barack Obama has been offered the prize. What does surprise and sadden me is that he has accepted it. Like millions of other people, I admire Obama. I, too, was caught up in the general elation that a country with a shameful history of racism, my father’s country, could find a clever, well qualified, eloquent and charismatic candidate who was also black and then vote him into the White House. I thought then, and I still hope, that he may achieve great things.

However, the glaringly obvious point is that Obama hasn’t achieved anything very much yet. As his Texan predecessor might have said, so far he has been all hat and no cattle. That is hardly surprising as he has been in office for less than 10 months, but it is both foolish and wrong of him to accept a prize for something he has not achieved. Perhaps he wanted it because two eminent fellow Democrats, Al Gore and Jimmy Carter, have got one too.

As an American commentator said, it is like accepting an Oscar now for being likely to make an Oscar-winning movie next year. It casts great doubt on Obama’s judgment and integrity — can’t he see the Nobel nonsense for what it is? — and gives comfort to his critics. It makes this apparently decent man complicit in the sentimental ruthlessness and meaningless verbiage of most international bodies.

But perhaps, for all Obama’s appearance of being better than them, he is really one of them, not one of us.

It is anyone’s guess what the Nobel peace prize people are really up to. If it is odd to give out the prize before the winner has reached the goal, it is odder still to nominate him when he has barely crossed the starting line: the committee’s nominations for the Nobel peace prize this year had to be sent in by February 1, only 12 days after Obama had become president. Obama did almost nothing of any importance during those 12 days at the tail end of the Nobel nomination period.

This is very Alice in Wonderland — all prizes to be declared before the start. It is also the way of the wicked old world and for that reason it is something a good man should be seen to avoid. Can it be that Obama is already intoxicated with the exuberance of his own celebrity? For that is all he is so far — a well-meaning super-celebrity.

The Nobel people claim they are trying to promote what Obama stands for; they want to endorse his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy” and to encourage people to “go along with his concept of zero nuclear power”. They also claim there’s nothing new about awarding the prize for good intentions; that’s why Willy Brandt got it and Mikhail Gorbachev.

One of their number said the committee wanted to encourage Obama, another said his win would help Africa. One can only feel grateful that they did not offer it to encourage Tony Blair for his high-flown rhetoric in his early days about healing the scar that is Africa and generally speaking about saving the world.