Actually, it was 1979, not 1976.

But thanks for the link love.

A friend also reminded me of a line from Carter’s Jan. 23 SOTU address:

“Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Not exactly the cheese-eating surrender monkey that the Right Wing has portrayed him to be.

I don’t have a problem with this kind of posturing, knowing full well that if we’d fully implemented Carter’s energy plan, we would NOT be in Iraq today. We wouldn’t have any interest in the Middle East because we wouldn’t need their oil. The Taliban wouldn’t have attacked because we wouldn’t have had a military base in Saudi Arabia.

Get off the oil tit, people.

Everyone did listen to Carter until he told them to turn down the heat and wear a freaking sweater (see the “malaise speech”). The way he completely botched Iran didn’t help much either. Or the gas pricing controls that repeated the same mistakes Nixon made in 1973.

I find it pretty hilarious that anyone would make the argument that CARTER of all presidents was the guy we shoul’ve listened to.

We use oil because it’s the most efficient and cheap means of energy production to run our automobiles. We primarily use coal to make electricity (the increase in coal usage was the one intelligent thing Carter did).

Here’s a chart of world energy usage-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World_energy_usage_width_chart.svg

We don’t use turkey guts/ethanol/hydrogen/solar/farts for gas because it isn’t as cheap or efficient as oil.

And for those who think if the US would leave the Middle east or Saudia Arabia (where we get less than 15% of our oil) then everything would be peachy neglect to mention that if we didn’t buy it China or India would.

Jimmy Carter as energy expert!

HIGH-larious.

Tman:

Tell me again how Carter botched Iran. No, really, explain it to me. Nixon and Ford were in office for 12 years and their propping of the Shah and his thugocracy lead to the discontent of the Iranian populace to the point of them welcoming Khomeini back from exile. Actually, we could go back a bit further to 1954 when the CIA (at the behest of the Dulles brothers) whacked Mossadegh to make room for Pretty Boy Pahlevi to ascend the Peacock Throne.

Lemme see. Stupid Carter tricks: Suggest that folks wear a sweater or turn down the thermostat to save energy–personally v Bushian genius of shopping to deter terrorism and borrowing our way out of debt.

When Jimmy Carter dies I’m sure folks like your will want to dance, or piss, on his grave. When George W. Bush dies? I don’t want to ever be in a line that long.

The sweater bit was about the most benign thing about the man. Jimmy Carter’s going to have to build a hell of a lot of houses to expiate for his murderous foreign policy in Haiti, Nicaragua, and El Salvador (which Reagan then continued and accelerated).

Also, one could question the wisdom of Carter’s decision to spend $40 billion or so promote Islam in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan as a way of bolstering resistance to the Soviet bloc. Thirty years on, I guess we know how that piece of Cold War genius turned out, huh?

Bridgett:

Is there some citation for the $40B spent on promoting Islam?

I must admit to not knowing that Carter was responsible for murderous foreign policy in those three countries you mention. But I’m willing to learn–give me some sources to check.

Tman:

Tell me again how Carter botched Iran.

Letting the Shah in to the states (against the wishes of pretty much every foreign US diplomats advice)for surgery was pretty stupid, but Operation Eagle Claw was probably the most tragic and unnecessary disaster that Carter was responsible for.

Tman:

Was that the failed attempt to rescue the US personnel being held hostage by the Iranians. Tragic, yes. Unnecessary? Only because it failed. Of course he didn’t know that there had been some behind the scenes, off the books, negotiations going on between the Iranians and certain “third” parties.

I do think allowing the Shah to come here was a bad idea. I would have been perfectly happy for him to die a in a more agonizing way than he did. It would have been small recompense to the families of the thousands who were imprisoned, tortured and murdered during his reign. I’m not really an eye for an eye kinda guy, but in his situation or Idi Amin’s, Pol Pot’s and some others I’d abandon my ethics.

BTW, do you mean the US foreign service? My guess is that Carter made his decisions, in both instances, based on his personal feelings and the advice/suggestions of his NSA, the Joint Chiefs and others. Obviously, the decision to let the Shah come here was a bad one. The attempted rescue of the hostages, had it succeeded would have undoubtedly angered some and delighted some.

I can think of a few decisions by other presidents that were “pretty stupid”, and have had some lingering bad effects; but that’s a story for another time.

Jimmah couldn’t have foreseen sand crashing our rescue helicopters; however,

He completely fucked up the handling of the hostage crisis by letting the crazy mullahs hold, not only those people, but the whole US, hostage for 444 days.
Jimmah was, and is, too much of a wuss to be commander and chief. He should have given the mullahs the same consideration we gave the Japanese 34 years earlier.

Democommie,

Sorry for the delay. Kids, you know…

Here’s some good academic studies on Carter’s Central American policy.

The Carter Administration’s Policy toward Nicaragua: Images, Goals, and Tactics
Martha L. Cottam, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 107, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 123-146.

