Jimmy Carter is at it again. Touring Europe, Jimmy is talking up his latest book and talking down America. In his world, Jimmy and his Leftist brotherhood are the only hope for this world; George Bush has created a world at risk due to his “cowboy politics” and cozying up to the rich.
How unfortunate that a man, with such a legacy of utter failure, continues to work so hard to hide the fact that it is George Bush and, like it or not, this congress who have had to deal with problem after problem all laden with Jimmy Carter’s fingerprints.
Let’s review again what Jimmy Carter has meant to the USA and the world.
The Carter Economy:
I can still see my mother’s face after moving me in to my first apartment, “I don’t see how you’ll ever be able to buy your own house”. It was 1980 and she was right, after 4 years of Democratic “leadership” I was faced with inflation running close to 12%, interest rates near 20% and taxes taking $.65 out of every dollar I earn, there was little hope to ever save enough for a down payment let alone afford mortgage payments.
Jimmy Carter and the Democratic-controlled congress had made shambles of the U.S. economy, but that was the least damage that Jimmy Carter inflicted.
Big Government
Carter's government reorganization efforts separated the Department of Health, Education and Welfare into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services. Even though many departments were consolidated during Carter's presidency, the total number of Federal employees continued to increase, despite his promises to the contrary.
The demise of our public school system under federal control is a historic embarrassment, and the welfare rolls grew exponentially until Bill Clinton reluctantly signed the Republican reform bill in to law. Even though Carter ran for President promising to reform the tax system, the ability to create a growing mass of government bureaucracy was for more attractive for him and in four years, tax reform was never again mentioned.
Today, the federal government is one of the largest employers in the world even as our quality of service continues to deteriorate.
Dependency on Foreign Oil
Carter also started the movement for federal “environmental protection”. His Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act created 103 million acres (417,000 km²) of national park land in Alaska, including ANWAR and took away the right of the people of Alaska to make their own decisions about how their land and state resources are used. To this day, ANWAR is still a painful reminder of why we are so dependent on foreign oil today.
Islamic Fascism - By Alan Peters - Monday, March 15, 2004
The linkage between the destruction of the Shah of Iran’s Government — directly attributable to Carter’s actions — and the Iran-Iraq war which cost millions of dead and injured on both sides, and to the subsequent rise of radical Islamist terrorism is one of the most long-lasting and life threatening outcomes of the Carter Presidency
Pres. Carter’s anti-Shah feelings appeared to have ignited after he sent a group of several of his friends from his home state, Georgia, to Tehran with an audience arranged with His Majesty directly by the Oval Office and in Carter’s name. At this meeting, as reported by Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda to some confidantes, these businessmen told the Shah that Pres. Carter wanted a contract, previously awarded to Brown & Root to build a huge port complex at Bandar Mahshahr, to be cancelled and as a personal favor to him to be awarded to the visiting group at 10 percent above the cost quoted by Brown & Root.
The group would then charge the 10 percent as a management fee and supervise the project for Iran, passing the actual construction work back to Brown & Root for implementation, as previously awarded. They insisted that without their management the project would face untold difficulties at the US end and that Pres. Carter was “trying to be helpful”. They told the Shah that in these perilous political times, he should appreciate the favor which Pres. Carter was doing him.
According to Prime Minister Hoveyda, the Georgia visitors left a stunned monarch and his bewildered Prime Minister speechless, other than to later comment among close confidantes about the hypocrisy of the US President, who talked glibly of God and religion but practiced blackmail and extortion through his emissaries.
The multi-billion dollar Bandar Mahshahr project would have made 10 percent “management fee” a huge sum to give away to Pres. Carter’s friends as a favor for unnecessary services. The Shah politely declined the “personal” management request which had been passed on to him. The refusal appeared to earn the Shah the determination of Carter to remove him from office.
Carter subsequently refused to allow tear gas and rubber bullets to be exported to Iran when anti-Shah rioting broke out, nor to allow water cannon vehicles to reach Iran to control such outbreaks, generally instigated out of the Soviet Embassy in Tehran. There was speculation in some Iranian quarters — as well as in some US minds — at the time and later that Carter’s actions were the result of either close ties to, or empathy for, the Soviet Union, which was anxious to break out of the longstanding US-led strategic containment of the USSR, which had prevented the Soviets from reaching the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.
