The Western Confucian puts it in a nutshell:
This is the man, appropriately surnamed Gore, who was number two during the bombing of Serbia and the Iraq sanctions regime that killed half a million souls, mostly children. And yet when Pope John Paul II was the leading voice for peace in 2003, he couldn't get the prize because of condoms. Instead, it was instead given to someone no one ever heard of and whom we've since all forgotten. Shameful.
Jan Oberg notes that 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." Al Gore's record on that speaks for itself.
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.
Or, as Alexander Cockburn observes:
It's as ridiculous as as if Goebbels got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938, sharing it with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for his work in publicizing the threat to race purity posed by Jews, Slavs and gypsies. (The peace prize actually went that year to the Nansen Committee for Refugees. Gore certainly played his part in creating Iraq's current 4 million refugees, among the greatest displacements of the past hundred years.)
I was going to say that one could at least say for Clinton-Gore that in Iraq, unlike Bush-Cheney, they did not pass the point of no return. They did not jump into the quagmire. But then, of course, they did jump right into the middle of the quagmire in Yugoslavia.
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