Jewish Advocate

Tom Mountain

Tom Mountain, a Newton resident, is also a columnist for the Newton TAB.

Echoes of President Jimmy Carter

By Tom Mountain - Saturday May 17 2008

At this point it’s reasonable to wonder how Jimmy Carter got elected governor of Georgia, let alone president of the United States. To witness him laying a wreath at the tomb of Yasser Arafat, then schmoozing with Hamas in Damascus, is enough to make the sane among us recoil in disgust.
On the very day that the peanut-farmer-who-became-president claimed to have scored a commitment of peace from Hamas, the terrorist thugs launched a rocket salvo at Israel, thus leading the former president to claim that at least he gallantly tried to bring about peace and stability to the Middle East.
And in the world of Jimmy Carter, it never hurts to try. The Carter mantra usurps the notion that all peoples ultimately want to live in peace and prosperity, we only need to bring them all together to find common ground.
That’s what he learned in 1978 when he clasped the hands of Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin on the White House lawn, heralding the dawn of a new era of peace in the Middle East. At about the same time he was staging this made-for-TV photo-op, the other end of the Middle East was poised for disaster. The Carterites had already lain the ground work for the downfall of the most loyal, peaceful, stable, and reliable ally in the region, for both the United States and Israel – the Shah of Iran.
As a champion of human rights no matter what the cost, Jimmy Carter had become increasing annoyed with the less- than-stellar human rights record of Iran. The Shah had this habit of repeatedly rounding up communists on charges of subversion, sedition, and whatever else he could drum up. But given that the neighboring Soviet Union had for decades tried to make inroads into Iran, mostly by training and funding Iranian communist agitators, it wasn’t such a bad idea. Then the Shah sent those religious clerics who openly challenged his regime into exile.
So the Carterites gradually abandoned the Shah, encouraged and fomented the exiled opposition, and welcomed the Ayatollah Khomeini as a leader of vision and change. The result: three decades of war, misery, and oppression emanating from the once staunch ally Iran, courtesy of Jimmy Carter’s myopic obsession with human rights at all costs. And it cost dearly. If Iran acquires and uses nuclear weapons against Israel, Jimmy Carter will bear a portion of the blame, since it never would have happened under the Shah.
After Carter abandoned his Iranian ally, the Soviets reasoned that he would do nothing to help America’s non-ally Afghanistan, and so they invaded. The Reagan administration was left to clean up the mess, which they did by arming the only Afghans willing to fight back – the Mujahadin. A decade later the Mujahadin succeeded in defeating the Soviets, after which they morphed into the Taliban, setup a radical theocracy to export their new found Islamic revolution (like Iran), and welcomed Al Qaeda.
Blame Reagan or Charlie Wilson’s War? Hardly. Ronald Reagan, or for that matter, Gerald Ford, would never have let Afghanistan (or Iran) fall. But Carter did. And 30 years later we’re still reeling from the monumentally idiotic foreign policy of the Carterites. Yet it never should have happened. Jimmy Carter should never have been elected president. But he was and we’re still paying for it.
When Carter was elected in 1976 he was an unknown politician, a one term governor from Georgia who championed himself as a virtuous alternative (“I will never lie to you”) to the Nixon era. Gerald Ford was depicted as too much the status quo candidate. Americans wanted change. And they were willing to gamble on a new face that smiled alot and said nice things. Jews especially flocked to Carter.
Sound familiar? Barack Obama is the Jimmy Carter of today. He’s barely a one term senator, with no foreign policy experience, committed to “peace in our time.” He’s the quintessential let’s-all-hold-hands, sing kumbaya, and make-the-world-a-better-place candidate. As a hardcore leftist he’ll recruit other leftists that have nothing but compassion for those poor Palestinians who only want their own state where they’ll live in everlasting peace and harmony with Israel.
Yet when Hezbollah and Hamas launch coordinated attacks against Israel, and Iran is poised for a nuclear showdown, can we really tolerate a President Obama calling for dialogue and restraint? Can we risk blindly supporting the “Change We Can Believe In?”
Remember Jimmy Carter.
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