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

Jimmy Carter's foreign policy is the reason the US is now fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to mention the wars already fought, Iran/Iraq, Iraq/Kuwait, Gulf War 1....

Just yesterday Saudi Arabia, increasingly nervous about an Iranian bomb, announced their intention to build a nuclear facility. This in addition to Oman, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco...

Millions have died so far! We have yet to see how Jimmy Carter's decisions will fully play themselves out.

The Nobel Peace Prize is usually a sop to some media-created persona. I'd add Al Gore to the list, as no one stands to profit more from the greening of the energy economy than he does, and some of his absolutist contentions about climate are proving to be false, to put it mildly. Kofi Annan's prize conveniently overlooks his role in halting UN intervention to the 1993 Rwandan genocide, to say nothing of the corruption scandals that erupted under his watch. (Not that his predecessors fared much better ...)

The "hard" NPs (sciences) tend to be the only ones that really matter, except for economics, which is almost as dotty as the Peace Prize. Bu then, economic realities have a way of making everyone look dumb.

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.

Mohamed ElBaradei and the IAEA

It was quite paradoxal to award the Nobel Prize to killers and terrorits like Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin which like giving Hitler and Stalin a peace prize. I guess the author of the article failes even to critisize such incompatibility while making a disgusting remarks about Mr.J.Carter. I just wander what kind of service you have accomplished to desrve a 1% of what Mr.Jimmy Carter did except taking a pro-Israeli and pro-aparthaid approach? You better bother yourself to read some pages from his book...

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.

While they didn't win, once you see that Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were all nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize ... well, it starts to lose some credibility.

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.

Recently environmentalists have received the Nobel Peace Prize. To me it is highly questionable whether an environmentalist complies with the intentions of Alfred Nobel. According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize should be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

To give the Peace Prize to IPCC/Al Gore (2007) and Wangari Maathai (2004) rather smacks of political correctness and since what is PC change with time, the IPCC/Al Gore and Wangari Maathai prizes will soon be regarded as ill-considered.

I believe that in a few years few people will understand why IPCC and Al Gore got the Nobel Prize, partly because science will prove them to be wrong and partly because the questionable logic that says debating climate change creates peace. They got the prize "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

Wangari Maathai got the prize "for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace". According to Wikipedia Maathai “founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights.”

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?

A few months ago, one of my kids asked me why I liked Carter -- actually, it's not so much that I liked him as that I didn't have as much invective for him as I did for most other US presidents.

I thought for a minute. Then it came to me: "Jimmy Carter," I told my son, "is the only president during my lifetime who didn't invade another country during his presidency."

And for that, he's been considered a wimp. Go figure.

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.

How does Al Gore not make this list? His "contribution" is completely irrelevant to peace (though I register his complaint that it really wasn't fair, sniff sniff, that he lost the 2000 election).

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.

Add to the list:

Mother Teresa - for the reasons stated above. An obsession with suffering doesn't = peace.

14th Dalai Llama - Pre Chinese occupied Tibet was a brutal Feudal state ruled by the Llama class...Human rights situation wasn't much better than.

Al Gore - Reasons stated above.