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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (221375)	3/2/2005 1:00:31 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574470

I was very disappointed when I heard this last week but I decided not to say anything. Then I read this article and decided its worth posting. I could not believe that J. Carter allowed them to name a killer sub in his honor. I thought it ran counter to everything the man stood for..........I guess I thought wrong. Apparently, this country is so militaristic that it makes the most peace loving among us militant. Its really too bad. *********************************************************** The grip of war** By James Carroll \| March 1, 2005 WAS IT Heraclitus who said war is humanity's natural state? Are those who imagine peace as the ground of a new condition guilty of an irresponsible wishful thinking? I just wrote two hopeful columns from Jerusalem, a city trying to wrench itself from the grip of war, and though I allowed for the prospect of yet more violence, I was stunned by Friday's news. A suicide bomber blew himself up outside a nightclub in Tel Aviv, killing four, wounding dozens of others. The killer targeted young people at play, a horror that had become common. In the new climate of hope, such brutality fully horrifies again. And then came news of yesterday's suicide bombing in Iraq, a staggering new level of carnage with more than 125 dead. Why do human beings, knowing the costs of war, cling to it nonetheless? It is a question not only for those diehards who dispatched these suicide murderers. News of another kind last week also raised it -- the commissioning by the US Navy of its newest submarine, a Seawolf attack sub, costing $3.2 billion and bearing more firepower than any submarine in history. But this sub, ordered during the Cold War, was designed to fight an enemy that no longer exists. What makes its commissioning even more anomalous is the name the sub was given -- the USS Jimmy Carter. The former president began as a submarine officer, and it is easy to grasp how an old man is moved by such an affirmation of his youth. But Carter presided at the commissioning ceremonies with the innocent enthusiasm of a man who should know better. 'The most deeply appreciated and emotional honor I've ever had," he said, 'is to have this great ship bear my name." Jimmy Carter is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, but that honor takes second place now to an attack sub. No man ever came into the presidency more determined to than Carter to contradict Heraclitus by breaking the grip of war. Even before he was inaugurated in January 1977, Carter summoned the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Blair House. Ernest May and other historians recount the story. Carter brushed aside the expected discussion of security needs to stun the chiefs by asking his one question: 'How long would it take to reduce the number of nuclear weapons currently in our arsenal?" What? The chairman of the Joint Chiefs did not understand what Carter meant. The generals exchanged looks. The president-elect asked again: 'How could we cut the number of missiles? What would it take to get the number down to a few hundred?" Carter was asking a question, but it was clear to everyone in the room that he was putting an agenda item on the table -- his first one. 'When my time as your president has ended," Carter said a few days later, in his inaugural address, 'I would hope that the nations of the world might say that we had built a lasting peace, built not on weapons of war but on international policies which reflect our own most precious values." It was not to be. As Carter left office four years after his shocking declaration at Blair House, he had not only not reduced America's nuclear arsenal; by approving the MX missile system, he had expanded it. He had more than doubled the list of targets our missiles were aimed at in the Soviet Union. With his 'Carter Doctrine," he had introduced the claim that the United States could protect its right to Persian Gulf oil by 'any means necessary, including military force." Carter, that is, prepared the ground for America's wars in Iraq. Given the intentions with which he started, Carter showed how powerful is the tidal pull of war. But upon leaving the presidency, Jimmy Carter set himself against that tide. He became the character ideal of the man of peace and did not hesitate to denounce his successors for a too ready recourse to violence. That is why his renewed embrace of 'weapons of war" against his self-proclaimed ambition is so disturbing. It is hard to let go of war. Was Carter guilty of wishful thinking when he wanted to? Is he more fully in synch with his nation now -- a nation waging a brutal war in Iraq without the slightest official qualm? We, too, keep dispatching young people to kill and die. Why does that seem as normal, say, as the launching of a Cold War relic? Running silent and deep, the USS Jimmy Carter will sail as a symbol of America's true condition -- alas, apparently and still, our nation's natural state. James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. boston.com