Jimmy Carter is dead

Jimmy Carter. Department of Defense. Department of the Navy. Naval Photographic Center, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Jimmy Carter is dead. He became 100 years old. He may be known as the 'least-bad American president', which is no small feat. Let's look at what he did, based on some notes I've made through the years; in other words, this is merely a collection of quotes from books, articles, and video interviews, and not a complete collection.

Former president Jimmy Carter deemed the U.S. as having become “an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery” in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision to strike down limits on campaign contributions, and the wielding of illegitimate authority within our political system has only grown more extreme in the eight years that have passed since then.⁷

This is undoubtedly one of the good things we can say about Carter. What more?

Few in the United States have faced up to the reality of what was done to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia by their country. Jimmy Carter, who went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize, declined to apologize for the war on the grounds that “the destruction was mutual.” Because we went to Vietnam “without any desire to capture territory or impose American will on other people,” Carter continued, there is no need to “assume the status of culpability.”⁹

That is something that should get the criminal court of justice in the Hague going. Furthermore:

America left Vietnam with an estimated three million dead, huge numbers of injured and missing human beings, unspeakable destruction, and a horrendously ravaged ecology. But the postwar presidential tone was set by Jimmy Carter two months after taking office in early 1977. Asked at a news conference if he felt “any moral obligation to help rebuild that country,” here’s how President Carter replied: “Well, the destruction was mutual. You know, we went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people. We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese. And I don’t feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.” The U.S. veterans and their families who suffered from Agent Orange’s severe health effects were up against policies of marginalization and denial from the Defense Department and the Veterans Administration. Veterans and their advocates had to fight for recognition and assistance: provided, if ever, only belatedly and inadequately. For some, aid came too late.¹¹

Carter was the least violent of American presidents but he did things which I think would certainly fall under Nuremberg provisions. As the Indonesian atrocities increased to a level of really near-genocide, the U.S. aid under Carter increased. It reached a peak in 1978 as the atrocities peaked. So we took care of Carter, even forgetting other things.'¹⁶

Noam Chomsky on the Carter administration effects on Indonesia.

Chris Hedges sums up Jimmy Carter's time in office:

Carter, under Brzezinski’s influence, walked away from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union, which sought to curb nuclear weapons deployment. He increased military spending. He sent military aid to the Indonesian New Order government during the Indonesian invasion and occupationoccupation of East Timor, which many have characterized as a genocide. He supported, along with the apartheid state of South Africa, the murderous counter revolutionary group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi. He provided aid to the brutal Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. He supported the Khmer Rouge.

He instructed the Central Intelligence Agency to back opposition groups and political parties to bring down the Sandinista government in Nicaragua once it took power in 1979, leading under the Reagan administration to the formation of the Contras and a bloody and senseless U.S.-backed insurgency. He provided military aid to the dictatorship in El Salvador, ignoring an appeal from Archbishop Oscar Romero — later assassinated — to cease U.S. arms shipments.

He poisoned U.S. relations with Iran by backing the repressive regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi until the last minute and then allowing the deposed Shah to seek medical treatment in New York, triggering the occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a 444-day hostage crisis. Carter’s belligerence — he froze Iranian assets, stopped importing oil from Iran and expelled 183 Iranian diplomats from the U.S. — played into Ayatollah Khomeini’s demonization of the U.S. and calls for Islamic rule. He obliterated the credibility of Iran’s secular opposition.

Carter gave Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, although he ruled under martial law, billions in military aid. He armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan after the Soviet intervention in 1979, a decision that cost the U.S. $3 billion, saw the deaths of 1.5 million Afghans and led to the creation of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The blowback from this Carter policy alone is catastrophic.

He backed the South Korean military in 1980 when it laid siege to the city of Gwangju, where protestors had formed a militia, which led to the massacre of some 2,000 people.

Finally, he sold out the Palestinians when he negotiated a separate peace deal, known as the Camp David Accords, in 1979 between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The agreement excluded the Palestine Liberation Organization from the talks. Israel never, as promised to Carter, attempted to resolve the Palestine question with Jordan and Egypt’s involvement. It never permitted Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza within five years. It did not end Israeli settlements — a refusal that led Carter to later claim Begin had lied to him. But since there was no mechanism in the agreement for enforcement, and since Carter was unwilling to defy the Israel lobby to impose sanctions on Israel, the Palestinians found themselves, once again, powerless and abandoned.¹⁹

People living in South America have much to say about Jimmy Carter, none of it positive.

In February 1980, the Archbishop of EI Salvador, Oscar Romero, sent a letter to President Carter in which he begged him not to send military aid to the junta that ran the country. He said such aid would be used to "sharpen injustice and repression against the people’s organizations" which were struggling "for respect for their most basic human rights" (hardly news to Washington, needless to say).

A few weeks later, Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying a mass. The neo-Nazi Roberto d’Aubuisson is generally assumed to be responsible for this assassination (among countless other atrocities). D’Aubuisson was "leader for-life" of the ARENA party, which now governs El Salvador; members of the party, like current Salvadoran president Alfredo Cristiani, had to take a blood oath of loyalty to him.

