Joshua Muravchik: Our Worst Ex-President (Jimmy Carter)
[Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a veteran contributor to Commentary.]
... Few men who are called to politics suffer defeat gladly, and Carter was certainly not one of the exceptions. The last election he had lost was his first run for governor of Georgia, and it deeply shook him; as he would later relate, it was in the course of struggling to right his mood afterward that he experienced the epiphany of being born again. The loss this time was even more devastating. In 1966 he had been a forty-one-year-old politician who knew he could try again. But now he had already reached the pinnacle, only to be found wanting. The political process offered little prospect of redemption.
Nonetheless, he has striven for it mightily ever since. The effort began in the early years of his post-presidency with highly publicized activity aimed at reestablishing his credentials as a man of piety. Enrolling as a volunteer with the group Habitat for Humanity, he posed for news photos hammering nails into the timbers of homes being built for the needy. Political coloration seeped into this mission only when it took him to Communist-ruled Nicaragua, where he posed with the Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega.
Carter was not content, however, with doing good works. In 1982 he oversaw the founding of the Carter Center at Emory University, which he still heads with the assistance of his wife Rosalynn. Although it employs some academics, the center is devoted not to scholarship but to activism. Its declared purpose is “to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health.” It provides the institutional support necessary for Carter to carve out a permanent albeit unofficial role for himself in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.
Some of the center’s activity has been non-controversial—like its missions, usually led by Carter in person, to monitor elections in countries where democracy is not yet firm. But other aspects—notably, Carter’s frequent pronouncements on issues of the day and his free-lance diplomacy—have had a much sharper edge. He has injected himself into several foreign crises, sometimes with the grudging acquiescence of existing U.S. administrations but sometimes in open defiance of them.
One remarkable instance grew out of Carter’s strong opposition to the use of force to reverse the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Not satisfied with issuing a torrent of statements and articles, he dispatched a letter to the heads of state of members of the United Nations Security Council and several other governments urging them to oppose the American request for UN authorization of military action. In this letter, writes Carter’s admiring biographer Douglas Brinkley, he
urged these influential world leaders to abandon U.S. leadership and instead give “unequivocal support to an Arab League effort, without any restraints on their agenda.” If this were allowed to occur, Carter believed, an Arab solution would not only force Iraq to leave Kuwait but at long last also force Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
The U.S. government under President George H.W. Bush learned of Carter’s missive only from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada. Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s National Security Adviser, called it “unbelievable” that Carter would “ask . . . the other members of the Council to vote against his own country. . . . [I]f there was ever a violation of the Logan Act prohibiting diplomacy by private citizens, this was it.” Later, Carter justified his action by noting that he had sent the letter to President Bush, too—as if this disposed of Scowcroft’s point. And even that was only a half-truth. As Brinkley reports, the copy to Bush was dated a day after the letter was sent to the others.
Despite Carter’s appeal, the Security Council voted 12-2 to authorize military action, with only Cuba and Yemen taking Carter’s side. But this was not the end of the ex-President’s efforts. Just days before the announced deadline for Iraq to withdrawal from Kuwait, Carter wrote to the rulers of America’s three most important Arab allies in the crisis—Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia—imploring them to break with Washington: “I urge you to call publicly for a delay in the use of force while Arab leaders seek a peaceful solution to the crisis. You may have to forgo approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets, and others fully supportive.” This time, he did not share a copy of his appeal with his own government even after the fact.
Why, one may ask, was Carter so adamant on the point of “an Arab solution”? After all, the so-called “Carter doctrine,” which he had laid down in his 1980 State of the Union address in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, explicitly threatened war in circumstances similar to those created by Saddam’s naked aggression in the Persian Gulf. What, then, led him to take a different tack in this instance? Brinkley’s gloss supplies a possible answer. It appears that Carter saw the fruits of Saddam’s aggression as providing valuable leverage against Israel that he did not want to see squandered. Why he might have been thinking in such terms is a subject to which we shall return....
