The Next Nobel
Vice President Gore is being mooted for the Nobel Peace Prize, but our nominee is General Petraeus. This is only a slight departure from our annual editorial calling for the Norwegians to award the prize to GI Joe. We've been advancing that idea ever since reading about it in an essay by Neil Kressel, a professor in New Jersey. It has seemed to us that the American GI is the greatest force for peace in the world today, and we say that without the slightest bit of irony. GI Joe and GI Jane always go overseas for reasons not of conquest but of liberation, to secure the hope of democracy, and always with the intent of returning home.
We advance the name of General Petraeus this year because he has come to personify the GI Joes and GI Janes of whom he is in command. He has breasted an extraordinary amount of obloquy on behalf of their, and our country's, cause and courage. This was put into sharp relief during his appearance last month before the Congress, where his honor and patriotism were questioned. The circumstances present an opportunity to the Nobel committee to underscore the point that however controversial our policies may be, the world recognizes — and we haven't the slightest doubt that it does — the risks that our GIs, and their generals, take for all of us.
It is true that General Petraeus doesn't seem to hate President Bush, which in recent years has seemed to be one of the pre-requisites for winning the prize. He hasn't bribed the dictator of North Korea, as had the 2000 winner, Kim Dae Jong. Nor did General Petraeus ever head a terrorist organization as did the 1994 co-winner of the prize, Yasser Arafat. Neither, for that matter, did Mr. Petraeus idle as the first wave of Islamo-fascism swept through Iran, as did the prize recipient in 2002, President Carter. General Petraeus today is not doing his best to stave off international sanctions on the Iranians for building an A-Bomb as is the 2005 winner, Mohamed ElBaradei.
No, General Petraeus is just trying to save the nation of Iraq from the competing death cults of fanatical Shiism and fanatical Sunnism. He has already achieved something that had eluded his predecessors in command — he's winning a war against Al Qaeda, working with local tribes toward preventing a confessional civil war from escalating and protecting whole neighborhoods in Baghdad from ethnic cleansers. His accomplishments make the commander of multinational forces in Iraq uniquely qualified for a prize given in the name of peace, and now would be the time to salvage the real legacy of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite so horrified by his invention that he created an international peace prize with the profits he reaped from it.
Lest we sound cynical about the prize itself, let us just say that we recognize it has had many magnificent recipients, from Theodore Roosevelt and Menachem Begin and Henry Kissinger and Elie Wiesel to the founder of the Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, the Iranian human rights lawyer, Shirin Ebadi, and the Burmese freedom fighter, Aung San Suu Kyi. General Petraeus's accomplishments are in the tradition of George C. Marshall, Lech Walesa, and Andrei Sakharov. These men did not seek peace at any price or without any cost. They took enormous personal risks. They stood on principle. They understood that true peace is earned in victory.
