by mike Evans
Although negotiations continued into the wee hours of January 20, 1980, Carter’s efforts to secure the release of the hostages on his watch remained fruitless. In fact, an ABC television crew documented Carter’s futile “all-night effort to bring the 52 hostages home before the end of his term.”20 (The captors had released 13 hostages shortly after the initial seizure, plus an additional hostage the following July for medical reasons.)
President Harry S. Truman’s desk in the Oval Office sported a sign that said, “The buck stops here.” Perhaps the same could be said of Jimmy Carter’s involvement in fomenting the Islamic revolution that has plagued the world in general and America in particular since the rise of Khomeini. It was truly the birth of the Islamofascist ideology we fight today in the war on terror. President Carter excelled in other areas but was always at a distinct disadvantage when confronted with American foreign policy, having been a Washington outsider before being elected president. Jimmy Carter’s intelligence did not disguise the fact that he could not fully assimilate the situation in Iran.
CARTER’S LIBERAL LEGACY
Jimmy Carter had originally crept into the White House with a campaign emphasis on the word faith. It was a theme that appealed both to conservative Christians and liberal Democrats disenchanted with the Johnson and Nixon White House years. This tactic gave Carter a slight edge with the American public, and that—coupled with his popularity in the South—won the election. He may have pulled the wool over the eyes of southern conservatives, but it wasn’t long before he divorced himself from their influence, and since leaving office he has broken with his Southern Baptist tradition, as well. In fact, Carter said of one-time supporter Rev. Jerry Falwell, “In a very Christian way, as far as I’m concerned, he can go to hell.”21
It apparently was no surprise to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president R. Albert Mohler Jr., who wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, according to Michael Foust, that “the former president actually began distancing himself from the Southern Baptist Convention years ago…. ‘On issues ranging from homosexuality and abortion to the nature of the gospel and the authority of Scripture, the former president is out of step with the majority of Southern Baptists.’…The theological divide between Carter and mainstream Southern Baptists is vast.”22
The Carter presidency can, perhaps, be summed up with two words: wretched ineptitude. America’s thirty-ninth president was he-of-the-overly-inflated-ego. Said ego was responsible for Carter’s early alienation of Congress and, in fact, from his own Democratic party. House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill was shunned as early as Carter’s inaugural dinner when he found his table on the far fringes of the event. Ned Rice of the National Review Online described Carter as “the Barney Fife of American presidents: alternatively bumbling, then petrified, then egomaniacal, then back to bumbling, and so on for four long, surreal years. One of history’s true buffoons.”23 It is interesting to note that 1976 was a banner year for future presidential hopefuls: Carter was elected president, William Jefferson Clinton became attorney general in Arkansas, and Albert Gore won a place in the Tennessee House of Representatives.
Carter’s government might best have been classified by the word pacifism, an ideology that was clearly expressed in his choice of Cabinet members. His appointment of Cyrus Vance as secretary of state sounded the alarm through the halls of Congress and set the stage for a dovish administration. (Vance resigned in protest of the aborted hostage rescue attempt.) Henry Kissinger said of the Carter administration:
[It] has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.24
Carter all but ignored congressional suggestions regarding appointments to various posts and continued to select pacifists and near-pacifists to populate upper-level posts.
Many of those who were recruited to implement Carter’s newly adopted globalism policies were selected from the George McGovern fringe. Some were tagged “the Mondale Mafia” after Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale. In fact, a number of Carter appointees, including Anthony Lake, Richard Holbrooke, and Jessica Tuchman, went on to serve in the Clinton White House. During the early days of the Carter administration, the triumvirate of Cyrus Vance, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and UN Ambassador Andrew Young had comparable input into foreign policy decisions.
The agenda, as put forth by Carter’s liberal leftist advisors, embraced what came to be called regionalism. It eschewed military intervention in favor of social reform and human rights issues. Historian J. A. Rosati wrote, “The Carter administration attempted to promote a new system of world order based upon international stability, peace, and justice.”25 To the detriment of future generations, Iran became the test case for Carter’s new prototype.
Author Steven Hayward characterized the Carter doctrine as “a sentimental, neopacifist view of the world [that] has come to define the core ideology of Democratic party liberalism today…[and] the philosophical view that your good intentions outweigh the practical consequences of your actions and words—and left-wing Christian pacifism that believes the use of force is always wrong.”26
Carter’s legacy of liberalism has had a definite and continuing impact, not only on the Democratic Party of Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry, but on the world as a whole. It is a universalistic, one-size-fits-all approach. Jimmy Carter became all things to all people in order to impress all. He became a champion of human rights and, by so doing, introduced the world to one of the most heinous regimes in history in the new Islamic Republic of Iran. He climbed into bed, figuratively, with Yasser Arafat and the PLO in order to establish a legacy as a “peacekeeper.” Far from protecting America’s foreign policy interests, Carter made whatever concessions necessary to be seen as the president of peace.
