Bush & Blair nominated for Nobel Peace Prize: Do they deserve it?
 

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Do you guys think they deserve it? I don't.

No they shouldn't get it nor will they. Its funny how the article brings up WMD's when really that should have nothing to do with the peace prize. If anything liberating 25 million Iraqi's would be worthy, but I don't think that matters to people much.

The peace prize has become political and mostly pointless.

And worse if they give it to George Ryan I hope they can fly to his warm jail cell for it.

I'm not sure about this years', but if things work out and continue to proceed as they have the last couple months, next years' Nobel should definitely go to Prime Minister Vajpayee and President Musharraf.

Oh yes, only in Orwell's world would you get a Peace Prize for going to war.

edit: Looking at the calendar again, I think they have time enough to make significant strides for peace in time to be considered for the award.

And only in Orwell's world would a known terrorist and murderer get a Nobel price too. If Arafat can get one, so can Bush/Blair.

did anyone read the piece ABC news did? ...it made me laugh, the whole tone of it, i could just hear the author busting out laughing as he wrote it.

Milosevic and Hitler...how ridiculous is that?

I can just see what happened at that meeting...

Norweigan parli member: I would like to nominate Bush and Blair to win the Noble Peace Prize.

Smartass: In the spirt of the Norweigian parli member's nominees, I would like to nominate Hitler and Milosevic for the peace prize.

*laughter erupts from the Peace Prize nomination room*

Also: two people beat me to the Orwell statement but that was my first thought too, War is Peace and all that...

Hahaha

Nobel officials:....(awkward silence)...(shrugs) Sure, what the hell.

1. this should have been a poll
2. absolutely not. people who start wars are not makers of peace, quite the opposite in fact, thats the definition of peace vs. war.

The world must be on crack.

An excellent point.

hmmm war with Iraq, War= opposite of peace. Just how in the hell are they even considered nominees for the Nobel PEACE Prize? What idiot nominated them?!!!!?!?!?!?!!?!!

Yeah I was going to say, as opposed to Arafat? Nobel is a crock, I would refuse to share the same honor as the scum that has won it in the past.

Peace through strength, it's a hard thing to kick an evil murderous tyrant out of power. How many people do you think will not be murdered by Saddams forces this year?

No, it's actually a pretty disingenuous point: Arafat won the prize in 1994 along with Shimon Peres and Yitzak Rabin for all the work they had done in the previous several years, leading to the Oslo Accords, an important step in the peace process. The Nobel Prize committee certainly wouldn't have given him the prize if they had known he would launch the "intifada" 7 years later.

Also, over a hundred nominees are named every year, and every year this subject comes up, ie "Why are these people on the list"? Please remember: they aren't the winners, they are just the nominees.

Yeah, so how did those Accords work out? Arafat is a joke. He abused his power to line his own pockets, all the while perpetuating the plight of "his" people for political gain.

Doesn't matter how they worked out, at the time they were groundbreaking decisions that led the the longest stretch of peace that Isreal/Palestine has ever seen.

If the award could be taken back, it probrably would have. At the time Arafat and Rabin deserved it.

This is crazy and should not happen.
Also..linking Arafat to the Award is an ignorant act.

Agree with most other posters... giving people Nobel Peace Prizes for going to war would be an insane mockery of the whole idea. But didnt they give on to GHenry Kissenger? If political satire became obsolete then, what could you say about giving it to Bush or Blair? It wouldnt be THAT much worse I suppose.

Also, apparently, Adolf Hitler was nominated in 1938.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/st...900496,00.html

Ignoble peace prize

Given the fact that previous nominees include Adolf Hitler and Henry Kissinger, can anyone take the Nobel Peace Prize seriously, asks Paul Hamilos

Friday February 21, 2003

Which word connects Bono, the European Union, Jacques Chirac and George Bush? Peace, apparently. It has been announced that they have all been nominated, by the rather convoluted method by which these things are done, for this year's prize.
Of course, this raises a number of questions: not least, who would pick up the prize if the European Union won it? And on whose mantelpiece would it find a home?

