http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/oct2002/cart-o12_prn.shtml
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WSWS : News & Analysis : North America
Nobel Peace Prize goes to Jimmy Carter-the "friendly" face of US
imperialism
By Bill Vann
12 October 2002
It was highly appropriate for the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award its
annual Peace Prize-named for the inventor of
dynamite-to former US president Jimmy Carter. The consequences of
actions initiated under his administration 25 years ago
are today producing a veritable explosion of American militarism from
Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf.
Having for years shamelessly lobbied for the prize, Carter now joins the
ranks of three prior US statesmen who were honored
by the committee in Norway as men of peace. The first was Theodore
Roosevelt, who explicitly embraced the "white man's
burden" of American imperialism. Announcing that his policy was to
"carry a big stick," he repeatedly used military force to
suppress the democratic aspirations of the peoples of Central America,
the Caribbean and the Philippines.
The second was Woodrow Wilson, who continued these colonial
interventions, led the US into World War I, and dispatched
American troops to Russia to aid the counterrevolutionary White armies
in their attempt to overthrow the workers' state that
emerged from the October, 1917 socialist revolution.
The third was Henry Kissinger, who now is unable to leave the US for
fear of being dragged into courts in Latin America and
Europe as a war criminal. His award was given in recognition of the
Paris peace accord, extorted from the Vietnamese after the
Christmas 1972 terror bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong.
Carter's record during his four years in office places him squarely
within the ranks of such well-known pacifists.
The committee's citation singled out Carter's role in negotiating the
Camp David treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1978.
Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
that year. While the Nobel committee wanted to include Carter at that
time, they were unable to because his nomination had
been submitted too late.
The Camp David accord was not a framework for Middle East peace, but
rather an instrument of rapprochement between a
section of the Arab bourgeoisie on the one hand and Israel and US
imperialism on the other, at the expense of the Palestinian
people. The main "achievement" of this deal was to isolate the Palestine
Liberation Organization and leave the central questions
of the status of the Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, and the
rights of Palestinians unresolved to this day.
Twenty-five years later, Israeli military occupation and raids in those
territories continue, while the death toll among both
Palestinians and Israelis has never been higher.
Carter, who served a single four-year term as the 39th president of the
US from 1977 to 1981, has often been cast as a
dedicated advocate of human rights by his supporters and an ineffectual
and bungling appeaser by his Republican opponents. In
reality, the Carter presidency, which coincided with a sharp
intensification of the crisis of US and world capitalism, set the stage
for both the eruption of US militarism and a ruthless
government-corporate offensive against the working class at home.
A former naval officer and nuclear submarine expert, Carter entered
politics as a state senator in Georgia and was later elected
as the state's governor. He was the first Democrat from the deep South
to be elected president since the Civil War, and his
nomination signaled a sharp turn to the right by the national Democratic
Party.
Entering office after defeating Gerald Ford, whose pardon of Nixon had
only deepened the atmosphere of political crisis and
corruption that surrounded the White House, Carter made populist
promises of economic reform while promising a foreign
policy centered on the promotion of "human rights."
Both of these declared shifts in policy proved largely rhetorical. On
the international front, the Carter administration preached
d�tente with the Soviet Union, while initiating an aggressive
policy-which would be intensified under his successor, Ronald
Reagan-aimed at undermining and rolling back the USSR.
The most infamous operation in this regard was the covert US support for
Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas fighting against the
Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. Washington poured money and
arms into the country-ultimately spending about $5
billion-to foment a war that devastated the country and claimed 1.5
million lives.
While the Carter and Reagan administrations portrayed their backing for
the Afghan Mujaheddin as a response to the Soviet
Union's dispatch of troops across the border to back the secular
government in Kabul, this has since been exposed as a lie.
Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted in a
1998 interview with a French newspaper that the CIA
began the operation well before the Soviet invasion, with the aim of
drawing the USSR into a "trap."
"It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap ..."
declared Brzezinski. "The day that the Soviets officially
crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the
opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war."
Asked whether he regretted US actions, given their effect on Afghanistan
and the rise of an armed right-wing Islamic
fundamentalist movement, Brzezinski replied: "What is most important to
the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse
of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of
Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" Among
those whom Washington armed and funded was Osama bin Laden.
Thus the Carter-Brzezinski provocation in Afghanistan set in motion a
process of turmoil and destabilization that ultimately led
to the terrorist attacks that took nearly 3,000 American lives on
September 11, 2001.
Elsewhere, Carter's professed dedication to human rights was allowed to
influence foreign policy only to the extent that it did
not conflict with US geopolitical interests and the profits of the major
US corporations and banks. It was notably absent in
relation to Iran, where Carter praised the Shah, a dictator installed by
the CIA in a 1953 coup, for his "progressive
administration," even as Iranian security forces were massacring
thousands of unarmed demonstrators. When US support
proved unable to rescue the Shah from revolution, the Carter
administration unsuccessfully attempted to foment a military coup.
