Jimmy Carter's Nobel Peace Prize
Weekly
Standard: The
Nobel Thing To Do
The Nobel committee is using Jimmy Carter to attack the
current president of the United States. The former president should give back
the Peace Prize.
Nobel Committee Admits Carter Award a Slap at U.S.
A spokesman for the organization that awarded
Jimmy Carter the Nobel Peace Prize late yesterday has admitted the decision was
intended to be a slap at the Bush administration for its policy against Iraq.
The unidentified official told reporters on Friday that
questions had arisen about whether the Carter award was directed against
"the administration in the United States because of the plans they have
taken in the Iraqi conflict."
"My answer is, simply, yes," the Nobel
Committee spokesman said in audio broadcast by ABC Radio network news. (Newsmax.com)
Jimmy Peanut Prize, By AmericanProwler.org
Oh, oh, the world's in trouble now. Jimmy Carter is this year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, an award as mightily deserved as the peace prize previously awarded to Yassir Arafat and Le Duc Tho. He won it despite having sulked for years for failing to share in the prize meted out to Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. Could it be he won because he's a willing and useful pawn in the international anti-American movement, which equates an assertive U.S. with Attila and Adolf?
(By Jay Nordlinger, National Review) For years, Carter has been a thorn in the side of presidents, acting as a kind of “anti-president,” as Lance Morrow once put it in an essay for Time. You recall how Carter irked Clinton on Haiti and North Korea. His low moment, however, came during the run-up to the Gulf War, when he wrote members of the U.N. Security Council — including Mitterrand’s France and Communist China — urging them to thwart the Bush administration’s effort. Our government found out about it when the Canadian prime minister, Brian Mulroney, called the defense secretary, Dick Cheney, and said, “What the . . .?” Some people actually allowed themselves to utter the word “treason.”
* The ex-president has always considered himself screwed out of the Nobel prize, and he and his Carter Center have campaigned rather embarrassingly openly for it. He has won prizes, however, about which he crows: There was one named after his fellow liberal southerner, Fulbright; there was one from the U.N. (natch); and there was my favorite: the Zayed International Prize for the Environment, named for His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates! Arabs are heavy-duty funders of the Carter Center, and they get a lot for their money.
* No one quite realizes just how passionately anti-Israel Carter is. William Safire has reported that Cyrus Vance acknowledged that, if he had had a second term, Carter would have sold Israel down the river. In the 1990s, Carter became quite close to Yasser Arafat. After the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia was mad at Arafat, because the PLO chief had sided with Saddam Hussein. So Arafat asked Carter to fly to Riyadh to smooth things over with the princes and restore Saudi funding to him — which Carter did.
Troubling
Trophy
Jimmy Carter gets the Nobel Prize
Prize, By Peter Schweizer
The announcement served a political purpose: The committee was rewarding Carter for his criticism of the Bush administration's policy toward Iraq. But the award also has a certain irony — because while Carter has championed laudable principles in public, some of his actions, both as a president and as a private citizen, raise troubling questions about his commitment to those very same principles.
While Carter's commitment to the principles of democracy, peace, and human rights is genuine, he has failed to grasp that good intentions are not enough. A commitment to championing human rights is no substitute for enacting policies that actually secure them — nor should it be an excuse for trying to manipulate an American election."
By James Taranto, OpinionJournal.com
Back in May, columnist Jonah Goldberg called Carter (borrowing a line from "The Simpsons") "history's greatest monster":
While the first President Bush was trying to orchestrate an international coalition to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, Carter wrote a letter to the U.N. Security Council asking its members to stymie Bush's efforts.
As the "human rights president," Carter noted that Yugoslavia's Marshall Tito was also "a man who believes in human rights." Carter saluted the dictator as "a great and courageous leader" who "has led his people and protected their freedom almost for the last 40 years." He publicly told Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, "Our goals are the same. . . . We believe in enhancing human rights. We believe that we should enhance, as independent nations, the freedom of our own people." He told the Stalinist first secretary of Communist Poland, Edward Gierek, "Our concept of human rights is preserved in Poland."
Since Carter has left office, he's been even more of a voluptuary of despots and dictators. He told Haitian dictator Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras he was "ashamed of what my country has done to your country." He's praised the mass-murdering leaders of Syria and Ethiopia. He endorsed Yasser Arafat's sham election and grumbled about the legitimate vote that ousted Sandanista Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.
And, I learned from a devastating critique by my National Review colleague Jay Nordlinger, Carter even volunteered to be Arafat's speechwriter and go-fer, crafting palatable messages for Arafat's Western audiences and convincing the Saudis to continue funding Arafat after the Palestinians sided with Iraq against the United States.
Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
It's probably an exaggeration to call Carter a "monster"; he seems a well-intentioned naïf, and he has done some worthwhile work for Habitat for Humanity. But his record as president illustrates the folly of seeking peace through niceness. He lectured Americans on the foolishness of their "inordinate fear of communism," and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. He tried to appease the mullahs in Iran, and they answered him by holding dozens of Americans hostage, releasing them the moment Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. Reagan, in fact, would have been a worthier nominee for a peace prize; the world was far more peaceful after his eight years in office than after Carter's four.
The head of the Nobel Committee, Gunnar Berge, says he and his colleagues meant to send a message about current affairs: "With the position Carter has taken . . . [the award] can and must also be seen as criticism of the line the current U.S. administration has taken on Iraq," Reuters quotes him as saying. (The Associated Press notes that some of Berge's fellow committeemen have distanced themselves from his view.) But sometimes you have to fight a war in order to establish peace. With Saddam out of power, Iraq will be a far more peaceful nation, and the Iraqi people will be liberated from decades of misery and repression. The Nobel Committee disgraces itself when it rewards Jimmy Carter for his moral preening while its chairman denounces George W. Bush for taking a stand that will actually promote peace.
Reflections
of an ex-president
BY GABRIEL SCHOENFELD
"Mr. Carter himself has conducted talks with men like Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro and Syria's Hafez al-Assad, all of whom, he writes, "have at times been misunderstood, ridiculed and totally condemned by the American public." Part of the reason is "their names," which "are 'foreign,' not Anglo-Saxon," he observes."