When Jimmy Carter Lied to Me (Twice) and the Weaponization of Most Everything

The policies of his presidency, from Iran, Camp David, "Carter Doctrine" to Afghanistan highlight the trajectory of US Empire, capable of instrumentalizing "human rights" and even "peacemaking".

[I wrote this piece a while ago and was looking to hold off on publishing it until Jimmy Carter was back in the news. But, upon reflection, with the presidential election obsession already upon us, I think it’s important to put it out as soon as possible. It shows how the establishment instrumentalizes every president. The minimal good that presidents do is largely symbolic or temporary, from Carter’s solar panels on the White House to Obama’s pause on funding the creation of potential pandemic pathogens lab work or the Iran deal. The big things they do, such as invasions, military programs, Wall Street giveaways, have a permanent effect. Whatever their “brand” or stated goal is, it’s used by the establishment for ultimately Machiavellian purposes. “America First” could have been a good thing. Feminism, nonproliferation, human rights, gay rights have all been weaponized. And, as part of this piece shows, even “peacemaking” has been weaponized. Each president therefore becomes an opportunity for the establishment, and a facilitation of its hypocrisies. Thus, anyone who is looking for positive change must in my view instrumentalize a candidate. Don’t be for or against anyone. Don’t personalize. What specifically do you want out of them? I addressed this regarding the current election in my last posting.] 

Much good will likely be spoken about Jimmy Carter in the coming weeks and perhaps months as he is in hospice care. And in some respects, he was arguably a better president — and post-president — than most. Unlike most recent presidents, he didn’t outright start a war. But that's a remarkably low bar. Even worse, his image may well be used to redeem the irredeemable.

Alternatively, Carter may be subjected to skewed attacks for his mild criticism of Israel, as was Archbishop Desmond Tutu when he died.

But it’s important to look at many of the policies Carter enacted or allowed to be enacted with clear eyes.

One aspect of the Carter presidency — his backing the Indonesian invasion of East Timor — is fairly well understood at least in parts of the US left because of the work of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, see Wade Frazier’s page on their work on East Timor and Carter’s general hypocrisy on “human rights” in Central America and elsewhere. But several critical aspects are less well known.

“Not up to the US government to announce another country” has nukes

I questioned Carter once, asking one of my go-to questions. In April 2007 I rather gingerly asked the former president at the National Press Club about why no administration, including his own, would acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons. He responded: “When I was president, I did not comment on Israel’s nuclear arsenal. But it’s generally known throughout the diplomatic and scientific world that Israel does have [a] substantial arsenal.... I don’t think it’s up to the U.S. government, president or officials to announce that another country does indeed have or have not nuclear arsenal if they themselves don’t acknowledge it....

"But the other nuclear powers, including India and Pakistan, now and the five original ones announced it themselves."

I didn’t realized it at the time, but that totally twisted the actual record. Before Pakistan announced it had nuclear weapons, Carter himself cut off aid to that country because of its nuclear program. In April of 1979, the New York Times reported: "Intelligence reports indicating that Pakistan is acquiring the ability to make nuclear weapons led the Carter Administration today to cut off economic and military assistance." 

But no such cutoff was made to Israel, which has gotten hundreds of billions of dollars. See my recent questioning at the State Department on this issue as well as the piece: "The Ostrich Caucus: Why won't members of Congress just say it: Israel has nukes?" 

Moreover, in 2019, Foreign Policy published an in-depth report "Forty years ago, a U.S. satellite detected the telltale signs of a nuclear explosion.... evidence today points to a clandestine nuclear test, a Carter administration cover-up, and only one country that was willing and able to carry it out: Israel.” The operation was apparently a joint one between Israel and apartheid South Africa.

I also asked, "have you had any contact with Mordechai Vanunu, the whistleblower who brought to light the extent of the Israeli nuclear weapons program?" Vanunu ended up spending years in solitary confinement for the crime of telling the truth.

To that Carter simply responded: "I'm not acquainted with Mordechai's position."

Unknown to me at the time, Carter actually shook hands with Vanunu in 2006, the year before, as reported by Delinda Hanley of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. One might have thought that the Sunday school teacher would have taken the convert to Christianity under his wing and publicly worked to help Vanunu get out of Israel as he has long pleaded. One would be wrong. 

