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Carter's
Administration : the Worst in Modern
American history
Iran held a
presidential "election" the other
day, and the "winner" was Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, the "hard-line" mayor
of Tehran. Now the Iran Focus Web site says
it has identified Ahmadinejad as a terrorist
depicted in a 1979 Associated Press photo
"holding the arm of a blindfolded
American hostage on the premises of the
United States embassy in Tehran."
Let this be a lesson to those who are
calling for America to cut and run from
Iraq. Jimmy Carter's stunning show of
weakness in the face of the Iranians' act of
war allowed the mad mullahs to solidify
their hold on power, so that a quarter
century later they are on the verge of
acquiring nuclear weapons and threatening
us.
But how did
we get to this? Carter's human rights
program demanded the Shah of Iran step down
and turn over power to the Ayatollah
Khomeini.
No matter
that Khomeini was a madman. Carter had the
U.S. Pentagon tell the Shah's top military
commanders – about 150 of them – to
acquiesce to the Ayatollah and not fight
him.
The Shah's
military listened to Carter. All of them
were murdered in one of the Ayatollah's
first acts.
By allowing
the Shah to fall, Carter created one of the
most militant anti-American dictatorships
ever.
Soon the new
Iranian government was ransacking our
embassy and held its staff hostage for over
a year. Only President Reagan's election
gave Iran the impetus to release the
hostages.
Carter's
decision to have the Shah fall is arguably
the most egregious U.S. foreign policy
mistake of the last 50 years.
And this
Democratic idiot still gets air time to
spout his garbage!!!!
Carter has been traveling the world these
past few years advocating a policy of
American weakness, but his legacy should be
cause for pause for current officeholders
who are inclined to agree. Not only did it
create problems and dangers we're still
dealing with a quarter century later, it
wasn't even good short-term politics. After
all, the voters decisively rejected Carter
when he sought re-election in 1980.
Four days
after the Nobel Committee announced that he
would be the 2002 recipient for the Nobel
Peace Prize, North Korea announced that it
had cheated on an agreement - one which had
been negotiated by Carter. North Korea
removed seals on cameras installed by the
United Nations, kicked out UN arms
inspectors, and pretty much attempted to
blackmail East Asia with nuclear weapons.
President
Carter's crowning achievement was the Camp
David Accords which returned the Sinai to
Egypt in exchange for the end of a state of
war between Israel and Egypt. While the
accords ended a shooting war between the two
countries, it is worth noting that the
agreement was not even negotiated by the
Americans - most of the diplomacy having
been done by the King of Morocco and the
Ceausescu regime in Rumania. Washington DC
was simply the money to fund the deal.
President
Carter never met a dictator he didn't like.
He negotiated with the military junta in
Haiti even while human rights groups
condemned them. Not that his negotiation led
to anything; Haiti remains today what it has
remained throughout the post-colonial period
- a Caribbean backwater run by military
strong men conveniently ignored by the
United States. He has run missions to Cuba
and Ethiopia as well, providing muted
criticism of regimes in exchange for their
use of him to legitimize themselves and
thwart the efforts of the American
administration of the time to isolate or
overthrow them.
He has been a
self-deluded pawn for dictators, and by the
anti-American European left wing.
Carter's
refusal to believe that the North Koreans
would not be negotiating in good faith has
shown that the President is far from
globalist: he is naive. Now the current
administration must redouble its efforts to
prevent "North Korea becoming a nuclear
Kmart, complete with blue-light
specials," says Jon Wolfsthal, a
nuclear proliferation expert at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. At the
same time the administration must contain
terrorism both within the US and abroad,
fight a diplomatic and possibly shooting war
with Iraq, as well as handle an economy
currently in a bad part of the business
cycle and corporate malfeasance not seen on
such a scale since the 1930s.
When Carter
took office in 1977, he received a
moderately growing economy in which
inflation was 5.4 percent and interest rates
were around 8 percent. When he left office,
the Soviets were entrenched in Afghanistan,
Iranian students had been holding US State
Department personnel and US Marines hostage
for 444 days, the American military had been
gutted by the administration's post-Vietnam
cutbacks, American prestige was in tatters
abroad and inflation was in the double
digits and interest rates were so high it
was impossible for Americans to finance
large purchases like homes and cars.
Carter's administration is without a doubt
the worst in modern American history, yet
Carter himself blamed his failures on a
"national malaise".
Jimmy Carter
was a failure within the United States and
the admission of North Korea only shows once
again that he is a failure abroad as well.
Why
would anyone who can think for themselves
want his opinion on anything!
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