Jimmy Carter, Ever the Healer, Seeks to Soothe Own Criticism of Bush
Nick Gillespie | May 21, 2007, 9:25am
Just a couple of days after calling the Bush admin "the worst in history" when it comes to foreign policy, former President Jimmy "Why Not the Best" Carter is pulling back.
In an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazetter, the Man from Plains, laid into Bush thus:
''We now have endorsed the concept of preemptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered,'' he said.
Carter, perhaps best remembered now for fighting a killer rabbit to a draw, collapsing during a Fun Run, and overseeing a spectacularly too-little, too-late botched rescue attempt of the American hostages being held in Iran, also kicked Tony Blair around a little, calling the outgoing Brit PM "Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient.'' More here.
Bonus: Carter was being interviewed to talk up a line of audiobooks of Bible stories he's doing.
Well, what do you know? Carter's on the money regarding the preemptive war stuff. Or, less precisely, he's right to intimate that our general foreign policy above and beyond Baghdad needs a hell of a lot work. There's no overarching vision that allows for a coherent strategy that either the U.S. or other countries understand right now. This is a problem that began five minutes after the Berlin Wall fell, and we've yet to have a serious debate about what U.S. foreign policy should be like.
In any case, Carter's trying to take it back now. The man who boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games as a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan has now told NBC:
"My remarks were maybe careless or misinterpreted. But I wasn't comparing the overall administration and certainly not talking personally about any president."
More here. So the legacy of this latest Carter intervention may be more to burnish Carter's rep as a feckless statesman (and supporter of dictators even as he preached humanitarian foreign policy) more than directing substantive analysis on Bush's foreign policy.
Will Allen | May 21, 2007, 11:43am | #
Yes, Reagan's Lebanon fiasco was the low point of his Presidency. However, given that the overarching concern of the day was a Soviet Empire still in an expansionist phase, it is not surprising that the Reagan Administration was inattentive to the nature of the internal politics of the Middle East. Using Islamist factions to help greatly weaken the Soviet Empire was smart. Abandoning Afghanistan in the manner that Bush I and Clinton did was not.
When evaluating Presidents, it is useful to delineate between foreign policy and domestic policy, and to evaluate them in the context of the difficulties they faced upon taking office. I count Roosevelt as a great President because, while his domestic policies were largely ineffective, when not outright oppressive, he did have a positive effect on public morale upon taking office in the worst of situations. More importantly, when nearly every political current was working against the U.S. being active in the international arena, he recognized and acted upon what was taking place in Europe and Asia. Yes, the U.S. was woefully ill-prepared for WWII, and it was on Roosevelt's watch that the greatest military disaster took place, with the U.S. remaining complacent after losing track of the Japanese Imperial Fleet following months of sabre-rattling. Matters could have been much worse with a different President, however.
Along the same lines, Nixon certainly had the worst domestic policies of any post-war President. He should have been impeached for wage and price controls, and for naming Arthur Burns as Fed Chairman, and then intimidating him into some of the worst monetary policy imaginable. This is before Watergate is even mentioned. He did inherit a truly awful situation in regards to foreign policy, but, then again, if he and Kissinger really did sabotage the Paris talks during the '68 campaign, and thus prevented the same settlement in'73 form occurring 4 years earlier, that is about as bad as it gets. I'm unsure if this is the case, however.
Carter wasn't a good President, but he did have really lousy luck in regards to oil prices, albeit with the aid of a clueless policy regarding Iran, before and after the Shah was removed. Like Reagan, however, the Soviet Empire was the primary foreign policy issue of the day, and Carter did take power right after the U.S, military had reached it's post-war low point. To his credit, Carter did name Volcker Fed Chief (btw, one of the best things Reagan did was not apply any political pressure to Volcker, when the Fed Chairman was prescribing some very bitter medicine indeed), started the trend towards degulation, and did begin to help the military recover.
Clinton's Presidency, I think will be in the future be seen as one of lost opportunity. He inherited the office in about the most favorable conditions of any President in the 20th century, and while he didn't screw anything up domestically (which is not an achivement to be underrated) his inattention and timidity, internationally, to the most pressing issue of his time in office, how the internal politics of the Persian Gulf and wider Middle East were expressed globally, proved to be very costly. Domestically, there was a real opportunity to do something useful regarding a trend that all prosperous western democracies face, the tendency to become gerontocracies, where the interests of the young are given short shrift, due to the politically powerful elderly and late middle-aged. A shame, really, but, again, one shouldn't underrate the accomplishment of not fouling things up terribly.
This post is entirely too long, but, in closing, one shouldn't overlook what a truly awful President Woodrow Wilson was.
