Put this one up on the shelf of shame, right next to Henry Kissinger's, or the peace prize they gave to Kofi Annan and the entire UN in 2001, sandwiched between the UN's okay for the bombing of Serbia, the killing of untold numbers of Iraqis, many of them babies and children in the years of sanctions, and its greenlight for the bombing of Baghdad in 2003. In 1998 the Nobel crowd gave the prize to Medecins Sans Frontieres, whose co-founder Bernard Kouchner is now France's foreign secretary urging the bombing of Iran. Like Gore, Kouchner was a rabid advocate of the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia and onslaughts on Serbia.

The UN often has an inside track on the "Peace" prize. The UN Peace-Keeping Forces got it in 1988. In 1986 another enthusiast for attacking Iraq and Iran, Elie Wiesel, carried off the trophy. Aside from Kissinger, probably the biggest killer of all to have got the peace prize was Norman Borlaug, whose "green revolution" wheat strains led to the death of peasants by the million.

When Gore goes to get the prize he shares with the pr hucksters and falsifiers at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Gore should be forced to march through a gauntlet of widows and orphans, Serbs, Iraqis, Palestinians, Colombians, and other victims of the Clinton era.

Back in Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign Gore was told to earn his keep with constant pummeling of George Bush Sr for having been soft on Saddam. Gore duly criss-crossed the country yoking Saddam and Bush in fervid denunciation, his press aides passing out speeches flatteringly footnoted with references to the work of the journalists covering his campaign. Gore charged that Bush had given Saddam "one of those milquetoast routines George Bush is so famous for". "The cover-up of Bush's arming of Saddam was", Gore shouted, "bigger than Watergate ever was." Right before the 2000 election Gore called for expansion of the no-fly zones in Iraq and said that any Iraqi plane venturing into such zones should be shot down.

In early January, 1993, Thomas Friedman interviewed president elect Clinton and asked about Saddam. Clinton amiably responded, "I always tell everybody, I'm a Baptist. I believe in deathbed conversions. If he wants a different relationship with the US and UN, all he has to do is change his behavior." This elicited cries of outrage from the national security establishment, and its prime respresentative, vice president-elect Gore, who announced that there could never be normal relations with Iraq so long as Saddam remained in power. He reiterated the call for a coup, if not by the Iraqi military then by the CIA (which in point of fact had been in receipt of a 'presidential finding' from Bush, three months after the guns of the Gulf War fell silent, authorizing it 'to create conditions for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power').

Vice president Al Gore was then given authority in the Clinton Administration for Iraq policy. On April 14, 1993, Bush went to Kuwait, whose regime duly arrested 17 people charged with plotting to kill Bush with a bomb placed in a Toyota Landcruiser.

Again the national security establishment mustered in support of a plan to hold Saddam accountable and bombard Baghdad, a plan hotly advocated by Gore and his national security advisor, Leon Feurth. The two individuals most reluctant to endorse this plan were Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr. "Do we have to take this action?" Clinton muttered to his national security team as the cruise missiles on two carriers in the Persian Gulf were being programmed.

Eight of the 23 missiles hit the residential Mansour suburb of Baghdad, one of them killing Leila al-Attar, a prominent Iraqi artist. According to Clinton's pollster Stan Greenberg, the bombing of Baghdad caused an uptick of 11 points in Clinton's popularity, a lesson Clinton and Gore did not forget. Years later, in the 2000 campaign, Gore out-hawked George Bush Jr on the subject of finishing the job in Iraq....

Louis N Proyect - 10/26/2007

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/10/25/alexander-cockburn-versus-al-gore/

Arnold Shcherban - 10/26/2007

I won't argue on the real intentions
of the piece's author, but if his is some expression of a thought that the mainstream so-called conservatives and so-called liberals
are the fruits from the same tree, i.e. corporate imperialists, I fully concur.
Therefore they all are among the last people in the world to deserve a Peace Prize.

Stephen Cipolla - 10/24/2007

Alex Cockburn??? Unrelentingly partisan???

No!

He has changed since The Nation stupidly cut his column by half several years ago. (I thought that the editors should have given him the page that the dearly departed if a bit dissolute Christopher Hitchens left behind.)

What exactly is it about his rhetoric that makes it so difficult to take seriously? It is not partisan at all. He is ripping into Gore. He has been warning people about Gore for over a decade. He doesn't associate himself with any party, so your use of the term partisan is mysterious. The people who need the warning are the ones who are called "liberals."

Gore would have pounced at the chance to blow away Saddam just as quickly as the current inhabitant of the White House. Even quicker because he's pretty good at speaking English in response to questions on the fly.

He probably would have heeded defense department warnings about bulking up the effort before going in, but maybe not. No Rumsfeld would have been involved.

Today, he would have the blood of even more civilians on his hands (as AC pointed out in his recent Nation column, Gore was a supporter of the Iraq sanctions, so he was accustomed to going to bed each night with the blood of children on his hands.)

The piece sneers at Gore. OK. It does. Take out the sneering adjectives, re-read it and, with all appropriate rationalism and decorum, then figure out where Cockburn is wrong.

Paul Barry Weinstein - 10/23/2007

The unrelenting partisan tone of this sneering piece precludes any reader inclined to rational consideration of the issues from taking it seriously.

Vernon Clayson - 10/21/2007

Mr. Kislock, far be it from me to suggest that George Bush should have gotten the peace prize, he's a war president and took the battle to the terrorists. I say thank heaven that Gore didn't get to be president, he would be worrying about ice melting rather than terrorists.

Stephen Kislock - 10/20/2007

G.W. Bush, should of Won the Nobel Peace Prize?

All of Bush's positive achievements, 1.

Vernon Clayson - 10/20/2007

The award had nothing to do with peace in any of its definitions, Algore's part of it was awarded merely as repudiation of George W. Bush and his presidency. All Gore has done is create a buzz, he has no especial education or experience in weather prognostication, it might as well have gone to a local weatherman or woman, they are less pompous, have better hair and are not nearly so boring as Gore.