So, in the span of two minutes, Carter basically lied to me twice, which, I should add, is less than many political figures I’ve questioned.

Camp David: “Isolate Egypt from its Arab milieu” and the rise of Saddam

The Camp David agreements are often heralded as a great achievement. But as the late Patrick Seale wrote in 2011 in Foreign Policy, it was largely a great gift to Israel: “The future of the (de)stabilizing Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty“: "By removing Egypt — the strongest and most populous of the Arab countries — from the Arab line-up, the treaty ruled out any possibility of an Arab coalition that might have contained Israel or restrained its freedom of action. As Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan remarked at the time: 'If a wheel is removed, the car will not run again.'"

Moreover, the late Eqbal Ahmad stated in 1990 (at an event I attended) that Camp David effectively led to the Iraq invasion of Kuwait and the ultimate destruction of Iraq. "There has been nothing (that I have seen) in the media about what compels Saddam Hussein’s extraordinary ambitions. … What has suddenly in 1990 compelled his ambition, that requires 350,000 American troops to control? What did it? No one has named the Camp David Accords. And Saddam Hussein’s ambitions are directly attributable to the Camp David Accords.... The Camp David Accords’ supreme achievement was to isolate Egypt from its Arab milieu.... There would be a political vacuum in the Middle East after Camp David. And smaller players -- like Syria and Iraq -- would love, would aim at, would have the ambition, to fill that vacuum." 

Ahmad also noted that Carter assured Egyptian leader Sadat that Israel would stop building colonial settlements on the West Bank when Israel leader Menachem Begin would not put such written assurance into Camp David. "Carter weighs in and says, 'You must understand Begin’s difficult position. I give you guarantee that there will be no settlements.'" This obviously proved worthless.

Still, Carter wrote the book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (perhaps to assuage his guilt), which was widely attacked, as was his meeting with officials from Hamas, putting himself well outside current acceptable US discourse in Congress and elsewhere.

I’ve grown to see that the Empire uses good things for its own purposes over and over: feminism to invade Afghanistan, human rights to bomb Yugoslavia and Libya, public health to illegitimately control people during a pandemic, gay rights and trans rights to demonize Russia. The case of Carter here shows that even peacemaking has been instrumentalized for insidious purposes.

Afghanistan: “Induce a Soviet military intervention” 

Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski would boast about getting Carter to sign the first directive for secret aid to forces in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet-backed government on July 3, 1979. "And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." That intervention came in December 1979. Ronald Reagan and Charlie Wilson would be associated with the policy in the public mind, but its origins are with Carter and Brzezinski.

It effectively weaponized “freedom” — with Ronald Reagan eventually calling the mujahideen “freedom fighters”.

Brzezinski’s triumph would give rise to whole clique of interventionists, most notably Madeleine Albright, who lead the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, which juiced up NATO and led to the rise of Putin. See my piece “Albright's Funeral -- The Sword and the Cross Come Together.” Her professional descendants currently inhabit many of the mechanisms of US government power.

George Kennan would argue that “The pretext offered [for the invasion] was an insult to the intelligence of even the most credulous of Moscow’s followers” — Kennan insisted that the action reflected “defensive rather than offensive [Soviet] impulses.” Afghanistan, he emphasized, was “a border country of the Soviet Union,” and it represented a natural security concern for the Soviets. Scholar David Gibbs largely supports Kennan’s views in an in-depth examination of Soviet motives.

All this was arguably a prequel to the US provoking the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

Carter would also refuse to send a US team to Moscow for the 1980 Olympics, effectively turning the ancient Olympic Truce on its head.

Carter Doctrine: Military commitment to the Mideast

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in turn provided a pretext for the “Carter Doctrine” which was written by Brzezinski and articulated by Carter in his State of the Union address in early 1980:

Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

This was the first clear commitment of US military power in the region.

In what is sometimes referred to as the "Reagan Corollary to the Carter Doctrine" the US government extended this to guarantee “both the territorial integrity and internal stability of Saudi Arabia” as William Safire wrote in 1981.

