politics to go

Thank Jimmy Carter for Iran mess

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As a country, two things we have learned from Barack Obama are that if things are going lousy, blame the previous administration, and if your successor fixes your mistakes, take credit for it.

There are times, however, when predecessors have earned the responsibility for the bad things going on in the world. A great example is former President Jimmy Carter and the rogue regime of crazies that is running Iran.

The “achievement” of Jimmy Carter’s that will endure for a long time is the fact that the Islamic crazies who are running Iran want to control the entire Middle East and blow up Israel and the United States. If, G-d forbid, the Iranian crazies ever get their hands on a nuclear bomb, the resulting deaths will be another reason we remember him.

A few years ago, an interesting Jerusalem Post analysis of Carter and Iran said in part: “Carter viewed Khomeini as more of a religious holy man in a grassroots revolution than a founding father of modern terrorism. Carter’s ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, said ‘Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint.’ Carter’s Iranian ambassador, William Sullivan, said, ‘Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure.’ Carter adviser James Bill proclaimed in a Newsweek interview on February 12, 1979 that Khomeini was not a mad mujahid, but a man of ‘impeccable integrity and honesty’.”

In other words, Carter and his foreign policy team had their collective heads in the sand.

The Shah, on the other hand, had the Peanut President down pat. He told his personal confidant, “Who knows what sort of calamity he [Carter] may unleash on the world?”

What the Shah didn’t know at the time was that the calamity involved him and his country.

Michel D. Evans, an expert on Middle East affairs, says Carter considered Khomeini a “holy man” and believed every crisis could be resolved with diplomacy. It was this Kumbaya pacifism that got him into trouble.

“Carter never understood that Khomeini, a cleric exiled to Najaf in Iraq from 1965-1978, was preparing Iran for revolution. Proclaiming ‘the West killed G-d and wants us to bury him,’ Khomeini’s weapon of choice was not the sword but the medias. Using tape cassettes smuggled by Iranian pilgrims returning from the holy city of Najaf, Khomeini fueled disdain for what he called gharbzadegi, which is Persian for the plague of Western culture.”

That doesn’t sound like a man who wants to have a peaceful relationship with the United States.

Khomeini could never have succeeded without Carter. The Islamic Revolution would have been stillborn. Carter pressured the Shah to make what he termed human rights concessions by releasing political prisoners and relaxing press censorship.

In his article in the Jerusalem Post, titled Father of the Iranian Revolution, Michael Evans wrote that “Gen. Robert Huyser, Carter’s military liaison to Iran, once told me in tears: ‘The president could have publicly condemned Khomeini and even kidnapped him and then bartered for an exchange with the [American Embassy] hostages, but the president was indignant. ‘One cannot do that to a holy man,’ he said.”

But anyone who would allow students under his rule to take 60 diplomats hostage for 444 days, as Khomeini did, is not someone most people would consider a “holy man.” But Carter believed that most leaders had good in their hearts, even when they didn’t.

Evans’s article continued, “I sat in the home of Gen. Huyser, who told me the shah feared he would lose the country if he implemented Carter’s polices. Carter had no desire to see the shah remain in power. He really believed that a cleric — whose Islamist fanaticism he did not understand in the least — would be better for human rights and Iran. He could have changed history by condemning Khomeini and getting the support of our allies to keep him out of Iran.”

Carter’s belief that every crisis can be resolved with diplomacy — and everything not solved by diplomacy is a wrong solution — ended up causing the deaths of thousands of Iranians, and setting the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel up for possible conflict with the rogue regime.

Khomeini had the help of the PLO when he came back to Iran. That alone should have been a big hint. But then again, Carter believed the Palestinian terrorists to be “good guys.” The PLO supplied weapons and terrorists to murder Iranians and incite mobs in the streets. No wonder Yasser Arafat was hailed as a friend of Khomeini after he seized control of Iran, and was given the Israeli Embassy in Teheran, where the PLO flag still flies overhead.

Fifty years after Jimmy Carter installed Ayatollah Khomeini and his team of radical Islamists into power, the government he helped to create threatens the lives and liberties of the American people, fires upon American troops based in Iraq, and is still seeking nuclear weapons, which the JCPOA allows them to do in 6 to 11 years.

But none of this had to happen — the hostages, the years of Iranian threats, hanging homosexuals for sport, throwing Christians in prisons, and other horrible torture of people who do not follow the Iranian political rules, and its radical Islamist sharia law.

The Shah of Iran was no Boy Scout, but thanks to Jimmy Carter, he was replaced by a terrorist-supporting radical Islamist state whose slogan is “Death to America.”

In recent weeks, people have been wondering if we are going to war with Iran, and as of now the answer is no. But America wouldn’t be having regular crises with the rogue Iranian regime if Jimmy Carter had a realistic view of the world.