David F. Schmitz and Vanessa Walker, Jimmy Carter and the Foreign Policy of Human Rights: The Development of a Post-Cold War Foreign Policy, Diplomatic History 28:1 (2004), 113–143.

John A. Soares. Strategy, Ideology, and Human Rights: Jimmy Carter Confronts the Left in Central America, 1979-1981. Journal of Cold War Studies 8:4 (2006).

During our so-called sanction of El Salvador for its human rights abuses, 1977-1981, we sent tons of military aid to Israel. A corresponding sum was sent by Israel to El Salvador in the form of jet fighters, military trainers, telephone and computer monitoring systems, and torture training (which they had learned from SoA.) Now it could be that they were not acting as a US cat’s paw — which is what Noam Chomsky argues in A Fateful Triangle — but it’s unclear what strategic interest they would have had in El Salvador apart from furthering American aims as the El Salvadorans weren’t actually able to pay for any of this stuff on their own.

I find William Blum’s argumentation to be needlessly polemical, but his research is good. His work, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA interventions since World War II is also a good resource for how CIA and State Department advisors were deployed in El Salvador and Nicaragua. One of the final acts of Carter’s administration was to order $10 million in military aid to El Salvador — Reagan merely amped up the sum during his administration.

The source for the $40B is from Robert Gates’ (former director of the CIA) memoirs. In an interview with Zbigenew Brzenzski, B. also mentions that they poured aid to Islamic insurgents as a means of handing the Soviet Union “its very own Vietnam.” When he was asked in 1998 if he regretted funding the Taliban, he said “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Lest you think I’m some sort of anti-Carter nutjob, I’m not. I think his foreign policy was schizophrenic, with the public face being all about idealist goals (like furthering human rights and decreasing authoritarianism) and the behind-the-scenes driven by Cold Warrior realist policies. The dualism was easy for our friends and our enemies to see and thus he was ineffective whichever way he swung — a weakening of our “soft power,” as they’d say in a foreign policy assessment.

Bridgett:

Thanks for the reading list.

I did a few quick googles and I see it will take several years for me to sort it all out.

Just a couple of observations.

Robert Gates is a career shit-heel. He was involved in Iran Contra and lied to congress about it, back then. He also lied about it during his confirmation hearings for his present job as DefSec. Any information he volunteers is only done to serve his agenda. Doesn’t mean he’s lying, but it is his stock in trade.

While I don’t doubt for a moment that Ziggy B. was (as has always been his wont) up to his neck in all sorts of anti-Russian intrigue–I’d be willing to bet that Carter was not in on a lot of the nitty-gritty. I’m not excusing his ineptitude, I just don’t think he was as nefarious as all that.

Why would Israel ship arms to El Salvador? Perhaps for the same reason that Richard Secord, Ollie North and some others did business with Iran and then used the proceeds to arm the Nicaraguan Contras. A quid pro quo of some sort?

I will have to do some reading.

Exador:

Yeah, nuking Iran, then or now, would have no significant downside; other than starting WWIII. I notice that Ronald Reagan punished the people who bombed the Marine barracks in Lebanon–by invading Grenada.

Yes, Carter’s motivations and the extent of his knowledge are the crux of the issue and much of what you’ll find on the Internet is ideologically charged with either trying to hang Reagan and make Carter a saint or trying to foist the blame for lamentably bad policy back to Carter’s administration and paint him as….well, as a inept cheese-eating surrender monkey. 30 years on, we’re finally getting some analysis from examinations of Carter administration papers and that’s where the more complex revised scholarly assessment of Carter is coming from. What scholarship I’ve read reveals a president that was both interested in and active in making foreign policy and believed very strongly in using soft power through aid, diplomacy, and covert ops. While he had a strong commitment to human rights as an overarching principle, his stronger commitments to anti-communism took over when it came down to planning on-the-ground action. Yes, he was influenced by Zig, but he also hired Zig, kept him on the job, and followed his advice.

(Oh, and here’s the primary source citation I was looking for…the NSA brief from Zig to Carter explaining why they needed to keep up the arms aid to the Taliban. See especially the “What Is To Be Done” section. They wound up discussing it at length during the weekly meeting and Carter agreed to send money.)

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/20/documents/brez.carter/

Bridgett:

Thanks, again.

I never thought of Carter as being uninvolved in foreign policy (or of being a naif–he was one of Hyman Rickover’s nuclear navy proteges. However, I also think that, like every president since Harry Truman, he had the “services” of the NSA and CIA to “help” him in formulating foreign policy, both tactically and strategically. I think it has been adequately demonstrated over the last 50+ years that the prognosticators at those two orgs as well as the Joint Chiefs have about as good an average of getting things right as the ancient roman soothsayers.

I hope that if the democrats take the WH this time around that they have the good sense to sack the entrenched leadership of those institutions who have through ineptitude or by design managed to destroy this country’s credibility while squandering lives and money on failed missions to Iraq and Afghanistan.

God, I hate homework, but now I’m gonna have to do some.