Nobel committee chairman Gunnar Berge told reporters the selection of Carter "should be interpreted as a criticism" of the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq.

Carter’s record is not exactly one of peace. A look at his record in office shows that he has been an equal partner with other Democrats and Republicans in supporting brutal dictators and advancing imperialist interests from the Middle East to Latin America and the Caribbean.

It was President Carter who moved to reinstate draft registration, using his January 1980 State of the Union speech to announce the decision. This step marked the beginning of a militarization drive whose impact we still feel today. The large-scale expansion of military spending began not with Ronald Reagan but Carter, late in his term. His administration undertook a systematic counteroffensive to try to turn back the retreat imposed on Washington by its defeat in Vietnam. That defeat was accompanied by an erosion of public belief in the truthfulness of those who spoke for the institutions of capitalist government.

Carter promotes himself as an advocate of human rights in the Third World--an image that the big-business press works overtime to preserve.

Again, his record in office belies the myth. Early in his administration, for example, the liberal president invited the bloodstained shah of Iran as his guest at a White House banquet, expressing his "personal commitment" to strengthening ties with the monarch and supporting the "beneficent" impact of Washington’s military alliance with Iran. For good measure, the Washington, D.C., police fired teargas at the thousands of protesters outside the White House who demanded an end to U.S. support for the dictator.

Carter nurtured a special antipathy toward the Cuban people, who made a revolution in 1959 to overthrow the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. In May 1980 he proclaimed his "open heart and open arms" to welcome to those arriving from Cuba--claimed by the president to be fleeing a "communist dictatorship."

Within days his arms were folded and his heart was hardened, as he ordered a halt to an air- and boatlift under way, and imposed restrictions on Cuban emigration even tighter than they were before Cuba had opened the port of Mariel.

At the same time Carter maintained a strict policy of denying political asylum for those fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti--a regime that never had to worry about a cutoff in military hardware from "human rights" Carter.

Carter’s speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony was consistent with his record as a war president of a liberal stripe. Alongside the usual empty pacifist blather that "we will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children," Carter endorsed the fundamentals of George Bush’s policy all along the line. He warned Iraq that it must disarm because "the world insists that this be done." Later he told a CNN interviewer that if Iraq does not disarm, then a U.S. bombing campaign and invasion would not be "unprovoked."

George Bush couldn’t have said it better himself.  
 
 
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