|
|
Home | Notes
Contributors
Archives | Search
Links | About
..........
Julia Gorin
  The America Show
Episode 4
Jesus and Mordy
Watch Video Now
..........
Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco
by Burt Prelutsky
.........
America Alone
by Mark Steyn
..........
..........
The
CRO Store
..........
..........
|
|
| CUCULLU |
Carter
Off The Rails – Again
by Gordon
Cucullu 9/19/06 |
“You
may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Leon
Trotsky
In a stunning
interview given by former President Jimmy Carter to Der Speigel
magazine the world was once again exposed to the embarrassing
spectacle of a man who once led the free world reduced to disjointed,
illogical, bitter rambling. If there are such critters as historical
psychiatrists I would leave it to them to analyze and dissect
the anger that seems to posses the man. Meanwhile, we have
to deal with the fact that once he put down his Habitat for
Humanity hammer and began to yap about world affairs he has
been a train wreck. It is almost as if he has internalized
his failed policies enacted while president and morphed them
into a philosophy of life, a credo by which he defines all
behavior and pronouncements.
Contributor
Gordon Cucullu
Former
Green Beret lieutenant colonel, Gordon Cucullu is
now an editorialist, author and a popular speaker.
Born into a military family, he lived and served
for more than thirteen years in East Asia, including
eight years in Korea. For his Special Forces service
in Vietnam he was awarded a Bronze Star, Vietnamese
Cross of Gallantry, and the Presidential Unit Commendation.
After separation from the Army, he worked on Korea
and East Asian affairs at both the Pentagon and Department
of State as well as an executive for General Electric
in Korea. His first major non-fiction work, Separated
at Birth: How North Korea became the Evil Twin,
is based in large part on his extensive experience
in Korea and East Asia as a governmental insider
and businessman. [website]
[go to Cucullu index]
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
At root his
ideology seems bizarre: an anti-democratic, anti-American advocacy
for any individual tyrant or repressive
movement regardless
of brutality. North Korean dictators, Iranian theocrats, thuggish
autocrats like Castro and Chavez, and blood thirsty terrorists – Carter
seems to love them all. This from a man who in 1976, as an avowed
liberal, ran on a platform of America supporting human rights
for the world. That, again, is an issue for skilled analysts
to address, but perhaps as P.J. O’Rouke notes, “it
takes a serious therapy to be a liberal.” At root, it seems,
may be a lack of moral courage. While at times Carter seemed
to assume great moral courage – when he told the Delta
Force commander that he alone was responsible for any failure
of the Eagle Claw mission to free American hostages in Iran,
for example. But he never seemed to have faith in the goodness
of America and the American experience. As a consequence his
self-anointed status as arbiter of the morally correct was severely
undermined by his own lack of personal confidence and confidence
in his country.
When America began to unravel economically he
spoke of a “malaise” that
seeped into our national consciousness, in fact blaming the American
people first. His constant use of moral equivalence was indicative
of his worldview. Carter spared no pains to find an American
fault when discussing our enemies. When the Soviet Union’s
gulag was revealed, Carter’s UN Ambassador Andrew Young
said while traveling abroad in Africa that “America has
political prisoners too.” Carter backed his ambassador’s
egregious statements.
Most revealing of his moral flabbiness was that
whenever he promoted his vaunted “human rights for all the world” campaign
he picked his targets cynically. Walking on eggs around the world’s
most egregious human rights violators, the Soviet Union and the
Peoples Republic of China, Carter instead focused on flawed allies
of America who were “our SOBs” in the Cold War vernacular.
With cold, deliberate actions he destabilized Iran under the
Shah and Nicaragua under Somoza. He came dangerously close to
knocking Park Chung Hee in South Korea which would have provoked
a second Korean War. In no case did he make any attempt to replace
an authoritarian leader with democratic institutions, but rather
cut the incumbent leadership off at the knees and tossed the
remains to whatever revolutionary sharks swam in the water. As
a consequence we saw a quick rise of a radical Islamic mullocracy
in Iran and a communist-led takeover by the Ortega brothers in
Nicaragua.
