President Jimmy Carter’s disastrous foreign policy resulted in the anti-American Ayatollah Khomeini taking power in Iran, and resulted in a violent anti-white Marxist ousting an elected black prime minister in Zimbabwe. That’s something to keep in mind as President Biden honors Jimmy Carter today, ahead of Carter’s 100th birthday on Tuesday.
Axios reports: “President Biden applauded his ‘good friend,’ former President Jimmy Carter, in a message released Sunday — two days before the longest-living U.S. president will celebrate his 100th birthday…’Mr. President, you’ve always been a moral force for our nation and the world…’ Biden said in a message first shared on CBS’ ‘Sunday Morning.'”
A Daily Caller article notes that
Carter’s disastrous policies brought to power an oppressive, anti-American regime in Iran that has killed hundreds of Americans, in addition to killing over 100,000 of its own people — massacring 30,000 political prisoners in 1988 alone…Carter’s disastrous empowerment of Iranian Islamists [is] arguably the most self-destructive presidential decision of the past half-century… The Islamic “Republic” and its proxies have by now killed U.S. servicemembers and citizens by the hundreds, sown regional chaos, destabilized our allies, tyrannically subjugated its own citizens and aligned itself with China and Russia. Of the numerous Mideast crises, few are without Iranian fingerprints….
Iran had been ruled for decades by the Shah when Carter’s term began in 1977. A staunchly anti-communist, anti-Islamist ruler, the Shah…was a steadfast U.S. ally and enemy of the Soviet Union with a powerful U.S.-equipped military….as Islamist anti-Shah protests came to a boil, Carter facilitated the ascent to power of the Shah’s uber-Islamist antagonist, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a man with deadly designs on Israel and the West.
That was no innocent miscalculation: the Carter administration was hardly oblivious to what Khomeinism meant for … the United States….Weeks before Carter green-lighted Khomeini’s triumphant return to Iran, the CIA had translated Khomeini’s most recent work….Any other president in Israel’s first 60 years would have balked at Khomeini’s overt jihadism…Any president would have sought to stop the ominous rise of so obvious a threat to American interests and regional allies, and recognized the implications of empowering Islamists who considered Israel only the “Little Satan” — but America their “Great Satan.”
But Carter was not just any president. In spite of that knowledge, Carter and his team publicly touted Khomeini as a harmless, simple, religiously inspiring figure. “Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint,” proclaimed Andrew Young, Carter’s ambassador to the UN; Khomeini is a “Gandhi-like figure,” announced William Sullivan, Carter’s U.S. Ambassador to Iran; Khomeini was a “holy man of impeccable integrity and honesty,” declared advisor James Bill. A 2016 BBC Report on declassified State Department cables revealed Carter’s invaluable assistance to Khomeini. Carter defused opposition from Iran’s powerful, Western-aligned military, still loyal to the Shah and his prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, thus ensuring that there would be no military overthrow of Khomeini.
Jimmy Carter’s policies caused more deaths and suffering in the African nation of Zimbabwe. Due to Carter’s meddling, Zimbabwe — which was once a prosperous food exporter — became a hungry, repressive one-party state, resulting in countless deaths from malnutrition, cholera, and massacres by the government.
Carter used U.S. sanctions to force Zimbabwe to replace its freely-elected leader — the moderate black bishop Abel Muzorewa — with the black Marxist insurgent leader Robert Mugabe, who later seized Zimbabwe’s white-owned farms, resulting in the collapse of Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector.
Carter was angry over the fact that the elections that Bishop Muzorewa won were held by the former white-run government of Zimbabwe, even though international observers characterized the elections that Muzorewa won as free and fair and not the result of meddling by Zimbabwe’s white minority government. So Carter used sanctions to pressure Zimbabwe into letting Mugabe take power.
After taking power, Mugabe blocked “international assistance to his malnourished subjects, who” were “dying in droves in a cholera epidemic that Mugabe… concealed.” As discussed back in 2008, Jimmy Carter
paved the way for Mugabe’s blood-soaked dictatorship, which turned Zimbabwe, once a prosperous breadbasket, into one of the world’s poorest and hungriest countries. Dissidents’ wives and children are tortured and murdered, orphans are beaten, schools are turned into torture chambers, aid agencies that once fed thousands of starving people were kicked out of the country, and a cholera epidemic rages across the country, where life expectancy has plunged from around 60 years to less than 40.
When Zimbabwean voters overwhelmingly elected a racial-reconciliation government headed by the black bishop Abel Muzorewa in 1979, to replace the white-only regime that had governed the country, the U.S. Senate unanimously voted to recommend an end to international sanctions against the new government, which was starved of funds and facing a bloody guerilla war led by Marxists like Mugabe, who was supported by North Korea. Carter ignored the vote, maintained sanctions against the new government, and supported Mugabe. His U.N. Ambassador, Andrew Young, effusively praised Mugabe, who had killed people simply for voting, saying that the only thing that bothered him about Mugabe was that he was “so damn incorruptible.”
Aided by U.S. sanctions, Mugabe soon took over the country, jailing Bishop Muzorewa. His North Korean-trained security forces then killed perhaps 25,000 members of the minority Ndebele tribe, forcing torture victims to sing praises to Mugabe even as they were savagely tortured, and forcing people to torture their own family members, sometimes to death. Guilty white liberals, who had lionized Mugabe as a saintly opponent of racism and representative of black Zimbabweans, did not know what to make of this, and either remained silent, or kept praising him. Mugabe’s government received billions of dollars in aid, which finally stopped after Mugabe destroyed his country’s economy by seizing the country’s white-owned commercial farms and giving them to his incompetent political cronies. More recently, Mugabe so mismanaged his country’s crumbling economy and infrastructure that an easily-preventable cholera epidemic broke out, killing thousands.
During his presidency, Carter was blind to Mugabe’s faults because he saw Mugabe through a prism of racial guilt, seeing a Third-World post-colonial conflict as a reenactment of the U.S. civil-rights movement.
