Nobel Peace Winner Supported Deposing Saddam

The Wall Street Journal congratulates the Nobel Committee for awarding the Nobel peace prize based on real grown-up criteria this year. (“Nobel Finn; An instructive peace prize”).

Martti Ahtisaari's Nobel Peace Prize yesterday won't get European elites buzzing as in past years (See: Gore, Al and Carter, Jimmy). In his diplomatic and political career, the former Finnish President brokered peace on various continents -- yet also recognized clear limits to good intentions. . . .

The Nobel Committee highlighted his midwifing of Namibia's independence and peace in Indonesia's separatist province of Aceh. But Mr. Ahtisaari's failures are as notably instructive.

In the early 1990s, he ran the U.N. mission to Iraq after the first Gulf War, watching Saddam Hussein's repression up close. Twelve years of frustrated diplomacy later, and against the grain of conventional European opinion, Mr. Ahtisaari found himself defending the U.S. invasion, the absence of a nuclear or biological weapons program notwithstanding. "Since I know that about a million people have been killed by the government of Iraq, I do not need much those weapons of mass destruction," he said.

Does that make him as dumb as George W. Bush? Or George W. Bush as smart as this year's Nobel Prize winner?

I'm just asking.