St. Jimmy the Lesser

Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jimmy Carter helped set the stage for some of the terrorism and violence that plagues our world today. It was Carter who said that the oil resources of the Persian Gulf were vital to U.S. security, and pledged in his Carter Doctrine to defend U.S. interests there "by any means necessary, including military force." George W. Bush is merely carrying out that doctrine.

It was also Jimmy Carter who began funding the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, and the CIA issued a call to Islamic fundamentalists around the world to join the battle against the Soviets. Osama bin Laden answered that call. Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, defended this approach with a now-infamous rationale: "What was more important in the worldview of history? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

Yes, Jimmy Carter has used his post-Presidential years well, compared to the nation's other three White House emeriti. The one-time millionaire peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, has not whacked golf balls at PGA Pro-Ams, jumped from airplanes, or pocketed $2 million for speeches in Japan. Instead, Carter has been a freelance mediator of conflicts in Haiti, Somalia, North Korea, Sudan, and other scenes of mayhem.

But when the Norwegian prize-givers conferred secular canonization on Carter, it appears that they were so awed by Carter the ex-President that they ignored the record of Carter the President. His White House years were marked by many decisions that had nothing to do with humanitarianism or nonviolence, and everything to do with the hustling of weapons designed to solve conflicts by killing people.

Carter didn't set out to be a record-setting arms peddler. When running for the Presidency, he spoke the language of the anti-war left. "We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war," he told the Foreign Policy Association months before the 1976 election. But once in office, he lacked the spine, or acumen, to take on the entrenched arms-traders in the Commerce Department, the State Department, and the Pentagon.

Shortly after the Salvadoran civil war began in 1979, Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero pleaded with Jimmy Carter--"Christian to Christian"--not to send military aid. He was ignored. In March 1980, Romero was slain while saying mass. The death squad killers were under the command of men trained at the School of the Americas.

In December 1980, when four American church women were slain by members of the Salvadoran National Guard, Carter immediately suspended all U.S. military and economic aid to the Salvadoran government. Weeks later, he thought better of it and ordered $5 million in what was called "emergency aid" to the military-dominated junta.

With the spigot opened, Carter went with the flow. He dispatched another $5 million. The military money to El Salvador was one of Carter's last decisions as President, and Ronald Reagan gladly took it from there.

Footnote: In 1986, Carter, now back to being a humanitarian, visited El Salvador to plead for peace. He made plans to lay a ceremonial wreath at the tomb of Archbishop Romero. But his Secret Service detail said no. Mobs of rightwing anti-Carter demonstrators protested at the U.S. embassy where the ex-President was staying. Tear gas and water cannons were needed to quell the fury.

Although Carter's prize is not so offensively wrongheaded as Henry Kissinger's, Yasser Arafat's, or David Trimble's, Carter is not worthy to be in the company of laureates who genuinely took personal risks and defied corrupt power in their pursuit of peace: Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, Carlos Belo of East Timor, and Martin Luther King Jr. Each put their lives on the line and, unlike Carter, dared to cross it.

Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D. C. His recent book is "I'd Rather Teach Peace."

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