Starring Jimmy Carter, in War and Peace
by Alexander
Cockburn
Dissident Voice
October 21, 2002
Now they've given Jimmy Carter the Nobel Peace Prize.
Looking at the present, wretched incumbent, Democrats feel smug about their
paladin of peace.
But there's continuity in Empire. Presidents come and
Presidents go. There are differences, but over much vital terrain the line of
march adopted by the Commander in Chief doesn't deviate down the years. Is
George Bush "worse" than, say, Jack Kennedy, who multiplied America's
military arsenal, nuclear and non-nuclear, and dragged the world to the edge of
obliteration forty years ago? Sure, Carter wasn't as bad as Reagan. By the low
standards of his office, he did his best in the Middle East. But how bad is
bad? Carter's projected military budgets for the early 1980s were higher than
the ones Reagan presided over. Remember his plan to run MX missiles by rail
around the American West?
Recall when Carter said America would not stand idly by
while Nicaragua tried to set forth on a different path after the Sandinistas
threw out Anastasio Somoza? Carter told them they had to retain the National
Guard, which had been Somoza's elite band of US-trained psychopathic killers.
The Sandinistas said no. So Carter ordered the CIA to bring up the officers and
torturers running the Argentine death squads to train a force of Nicaraguan
exiles in Honduras scheduled for terror missions across the border. They called
them the contras.
El Salvador? In October 1979, a coup by reformist officers
overthrew the repressive Romero dictatorship and pledged reforms, including
land reform. But within weeks, it became clear that the reformers among the new
rulers had been outmaneuvered, so they resigned en masse as the real leaders
stepped up frightful repression in the countryside, killing close to 1,000
people a month. Some 10,000 were killed in 1980, most of them peasants and
workers.
The Carter Administration sent millions in aid and riot
equipment to the Salvadoran military, dispatched US trainers and trained
Salvadoran officers in Panama. The Administration cast the conflict as one
between the "extremes" of left and right, with the junta trying to
steer a "moderate" course. In fact, 90 percent of the killings were
carried out by the army or paramilitary death squads acting under army or
government supervision. The Carter Administration continued to push this line
throughout 1980, not suspending aid until the killing of four Maryknoll nuns in
December. It's all coming back to you? Yes, it was the Carter Administration
that restored the Khmer Rouge to military health after the Vietnamese kicked
them out of power in Cambodia.
And he harked to the pain of South Korea, where students
and workers were demonstrating against the military dictatorship of Chun Doo
Hwan, notably in Kwangju. Carter's envoy advised the South Korean military to
hit back hard, and it did on May 17, 1980, killing at least 1,000, the most
horrible massacre since the Korean War. The White House instructed the local US
military commander to release a South Korean force from border duty to attack
the demonstrators, which they did with terrible brutality.
In his introduction to Lee Jai-eui's Kwangju Diary, Bruce
Cumings reviews the documents unearthed by Tim Shorrock and says the record
"makes it clear that leading liberals-such as Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew
Brzezinski; and especially Richard Holbrooke (then Under Secretary of State for
East Asia), have blood on their hands from 1980: the blood of hundreds of
murdered or tortured students in Kwangju."
Carter presided over the dispatch of arms to Indonesia,
fresh from its invasion of East Timor, which makes him, oh, just one more
American to get the Nobel Peace Prize after sponsoring genocide in Asia. And he
started the covert CIA operation in Afghanistan, rallying the mujahedeen to
fight the Soviets. Soon the CIA would bring the Saudis, and Saudi cash, to
Afghanistan, not least among them Osama bin Laden.
As Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, who's just finished a history of
the first years of the Nicaraguan revolution, put it to me after the news of
Carter's Nobel, "'Benign' Carter was the source of so many bad things,
including the rise of the Christian right (his endless public pronouncements of
his faith and his sister's leadership in the actual Christian right gave the
movement a new legitimacy), the erosion of the UN, the destruction of the New
International Economic (and Information) Order, etc. And no one seems to recall
that he led a campaign to free Lieutenant Calley [of My Lai infamy] when Carter
was governor of Georgia."
Remember that the late 1970s were years of great optimism
at the UN, with reforming agendas such as the report of the Brandt Commission,
which called for radical transformation of the world economic order, with
transfer of technology and development financing from North to South. The
Carter Administration decided to undercut one 1980 UN Special Session, echoing
its behavior at the UN Conference on Racism in 1978. The United States sent a
very low-level delegation to announce its non-cooperation with the terms of the
discussion and generally disrupt the proceedings.
That whole initiative for readjustment of the economic
relationship of North and South came to naught. We headed into the Reagan
1980s, when the deregulatory philosophy embraced by Carter came to full flower,
both at home and abroad, with the destruction of public infrastructure and
social services across the world, the collapse of healthcare in Africa, the
onset of the plague years. At home, too, the post-Nixon/Ford years were times
of hope. Carter presided over their demolition. Neoliberalism won the day on
his watch.
Now he's a peace prize winner. He's been campaigning for it
for years. In the end, how could he have missed, unless the peace prize
committee had decided to compress the whole process and give it to George Bush?
Maybe Bush will get it next year, in partnership with Ariel Sharon.
Alexander Cockburn
is the author The Golden Age is In Us (Verso, 1995) and 5 Days That
Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (Verso, 2000) with Jeffrey St. Clair.
Cockburn and St. Clair are the editors of Counterpunch, the nation’s
best political newsletter, where this article first appeared.