GALLOPING CARTERISM:

Prize Fight (Peter Beinart, October 28, 2002, New Republic)

Two types of people win the Nobel Peace Prize. The first are the more obvious: People who resolve international conflicts. In 1926, Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann won for the Locarno Pact, which supposedly guaranteed the borders of Germany, Belgium, and France. In 1929, America's Frank Kellogg won for the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in which the great powers renounced war. In 1973, Henry Kissinger and Vietnam's Le Duc Tho won for ending the Vietnam War. And in 1994, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yasir Arafat won for the Oslo Peace Accord between Israel and the Palestinians.

The second type of winners promote peace in a very different way: They don't resolve conflict, they advance freedom. In 1960, the Nobel Committee honored African National Congress leader Albert Luthuli, and, in 1984, it honored Archbishop Desmond Tutu, even though both men pursued conflict with the apartheid state. In 1983, it selected Poland's Lech Walesa; in 1991, Burma's Aung Sun Suu Kyi; and, in 1996, East Timor's Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta. None of these dissidents were peacemakers in the narrow sense; some even rejected negotiations with the regimes that persecuted them. By honoring them, the Nobel Committee implied that conflicts can't truly be resolved without freedom.

Jimmy Carter falls into the first category. In explaining its decision to award Carter the prize last week, the Nobel Committee praised him for championing "mediation and international cooperation" and "respect for human rights." But in reality, Carter's career is marked by fidelity to the former over the latter. As the American Enterprise Institute's Joshua Muravchik detailed in The New Republic in 1994, Carter has repeatedly praised dictators in the name of international rapprochement. [...]

[T]he committee has turned its back on that other definition of peace embodied by Walesa, Tutu, and Suu Kyi. Viewed from that other tradition, the post-September 11 world looks not like a conflict between Islam and the West but a conflict within the Islamic world, a conflict in which peace is best achieved not through negotiated settlements but through the advance of freedom. In 1983, when the Nobel Committee chose Walesa, it signaled that totalitarianism, not the cold war, was the problem and that freedom was the answer, not détente. Today it could have sent the same message by choosing one of the many dissidents suffering in relative obscurity under the dictatorships of the Muslim world. It could have chosen Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the Egyptian pro-democracy activist recently thrown back in prison for challenging Hosni Mubarak's repression. It could have chosen Dr. Sima Samar, who ran schools and health clinics for refugee Afghan girls denied education and medicine by the Taliban. It could have chosen Asama Khader, Jordan's foremost crusader against honor killings. Or it could have chosen Iranian philosopher Adbolkarim Soroush, targeted by Tehran's mullahs for advocating separation of mosque and state. Rather than Carter and Annan, world figures who fly in to negotiate with dictators in their palaces, it could have chosen one of the men or women who suffer under those dictators' rule. The Muslim governments that praised Annan's and Carter's selections would have howled with outrage. But they would have howled for the same reason the governments of South Africa, Poland, and Burma howled when their dissidents won the prize: Because the world was no longer indifferent to their peoples' plight.

Bingo! If the Realists are to have their peace at any cost, it will require our indifference to the plight of those living under dictatorships in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 9, 2009 4:56 PM