Capitol Letter: The Meaning Of Jimmy Carter

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize is a vindication for Jimmy Carter, sweeter now than it would have been in 1979, when he was first nominated. Most Americans are proud of their former president. Even those who are old enough to remember the high inflation and humiliating hostage-taking that doomed his reelection feel warmth toward him now.

But not everybody applauds Carter. The most stinging criticism has come from the neoconservatives who are President Bush's biggest backers as he prepares for war with Iraq. They wonder why five guys in Norway get to play God and decide who's a peacemaker. They think the Bushes, father and son, are more deserving because of their willingness to confront evil through the barrel of a gun rather than talk it to death the way Carter does. They accuse Carter of coddling dictators and note that he'll be right at home with fellow Nobel laureates Yasir Arafat, the discredited Palestinian leader, and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho, who shared the prize with Henry Kissinger.

The Nobel committee didn't help matters by announcing that the award to Carter was meant to underscore European dissatisfaction with Bush's bellicose foreign policy. That made it almost too easy for the hawks to discredit the award and to lob broadsides at Carter and the peace wing of the Democratic Party. The dilemma for Democrats is that members of Congress, senior senators, even an ex-president cannot thoughtfully oppose war with Iraq without being labeled a peacenik and a throwback to the Vietnam era. Bush has Democrats cornered on foreign policy. They're afraid to take him on, so they back him. Or they oppose him, but aren't too loud about it. This lack of conviction alienates the Democratic base, which yearns for leaders who will stand up to the president.

Bush, too, is cornered. He has talked of nothing but war for months now, and his dilemma is driven by the weather. The window for war shuts in mid-February, and Bush cannot sustain this level of frenzy for another year. Public support for a confrontation with Iraq is already waning, yet Bush can't afford to look weak. What matters to Bush is the application of power. Diplomacy is for sissies.

Carter represents the antithesis of the Bush Doctrine. Yet Carter settled a hostage crisis peaceably even though its long duration cost him his presidency. A failed rescue mission to liberate American hostages held in Iran was Carter's worst moment as president. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national-security adviser, had urged him to bomb Tehran so that if the risky rescue mission failed, it would be a sidebar to the larger story of the military strike. Carter rejected the advice, and he also wondered if the Special Forces leading the raid could use stun guns on the radical Iranian students holding the Americans hostage in the U.S. Embassy rather than kill the young men. The Islamic revolution that took hold in Iran during Carter's presidency is just now, two decades later, loosening its grip, a cautionary tale to those who suppose democracy will trump theocracy in the Middle East.

When Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan in 1979, Carter couldn't believe the Soviet foreign minister would sit across from him in the Oval Office and lie about his country's intentions. Carter declined to intervene militarily while various news commentators ridiculed him for his naivete in trusting the Russians. He pulled American athletes out of the Olympic games scheduled the following year in Moscow, and he angered farmers by barring American grain sales to the Soviet Union. But he didn't do anything that didn't come under the broad heading of diplomacy. A decade later, the Soviets left Afghanistan, their army decimated and defeated, and the cold war ended without a missile being fired.