Its been said numerous times, and today's
WaPo front page story, as pointed out by
zenbowl, just furthers the point: our intervention in the region has always backfired. What got my goat and finally led me to post this, my first diary entry (applologies for any rookie mistakes), are the confluence of recent harsh criticisms of President Carter and some comments my Dad made to me when discussing Carter and his delaing with the Iran hostage crisis.
More below.
First, a friend sends me a link to something called
Jimmy Carter - Dhimwit of the Month. Next, my Limbot father forwards an email to me about a trip my uncle made last week to Plains, GA to see Carter teach a Sunday school class. (My uncle doesn't much agree with my political leanings, but he's battling brain cancer and seems to be discovering a deeper side of his religious life.) Of course, Dad couldn't pass up the opportunity to bash Carter for "leaving the hostages over there and refusing to let the military act". I'm pissed off.
My friend's signature tag line is to quote Reagan: "If history teaches us anything, it teaches simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom." - "Seeds of an Idea" Ronald Reagan (March 1983). Well, that's just dandy if one was solely focused on the Soviet Union, but Carter seems to have been the one President that actually to understood the implications of interference in the region...
Consider:
In the Iran/Iraq war, Reagan supported Saddam, supplying weapons and intelligence resources. Except, uh, well he also sorta supported Iran, because at the same time he was secretly selling arms to them - first via Israel, then directly. Lovely, he managed to help arm both of those now problematic nations and keep both Saddam's and the Ayatollah's regimes in power after what amounted to basically a draw in the war. Double your pleasure, double your fun?
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Ronnie trained and funded the Mujahideen (remember them, that's where BinLaden learned his tools of the trade?). Of course, after the Soviets pulled out, Reagan lost interest in the Afghans (maybe he was too occupied with the Contras... he was never know for great powers of concentration) and any idea of actually helping them rebuild their nation. The resulting poverty and discontent of course lead to the rise of the Taliban. So, now we're three for three on the region's trouble spots, aren't we, having armed them all, but gaining nothing for the effort but the instability we now face?
Idiots like the author of the "Dhimwit" piece would be the worst kind of historical revisionists. Without getting into comparing the personal character of Carter as opposed to, say, W (a successfull peanut farmer v. many-times-over failed oilman... a respected humanitarian and Navy veteran v. recovering drunk, druggie and awol TANG golden boy), we can take a few lessons from how he handled the region.
People say, "Carter didn't prevent the Shah's overthrow!" Damn straight - what would that have garnered us? The man knew better than to involve us militarily in the internal turmoil of a volatile mideast state and was willing to wait it out and deal with whomever emerged in power, as evidenced by his attempts to negotiate with the new Iranian government (remember: it was student radicals, not the Iranian government that took the hostages), which ultimately - and let's not lose sight of this - bore fruit with the release of the hostages. He didn't pay them, send them arms or otherwise coddle them. The fact that they were released on the day of Reagan's innauguration means one of two things: either Carter was ultimately successful in getting them home, or the "kitchen cabinet" consipiracy theories are correct and Reagan staged it. I'm more inclined to lean away from theories that require a tinfoil hat.
Here's what we should have learned from the past - and perhaps Carter knew - and which is woefully lacking in Bushworld. The region is hopelessly unsettled and always will be. It is tribal in nature before any political or national interests will ever enter into consideration. Involving the US militarily - in action or support - is always a huge mistake, as we will invariably suffer for the efforts; the people of the region will welcome our assistance, but hold no allegiance to us once their short-term goals are met. They don't want us there - period. If we help one faction, the other is going to redouble their effort to get back at us. These are people who hold grudges a long, long time.
Reagan played all sides of the issues, allowing Saddam, the Ayatollah and the Taliban all to rise to or retain power. George I rightly kicked Saddam out of Kuwait, but encouraged a revolution and promptly abandoned those he egged on to suffer some of the most heinous of Saddam's attrocities (which are now being used to help justify our current campaign - how convenient). Clinton dropped lollipops on old AQ training camps and an aspirin factory. Now, GWB has so firmly entrenched us in between the Shia and Sunni factions in Iraq, abandoned the Afghans so that there is more heroin than ever coming out of there and put all of his eggs in one basket thusly neglecting Iran and N Korea, that we are now at a point where nobody has a clue what to do about any of it.
My prediction is that he will pull out and leave them to their own devices, same as Reagan did in Afghanistan and Bush I did after Desert Storm, which could and would have happened eventually with or without our involvement. We've "liberated" 50 million people only to empower them to kill each other off in acts of genocide (and here I thought we were supposed to try and prevent genocide). And, we're going to be the worse off for it.
Iraq has a polulation less than that of California. If there were daily murders of groups of 20 to 50 people in Califonia, we might well not consider it a civil war, but I hardly think we'd be saying - as Gen. Pace said - that things are going really really well. Pretty soon, we're going to need to start asking that question again - the one Hannity has suddenly stopped confronting his lib callers with - "Is the world better off without Saddam?" The way things are going, the answer is a resounding NO.
Putting it in language Carter might have used, don't get between two fightin' dogs or you're gonna get bit. Yeah, the hostage crisis sucked. But they all came home, didn't they? He did try to send in a couple of quick-strike resuce teams, but you know what: sandstorms happen... If there had been an all-out military attack, there is absolutely no guarantee that every last one of those hostages wouldn't have ended up dead rather than eventually back home on American soil. That's a lot more than you can say for 2,500 American troops engaged in an insane whatever-it-is in Iraq.
Carter stayed out of the Shah's overthrow and was unwilling to negotiate with the hostage-takers. Reagan sent arms to Iran in an atempt to gain help in getting hostages in Lebanon released (which, btw, didn't happen). I wonder which has more emboldened the current crop of a-holes taking hostages in Iraq, the guy who didn't give them a dime or the one who helped the Ayatollahs arm themselves? To my mind, you can lay a large chunk of the blame for the barbarious beheadings at the feet of Reagan and any of his coconspirators who shipped arms to Iran.
Carter may have been naiive in trying to broker any deal involving Arafat with Israel, but he knew better than to intervene militarily in a region where the camel-traders would just as soon see you die as not once you bought the beast.