Jimmy Carter vs. the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter

This Saturday, February 19, the U.S. Navy will commission the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter, a multi-mission platform (MMP) boat christened (in the pagan Greek fashion, with a bottle of wine smashed on its hull as an offering to Poseidon) last June. As the Department of Defense press release describes it, SSN-23 is “the third and final submarine of the Seawolf class.”

Some might ask why Jimmy Carter, winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, would want or permit a military weapon of war to be named after him.

This tribute is also unusual because former U.S. Presidents usually die before warships are given their names (although former President Ronald Reagan in 2001 became namesake of an aircraft carrier [CVN-76] prior to his 2004 passing). In such cases the presumption seems to be that these former leaders will never again seek public office and therefore gain no political advantage from having military ships bearing their names.

Former President Carter deserves this honor for several reasons beyond his being Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military (1977-1981) during the most underwater, in-over-its-head presidential administration in American history.

In 1946 Jimmy Carter graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md. He was selected for the “silent service” by Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the Navy’s nuclear submarine program, and served as a submariner in both the Atlantic and Pacific. His breathing all that recycled air helps explain some of Mr. Carter’s many eccentricities – claiming he saw a UFO in 1969, saying he was attacked by a crazed rabbit, and so forth.

We ought to remember, too, that Jimmy Carter was given the Nobel Prize not only to reward his appeasement of leftist comrades such as Fidel Castro, but also as an insult directed by the socialist head of the Peace Prize committee to President George W. Bush. Carter’s Peace Prize was, in other words, an act of political-ideological war against the U.S.

Few leaders in human history have caused more war, violence and killing than has Jimmy Carter. President Carter deliberately toppled the Shah of Iran, then America’s (and Israel’s) most important ally in the Middle East. This, in turn, precipitated the Iran-Iraq War, causing more than 500,000 needless deaths and producing a militarily-mighty Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Carter’s weakness and incompetence also caused the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, bordering Iran, and this turned Saudi millionaire playboy Osama bin Laden into an Islamist resistance leader skilled in guerrilla tactics and strategy.

Bin Laden would later plan and fund the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The resulting 3,000 deaths and near-trillion-dollar economic damage to the U.S. are also on Jimmy Carter’s hands, the bloody hands that opened the door to our age of global Islamist terrorism.

How many of us eventually might die from nuclear weapons provided to terrorists by Iran's Islamist theocratic dictators who replaced the Shah – or by the Communist North Korean fanatics Carter helped go nuclear when he was Bill Clinton’s 1994 negotiator – is not yet known. A single such nuke in New York City, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Houston, Phoenix, San Francisco or Los Angeles could potentially kill more than a million Americans.

The paradox to ponder this Saturday is that American warships like the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter help create and preserve world peace, but Jimmy Carter has been one of the world’s largest causes of war, terrorism and terror.