And if they gave a prize for ill-considered prizes...

specific to those years? I suppose it could be changed to an award given as accomplishments merit...

You award a prize every year, you're going to get some undeserving recipients. At least the Nobel committee only hands out one Peace Prize (albeit sometimes splitting it). Look at how badly the US Medal of Freedom has been devalued by handing it out like a magazine subscription.

As I recall, most of the people who originally objected to the 1973 Nobel award did so because half of it went to Henry Kissinger. Le Duc Tho they were fine with, and it is true that negotiating in bad faith, immediately violating the treaty resulting from the negotiations, and exterminating, sending to concentration camps or driving from the country all actual or potential opponents did eventually lead to peace of a kind, approximately six years after the Peace Prize was awarded. The irony is that Kissinger probably deserved the Prize for what he did later in the Middle East.

Territories and deserves the prize for that alone if nothing else. By calling on Israel to do the ONLY right that that can be done, to pull out of the settlements entirely regardless of any other circumstances, he is advancing peace and security for all sides.

Regarding Arafat, the story that is told is that he was so unreasonable. But Israel's behavior has only gotten WORSE since his death, not more reasonable in the absence of a supposed bad actor in this scenario. Israel works to vilify and/or discredit every possible "partner for peace" that they would have to deal with, so that continuing to relentlessly expand the settlements in every and all cases does not look so nakedly wanton and aggressive.

The biases on this site are so extreme.

The columnist attacks Jimmy Carter for his so called blind support of the Palestinian leadership while ignoring decades of America's effectively blind support for Israel (sure we tell them to stop building settlements and stop killing Palestinian children, but they know we will continue to pour billions of dollars into Israel no matter what Israel does, at least until one of the political parties decides it no longer needs New York and Florida).
I suspect the columnist is pretty much a blind supporter of Israel (again, at least effectively), but it is hard to be certain.

Then others pile on and blame Jimmy Carter for all of our problems. Iran's revolution was decades in the making, yet somehow Jimmy Carter could have stopped it? American intervention in Iran would have made Iraq look like a walk in the park.

I am old enough to remember Jimmy Carter's presidency and he certainly should have been less naive and idealistic, but he could not have stopped the Iranian revolution, the Afghan civil war (the coup that led to communist leadership was in 1973, by 1979 the Soviets were already supporting a communist government, so Afghanistan would have been ugly no matter what). About the only thing Carter could really have prevented was the hostage crisis, just as President Ford had the good sense to evacuate Americans from Lebanon in 1976. Carter's post presidential work on everything from human rights and democracy around the world to stopping epidemic diseases in the Third World deserves a Nobel Peace Prize as much as anyone who has received it, even if he is not always right and still sometimes suffers from an excess of idealism.

I am only going to comment on David's view of Jimmy Carter's Nobel prize. He deserves it completely and without restrictions. The Israeli newspaper Haretz, while not agreeing with all of Carter's opinions, has recently stated that, when he comes to Israel, Jimmy Carter should be treated as royalty. He pushed for and was the ultimate mediator of the Camp David Accords between a very reluctant Menachem Begin of Israel and Anouar Sadat of Egypt. The resulting 'cold" peace between the two countries for the last 30 years, has worked to the benefit of Israel, allowing it to act as it sees fit (and with impunity), without having to worry about being attacked from their erstwhile most formidable enemy. As to Carter's positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I believe they are well grounded and supported by a lot of people in Israel. Besides, there should be at least someone of stature in the US willing to bring some balance to the US policy there, as nobody else, apart from Bush I, has been willing to do it for the last 40 years.

Isn't it also true that Henry K. has never picked up his award the fact that he is under indictment for war crimes and can't travel to Europe for fear of arrest?

I am surprised to see Mother Teresa is absent from your list of ill-considered peace prize winners. As a woman who opposed birth control, divorce and abortion, not to mention the equality of women, she did not and does not deserve to be lauded.

It's a little farther than anyone else has gone back, but Gustav Stresemann's award in 1926 proves, more than anything, the point that the Nobel Prize is awarded for good PR.

He received it for negotiating Germany into the League of Nations, for eliminating German reparations, and negotiating peace with France. This was all thanks to political sweet talking that thinly masked a notably radical nationalist agenda. In his speech accepting the Nobel prize, he basically claimed that the best thing germany could do for the greater world would be to make the biggest show of power nationally possible.

He later fought against stabilization in Poland in order to extend eastern german borders.

He was by no means a Nazi, but he certainly fueled nationalist resentment for the Versailles villains and believed in a stronger Germany at any cost leading into the rise of the Nazis.