Added to this, we are not even two months into the new year, and Jimmy Carter is still basking in the glory of last year's award. How can anyone put forward either Chirac or Bush?

With the war in Iraq not even started yet, it seems odd that the two are in the running. Putting aside the hawk's view of the French president and the dove's view of Bush, the idea that either of them is promoting world peace seems not only ludicrous but also an offence to the meaning of the word. Have those responsible for sending these nominations to the Nobel institute misplaced their dictionaries?

But then, this is nothing new for the Nobel peace prize. After all, Adolf Hitler was in the running in 1938. Yes, that's 1938, not 1933 - after the persecution of the Jews had been established under the Nuremberg laws. This was also the same year in which Gandhi was nominated, although the committee agreed that he didn't deserve recognition. Alfred Nobel, incidentally, also invented dynamite.

And there was also the famous comment by the American songwriter Tom Lehrer, who believed that "political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize".

In 1973, Kissinger, then the US secretary of state, was jointly honoured with his Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, for their roles in negotiating the Vietnam peace accord.

There was a certain irony in this, as Kissinger is accused of deliberately scuppering the peace talks in 1968, leading to the unnecessary prolongation of an already pointless war. His "peace efforts" in Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, Bangladesh and East Timor also failed to win universal praise. Le Duc Tho, quite understandably, declined to accept the award.

The Nobel peace prize, however, is not just for old war criminals. In 2001, Swedish MP Lars Gustafsson nominated football. All right, the beautiful game didn't win, but what was he thinking? Surely such a prize can only be awarded for deliberate actions made by sentient beings (and whatever you think of David Beckham, nobody would accuse him of being that).

You might cite the famous Christmas Day match between German and English soldiers stuck in the trenches during world war one as an example of football's unifying qualities. A brief look at the history books shows, however, that that particular game did not bring war to an end and that the sharing of half-time oranges failed to prevent them from killing each other a day later.

What is particularly startling about the peace prize is just how many of its recipients have been men, generally regarded as more the more bloodthirsty of the sexes. Of the 110 prizes that have been awarded, a dismal 10 have gone to women, including Mother Teresa (1979) and Aung San Suu Kyi (1991).

As these awards were met with far less outrage than that which greeted some of the male winners, it leads one to wonder why it is that men, who usually opt for war, are the ones who have generally gained the plaudits for peace.

The prize was inspired by Alfred Nobel's secretary, Bertha von Suttner, who was nominated four times (nothing to do, of course, with Alfred being deeply in love with her) and was the first female winner in 1905.

But, despite the abundance of potential female winners that followed her, from the suffragettes to the feminist movement, we still prefer to congratulate the men for their efforts. Perhaps it is because society sees women as inherently peaceful creatures and that any man who has overcome his natural inclination to maim and slaughter is immediately deserving of some kind of award.

So where does that leave us in 2003? With a multi-millionaire Irish pop star; a French president who is stalling over Iraq for reasons of self-interest; an American leader whose peace credentials are at best dubious, at worst non-existent; and an institution, the EU, that is being torn apart by the upcoming war.

So, who should be in the running? Well, taking the lead from the Kissinger-Tho Le Duc award, I go for the Iraqi foreign secretary, Tariq Aziz, and his US counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld.

We may have to put up with a bloody, murderous war beforehand, but if these two can sit around a table before the end of the year to sign a peace treaty, surely they're a shoo-in?

out of interest, does anyone know WHO nominated hitler and milosevic this year?

the nobels are a bit of a joke, really. once in every few years, people who deserve it, get it. the rest of the time its worthless.

and yes, at the time, there can be no doubt that Arafat deserved the nobel prize. if we knew then what we know now, it would be a different story, but going on what we knew back then, he deserved it every bit as much as Rabin and Peres. Lets not forget that Rabin was not exactly the most non-violent person a couple of decades before Oslo.

For some ultimate irony: Nobel made his fortune with the discovery of dynamite...