It’s notable that when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990, the US government claimed there was an Iraqi army massing to move into Saudi Arabia. This effectively served as part of the initial pretext for US action. Noam Chomsky, in a rare appearance in US media, claimed on PBS that Saddam Hussein could have been poised to commit “further aggression”. But when the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) obtained commercial satellite photos, they showed no such buildup. And in interviews I’ve seen with Tariq Aziz, he states that Saddam dismissed out of hand the possibility of attacking Saudi Arabia.

Carter also created the Rapid Deployment Force. By 1983 the Reagan administration would escalate the RDF into creating CENTCOM, which would be the instrument for direct US military aggression throughout the region including Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and to threaten Iran.

Truth for Hostages

What overshadowed much of Carter's presidency, effectively destroying it, was the Iranian hostage crisis. His Secretary of State, Cyrus R. Vance, would resign over Carter’s decision to try a failed military operation to get the hostages out.

It’s little known that there were other apparent solutions.

James Abourezk presenting Jimmy Carter a pair of Cuban cigars in the Oval Office in 1977, which were illegal in the US at the time. George McGovern, who went to Cuba with Abourezk, looks on.

Sen. James Abourezk, who died earlier this year, effectively argued that Carter destroyed his presidency because he didn't want to hold hearings about US support for tyrannical Shah, telling C-SPAN’s “Book TV” in a 1990 interview:  

I was actually general counsel for the government of Iran here in Washington at that time, for the embassy here in Washington. It was about two weeks after the embassy was taken over, I decided I'd go over and try to obtain the release of the hostages. So I went over and I negotiated with [Abolhassan] Banisadr, who was then chairman of the Revolutionary Council. And I worked out a deal with him. I -- what the Iranians wanted was to air their grievances against the United States, of which they had many at that time, by the way. You know, we had supported the Shah while he was torturing and killing Iranian citizens. They had found, by the way, in the basement of the American Embassy a CIA counterfeiting operation, counterfeiting [Iranian] money. …

They were very upset about that.… And so anyhow, I -- knowing this -- I said to Banisadr, "Look, if you want to air your grievances, I think, in return for the release of the hostages, that I can get the US Senate to hold big publicized hearings allowing you to do just that." Well, we worked out a deal. It'd be a three-step deal, where we would announce the hearings, he would release the hostages and then we would have the hearings. And he said, "All right. You take that to the Senate and I'll take it to the Revolutionary Council. We'll try to work it through."

So I called Senator Byrd, who was of West Virginia, who was majority leader, and proposed it to him. I called him from Iran. Then when I got back from Iran, I called him up and he said, "Well, the administration is opposed to that kind of a thing." Because Jimmy Carter at that time was standing tough. He was trying to look like he didn't want to negotiate.

Apparently, when this deal was floated, the “hostage crisis” was actually working in Carter’s favor. At the time, Carter was being challenged for the Democratic nomination by Ted Kennedy and Abourezk was backing Kennedy. The public was initially rallying behind the incumbent because of the crisis in Iran. So Carter persuade a “Rose Garden strategy”.

Carter also wouldn’t attack the Shah. Abourezk would later recount of Kennedy: “He had just finished making a statement about the shah being a jerk,” and then “Carter and his minions came down on him.” (Abourezk would initially recount this in 1986 after the congressional campaign of Rep. Joe Kennedy, the eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy, returned a $100 check from Abourezk.)

Apparently along similar lines, Phillip Agee, author of Inside the Company: A CIA Diary, proposed resolving the Iranian crisis by exchanging CIA files on Iran for the release of the hostages. The “dove” Vance then incredibly revoked Agee’s passport.

Thus, Carter seems to have squashed a Senate inquiry regarding US policy on Iran which could have resolved the festering crisis, saved Carter’s presidency, shown the US could admit to wrong doing and chart a peaceful future. (Another dimension to this is why the Senate should take its orders from the White House on such a matter.)

Instead, the hostages would be released just minutes after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. In 2011, Carter would say he still hadn't made up his mind about long-standing suspicions that Republicans went behind his back in 1980 to stop him from freeing 52 American hostages in Iran. But Robert Parry would argue that there is a wealth of historical evidence.

I’ve grown to see the US establishment as an Empire. And it uses presidents of different stripes to fulfill its ends at different times, weaponizing their attributes for various purposes. This goes for ostensible “America Firsters” like Trump, outright warmongers like the Bushes — and alleged humanitarians like Carter.