Carter's Nobel intentions

The Wall Street Journal

The Nobel Peace Prize for Jimmy Carter is certainly well-timed. As the West prepares to confront Saddam Hussein's tyranny in Iraq, the former U.S. President's award is a useful reminder of the limits of good intentions.

Mr. Carter is one of the most well-meaning men in history, and we intend that as a compliment. A religious man, he has always looked for the good in people, especially America's foreign adversaries. As President, he fought for human rights and brokered a peace between Egypt and Israel that lasts even today. Out of office he has used his prestige to promote many good causes, including Habitat for Humanity.

Mr. Carter's noble intentions failed disastrously in office, however, in ways that are still instructive today. The humble Georgia peanut farmer came to the Presidency in the heyday of Cold War "detente" between the Soviet Union and the West, a policy he sought to deepen and extend. Early in his term he pronounced an end to our "inordinate fear of Communism." He once kissed Leonid Brezhnev on the cheek.

But Brezhnev did not turn his cheek in return. He repaid a falling U.S. defense budget by undertaking a huge military buildup, notably in nuclear missiles. Soviets bankrolled proxies who extended Marxist rule in Angola, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and nearly in El Salvador. When Islamic radicals threatened the Shah of Iran, a U.S. ally, Mr. Carter sent indifferent signals and the Shah fell. Soon those same radicals took American diplomats hostage, holding them for 444 days until the very day Mr. Carter left office.

By the end of his Oval Office tenure, to be fair, Mr. Carter had begun to recognize his mistake. He proposed more military spending, and his hawkish National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was dominating U.S. foreign policy. But none of this came soon enough to save his own Presidency, which he lost in a rout to a man whose view of Soviet intentions was summed up by "the evil empire."

We are now at a similar pivot point in history regarding a new kind of threat to freedom. The U.S. mainland has been attacked by terrorists inflicting mass casualties on civilians, new weapons threaten far greater destruction, and an American President is asking the world to help him disarm a madman who trucks with terrorists and is attempting to build nuclear weapons. Those of us who support President Bush's policy believe it is folly to think that a tyrant like Saddam, or a terrorist like Osama bin Laden, can be deterred. With such men and modern weapons, a pre-emptive strike is morally justified and strategically necessary.

Yet once again Mr. Carter is worried less about that threat than about our own inordinate fear of Saddam Hussein. His recent op-ed in the Washington Post castigated the Bush Administration's "belligerent and divisive voices" for throwing down "counterproductive gauntlets to the rest of the world." He wrote that "there is no current danger to the United States from Baghdad." It was a fierce, and nearly unprecedented, attack on a successor by a former President.

Significantly, Mr. Carter's views are not prevailing among his fellow Americans today. Every poll shows a solid majority views Saddam as a threat and supports pre-emptive U.S. action to remove him from power. Mr. Carter also couldn't convince a majority of his own party's senators. On the same day Mr. Carter won his Nobel, Senate Democrats voted 29-21 to give Mr. Bush broad authority to use military force against Saddam. Apparently that majority agrees that in the modern world of terror threats, as during the Cold War, peace can't be won only by peaceful intentions. Someone has to strip the terrorists and their suppliers of their weapons, just as someone had to stand up to Soviet tyranny. That burden falls uniquely to the United States now as it did then. In that sense, it's fitting that Mr. Carter should accept European accolades in Oslo, leaving more realistic souls in Washington to defend American lives.