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CounterPunch
October
18, 2002
American Journal
Starring Jimmy Carter, in War
and Peace
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
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 nonnuclear, 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 CarterSand 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 noncooperation 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 nought.
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.
Yesterday's Features
Desmond Tutu
Do I Divest?
Occupation and Apartheid
Dave Marsh
Clay Pigeons:
The Politics of File Sharing
Trey Sager
You Don't
Have to Drop No More Hints, Baby:
I Can Tell You Want Us to Bomb You
Ron Jacobs
Todd Gitlin
Does the Bossman's Work:
Redbaiting the Antiwar Movement
Jackson Thoreau
Karen
Hughes in Texas: Mrs. Nasty
Kurt Nimmo
Snipers,
Predators and the Posse Comitatus Act
Jerre Skog
Identify
the Enemy:
The Business in Bali
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- How to Change the Subject: Corporate Scandal and Pension
Reform as Weapons Against Warmongering;
- Padilla's Predecessor: Court Ruling Cites 1904 War
Against Mining Union;
- Adios Hitchens: the Dorian Gray of Our Time;
- Object of Suspicion: How the FBI Watched Janis Ian
From Birth;
- First Carter, Then Clinton,
Now Sen. John Edwards:
Another "New South" Slimeball;
- Corporate Crooks: Nature or Nurture?
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October 14,
2002
Harry Browne
Ireland:
No to War; No to Nice
Don Atapattu
The Tragedy of Alan Dershowitz
Linda Heard
So You
Think You Live in a Democracy?
Bob Feldman
Flashback: Inspecting Nuclear Israel
Adam Engel
The Anger
of Achilles
Anthony Gancarski
The
Washington Post and the Wal-Mart Way
Philip Farruggio
Sleepers
Harold Gould
Islamic
West Asia and US Foreign Policy:
A Tale of Strategic Self-Delusion
Dan Brook
An Open Letter to Barbara Lee
October 12
/ 13, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Vindication
Through Violence:
Jimmy Carter and the DC Sniper
Robert Jensen
The American
Political Paradox:
More Freedom, Less Democracy
Ben Tripp
Congratulations! It's a War!
Susan Davis
Proverbial
Wisdom:
Red!
David Krieger
A Bleak Day for America
Anis Shivani
George W. in Therapy
Ken Paff
Where Do Hoffa's Tactics Belong in a Mob-Free Teamsters?
Carol Norris
The Politics of Fear
Elaine Cassel
The Lynne Stewart Case:
When Representing an Accused Terrorist Can Land a Lawyer in Jail
Musa AlShaer
Scenes
from an Occupied Wedding
Anthony Gancarski
Concerned Citizen: a serialized
novel (Episode 3)
M. Shahid
Alam
I Will Fight Your Enemies
October 11,
2002
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Montana
Fusion
Steve Kelly's Wild Ride for Congress
Ralph Nader
Whirlwind
Wheelchair Intl.
Anthony Gancarski
Stayin'
Alive: Notes on Facials and Saving Face
Romi Mahajan
What
War Means to the Iraqi People
Uri Avnery
Israel:
the Jewish Demographic State?
Francis Boyle
Bush's
Banana Republic
Lee Sustar
Taft-Hartley,
Bush and the Dock Workers
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk
Syndrome and George W. Bush
Jerre Skog
The Blessings
of Growth:
The Greatest Deception of All Time
October 10,
2002
Elson E. Boles
Iraq and
Chemical Weapons:
The US Connection
Senator Russ Feingold
"Confused Justifications and
Vague Proposals": Why I Oppose Bush's War Resolution
William A.
Cook
What Bush
Didn't Tell the UN:
The Case Against Israel
Jorge Mariscal
Chicanos
and Chicanas Say:
"No a la Guerra"
Norman Madarasz
Rio's
Holiest View:
Brazilian Elections 2002
Amir Boroomand
Just
Nod, Please
Fedwa Wazwaz
Falwell,
Graham & Friedman:
Religious Extremism in America
Kurt Nimmo
Condoleezza
Rice at the Waldorf Astoria
Resources:
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About 9/11
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Days That
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By
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and Jeffrey St. Clair
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Whiteout:
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by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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