The award of the Peace Prize is always political, whether it goes to a politician or not.

Sometimes it's to lend strength to someone working to make things better in a tight corner; sometimes - and these tend to be the most grotesque cases - it's a hopeful gesture to mark the fact that some unutterable bastard has made a move in the right direction.

Kissinger's prize was the most extreme example of that. Comparable only to the fact that Adolf Hitler was nominated in 1938, because he cooperated in not actually starting a war that year.. But at least he didn't get it.

At least this year they seem to have chosen a genuine peacemaker. I hope some of the people who'll go on record as welcoming the award will pay some attention to what she actually says. For example, from that page I linked to earlier:

Ebadi wasted no time in pursuing her bold fight for human rights, calling for the release of political prisoners in her homeland but warning the United States not to intervene.

Just hours after becoming the first Muslim woman to win the prestigious accolade, Ebadi also spoke out against rights abuses around the world, taking aim at the US occupation of Iraq and describing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an unequal war of "stones against weapons."