St. Jimmy the Lesser.

• Author: McCarthy, Colman

Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jimmy Carter helped set the stage for some of the terrorism and violence that plagues our world today. It was Carter who said that the oil resources of the Persian Gulf were vital to U.S. security, and pledged in his Carter Doctrine to defend U.S. interests there "by any means necessary, including military force." George W. Bush is merely carrying out that doctrine.

It was also Jimmy Carter who began funding the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, and the CIA issued a call to Islamic fundamentalists around the world to join the battle against the Soviets. Osama bin Laden answered that call. Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, defended this approach with a now-infamous rationale: "What was more important in the worldview of history? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

Yes, Jimmy Carter has used his post-Presidential years well, compared to the nation's other three White House emeriti. The one-time millionaire peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, has not whacked golf balls at PGA Pro-Ams, jumped from airplanes, or pocketed $2 million for speeches in Japan. Instead, Carter has been a freelance mediator of conflicts in Haiti, Somalia, North Korea, Sudan, and other scenes of mayhem.

But when the Norwegian prize-givers conferred secular canonization on Carter, it appears that they were so awed by Carter the ex-President that they ignored the record of Carter the President. His White House years were marked by many decisions that had nothing to do with humanitarianism or nonviolence, and everything to do with the hustling of weapons designed to solve conflicts by killing people.

Carter didn't set out to be a record-setting arms peddler. When running for the Presidency, he spoke the language of the anti-war left. "We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war," he told the Foreign Policy Association months before the 1976 election. But once in office, he lacked the spine, or acumen, to take on the entrenched arms-traders in the Commerce Department, the State Department, and the Pentagon.

Shortly after the...