Thousands of peasants and urban poor took part in a commemorative mass a decade later, along with many foreign bishops, but the US was notable by its absence. The Salvadoran Church formally proposed Romero for sainthood.

All of this passed with scarcely a mention in the country that funded and trained Romero’s assassins. The New York Times, the "newspaper of record," published no editorial on the assassination when it occurred or in the years that followed, and no editorial or news report on the commemoration.¹²

Nicaragua and the Contras: Though the Contra War and U.S. destruction in Nicaragua was mostly a Ronald Reagan product, Carter set the stage for later intervention in the summer of 1979, when the Sandinista Revolution made its final push to take over Managua and then deposed Somoza in July. Earlier, when the Sandinistas were in a larger popular front group, Carter insisted it take a more moderate position, which prompted the FSLN to leave the coalition.  Then, in June, he directed Cyrus Vance, the Secretary of State, to urge Somoza to leave but be replaced by a broad-based government and an OAS peacekeeping force, conditions that would deny a Sandinista victory.  Once the FSLN took over on July 19th and began receiving aid from other socialist states Carter authorized the CIA to support resistance forces in Nicaragua, the genesis of the Contras.¹⁷

Jimmy Carter claimed he would support unions and workers. He did not.

As a worker in the 1970s, I looked forward to a Jimmy Carter administration. By the end of his term in office, like millions of my union sisters and brothers, I felt betrayed.¹⁴

Jimmy Carter opened the doors for neoliberalism:

There weren’t any major banking crises in the 1950s and 1960s, a big growth period, because the Treasury Department kept control of the banking industry. In those days, a bank was just a bank. You had some extra money, you put it there. Somebody came and borrowed money to buy a car or send his or her kid to college. That was banking. It started to change a little bit with Jimmy Carter, but Ronald Reagan was the avalanche. You got people like Larry Summers saying, let’s deregulate derivatives, throw the whole thing open. One crisis after another followed. The Reagan administration ended with the huge savings and loan crisis. Again, call in the friendly taxpayer. The rich make plenty of money and the rest pay the costs.¹⁵

In Indonesia and at Camp David:

Carter increased, as the Indonesian atrocities were increasing — they peaked in 1978 — Carter’s flow of weapons to Indonesia increased. When Congress imposed human rights restrictions — by then, there was a human rights movement in Congress to block the flow of advanced weaponry to Indonesia — Carter arranged through Mondale, the vice president, to get Israel to send U.S. Skyhawks to Indonesia to enable Indonesia to complete what turned out to be near genocide, killing maybe a quarter of the population or something. In the Middle East, Carter had just won the Nobel Prize. His great achievement was the Camp David agreements.

Agreements are presented as a diplomatic triumph for the United States. In fact, they were a diplomatic catastrophe. At Camp David, the United States and Israel accepted finally Egypt’s 1971 offer, which the US had rejected at the time, except that now it was worse from the US-Israeli point of view because it included the Palestinians. In order to get Israel to accept Egypt’s 1971 offer, after a major war and atrocities and so on, Carter raised military and other aid to Israel to more than fifty percent of total aid worldwide. Israel used it at once in exactly the way they said they were going to do, as every sane person knew, as an opportunity to attack their northern neighbor, first in 1978, then in 1982, and to increase the integration of the occupied territories. And that's for starters.⁶

We should remember whose administration helped build up the Mujahedeen:

Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, along with the Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, oversaw the arming of the most radical Islamic mujahedeen groups fighting the Soviet occupation forces, leading to the extinguishing of the secular, democratic Afghan opposition. Brzezinski detailed the strategy, designed as he said to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam, taken by the Carter administration following the 1979 Soviet invasion to prop up the Marxist regime of Hafizullah Amin in Kabul: We immediately launched a twofold process when we heard that the Soviets had entered Afghanistan. The first involved direct reactions and sanctions focused on the Soviet Union, and both the State Department and the National Security Agency prepared long lists of sanctions to be adopted, of steps to be taken to increase the international costs to the Soviet Union of their actions. And the second course of action led to my going to Pakistan a month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for the purpose of coordinating with the Pakistanis a joint response, the purpose of which would be to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible; and we engaged in that effort in a collaborative sense with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the British, the Chinese, and we started providing weapons to the Mujaheddin, from various sources again — for example, some Soviet arms from the Egyptians and the Chinese. We even got Soviet arms from the Czechoslovak communist government, since it was obviously susceptible to material incentives; and at some point we started buying arms for the Mujahedeen from the Soviet army in Afghanistan, because that army was increasingly corrupt.³

Carter also lauded the Iranian shah, a known dictator in the late 1970s; the following quote is from a discussion with Ervand Abrahamian, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Iranian and Middle Eastern history and politics at Baruch College, City University of New York:

Q: In your book The Coup you write, “The U.S. and Iran have been locked in a deadly embrace.” You compare the relationship to an “iron cage.”