Had Jimmy Carter adopted a slightly more hawkish stance and been more prone to protect American interests overseas—and certainly in Iran—the world might well have been a safer place today. The fall of the shah of Iran opened the door to the rise of Islamic radicalism in Iran and throughout the Arab and Muslim countries. It also led to the assassination of Anwar Sadat in Egypt. This is not the footprint of a peacemaker.
Carter’s belief that every crisis can be resolved with diplomacy—and nothing but diplomacy—now permeates the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, Mr. Carter is wrong. There are times when evil must be openly confronted and defeated. Without a strong military backup with a proven track record of victories, diplomacy can be meaningless. As Theodore Roosevelt liked to put it, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”27
In his book Failing the Crystal Ball Test, Ofira Seliktar says of the situation with Iran:
Although the Carter administration bears the lion’s share for the policy failure, the role of Congress in the Iranian debacle should not be overlooked…the Democratically controlled Congress was responsible for turning many of the [Carter] imperatives into applied policy, most notably in the realm of foreign aid, military sales, human rights, and intelligence…leftist and liberal members of Congress strove to put the United States on the “right” side of history. To do so, they had to stop American anticommunist interventions around the world and terminate relations with right-wing authoritarian regimes, many of which faced leftist insurgencies.28
While Jimmy Carter has done good things in his life, most notably his association with Habitat for Humanity, his foreign policy decisions as president of the United States have led to more turmoil in just about every region where he tried to intervene. Carter seemed to think that it was enough to talk people into a stupor, and then entice them with treaties and incentives.
Mr. Carter and his fellow pacifists have yet to understand the impossibility of reasoning with the unreasonable. It is never advisable to sell one’s soul to the devil in order to keep him at bay. Sooner or later, evil demands the supreme sacrifice and will achi
eve its goals, not through compromise but through terror and coercion. This is one lesson that James Earl Carter has never learned.
The former president’s connections with Yasser Arafat and the PLO are legendary. Some believe that it was through Carter’s machinations that Arafat, the godfather of world terrorism, was knighted with the Nobel Peace Prize. It is general knowledge that the Carter Center is underwritten by funds from Palestinian sources. Perhaps that is why he described the PLO in glowing terms as “a loosely associated umbrella of organizations bound together by common goals, but it comprises many groups eager to use diverse means to reach these goals.”29 How benevolent! It sounds nothing like the organization responsible for the intifada against the Jews and the murder of more than one thousand innocent civilians.
Although Yasser Arafat has departed the scene, Carter has continued to court the good will of terrorists, madmen, and leftists, all the while criticizing the Bush administration to any and all who would listen. Perhaps it was a reflection of Jimmy Carter’s own divisiveness that caused the chair of the Nobel awarding committee to use the presentation ceremony as an opportunity to criticize the Bush administration.30
In 1986, Carter defied restrictions imposed on Syria for the attempted bombing of an American airliner by filing a false travel plan before departing for Damascus.31 He felt that he was somehow exempt from the laws of the land that governed other American travelers. His actions made it apparent to all that he supported al-Assad’s regime and, as such, was treated to a hero’s welcome.
It was not long after leaving office that the world would begin to see Carter’s real legacy. As early as 1984, he was suggesting that Russian ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin support Ronald Reagan’s opponent, Walter Mondale, in the upcoming presidential election. He also felt it incumbent as an ex-president to write a letter to the regimes in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, asking them to stall the invasion of Iraq in 2003.32
However, it was Bill Clinton who elevated Carter to the role of infallible elder statesman. With Clinton’s approval, the former president traveled to North Korea for discussions on that nation’s nuclear ambitions.
One reporter wrote that Carter agreed to give North Korea:
…500,000 metric tons of oil, tons of grain, and a light-water nuclear reactor…. The unverifiable agreement Carter designed allowed North Korea to develop as many as half-a-dozen nuclear weapons—which he now blames on George W. Bush.33
The former president’s interference with foreign policy did not end there. He wrote a speech for Yasser Arafat and certified the “election” of Venezuela’s Castro-clone, Hugo Chavez.34 In a trip to Cuba in 2002, the erudite Mr. Carter called UN Ambassador John Bolton a liar for daring to insinuate that Castro was developing biological weapons, reports of which, by the way, first surfaced during the Clinton administration.35 In the ultimate kudos, the man from Plains, Georgia, James Earl Carter, was himself awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
In his most recent book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, the former president equates Israel’s battle to combat terrorism within its borders to the hateful South African practice of apartheid. The reader would be hard put to uncover actual instances of the dreadful terrorism suffered by the Israelis mentioned in the book. It says little about the fact that Israel has already given away land in failed attempts to achieve peace with its neighbors, or the ensuing missile attacks and kidnappings initiated from the very land that was given away. Apparently, Mr. Carter has also forgotten Munich and the massacre of the Israeli Olympic team and the murder of Leon Klinghoffer aboard the Achille Lauro, among other such atrocities committed in the name of Palestinian liberation. In fact, throughout the book, he champions the PLO and denigrates Israel.
