Jimmy Carter and the Uses of the Nobel Peace Prize

Of the four US presidents who’ve been handed a Nobel Peace Prize–Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama–the one who’d shown the cleanest pair of heels when it comes to escaping the world’s guffaws for the absurdity of the award is Jimmy Carter, who on his second day in office amnestied Vietnam War resisters and draft dodgers.

Woodrow Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, having brought America into the carnage of the First World War. The rationale was Wilson’s effort to establish a League of Nations, but his substantive achievement was to have refined the language of liberal interventionism. Between TR and Wilson, it’s hard to say who was the more fervent racist. Probably Wilson. As governor of New Jersey he was a fanatical proponent of the confinement and sterilization of “imbeciles,” a eugenic crusade that culminated in the US Immigration Act of 1924, which barred Jews, Chinese and other suspect genetic material from entering the United States. Much against their will many of these excluded Jews made their way to Palestine. Others involuntarily stayed in Russia and eastern Europe and were murdered by the Nazis. Above all, Wilson at Versailles was the sponsor of ethnic nationalism, the motive force for the Final Solution. And they say Obama’s award has brought the Peace Prize into disrepute!

The peace laureate president who preceded him was TR, who got the prize in 1906 ostensibly for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War, but really as a reward for sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the Philippines.  Senator George Hoar’s famous denunciation of Roosevelt on the floor of the US Senate in May of 1902 was probably what alerted the Nobel Committee to Roosevelt’s eligibility for the Peace Prize:

“You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture. ”

TR was given the peace prize not long after he’d displayed his boundless compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of  Filipino “monkey men” in the 1904 St Louis World Fair as “the missing link” in the evolution of Man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible if necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly dispatched the Great White Fleet  (sixteen U.S. Navy ships of the Atlantic Fleet  including four battleships) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle Sam’s imperial credentials, anticipating by scarce more than a century, Obama’s award, as he prepares to impose Pax Americana on the Hindu Kush and portions of Pakistan.

What the committee of those worth Norwegians was really saying was that when it comes to giving a US president the peace prize, the bar has to be set terribly low.

Carter got his Nobel in 2002 as a reward for conspicuous good works. But there again, the message of the Nobel committee was: Take the rough with the smooth.  As with Obama, the election of Carter in 1977 was also a season of hope that a new era was dawning, particularly in the arena of foreign policy and the Cold War. During his successful drive for the presidency, the Georgia governor and peanut farmer told a group of Democrats that “Without endangering the national defense of our nation or commitments to our allies, we can reduce the present defense expenditures by about five to seven billion annually. Exotic weapons which serve no function do not contribute to the national defense of this country. The Pentagon bureaucracy is bloated and wasteful.”

“If, after the inauguration,” Carter’s campaign manager, Hamilton Jordan, told the press, “you find Cy Vance as Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And I’d quit.”

Once in the White House, such stern talk from Carter quickly gave way to a more dispassionate deportment. Carter named Harold Brown–who had served as Secretary of the Air Force in the LBJ admininstration and once worked as a government scientists on nuclear weapons development, as his Defense Secretary. Carter wanted George Ball as secretary of state, but in the backstage maneuverings of the real election, the Israel lobby vetoed Ball. Carter was forced to pick Vance as Secretary of State and the Cold War fanatic Brzezinski as National Security Advisor. Jordan did not quit.  Such non-resignations are symbolically important because they indicate the real election is recognized and loyally accepted by all.

Carter soon cited all of the usual grave threats the Soviet Union posed to US national security. For 1978, the first fiscal year under his budgetary supervision, he requested $118 billion in defense spending. A pittance by today’s standards, but 25% more than the amount Carter had pledged as a candidate. By December of 1978, Carter was publically boasting that under his leadership, defense spending had “gone up in real dollars. We have compensated for the inflation rate and then added on top of that.”

Carter, the former nuclear scientist, and nearly all of the major media swallowed the demented notion of US nuclear “vulnerability” to a pre-emptive strike by the Soviet Union. Early in 1978,  TIME was asking: “Can the US Defend Itself?” The nation’s leading defense experts, the magazine reported, were in broad agreement on a number of key matters: “The Soviet Unio’s continuing nuclear and conventional military buildup is increasingly ominous and may jeopardize the delicate balance of power that has deterred nuclear war…Disarmament negotiations like the SALT may not be capable, by themselves, of preserving the US-USSR balance.”

Carter crumbled, and the MX missile, the lovechild of Harold Brown, won the day.

By the 1980 presidential campaign, Carter and Reagan were dueling each other for who could promise the most federal largesse to the military, exactly like the Roman legions of old selling off the throne to the highest bidder. In fact, Carter’s pledges for future arms spending were actually greater than what Reagan proposed and won in the ongoing weapons boom of the 1980s.

It was Carter, after all, who amped up the new Cold War, got Argentinian torturers to train the Contras, and, above all, dragged the United States into Afghanistan. It was in 1978 that a progressive secular government seized power in Afghanistan, decreeing universal education for women and banning child marriage. By early 1979, Carter was hatching plans with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and China to arm the Mujahideen and tribal warlords in Afghanistan to overthrow the government and attempt to lure the Soviet Union into combat. In December 1979, after repeated requests from the government in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union sent forces to fight the rebellion by fundamentalists. The CIA launched the most expensive operation in its history to train and equip these fundamentalists and warlords.

(Nixon drank heavily and so did Ford. Jimmy Carter, the prig, brought jogging into the international politics. In the old days, the high and mighty stood at banquets sluicing down tumblers of firewater. These days they run about in their underwear. Who says there’s progress in human affairs?)

People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there’s method in the madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition, which they should accept as representing the considered opinion of rational men, albeit Norwegian. It’s a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth: you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or  Vietnamese or Afghans  and still  win a Peace Prize. That’s the audacity of hope at full stretch.

One shouldn’t take these prizes too seriously. Awards to liberal figures like Carter and Obama are gifts from the battlements of capital, signifying to doubters that the empire is in a safe pair of hands.

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