Historians and observers still debate Carter’s reasons for his actions during his tenure at the White House, where almost everything, including shutting down satellite surveillance over Cuba at an inappropriate time for the US, seemed to benefit Soviet aims and policies. Some claim he was inept and ignorant, others that he was allowing his liberal leanings to overshadow US national interests.
The British Foreign & Commonwealth Office had enough doubts in this respect, even to the extent of questioning whether Carter was a Russian mole, that they sent around 200 observers to monitor Carter’s 1980 presidential campaign against Ronald Reagan to see if the Soviets would try to “buy” the presidency for Carter.
In the narrow aspect of Carter setting aside international common sense to remove the US’ most powerful ally in the Middle East, this focused change was definitely contrary to US interests and events over the next 25 years proved this.
Apologists, while acknowledging that Carter had caused the destabilization of the monarchy in Iran, claim he was only trying to salvage what he could from a rapidly deteriorating political situation to obtain maximum benefits for the US. But, after the Shah was forced from the throne, Carter’s focused effort to get re-elected via the Iran hostage situation points to less high minded motives.
In 1978 while the West was deciding to remove His Majesty Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi from the throne, Shariatmadari was telling anyone who would listen not to allow “Ayatollah” Ruhollah Khomeini and his velayat faghih (Islamic jurist) version of Islam to be allowed to govern Iran. Ayatollah Shariatmadari noted: “We mullahs will behave like bickering whores in a brothel if we come to power ... and we have no experience on how to run a modern nation so we will destroy Iran and lose all that has been achieved at such great cost and effort.” 2.
Pres. Carter reportedly responded that Khomeini was a religious man — as he himself claimed to be — and that he knew how to talk to a man of God, who would live in the holy city of Qom like an Iranian “pope” and act only as an advisor to the secular, popular revolutionary Government of Mehdi Bazargan and his group of anti-Shah executives, some of whom were US-educated and expected to show preferences for US interests.
Carter’s mistaken assessment of Khomeini was encouraged by advisors with a desire to form an Islamic “green belt” to contain atheist Soviet expansion with the religious fervor of Islam. Eventually all 30 of the scenarios on Iran presented to Carter by his intelligence agencies proved wrong, and totally misjudged Khomeini as a person and as a political entity.
The resulting "plan b "effort was pathetic. Here was Carter, the leader of the most powerful free country in the world, pleading and begging for the release of the hostages. In a biography written by his nephew, Khomeini was expecting American Lightening from the sky and was shocked to see a whimpering Carter acting powerless and willing kiss his ass to make the problem go away. It was at this time, the radical Islamists figured that America had gone soft.
Osama Bin Laden
Carter’s weakness wasn’t just noticed by Khomeini. The Russians also seeing that we had lost our spines went ahead and invaded Afghanistan. Soviet ground forces entered Afghanistan from the north on December 27. In the morning, the Vitebsk parachute division landed at the airport at Bag ram City and the deployment of Soviet troops in Afghanistan was underway.
Jimmy Carter indicated that the Soviet incursion was "the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War." Carter later placed an embargo on shipments of commodities such as grain and high technology to the Soviet Union from the US and of course, boycotted the 1980 Olympics.
A civil war continued in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. The Soviet Union left Afghanistan deep in winter with intimations of panic among Kabul officials. In April, Kabul ultimately fell to the mujahedin because the factions in the government had finally pulled it apart. The mujahideen of Afghanistan were the direct ancestors of the Taliban and the Al Qaida group which carried out the September 11 attacks and sparked the ongoing War on Terrorism.
Sleeping with the Enemy
Soviet diplomatic accounts and material from the archives show that in January 1984 former President Jimmy Carter dropped by Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin's residence for a private meeting.
Carter expressed his concern about and opposition to Reagan's defense buildup. He boldly told Dobrynin that Moscow would be better off with someone else in the White House. If Reagan won, he warned, "There would not be a single agreement on arms control, especially on nuclear arms, as long as Reagan remained in power."
Using the Russians to influence the presidential election was nothing new for Carter.