In response to the upheavals in the region, Carter announced in his
January 1980 State of the Union Address a new US policy
that came to be known as the Carter Doctrine. He warned: "An attempt by
an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf
region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the
United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled
by any means necessary, including military force." He went on to explain
that this policy was necessitated by the "overwhelming
dependence of Western nations on vital oil supplies from the Middle
East."
It is essentially a more aggressive version of this same doctrine-the US
right to use military force to control Persian Gulf
oil-that is now being implemented by the Bush administration in its
preparations for an unprovoked war to conquer and
occupy Iraq.
Carter first established the military means for carrying out this kind
of aggression, founding the Rapid Deployment Joint Task
Force (RDJTF) and reorganizing the US military for intervention in the
Persian Gulf. By the time Reagan took office in 1981,
this intervention force had already grown to include more than 200,000
troops.
The human rights approach found expression only in what were peripheral
areas for US imperialist interests. Security assistance
was cut off to the dictatorships in Ethiopia, Chile and Uruguay. In the
latter two countries, ties with the US military and
economic aid remained untouched. Moreover, the secretary of state
announced that the military regime in South Korea and the
Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines would be exempted entirely from
the policy on grounds of "national security."
In Central America, the Carter administration came up with a unique
method for limiting direct security assistance to right-wing
dictatorships, while assuring that they remained armed to the teeth for
the purpose of suppressing popular revolt. Israel was
recruited to fill the gap, supplying Galil assault rifles and Uzi
submachine guns to substitute for American-made M16s. Israeli
military advisers were likewise dispatched to the region, while US aid
to Israel rose dramatically.
The Carter administration attempted unsuccessfully to bring Nicaragua's
infamous National Guard to power following the
overthrow of the dictator Somoza. Having failed in this attempt, it
began the process of regrouping ex-guardsmen into a military
force that, under Reagan, would become known as the "contras" and would
wage a war of terror, claiming tens of thousands of
lives.
The Carter administration steadily increased aid to the regime in El
Salvador, where in 1980-Carter's last year in the White
House-the death toll reached an estimated 13,000, the vast majority
peasants massacred by the army and police.
At home, Carter responded to a growing economic crisis with policies
aimed at slashing social services and attacking the power
of the working class. The blueprint for the Reagan administration's
smashing of the air traffic controllers' union, PATCO, and
replacing striking controllers with scabs was drawn up by the Carter
administration. This action signaled a nationwide onslaught
against the working class by the employers and the government.
Prior to Bush's invocation of the Taft-Hartley law against the West
Coast longshoremen earlier this week, Carter was the last
president to use this strike-breaking legislation. He declared an
emergency under Taft-Hartley in an unsuccessful attempt to
force coal miners back to work and break their 1977-78 national strike.
The widening of social inequality in the US and internationally
accelerated under the Carter administration, which tapped Chase
Manhattan banker Paul Volcker to serve as chairman of the US Federal
Reserve Board in 1979. Volcker announced that "a
decline in real income" was necessary to fight inflation, and
implemented a high interest rate policy that saw the prime rate hit 20
percent. The result was a deep recession in which less profitable
sections of industry failed and layoffs mounted. These policies
set into motion what became a vast transfer of wealth from the working
class to the financial aristocracy.
The economic crisis and the attacks on working people eroded the
Democrats' electoral support, allowing Ronald Reagan to
defeat Carter and drive both foreign and domestic policy further along
the rightward trajectory that has continued until this day.
Carter meanwhile, established his Atlanta-based Carter Center, which
serves as a non-governmental instrument of US foreign
policy, carrying out operations in areas such as the former Yugoslavia,
Cuba, North Korea, Central America and the Horn of
Africa.
A regular mission of the former president has been election monitoring
in the former colonial countries, to assure that they meet
the "democratic" standards set by Washington. Given the suppression of
the vote and the outright theft of the presidency by the
Republican Party in the 2000 US election, Washington's seal of approval
in such questions has become more than a little
tarnished.
The Nobel prize is a European institution, and the selection of Carter
was bound up with the increasingly poisoned state of
political relations between Europe and America. The judges made it clear
that their choice was intended as a rebuke to the
present occupant of the White House. As improbable as it may sound,
George W. Bush was also a candidate for the award.
This year's prize "can and must be interpreted as a criticism of the
position of the administration currently sitting in the US
towards Iraq," Nobel committee chairman Gunnar Berge told reporters. "In
a situation currently marked by threats of the use
of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far
as possible be resolved through mediation and
international cooperation based on international law, respect for human
rights and economic development," the committee said
in its politically pointed citation of the former American president.
In reality, the foundations for the criminal policies now being carried
out by the Republican administration of Bush were laid by
the Democratic President Jimmy Carter a quarter of a century ago.
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