Carter Takes the Prize

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, reportedly beating out such contenders as George W. Bush (who has shown rewardable constraint in only having waged one active war during his two years in office) and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (who, it must be admitted, hasn't waged any wars, despite a reputation for personal pugnacity).

Carter's most famous achievement for peace was finagling Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat into signing the Camp David accords. While there has been no open war between those two nations since then, Carter's Middle East machinations hardly brought peace to the region. The Nobel selection team probably didn't care that Israel's relief from war with its neighbors has more to do with its own military might than from any diplomatic negotiations, whether led by Carter or someone else.

But who cares? More was at stake than Carter's contribution to actual peace. As committee chairman Gunnar Berge declared, part of the purpose of honoring Carter now was to stick a burr in the side of President Bush.

Carter, deploying the refreshing humility that is second nature for the morally upright, averred that his receiving this huge chunk of change was "an inspiration…to suffering people around the world."

Yet giving the Nobel Peace Prize to "statesmen" is a sure way to embarrass the cause for which it is allegedly dedicated. As critics have been quick to point out, President Carter's support for the likes of the Khmer Rouge and Indonesia don't exactly make him a consistent paragon for peace, much less justice. Surely the peacenik bona fides of fellow winner Woodrow Wilson are open to debate, as are those of 1994 laureate Yasir Arafat. But the Nobel committee, as Berge's comments underscore, is less interested in getting it right than in playing politics. And as Carter might have told him, that's a hard game to play without getting bloody hands.