The damage he did with a “break but don’t fix” policy
was sufficiently severe that we are fighting the results today
in the resurgent communism of Central and South America, and
most tellingly in the war against Islamofascism which gained
a huge amount of credibility by defeating Carter during the Iranian
hostage crisis. Refusing to accept any personal responsibility
for the war that now extends into the 21st century, Carter has
instead inexplicably placed himself on the side of defending
the horrid rogue regimes that sponsor or carry out terrorism
throughout the world. He spares no criticism for America, Israel,
or the UK all of whom are fighting the enemy that his irresponsibility
helped create. In fact, Carter refuses to even acknowledge the
presence of a fight.
He continues to rationalize away any evil done
by America’s
enemies (and in fact, adamantly rejects use the word “evil” unless,
possibly, when applied to George Bush), and minimizes any good
that America does, particularly through force of arms. Most unsettling,
in his Der Speigel interview was the feckless moral equivalency
with which he addressed problems. Never would he even acknowledge
that America was in a war, rather that all our present troubles
are a result of the Bush administration “just refusing
to talk to someone who is in strong disagreement with them.”
This he oddly attributes to Bush’s “fundamentalism” which
Carter speculates means that he “can’t bring himself…to
negotiate…because the process itself is an indication of
implied equality.” In other words, he rejects any of the
months of overtures made directly to Saddam Hussein, through
the UN, or by involved third parties. As David Limbaugh pointed
out, “leave it to [Carter] to believe the worst about ‘fundamentalist’ Christians
and the best of Islamofascist terrorists.” Perhaps it is
part of Carter’s mindset that, as he told the Speigel interviewer, “I
think that most people believe that enough time has passed that
historical facts can be ignored.” Ignoring facts is his
strongest characteristic.
Whenever the interviewer tossed him a softball
to hit, Carter used the opportunity to bash America. Referring
to the “coalition
of the pious” the Speigel interviewer unctuously asker
Carter about the “moral catastrophes like the Iraqi prison
scandal in Abu Ghraib and torture in Guantanamo.” Quite
unsettling was that Carter never challenged this bald lie. Instead
he launched into a rambling attack on the president as a “fundamentalist” and
then justified his comments by equating the Bush administration
through implication with the Islamofascist terrorists worldwide.
Carter is in a position to review classified information on
a range of topics, receive briefings, and participate in official
and unofficial visits if he chooses. Instead he prefers a calculated
stance of feigned ignorance. He could have had access to the
Peers and the Schlesinger reports on Abu Ghraib, both of which
were critical of leadership at the prison. They found that bad
behavior is intolerable and must be punished but does not equate
to torture or reflect national policy. Furthermore, both commented
positively on the highly effective, humane treatment meted out
at Guantanamo. Nor has Carter bothered to visit Guantanamo to
see for himself, preferring to sit within his ideological comfort
zone and shoot barbs at a president who he seems to want to fail
along with American foreign policy.
“Unfortunately after September 11 there was an outburst
in America of intense suffering and patriotism,” Carter
pontificated. Unfortunately there was patriotism? Perhaps we
ought to have engaged in more of Carter’s patented blame-America-first
policies capped by ineffectual negotiations with the killers?
Carter would seem to agree. “You never can be certain in
advance that negations on difficult circumstances will be successful.” [emphasis
added] But that ought not deter us from talking with our killers
because “if you don’t negotiate … your problem
is going to continue and maybe even get worse.” Gee, what
pain we could have saved if we’d just negotiated with Hirohito
after Pearl Harbor. I’ll just bet things would have improved
immediately.
Carter takes pains to identify himself with mainstream
America, at least with the Democrat Party. “I think I represent
the vast majority of Democrats in this country,” he says
with vintage Carter modesty. We assume that he means America,
though the interview was held in Germany. Maybe not. His attitude
and moral stance has more in common with soft-on-terror European-appeasers-in-denial
than it does with Americans who are cognizant of the stakes of
this fight. Those who share his attitude may not be interested
in war with the Islamofascist terrorists. But the terrorists
are definitely interested in war with them.
Tellingly, Carter gets angry not at attacks on
America but on a perceived implication that his failed presidency
was, well,
failed. Reacting to a Speigel comment that his “performance
was often criticized,” Carter angrily reacted. “I
had four years in the White House – it was not a failure.
For someone to serve as president of the United States you can’t
say it is a political failure.” On the contrary we can,
and have, and will continue to recognize failure and call it
by its proper name as long as Jimmy Carter represents the interests
of the enemies of the United States more than those of the country
that once mistakenly chose him as its leader. CRO
copyright
2006 Gordon Cucullu
§
|
|
|