Read entire article at Commentary
... Few men who are called to politics suffer defeat gladly, and Carter was certainly not one of the exceptions. The last election he had lost was his first run for governor of Georgia, and it deeply shook him; as he would later relate, it was in the course of struggling to right his mood afterward that he experienced the epiphany of being born again. The loss this time was even more devastating. In 1966 he had been a forty-one-year-old politician who knew he could try again. But now he had already reached the pinnacle, only to be found wanting. The political process offered little prospect of redemption.
Nonetheless, he has striven for it mightily ever since. The effort began in the early years of his post-presidency with highly publicized activity aimed at reestablishing his credentials as a man of piety. Enrolling as a volunteer with the group Habitat for Humanity, he posed for news photos hammering nails into the timbers of homes being built for the needy. Political coloration seeped into this mission only when it took him to Communist-ruled Nicaragua, where he posed with the Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega.
Carter was not content, however, with doing good works. In 1982 he oversaw the founding of the Carter Center at Emory University, which he still heads with the assistance of his wife Rosalynn. Although it employs some academics, the center is devoted not to scholarship but to activism. Its declared purpose is “to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health.” It provides the institutional support necessary for Carter to carve out a permanent albeit unofficial role for himself in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.
Some of the center’s activity has been non-controversial—like its missions, usually led by Carter in person, to monitor elections in countries where democracy is not yet firm. But other aspects—notably, Carter’s frequent pronouncements on issues of the day and his free-lance diplomacy—have had a much sharper edge. He has injected himself into several foreign crises, sometimes with the grudging acquiescence of existing U.S. administrations but sometimes in open defiance of them.
One remarkable instance grew out of Carter’s strong opposition to the use of force to reverse the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Not satisfied with issuing a torrent of statements and articles, he dispatched a letter to the heads of state of members of the United Nations Security Council and several other governments urging them to oppose the American request for UN authorization of military action. In this letter, writes Carter’s admiring biographer Douglas Brinkley, he
urged these influential world leaders to abandon U.S. leadership and instead give “unequivocal support to an Arab League effort, without any restraints on their agenda.” If this were allowed to occur, Carter believed, an Arab solution would not only force Iraq to leave Kuwait but at long last also force Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
The U.S. government under President George H.W. Bush learned of Carter’s missive only from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada. Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s National Security Adviser, called it “unbelievable” that Carter would “ask . . . the other members of the Council to vote against his own country. . . . [I]f there was ever a violation of the Logan Act prohibiting diplomacy by private citizens, this was it.” Later, Carter justified his action by noting that he had sent the letter to President Bush, too—as if this disposed of Scowcroft’s point. And even that was only a half-truth. As Brinkley reports, the copy to Bush was dated a day after the letter was sent to the others.
Despite Carter’s appeal, the Security Council voted 12-2 to authorize military action, with only Cuba and Yemen taking Carter’s side. But this was not the end of the ex-President’s efforts. Just days before the announced deadline for Iraq to withdrawal from Kuwait, Carter wrote to the rulers of America’s three most important Arab allies in the crisis—Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia—imploring them to break with Washington: “I urge you to call publicly for a delay in the use of force while Arab leaders seek a peaceful solution to the crisis. You may have to forgo approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets, and others fully supportive.” This time, he did not share a copy of his appeal with his own government even after the fact.
Why, one may ask, was Carter so adamant on the point of “an Arab solution”? After all, the so-called “Carter doctrine,” which he had laid down in his 1980 State of the Union address in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, explicitly threatened war in circumstances similar to those created by Saddam’s naked aggression in the Persian Gulf. What, then, led him to take a different tack in this instance? Brinkley’s gloss supplies a possible answer. It appears that Carter saw the fruits of Saddam’s aggression as providing valuable leverage against Israel that he did not want to see squandered. Why he might have been thinking in such terms is a subject to which we shall return....
There is little doubt, in sum, that the electorate was right in 1980 when it judged Carter to have been among our worst Presidents. It is even more certain that history will judge him to have been our very worst ex-President.