I get to say "Reality is on the blink" so often these days, for phrases on the tip of my tongue its right up there with "Did IQs drop sharply?". But this news report about Bush and Blair being nominees for a Nobel Peace Prize really takes the biscuit. Of course its ironic that Nobel awards, the peace prize included, are financed by the monetary legacy left by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, the first safe encapsulation of high explosive. But at least dynamite has more peace time uses than a Bush or Blair...
However on second thoughts, a Bush and Blair win of the peace prize would entirely in keeping with the award to that other infamous peace prize winner Henry Kissinger who got the award in 1973 with Le Duc Tho "for jointly negotiating the Vietnam peace accord in 1973." Why? Because to this day Kissinger still faces arrest for war crimes charges if he ever steps foot in Belgium. Right now there's a good number of people who would like to see Bush and Blair, the big bullies on the block, step up to the dock with Kissinger.
Just in case you need a quick history lesson, Kissinger became imfamous for his support of Augusto Pinochets overthrow of the democratically elected leader Salvador Allende in Chile thirty years ago (1973), and his subsequent turning of a blind eye to Pinochets crimes against humanity in Chile which included thousands of people murdered, tortured and disappeared over a seventeen year period. Kissinger met with Pinochet after the 1973 coup and at one point told him:
My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist. But we have a practical problem we have to take into account, without bringing about pressures incompatible with your dignity, and at the same time which does not lead to US laws which will undermine our relationship.The rest, that is the conservatively estimated 3,200 people killed and tens-of-thousands tortured and disappeared, are now history. History because they never lived to see Pinochet ousted in 1990.
Of course at the time Kissinger got his award in '73 the full implications of his support of Pinochet were yet to be known. The same could be said for people that supported Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden before they turned into enemy of the state #1 (that would be Bush, Bush and Rumsfeld. Naturally sanity might, if pigs are in flying condition, win the day and Bush and Blair might join the list of infamous nominees who never made it t the winners circle. These include famous tyrants Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic. But if sanity doesn't win out, I wonder how Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King would feel about sharing the Nobel Peace Prize winners title with Bush and Blair who are now more infamous for the wars they waged, and the blood they spilled in the name of peace, than their efforts to bring peace itself?
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