JIMMY CARTER: HISTORY'S BUFFOON
By Mike Evans
Ayatollah Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint.
— Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter’s choice for America’s UN ambassador
With the United States and Iran moving toward a showdown over Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, it is sobering to consider how relations between the two countries deteriorated so far – and which American president was largely responsible.
The United States once looked to the shah of Iran to support Western economic stability, and the shah relied on the US to help implement his vision for Iran’s future. But when Jimmy Carter became president, the shah’s confidant, Asadollah Alam, wrote in his diary about Shah Pahlavi’s concerns over Carter’s election: “Who knows what sort of calamity he [Carter] may unleash on the world?”
The answer was evident just a few years later, when the shah was overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Carter, it became clear, was the answer to the ayatollah’s prayers. Khomeini could never have carried out the Islamic Revolution without him.
With characteristic naivete, Carter pressured the shah to allow more political freedom. While some 300 political prisoners were released, censorship was relaxed, and judicial reforms initiated, the youth of Iran were swarming to radical Islam. University students gathered at Islamic study centers, the young women clothed in the chadors outlawed by the shah. This new, radical Islam exploded on the campus of Teheran University in October 1977.
Before the ensuing 1979 Islamic Revolution, Carter sent Gen. Robert Huyser, deputy chief of the US European Command and involved with Iran for over a decade, to advise the shah. Huyser said of his boss: “The administration obviously did not understand the Iranian culture.”
Carter viewed Khomeini as a religious holy man in a grassroots revolution, rather than a founding father of modern terrorism who introduced the Islamofascist ideology we are fighting today in the world war on terrorism.
As Henry Kissinger said: “[Carter] 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.”
In his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Carter equates Israel’s battle against Palestinian terrorism to the hateful former South African practice of apartheid, as if there were any logical connection between them. Worse, he condemns Israel for exercising the basic human right of self-defense by building a security fence to keep out suicide bombers, or responding to missile attacks from the very land that was given away “for peace.”
Carter also deliberately misrepresents Israel as the aggressor in the 1967 war; fails to note the threat that precipitated its destruction of Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981; and exonerates Arafat for walking out of the peace talks with Ehud Barak and turning down a settlement that would have given the Palestinians 96 percent of the land they seek.
Dr. Kenneth Stein, who resigned as Middle East Fellow of the Carter Center of Emory University, wrote in a letter to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “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.”
With Arafat gone, Carter has continued to court terrorists, madmen, and extreme leftists, all the while lambasting the Bush administration. He has constantly praised such heinous dictators as the former Yugoslavia’s Tito, Romania’s Ceausescu, Panama’s Ortega, and Kim il-Sung of North Korea. Sent as an emissary to North Korea by president Bill Clinton, Carter made a deal that allowed it to develop as many as half a dozen nuclear weapons.
Carter’s naive belief that every crisis can be resolved with diplomacy — and nothing but diplomacy — now permeates the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, he is dead wrong. There are times when evil must be openly confronted and defeated.
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