Obama's Nobel

Gut reaction: it's preemptive; here, Mr. President, we like where you're going, so please stay the course because we believe in the potential for change you represent.
Because really, what all has Obama done? US troops are fighting in Iraq. US troops are fighting in Afghanistan. US troops are fighting or preparing to fight in an untold number of locations.
Call it a right wing to the gut.
Naturally, the right has attacked Obama for the abovementioned inconsistencies.
Which still leaves the question: why? No matter the arguments of entitlement, the Nobel committee thought Obama deserving, so the challenge is to parse why he received the Nobel.
People still fight. People still die. Just like they have since Ardi. And America, thus Obama, is still in the middle of a great many conflicts.
We see him in another summit, at another conference, weaving his way through hotspots and combat zones from behind the greatest possible portable defenses. We see the same engagements, the same indistinct faces with incomprehensible names, reflect on our friends and loved ones (even if familiar only through human interest stories), and think, "Peace? What peace? My _________ is over there!"
But our viewpoint is considerably stilted: we sent our _________s over there, whether for combat, occupation, reconciliation, disaster relief or whatever else. And what a limited perspective that ascribes to us and our assumptions. We will be happy when our _________s are no longer in hot spots, and Obama hasn't made that happen.
But then there's another perspective: for the past few years, America has been in hot spots of its own aggressive creation. America walked around brandishing the cudgel of capitalism and the whip of democracy and striking freely until sparks ignited.
Now, America is still in the hot spots, but not in an aggressively causal role. America is in hotspots to foment peace, to preemptively strike aggression, to remove itself from combat.
From that other perspective, America is not the great aggressor. It might still represent the great wrong, the great evil, but it is not aggressively affirming those assumptions.
And what changed? Obama.
Obama, in the few months he has had in office, has made considerable strides toward undoing the damage of the past eight years, and the proof is in the prize.
Maybe we're not where we'd like to be, but at least we're moving in that direction.