A: It wasn’t always that way. Jimmy Carter went to Tehran on December 31, 1977, for a lavish banquet that the shah hosted. Over a dinner toast Carter called Iran “an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas in the world.” He praised the shah for his “great leadership” and noted “the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you.” Not long after that, strikes and huge demonstrations ensued. And on January 16, 1979, just a little over a year after that banquet, the shah fled Iran and the Pahlavi monarchy ended. When Carter was giving that speech, Ambassador William Sullivan and other embassy officials in attendance looked at each other in horror. They already saw trouble brewing in Iran. But they weren’t at the point of realizing it could lead to a revolution. Carter’s banquet speech was a kind of compensation for the demonstration in Washington by the Iranian students against the shah during his official visit in November 1977. The shah complained that the Carter administration was not backing him enough; instead they were promoting human rights and liberalization. So in order to reassure the shah of U.S. support, Carter made the very flattering speech. But the speech later haunted the Carter administration because he had lauded the Iranian government’s stability when the regime was already clearly unstable.⁸

Let's not forget how Jimmy Carter 'shielded' Iraq, a quote that basically says everything about U. S. foreign policy:

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.¹⁰

What happened in Korea, in regard to the Gwangju massacre?

Carter, who has won global praise for his humanitarian actions since leaving the presidency, has never spoken publicly about his actions in Gwangju (through an intermediary, he declined to comment for this article). His most extensive remarks came in an interview on CNN on June 1, 1980, when he was asked by the journalist Daniel Schorr if US policy in Korea reflected a conflict between human rights and national security.

“There is no incompatibility,” Carter snapped. South Korea, he said, typified a situation where “the maintenance of a nation’s security from Communist subversion or aggression is a prerequisite to the honoring of human rights and the establishment of democratic processes.” Shamefully, none of this was true.¹⁸

More on the Israel-Palestine atrocities:

Returning to the U.S. government attitude towards the invasion, after a briefing by national security adviser William Clark, Jimmy Carter refused to divulge its contents but stated that “The only thing I can say is that the word I got from very knowledgeable people in Israel is that ‘we have a green light from Washington’.” Alexander Haig, who was Secretary of State at the time, angrily denied this charge (“a grotesque and outrageous proposition,” “totally untrue”) and then proceeded to confirm it, saying: “The Israelis had made it very clear that their limit of toleration had been exceeded, and that at the next provocation they were going to react. They told us that. The President knew that.” It is unlikely that even the Secretary of State was totally unaware of the facts concerning “provocation” and “toleration” in 1981-2. The State Department press office, asked to supply some evidence for the official stance that Washington did not back the invasion, was unable to cite a single official statement opposing it apart from the support, quickly withdrawn, for the first UN Security Council Resolution calling on Israel to terminate its aggression.92 The affair is reminiscent of the U.S. backing for the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor and the subsequent near-genocidal massacre. In that case too the U.S. government pretended ignorance of the invasion plans and also claimed that the U.S. had imposed an embargo on arms after the aggression. The latter claim was false (furthermore, under the Human Rights Administration the arms flow, which had never been reduced, was substantially increased to enable Indonesia to consummate the slaughter), and the former, always incredible (except to the U.S. press), has since been thoroughly demolished. In that case too the U.S. blocked UN action to stop the aggression, a story that UN Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan recounts with pride in his memoirs. Diplomatic cables that have since surfaced reveal that the U.S. Ambassador to Jakarta expressed his hope, several months earlier, that if Indonesia intervened as planned it would do so “effectively, quickly and not use our equipment,” very much the reaction to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon; the concern over the use of U.S. equipment is farcical in both cases given the dependence of the aggressors on U.S. supplies, and is to be understood as a hope that Congress will not act to enforce treaty obligations that these weapons are to be used only in self-defense.⁴

Where did Jimmy Carter's efforts to try and 'broker peace' between Israel and Palestine lead?

Carter's 1978 efforts were also no doubt undertaken with the best of intentions. It didn't quite turn out that way. Menachem Begin did agree to abandon Israel's project of settling the Egyptian Sinai but insisted that Palestinian rights should be excluded from the accords, and illegal settlement sharply increased under Ariel Sharon's direction, always with vital US aid and in violation of Security Council directives. And as Israeli strategic analysts quickly pointed out, removal of the Egyptian deterrent freed Israel to escalate its attacks on Lebanon, leading finally to the US-backed 1982 invasion that killed some twenty thousand Lebanese and Palestinians and destroyed much of Lebanon, with no credible pretext. Ronald Reagan finally ordered Israel to end the assault when the bombing of the capital city of Beirut was causing international embarrassment to Washington. It of course complied but maintained its control of South Lebanon with constant atrocities against what it called "terrorist villagers" resisting the brutal occupation. It also established a vicious torture chamber in Khiam, which was kept as a memorial after Israel was forced finally to withdraw by Hezbollah guerrilla warfare, I was taken through it before it was destroyed by Israeli bombing to erase memory of the crime.⁵