Nobel Committee Honors Carter, Disses Bush

Friday's announcement that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter will receive this year's Nobel Peace Prize represents a pointed challenge to the unilateralist foreign policy advocated by rightwing hawks in the Bush administration.

While the announcement itself cited Carter's "vital contribution" to the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt -- one of the stellar achievements of Carter's four-year tenure (1977-1981) -- as well as his subsequent peace-making and human rights activities, the criticism of the Bush regime was implicit in its wording.

Reading out the announcement written by the five-person Nobel Committee, Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik said, "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 co-operation based on international law, respect for human rights, and economic development."

But the chairman of the Nobel Committee, Gunnar Berge, was far more direct in his statements to the press. He said the award "should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken. It's a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States."

Over the past year, the former president has emerged as one of the most articulate and eloquent critics of the ultra-rightwing trend in U.S. foreign policy. He has publicly assailed a wide array of Bush policies, including the planned war on Iraq, handling of the Middle East crisis, relations with Cuba and its failure to provide substantially increased aid to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa.

In a Sept. 5 Washington Post article, “The Troubling New Face of America,” Carter took aim at Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, accusing them of leading a "core group of conservatives who are trying to realize pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism." In the same article, he also flatly rejected the Cheney-Rumsfeld push to launch a unilateral war with Iraq.

The article was a detailed indictment of the administration's record: "Peremptory rejections of nuclear arms agreements, the biological weapons convention, environmental protection, anti-torture proposals, and punishment of war criminals have sometimes been combined with economic threats against those who might disagree with us."

"Belligerent and divisive voices now seem to be dominant in Washington," Carter wrote. "It is crucial that the historical and well-founded American commitments prevail: to peace, justice, human rights, the environment and international co-operation."

Carter's most significant accomplishments as a president built on these same principles. His major foreign policy achievements included the Camp David agreement of 1978, the ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty, the establishment of full diplomatic relations with China, and a major nuclear arms agreement with the Soviet Union. He is perhaps best remembered, however, for his championship of human rights, especially in Latin America, as well as his denunciation of Washington's "inordinate fear of communism."

After retirement, Carter threw himself into international diplomacy and humanitarian work, mostly organized through the Carter Center, which he and his wife Rosalynn founded in 1982. In some cases, his mediation efforts were supported by the U.S. government, as when he and the current secretary of state, Colin Powell, helped arrange the peaceful intervention of U.S. troops into Haiti to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994. In other cases, such as his dramatic trip that same year to Pyongyang to defuse a major crisis between the U.S. and North Korea over nuclear inspections, government officials saw him as meddlesome, even as they later built on the progress and trust he had established.