'We Need to Heal'

At 80, former president Jimmy Carter remains an active humanitarian--and a prolific writer. His Revolutionary War novel, "The Hornet's Nest" (Simon & Schuster) was released in paperback last month; his 19th book, a recollection of relaxing times spent with friends and family called "The Things that Matter Most" (Simon & Schuster) will be out next month. At the same time, he remains a keen political analyst. He spoke to NEWSWEEK's Eleanor Clift about the lessons of war and how politics have changed in the three decades since he won the presidency. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What are the lessons you drew from writing about the American Revolution?

Jimmy Carter: A couple. One is [that] from that time forward, based on the advice of George Washington and others, the United States looked on war as an absolutely last resort, that we wouldn't get involved in a war gratuitously--but only if our country was in danger, that its existence was threatened or sometimes expansion was threatened as we moved out to the West Coast. But I've been concerned lately, since I wrote the book, [about] an entirely new philosophy that George Bush has put forward, that preemptive war is an acceptable foreign policy--to go to war even though our country is not directly threatened in order to accomplish another goal, like deposing an obnoxious foreign leader. The second thing [I've learned is] the urgent need for alliances. We would never have won the [American Revolution] without the strong alliance with the French that Benjamin Franklin and others negotiated.

A third thing is the horror of war. The Revolutionary war was the most vituperative of all--filled with absolute and total uncontrollable anger. In many battles in the South no quarter was given. The soldiers knew that if they surrendered on the battlefield they would not be taken prisoner, but be executed.

You talk about the loss of life. I'm reminded of this recent research [by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University] that 100,000 Iraqis might have been killed in the course of their liberation.

I don't doubt that because for months and months we bombed indiscriminately, and we don't have any way to know [how many died]. I was the one who, with my Defense Secretary Harold Brown, a Nobel-quality physicist, shaped the basics of smart bombs. But even in the best of circumstances now with the updating of those so-called intelligent weapons, you still have an error rate of at least 5 percent.