Carter in Ethiopia: Revisiting one of the Nobelist's missed chances.(former president Jimmy Carter )

The award of the Nobel peace prize to former president Jimmy Carter is a manifestation of selective memory. What follows is a story about how the precepts of the Carter administration's human-rights policy-and that president's aversion to the use of force in the defense of moral principles-became an impediment to possibly saving 30 million Ethiopians from the undertow of totalitarianism.

The story begins during the Nixon and Ford administrations, when the murderous Ethiopian Dergue ("Committee") and its merciless leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam, rose to power concomitant with the domestic distraction of Watergate and the fall of South Vietnam. The Dergue began executing its own followers and threatened to do the same to more members of the Ethiopian royal family. Since Mengistu's ruthless and dynamic regime seemed unlikely to fall, the outgoing U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, trying to keep an iron in the fire, continued some of the military assistance that had been going to Addis Ababa. If the United States were to give up all its leverage in Ethiopia, the country would simply take the next step and become a Soviet satellite, with vast and unpleasant consequences for its entire population.

President Ford and Kissinger were replaced in January 1977 by Jimmy Carter and his new secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, with Andrew Young as U.N. ambassador adopting a high profile on African affairs. They wanted a policy that demonstrated more concern for sub-Saharan Africa but with less heavy-handedness. In the Horn of Africa, that translated immediately into asymmetry because the Soviets were becoming more enterprising and brazenly aggressive than ever.

With Ethiopia riven by revolutionary turmoil, the Soviets helped their irredentist Somalian clients to plan an invasion of Ethiopia's Ogaden Desert; the aim was to use Somalia to pressure Ethiopia into the Soviet orbit, and then to call off the Somalian invasion. Somalia was at the time a country of only 3 million nomads, whereas Ethiopia had a more urbanized population ten times the size-excellent fodder for the mechanized African satellite that gradually became Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's supreme objective. The Soviets, while threatening Ethiopia with a Somalian invasion, were also offering it military aid-the classic carrot-and-stick strategy. Yet, thanks partly to the M-60 tanks and F-5 warplanes that Mengistu had been receiving from the United States as the Ford administration was leaving office-as well as American spare parts coming to him courtesy of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin-the Ethiopian leader was hesitant to go through the disruptive task of switching armorers for an entire army.

In the spring of 1977, despite the military threat from Somalia, Carter cut off all arms deliveries to Ethiopia because of its awful human- rights record. The Soviets next dispatched East German security police and Cuban advisers to Addis Ababa to help Mengistu consolidate his regime, and invited the Ethiopian ruler to Moscow for a week-long state visit. In the coming months, with the help of the East Germans, the Dergue would gun down hundreds of Ethiopian teenagers in the streets in a process that came to be known as the "Red Terror."

There was still some hope, though. The Ethiopian revolution, leftist as it was, and despite Mengistu's diatribes, showed relatively few other signs of overt anti-Americanism, nor were there any foreign hostages, as would be the case in Iran. Israel's new prime minister, Menachem Begin, in an attempt to save Ethiopian Jews, pleaded with Carter not to close the door completely on Ethiopia, but to give Mengistu some military assistance against the Somalian advance: for the Soviets, having unleashed the Somalians, were failing to engineer the cease-fire between the two countries that became part of their overall game plan.

Carter refused to resume the arms relationship with Mengistu, which was somewhat understandable given Ethiopia's tilt toward Moscow. Still, in ...