What Iranians have known about Jimmy Carter from the beginning
eco.freedom.org
A few days ago, I walked into a local small business owned by a naturalized American citizen who was from Iran. During our conversation, the owner asked me what I thought about the U.S. and Coalition forces invading Iraq.
I said that in my opinion Jimmy Carter and his State Department were totally responsible for this war, Iraq's slaughtering of its own citizens, and the tragic war with Iran.
The shop owner grabbed me and gave me a "bear-hug." He said that in his 20 years living in America, I was the only American who understood what Iranians have known about Jimmy Carter from the beginning.
He agreed with me that Jimmy Carter started the dominoes falling that eventually created the chaos that led to the present and recent wars in the Gulf.
Thousands of Iraqi citizens now fleeing the Gulf II War zone will join thousands of Iranians who fled during the "Reign of Terror" which the Ayatollah Khomeini unleashed after then-President Jimmy Carter decided to make a regime change by pulling U.S. support from the Shah of Iran. The Shah and his administration were suppressing Islamic fundamentalists who wanted to return Iran to the 7th century under Islamic law.
President Carter's advisors were out of touch with reality. Like Don Quixote, they raced in, without regard to reality, to vanquish the Shah and his attempt to modernize Iran.
The consulting company I worked for at that time sent their Iranian office manager and engineering staff to a technical symposium in Pasadena, CA. The staff from our Tehran office was not so concerned about the technical presentation as they were about the pending disaster that President Carter was about to create, since his State Department was removing all support for the Shah. After all, it was argued, the kindly religious leaders of Iran would install a peaceful socialist government and save the country from the upheaval of Westernization.
Our office manager, a Jordanian Christian, recommended that we cease soliciting contracts from the Shah's government because its days were numbered. He recommended finishing the existing construction jobs and moving the office to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He was worried we might not be paid for the existing work, and certain we would not be paid for any work done for a replacement government.
We had moved his family to Riyadh and also recommended that all other employees move there for their safety.
When the Shah fell, the Ayatollah Khomeini promised a welfare state that would outshine anything the Shah had done for Iran. Of course, his real objective was to use Iran as a launching pad for radical Islamic rule of the Middle East.
The Ayatollah unleashed a blood bath against his enemies. Americans in the Embassy were taken hostage for 444 days, and the economy of Iran plummeted into chaos.
As the Ayatollah encouraged radical Islamic uprisings in surrounding countries, we decided to contain Iran by using the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. We supplied him with a massive arms buildup, which apparently included chemical, and perhaps even biological, weapons.
The 15,000,000 Iraqis were outnumbered by the 43,000,000 Iranians; but with the weapons we supplied him, Saddam Hussein fought the Iranians to a stalemate. Millions were killed and wounded.
In the first Gulf War hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Kuwaitis were sacrificed by Saddam Hussein. The United Nations Coalition failed to consummate their victory over Saddam Hussein.
General Douglas MacArthur said it best: "There is no substitute for victory."
We naively thought that the Iraqis would rise up and depose their evil dictator. The majority of Iraq's provinces, with our encouragement, did revolt. However, the United Nations and the United States left these people without the needed military support, and Saddam Hussein annihilated them by the tens of thousands. Thousands of them were killed by poison gas.
Perhaps the most ironic twist in this whole affair is that Jimmy Carter was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
newsmax.com
Jimmy Carter’s Trail of Disaster
Christopher Ruddy
Monday, May 13, 2002
Jimmy Carter is off this week to save Cuba.
With Carter on the loose, the American public needs to watch out.
It seems that almost wherever he goes and whatever positions he pushes, Jimmy Carter leaves a wake of devastation and disaster.
Carter, we should note, has been cozying up to North Korea for years. He helped the U.S. and the communist country come to agreement during the Clinton years to defuse a tense situation over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Under the wacko deal Carter arranged, the U.S. would stop complaining about Korea's nuclear weapons program as long as the U.S. gave aid to North Korea and helped the communists build more modern nuclear reactors.
The U.S. was well on the path to doing this when the new Bush administration sounded the alarm and immediately stopped the cockamamy plan dead in its tracks.
North Korea was not cooperating with the U.S. to stop its weapons program, but we should continue helping them to build nuclear reactors. Make sense?
Of course not.
But that's Jimmy Carter for you.
It's also Jimmy Carter the hypocrite. Carter has always claimed to be the champion of human rights worldwide.
Yet North Korea is one of the most, if not the most, repressive regimes on the planet.
The Stalinist nation is headed by a young madman named Kim Jong-il. Kim likes to watch American movies like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and then act out his fantasies on his own citizenry. Millions of North Koreans are starving at any given time.
Does Carter have much to say about this?
Of course not. North Korea is an enemy of the U.S., so Carter goes easy on them. When he met Kim, Carter didn't criticize him – he kissed him!
But there is nothing new here.
The media would have us forget Jimmy Carter's presidential record.
But I won't.
Remember Carter's human rights program, where he 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 hostage its staff for over a year. Only President Reagan's election gave Iran the impetus to release the hostages.
I believe Carter's decision to have the Shah fall is arguably the most egregious U.S. foreign policy mistake of the last 50 years. [Former President Bush's decision to allow Saddam Hussein to stay in power is a close second.]
With the Shah gone, the whole region was destabilized. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan; no doubt a direct link to the rise of the Taliban can be traced to this invasion. Iraq also took advantage of the Shah's departure to invade Iran. A long war followed that helped make Saddam's Iraq a great Middle Eastern power.
And decades after Carter's ignominious act, Iran is still bent on destroying America. President Bush named it one of the three nations in the "axis of evil." Iran is developing both nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver these weapons to its enemies.
We can thank Jimmy Carter for all of this.
Since Carter left the presidency, he has had little to say about the human rights abuses in Iran. Why should he? Iran opposes the U.S. |