Among the inequities in Mr. Carter’s discourse is
the deliberate misrepresentation that Israel was the aggressor in the 1967 war;
a failure to reveal the threat against Israel that precipitated the destruction of Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1980;
the exoneration of Yasser Arafat for walking out of the peace talks with Ehud Barak.
He gives no credit to Israel for decades of attempts to establish a peaceful relationship with the Palestinian Authority, and in fact faults them for the ills of the region.
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz says of Carter’s book:
It’s obvious that Carter just doesn’t like Israel or Israelis…. He admits that he did not like Menachem Begin. He has little good to say about any Israelis—except those few who agree with him. But he apparently got along swimmingly with the very secular Syrian mass-murderer Hafez al-Assad. He and his wife Rosalynn also had a fine time with the equally secular Yasir Arafat—a man who has the blood of hundreds of Americans and Israelis on his hands.36
The first executive director of the Carter Center—as well as its founder of a Middle East program—Kenneth Stein, was openly critical of Jimmy Carter’s latest book. In a letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mr. Stein wrote:
President Carter’s book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analysis; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments.
Aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book.37
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is an outrageous misrepresentation of events in the Middle East, but certainly no more outrageous than Carter’s leftist manipulation of events in Iran. Carter did everything in his power to weaken the shah and to prop up Khomeini. Mr. Carter has remained consistent since that time—consistently wrong. He articulates a worldview of the liberal Left.
I am reminded of the debate between vice presidential hopefuls Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen. After comparing his tenure as a U.S. senator with that of John F. Kennedy, Dan Quayle was met with this response from Senator Lloyd Bentsen: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.”
Jimmy Carter has taken credit for being the architect of peace between Egypt and Israel. He can, indeed, take the credit, but he is not the one directly responsible; it was Menachem Begin. Begin and I had many discussions about the meetings at Camp David and matters relating to Anwar Sadat. Menachem Begin told me that the idea to pursue an accord with Egypt came to him while on a visit to Romania. Begin said he mentioned to Nicolae Ceausescu that he would like to have direct talks with Sadat. This was not an unusual move for Begin. In his first pronouncement as prime minister of Israel, he called on Arab leaders to meet him at their earliest opportunity.
Later, when Sadat visited Romania, Ceausescu told him of Begin’s wish to meet with him. According to the prime minister, an exchange of views took place there, and then later between the two men. Nicolae Ceausescu confirmed his role when he remarked in a speech in Bucharest that year that he had acted for the settlement of the Middle East peace issues through negotiations. Sadat used a public occasion to indicate that for the sake of peace, he would be ready even to travel to Israel to speak to the people of Israel from the rostrum of the Knesset.
Immediately, Menachem Begin countered by inviting the Egyptian leader to Jerusalem. He extended the invitation in a speech to a delegation of members of the American Congress Armed Forces Special Committee touring the Middle East, which was proceeding to Cairo the next day. When he heard that Sadat later told the same committee he had not received an official invitation, Begin immediately broadcast a special appeal in English directly to the Egyptian people; he followed that with a formal invitation transmitted through the American ambassador.
In his speech to the people of Egypt appealing to Anwar Sadat to meet with him, of which he gave me a copy, he said:
Citizens of Egypt, this is the first time that I address you directly, but it is
not the first time I think and speak of you. You are our neighbors and will always be. For the last twenty-nine years, the tragic and completely unnecessary conflict continued between your country and ours. Since the time when the government of King Farouk ordered to invade our land, Eretz Yisrael, in order to strangle our newly restored freedom and democracy, four major wars have taken place between you and us. Much blood was shed on both sides, many families were orphaned and grieved in Egypt and in Israel…. You should know we have come back to the land of our forefathers. It is we who established independence in our land for all generations to come. We wish you well; in fact, there is no reason whatsoever for hostilities between our people…. Your president said two days ago that he was ready to come to Jerusalem to our Knesset in order to prevent one Egyptian soldier from being wounded. I have already welcomed this statement, and it will be a pleasure to welcome and receive your president with the traditional hospitality you and we have inherited from our common father, Abraham.
I, for my part, will be ready to come to your capital, Cairo, for the same purpose: No more war, but peace, real peace, forever.38