The 2013 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons -- a little-known outfit that's just starting to locate and destroy Syria's chemical weapons arsenal.  It will be many months before any conclusions can be reached about the success or failure of its work.  But, in a pattern that's become all too familiar, the Nobel Peace Prize panel made a decision based on a hope and a prayer -- not on firm accomplishments of lasting importance and value.

There was a time when the award of the Nobel Peace Prize went to winners with scintillating records of having advanced the cause of peace and human rights.

Going back to the 1980s, one thinks of Lech Walesa, who helped topple the Soviet empire.  Or Desmond Tutu, who helped demolish apartheid in South Africa.  Or Elie Wiesel, whose call to bear witness to the Holocaust still resonates today.  Or such towering individuals as the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi, or even Jimmy Carter for his global peace-making efforts after he left the White House.

But there also have been some clunkers in modern times.  Yasser Arafat immediately comes to mind; he shared the Peace Prize with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin for the Oslo Accords, which subsequently soured into the second Palestinian intifada, with its monstrous terrorism that claimed more than a thousand Israeli lives.

Or the United Nations and Kofi Annan, who did little, if anything, in the cause of peace and all too often provided a propaganda haven for unsavory regimes.  Or laureates selected more on the basis of dubious or hoped-for work than for actual pragmatic progress -- the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has yet to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the European Union. 

And the No. 1 example of turning the Nobel Peace Prize into utter derision: Barack Obama, at the start of his first presidential term.

In this year's competition for the award, the clear favorite was Malala Yousafrai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot in the head by the Taliban for crusading for educational opportunities for girls.

The awards panel, which passed her by, might profit from her take on the Peace Prize.  Interviewed before the award was made, she said she really wasn't ready to  receive it.  Wait until I have opened a school or inaugurated a teacher's training program, then I might be considered a qualified candidate, she remarked.

There's a bit of advice the Nobel Peace Prize committee might well consider in future years to help it get back on the track.

Leo Rennert is a former White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief of McClatchy Newspapers.