LuisTeodoro.com

One of the worst presidents we’ve ever had” was how one caller to the US public TV channel C-Span described Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States, on October 12.

History is likely to say otherwise. Carter, who was US President from 1977 to 1981, had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the day before. Coming as it did at almost the same time as the US Congress’s approval of a resolution giving the current US President, George W. Bush, authority to wage war against Iraq, the award constituted a sharp rebuke not only on Bush but on the US’s drive to wage “preemptive” (read: aggressive) war.

The awards committee in fact said so:

“In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must be resolved through mediation and international cooperation based on international law, respect for human rights and economic development.”

Indeed Carter said in a statement reacting to the award that his concept of human rights “has grown to include not only the rights to live in peace, but also to adequate health care, shelter, food and economic opportunity. I hope this award reflects a universal acceptance and even embrace of this broad-based concept.”

In the last 20 years since he left the presidency, Carter has been trying to resolve conflict through negotiations and mediation, and in medical and aid programs in Africa and Asia. He was a recent visitor to the Philippines, where he was involved in the construction of housing for the urban poor, and also visited North Korea in an attempt to mediate between the two Koreas.

One of the few Democrats who has had the courage to oppose the US government’s impending war against Iraq, Carter was the first US President to make respect for human rights a condition for US military and economic support.

In 1978 Carter made that precept a cornerstone of his foreign policy, a fact that did not sit well with the Cold War hawks in the US government who believed in supporting any regime so long as it was anticommunist.

The Carter policy was a source of worry for the Marcos dictatorship, which feared US aid restrictions because of the gross human-rights violations it was committing. It was equally worrisome for the regime of Augusto Pinochet of Chile, who, like Marcos, had seized power with the encouragement and active support of the Nixon government that preceded Carter’s.

A US electorate traumatized by the US defeat in the Vietnam War and the lies of Watergate had elected Carter. He inherited a world in which US-sponsored dictatorships—where human rights were routinely violated—ruled much of Asia, Africa and Latin America. By making the encouragement of human rights his priority, Carter was thus repudiating decades of US Cold War policy—and in the process restoring hopes that the United States would indeed be a force for democracy and independence rather than the opposite.

Carter was the only US President since 1945 who never sent any US soldier into combat—and has so far been the last. The only instance in which US military power was projected abroad during his administration occurred in 1980, when under domestic pressure to do something about the hostaging of US diplomats in Iran, Carter authorized a military operation against Iran that turned into a disastrous failure.

That botched operation—and a right-wing campaign to oust him for his supposed indecisiveness—cost him a second term. In what is usually regarded as a repudiation of his administration and its policies, Ronald Reagan came to power in 1982 on the crest of support from both the right-wing groups (the political and economic elite, the conservative churches, big business, the military) and the rural, white, male and less-educated sectors of the electorate that wanted the US to resume its aggressive role in world affairs.

Indeed the likes of Donald Rumsfeld (currently US secretary of defense) and Dick Cheney (US Vice President) were among those behind the campaign against Carter, which emphasized, among others, the line that the US citizenry’s opposition to the Vietnam War weakened the United States, and that it had caused the US to lose a “winnable” war. Carter himself saw the folly of that war, a conviction reflected in his efforts to find peaceful solutions to international disputes—an approach the Rumsfelds and Cheneys dismissed as indecisive and indicative of weakness.

And yet, as the British-born doctor Peter Bourne (who, according to the UK newspaper The Guardian, had worked on the Carter administration’s drug policy) said October 12, Carter actually “symbolizes all that is historically thought of as the best in America—America as peacemaker, healer, champion of human rights, social justice and democracy, an eradicator of disease and hunger worldwide.”

In symbolizing the best in America, however, Carter’s record as President has been regarded by his jingoist countrymen as one of the worst. Though praised and recognized in many parts of the world, the image of Carter as weak and indecisive persists in the United States, thanks among others to the campaign to defeat him in 1981.

The C-Span caller had nothing positive to say about Carter, and even less about the decision of the Nobel Award Committee. He was obviously from the US South, as Carter is, but unlike Carter apparently belonged to that class of people—the ignorant and uneducated—that to this day still gives the South a bad name.

The caller’s criticism of Carter was focused on his supposedly having allowed the then new government of Muslim mullahs in Iran to get away with hostaging US diplomats—an act synonymous with rubbing the US nose in the dirt. No country, the caller said, should get away with that, the US being Number One.

The caller’s attitude was reminiscent of the attitude, widespread in 1980, of many Americans, among whose worst instincts is the assumption that the United States has a God-given right to impose its will on everyone else. (“When we want your opinion,” said one e-mailer to The Guardian, “we’ll go over there and beat it out of you.”) Among the manifestations of this instinct was the demand in 1980 that the US “nuke Iran” in retaliation for the humiliation the US had supposedly suffered, and to do so regardless of the consequences.

This is the instinct, resident in vast sectors of the US population, that led to Carter’s defeat in 1981. It is the same instinct that’s today one of Bush Jr.’s firmest bases of political support for his determination to impose the US will on Iraq, and eventually the rest of the world.

The American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has described the shoot-first approach that Bush and company call “preemptive war” as an option that used to be identified with the lunatic fringe. It has always been there, said Schlesinger, except that “the loonies” (his words) partial to it have never come to power, and that the good sense of the US electorate would never allow them to do so.

Schlesinger implies, however, that “the loonies” are now in power, and trying to put down the best in America with the worst by relying on those instincts of fear and insecurity among the population in support of war and global dominance. Bush and company may seem to be winning, but a peace movement uniting “the best in America” is also growing. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Carter is, in this context, a victory for that movement.

In another country the continuing struggle between the best and the worst, as well as the struggle to come would have relatively limited consequences. But because it is taking place in the United States, which has the power to incinerate the globe, it takes on the aspects of a life-and-death issue for the entire planet. That includes the little corner of it called the Philippines—where, as of the other day and as the world teetered on the brink of war, the citizenry was being enthralled with news that their President was getting plenty of sex.

(TODAY/ABS-CBNNEWS.COM, October 14, 2002)