Schweizer reveals Russian documents that show that in the waning days of the 1980 campaign, the Carter White House dispatched businessman Armand Hammer to the Soviet Embassy.
Hammer was a longtime Soviet-phile, and he explained to the Soviet ambassador that Carter was "clearly alarmed" at the prospect of losing to Reagan.
Hammer pleaded with the Russians for help. He asked if the Kremlin could expand Jewish emigration to bolster Carter's standing in the polls.
North Korea
Well, one of the conflict-resolutions that supposedly put Jimmy over the top for winning the prize (over the more-deserving Afghan president, Hamid Karzai) was the one between the United States and North Korea in the early 1990s. When Bill Clinton and Kim Il Sung were squaring off over Pyongyang's nuke program, Carter jetted off to the world's last Stalinist nation to compliment the mass-murdering North Korean dictator as a "vigorous and intelligent" man. He declared of a government that has imposed famines on millions: "I don't see that they are an outlaw nation."
And it was brother Jimmy who had the bright idea of lavishing the North Koreans with aid in exchange for their "cross-our-hearts-and-hope-to-die" promise that they would stop pursuing nuclear weapons technology.
Of course, many argue it was Carter's mollycoddling of the North Koreans during his presidency that encouraged them to start their nuclear program to begin with. But hey, that's heavy water under the bridge.
In 1994, when Carter went to North Korea to strike a deal, he didn't have the support or authority of the U.S. government to agree to anything. That didn't stop him from announcing on television that he'd made a deal.
And the fact that the Clinton administration was out of the loop didn't stop Al Gore from persuading Bill Clinton to leap on the proposal, even though it basically surrendered every major American demand, starting with our insistence that North Korea completely and immediately stop its nuclear weapon program.
The final agreement, which Clinton dubbed "a very good deal indeed," called for the United States to provide the North Koreans with $4 billion worth of light-water reactors and $100 million in oil in exchange for a promise to be good and an assurance that inspectors would be allowed to poke around at some indeterminate point down the road.
At the time, Kang Sok Ju, the chief North Korean negotiator, bragged that "the complete elimination of the existing nuclear program will only come when we have the light-water reactor in our hands." In other words you pay first, we stop later.
The problem with this deal, which prompted The New York Times to declare, "Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph," is the problem with all such deals: It was based on the assumption that evil men willing to murder their own people would never presume to lie to someone like Jimmy Carter. Just as so many thought Hitler wouldn't deceive Chamberlain. The founding Soviet dictator, V.I. Lenin, called the pliant liberals of the West "useful idiots," and the label still has resonance today.
Now, it is Iran’s useful idiots like Connecticut Senatorial candidate Ned Lamont and Wisconsin’s own Russ Feingold cite the threat of a potentially nuclear-armed North Korea to argue that we should pull out of Iraq, put Iran on the back burner and deal with North Korea first. That would be a better argument if it weren't made by precisely the sort of people who allowed North Korea to become such a threat to begin with.
And that's why a little finger-pointing is a good thing -- not because it's fun (it is), but because those who believe laws and treaties will stop murderers and madmen would have us strike a similar deal with Iran. The Clinton administration, the gray beards of the Democratic Party, the editors of The New York Times and the "enlightened" thinkers of Europe represented by the Nobel committee: They all believe that George Bush is a fool if he doesn’t approach Iran’s nuclear program the way Clinton and Carter approached North Korea.
And if they win the day, we'll be debating what we should do about Iran's nuclear weapons in no time at all.
While I try not to hold ill will toward anyone, I do believe that the world and certainly this country, would be better off if Jimmy Carter had never succeeded in politics and now I long for the day that, one way or another, his voice is silenced forever.
Footnotes: 1. © 2004 Alan Peters. The name “Alan Peters” is a nom de plume for a writer who was for many years involved in intelligence and security matters in Iran. He had significant access inside Iran at the highest levels during the rule of the Shah, until early 1979.
2. See Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, March 2, 2004: Credibility and Legitimacy of Ruling Iranian Clerics Unraveling as Pressures Mount Against Them; The Source of Clerical Ruling Authority Now Being Questioned. This report, also by Alan Peters, details the background of “Ayatollah” Khomeini, the fact that his qualifications for his religious title were not in place, and the fact that he was not of Iranian origin.
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