I've seen Al Gore's movie-cum-lecture and there's no doubt he has helped to raise awareness of global warming. Indeed, so crucial is this topic that most of us feel we can do nothing but stick our heads in the sand. But should the Nobel Peace Prize really be snuggling up to Oscar on Gore's mantelpiece?

Although the mainstream press has been fulsome in its praise of the man who used to be 'America's next president' there's a major hypocrisy lying at the heart of this year's award. Alfred Nobel wrote in his will that the Peace Prize should be awarded to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

As vice-president under Bill Clinton from 1993 and 2001, he was certainly not thought of as a peacemaker. As one commentator points out, Gore was "one of only 10 Senate Democrats who voted for the first US war against Iraq in 1990, he was second-in-command of an administration that dispatched US troops to Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia, financed death squads in Colombia, bombed Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan, maintained an economic blockade of Iraq that caused the death of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children, and waged a devastating air war against Serbia."

This hypocrisy is so glaring that it blinds us. Admittedly, it's not quite so egregious as the Peace Prize given to Henry Kissenger whilst the US was still saturation bombing Indochina, but it's in similar territory. Nor is it quite so absurd as the nominations a couple of years back of George W Bush and Tony Blair, but it must raise the question of whether or not politicians of any nationality should ever be considered for Nobel awards.

Of course, Nobel himself, made millions out of dynamite. Regret at its destructive use compelled him to launch the awards. Maybe Gore's guilt, like Nobel's before him, is now being put to good use.