As the Norwegians get ready to bestow the Nobel prize for peace, the excitement surrounds the question of whether the prize will finally go to one of the great critics of the Chinese communist regime. An imprisoned Chinese dissident named Liu Xiaobo has emerged as the favorite, according to other human rights advocates cited by the New York Times. At the moment Mr. Liu is sharing a cell with five people, according to a dispatch in the Guardian. The prospect that he might get the prize has so alarmed the Communist Party mandarins that one senior Chinese official actually warned the Nobel Committee to back off, according to the account in the Times. But, the newspaper reports, Mr. Liu’s candidacy is meeting with unusual opposition from other Chinese dissidents who reckon Mr. Liu has been, in his various statements, too soft on the Communist party.

Our own candidate for the prize is G.I. Joe — and G.I. Jane. The Sun has pressed this point almost every year about this time, in hopes that the Norwegians would not only acknowledge the heroism and sacrifice of the American soldiers, airmen, sailors and marines but also honor the idealism of the American military mission, which has ever been not to conquer but to liberate — and to bring peace. This was the case when the idea of a Nobel Prize for G.I. Joe was first advocated back in the 1990s, in the pages of the Forward newspaper, by a professor in New Jersey, N.J. Kressel. The New York Sun first backed the idea in 2003. The logic of the idea has only increased with each mission since then.

There are those who say the Nobel Prize for Peace has lost some of its luster since the days when it went to giants like, to name but a few, Theodore Roosevelt, George Catlett Marshall, Menachem Begin, Martin Luther King, Vaclav Havel, Elie Wiesel, and Henry Kissinger. We wish to take nothing away from any of those winners, or from the more controversial or even un-deserving recipients who have won in the past. But in the whole history of the peace prize — going back all the way to 1902, when it was won by Frederic Passy, a French pacifist, and Jean Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman who founded the Red Cross movement, and carrying up through President Obama — the fact is that there is no one who has put his or her life on the line as courageously and idealistically, or as many times, as America’s G.I.s. Theirs is a record of heroism from which nearly every country in the globe has benefitted, including, incidentally, the Norwegians.