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.

Instead, he has focused his attention on Israel, America's lone democratic ally in the Mideast. Recently, Carter suggested that the U.S. should cut off aid to Israel, so angry was he after Israel sought to defend itself in the wake of suicide bombings.

Fair enough. But what has Carter said about Arab or Muslim countries that have had long records of human rights abuse – Syria or Libya or Iran or Iraq?

Not much. One reason may be money. As NewsMax's Dave Eberhart reported recently, Carter and his Carter Center foundation are recipients of millions of dollars of Arab money.

So I give Carter his due. At least he is not a hypocrite in one sense. He is good to the dictators and butchers who give him money.