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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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