Get Carter
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 21 May 2007 11:48:29 -0700
Get Carter
We take another look at the worst Democratic President of the 20th
Century
Editors Note: This is an update of the article that originally
appeared here in October 2002. Why? Because Carter is the "undead" of
American politics, taking the stage at the most inauspicious moments.
Besides, most of us at the Razor actually lived through the
disasterous four years of his presidency.
President Jimmy Carter has always had rotten luck. So it comes as no
surprise that 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 the former president. Since that announcement, North
Korea has removed seals on cameras installed by the United Nations,
kicked out UN arms inspectors, and is pretty much attempting to
blackmail East Asia with nuclear weapons.
President Carter's supporters have countered his critics by stating
that the president always takes the "high road", sees the "big
picture" or has a "global perspective" of events - implying that the
critics are warmongering provincialists who lack the ability to care
about anyone not of their class or nationality. There is an American
tendency to look with nostalgia upon the administrations of past
presidents, but even looking past the domestic failures of the well-
traveled President, are his foreign policy successes deserving of the
Nobel Prize?
No Prize for Jimmy
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.
It is also worth noting that the resulting situation between them
could not be viewed as peace - or even a "Cold Peace" as the state of
affairs has been referred to by others. Egyptian authorities continue
to support Palestinian terrorists. The Israeli army regularly finds
tunnels into Gaza from the Sinai that are used to smuggle weapons and
bomb making materials. The Egyptian press is filled with the most vile
anti-Semitic propaganda seen since Heinrich Himmler. Egypt is also a
hotbed for anti-American militancy, with the government unable to
crack down on all but the worst excesses for fear that it will be
overthrown by Islamic radicals. At the same time the government
supports the terrorist operations by the likes Islamic Jihad and Hamas
within the "Occupied Territories" and Israel proper. While Egypt may
not be responsible for bombing Tel Aviv from fixed wing aircraft in a
conventional war, it has bombed that city through its direct support
of terrorism - achieving the same goal and in the eyes of all but the
most hard-core moral relativists, taking the same responsibility. In
effect, Carter's true achievement was to shift Egyptian attacks from
direct conventional military strikes to direct support of
unconventional attacks - a legacy which Israel still grapples with
today.
President Carter has 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 now by the anti-
American European left wing. As Gunmar Berge, chairman of the Nobel
committee stated, Carter's "prize must be considered as a criticism of
the present US administration," - implying that without Bush's hawkish
stance towards Iraq, Carter wouldn't have joined the ranks of more
deserving winners such as the Red Cross, Ann San Suu Kyi, and the Dali
Lama. Instead he joins the ignomonious ranks of such "men of peace" as
Chairman Yassir Arafat, Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. It is
interesting to note that Le Duc Tho refused his share of the Nobel
Prize in 1973, stating "peace had not been established" in Vietnam - a
lesson apparently missed by the limelight-thriving Carter.
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". This "malaise" kept his Democratic party out of power for 12
years; even today it wrestles to free itself from Carter's legacy.
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. A Nobel Prize will never obscure these facts.
If only the following were true...
***
CARTER RETURNS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
By Michael Kelly
WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP
CARTER RETURNS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
'Too, Too Ridiculous,' Ex-Prez Says
PLAINS, Ga., March 17 - In a move that stunned veteran narcissistic
personality disorder observers, a smiling Jimmy Carter today announced
that he had decided to return the coveted Peace Prize awarded to him
last year by the Nobel Committee.
"I may be the most vainglorious, self-regarding, preachifying old coot
since Henry Ward Beecher, but even I know when a joke has gone too
far," said Carter. "Let's consider my contributions to world peace. In
1991, as the United States was on the very verge of war, I secretly
lobbied the presidents of the United Nations Security Council nations,
and also the heads of the Arab nations, to try to persuade them to
scuttle my own country's efforts to build a coalition and defeat Iraq.
Imagine if I had succeeded - why, we now know Iraq was within months
of building its first nuclear weapon when the war began!
"Then, I butted into Clinton's disaster in Somalia, to put together
the surrender to that charmer Mohamed Farah Aideed after his boys
killed 18 of our soldiers and dragged their beaten bodies through the
streets. And we now know that the spectacle of the Great Satan
knuckling under to a guy whose entire army consisted of 10 second-hand
Jeeps directly encouraged Osama bin Laden to believe that America was
ripe for capitulation on a much greater scale - if you killed enough
Americans.
"And the clincher - Korea. Yep, I'm the boy who free-lanced the 1994
agreement with the head-case of that horror show to stop his nuclear
bomb program, in exchange for a whole bunch of aid from us. When
reporters asked me then if it was really reasonable to expect Kim Il
Sung to keep his word, given that he never had before, I said: 'This
is something that's not for me to judge.' Well, of course, neither
that nut-job nor his nut-job son honored the deal for one second. So,
now, eight years later, another American president has inherited
another fine mess I got us in."
"Please, take it back, and stop me before I negotiate again."
.
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