The Death of the Nobel Peace Prize

It’s official: the Nobel Peace Prize is death. Final breathe was giving half of this prize to Al Gore. I will not write about Gore’s role in climate change campaign; I will focus on his “peace” work.
I am witness that Al Gore is now way peacemaker. He was vice-president in 1999, when USA with it’s NATO partners bombed Serbia for 78 days. Thousands of people died. Damage was valued for over $40 billion dollars!

Some foreign observers also noted this, plus some other crises around the globe. I’ll quote some articles.

A Grand Misjudgment: Gore’s Peace Prize by Jan Oberg

Alfred Nobel wrote in his will that the Peace Prize should be awarded to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

…

In particular, Al Gore – as vice-president under Bill Clinton between 1993 and 2001 was never heard or seen as a peace-maker. Clinton-Gore had a crash program for building up US military facilities and made military allies all around Russia – and missed history’s greatest opportunity for a new world order.

In contravention of international law and without a UN Security Council mandate, they bombed Serbia and Kosovo, based on an extremely deficient understanding of Yugoslavia and propaganda about genocide that has caused the miserable situation called Kosovo today (likely to blow up this year or the next), and they bombed in Afghanistan and Sudan.

Nobel Prize for Al Gore: “Old Europe” fires back at the Bush administration By Patrick Martin

Vice President Gore, however, is hardly to be identified with the cause of “peace.” One of only ten Senate Democrats who voted for the first US war against Iraq in 1990, he was second-in-command of an administration that dispatched US troops to Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia, financed death squads in Colombia, bombed Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan, maintained an economic blockade of Iraq that caused the death of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children, and waged a devastating air war against Serbia.

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Gore, of course, is a capitalist politician, and has grown wealthy from stockholdings in Apple, Google and other high-tech giants. He is incapable, by ideology and by social interest, of offering a serious program to deal with climate change.

Moreover, Gore has talked a better game than he has played. When in office, as vice president for eight years, he did little to advance his avowed environmental concerns. The Kyoto Treaty, which Gore played a significant role in drafting, was a largely symbolic exercise, and the Clinton administration never submitted it for ratification by the Senate because of intense opposition by American business interests.

More links:
Changing the climate, one winner at a time
Gore’s Nobel win has sides lined up
Users’ comments on BBC
Users’ comments on IHT

If you find some interesting text on this topic, share it with me.