Jimmy Carter’s Blood-Soaked Legacy
by Matt Peppe / August 17th, 2015

A few days ago former President Jimmy Carter announced that he has cancer and it is spreading. While it would be premature to assume this spells the end for the 90-year-old, it does present an opportunity to take stock of the tenure of a President who, like the current occupant of the White House, entered office with a promise to respect human rights, but failed miserably when given the opportunity to do so.

Carter just last month published a memoir about his “Full Life.” Others have begun to look back at his four years as President. David Macaray, writing in CounterPunch on 8/14/15, noted that despite his reputation as a President so hapless his fellow Democrats tried to knock him off in a primary, “a closer look shows that Carter accomplished some fairly important things during his single term in office – things that, given the near-paralytic gridlock that defines today’s politics, seem all the more impressive in hindsight.”

Macaray lists 10 accomplishments which were, indeed, impressive. Among them were supporting SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitations Talks); brokering the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty through diplomacy at the Camp David Accords; granting amnesty to Vietnam draft-dodgers, and presenting a plan for universal health care.

However, the self-professed advocate for human rights demonstrated quite the penchant for bloodshed. While he didn’t initiate any aggressive invasions of foreign nations the way his predecessors and successors did in Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries, Carter proved remarkably generous at providing financial, military, diplomatic and ideological support for fascist dictatorships that tortured and killed millions of members of their domestic populations in an effort to crush popular movements for social justice. Some of the regimes he backed carried out mass slaughter that amounted to genocide.

“Carter was the least violent of American presidents but he did things which I think would certainly fall under Nuremberg provisions,” said Noam Chomsky. Much like Nobel Peace-prize winner Barack Obama 30 years later, Carter was an advocate of human rights in the abstract, but of repression and imposition of power through violence in practice.

Below are some of Carter’s most shameful and indefensible foreign policy positions that caused monumental levels of death, destruction and suffering for poor, socially disenfranchised people from Asia to Latin America to Africa.

1. Zaire, 1977

After the CIA-sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961, Mobutu Sese Seko ruled as dictator for 16 years – changing the name of the Congo in 1971 to Zaire. In early 1977, rebels fighting with the revolutionary MPLA popular movement in Angola re-entered Zaire to resume their civil war and oust the military strongman. Mobutu sought help from his American and European allies to crush the movement.

William Blum writes in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II that Carter, who had been in office for only two months, was reluctant to involve his administration in a far-reaching intervention whose scope and length could not be easily anticipated.

However, Carter did provide “non-lethal” aid, while he did not protest as European countries offered military aid, and Morocco sent several thousand of its US-trained military forces to aid Mobutu.

“President Carter asserted on more than one occasion that the Zaire crisis was an African problem, best solved by Africans, yet he apparently saw no contradiction to this thesis in his own policy, nor did he offer any criticism of France or Belgium, or of China, which sent Mobutu a substantial amount of military equipment,” writes Blum.1

2. Guatemala, 1977

The Carter administration issued a report critical of the human rights records of the military government and officially cut off aid. However, Blum argues that this was little more than a public relations stunt while tangible support continued:

The embargoes were never meant to be more than partial, and Guatemala also received weapons and military equipment from Israel, at least part of which was covertly underwritten by Washington. As further camouflage, some of the training of Guatemala’s security forces was reportedly maintained by transferring it to clandestine sites in Chile and Argentina.2

Meanwhile, the horrors of a genocidal campaign against the indigenous population continued unabated on Carter’s watch. Death squads were eliminating peasants, labor leaders, human rights activists and clergy. In the countryside, the military would torture and burn alive “subversives,” such as Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú’s own brother.

3. East Timor, 1977

After the democratically-elected President Sukarno of Indonesia was overthrown with the assistance of the CIA in 1967, mass-murderer Suharto assumed power as military dictator and a strong ally of the US government.

In late 1975, Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford gave the green light to Suharto to invade neighboring East Timor. After occupying the capital city Dili, Indonesian troops systematically rooted out resistance by the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETILIN) and the civilian population across the island. Residents of occupied areas were subjected to massive re-education brainwashing campaigns. The death toll from violence by Indonesian forces, malnutrition and disease quickly climbed into the tens of thousands.

The genocidal slaughter reached its peak in 1977. On March 1, 95 members of the Australian Parliament sent a letter to Carter claiming the Indonesian troops were carrying out “atrocities” and asking the American President “to comment publicly on the situation in East Timor.”3

The response was crickets. Carter ramped up aid with funding and weapons to the murderous Indonesian regime, brazenly flaunting the human rights requirements imposed on American aid.

As journalist Richard Dudman reported at the time: “amid all the talks about human rights, the country with perhaps the worst record has been getting increased amounts of economic and military aid from the Carter administration,” which is attributed to the “bonanza enjoyed by American oil companies and multi-national corporations since the present military regime came to power.”4

Precise statistics on the death toll of East Timorese at the hands of the Indonesian forces – who enjoyed the unconditional support of the US government – are hard to come by, but FAIR noted in a 1994 article that “by the time Carter left office, about 200,000 people had been slaughtered.”

4. Angola, 1978

In 1978, the South African Defence Forces (SADF) carried out a massacre against a refugee camp in Cassinga, Angola. SADF bombers dropped bombs over sovereign Angolan territory that killed more than 600 Namibians.

When details of the attack came to light, the U.S. made sure that the racist regime would not face sanctions in the UN Security Council.

Carter took the excuses of the apartheid government at face value: “They’ve claimed to have withdrawn and have not left any South African troops in Angola. So we hope it’s just a transient strike in retaliation, and we hope it’s all over.”

Granting the racist South Africans a blanket diplomatic shield at the UN and allowing them free reign to terrorize their neighboring Southwest African countries at will, while subjecting their own domestic population to the crime against humanity of apartheid, would prolong the suffering of millions of Africans for another 15 years.

Meanwhile, Carter and his administration would continue demanding the immediate exit of the Cuban military from Angola. As many as 30,000 Cuban troops had been stationed in Angola since 1975 to prevent South Africa from toppling the nascent revolutionary MPLA government and installing a puppet regime that, according to historian Piero Gleijeses, “would be the centerpiece of the Constellation of Southern African States that [South Africa] sought to create.” The constellation would be “anticommunist, tolerant of apartheid, and eager to persecute [Nelson Mandela’s] ANC and [Namibian liberation movement] SWAPO.”5

5. Afghanistan, 1979

When the Communist government came to power in 1978, they brought health care and education to a wide segment of the Afghan population. In cities such as Kabul, women enjoyed significant freedom. But this state of affairs was impermissible to the U.S. government, who sought to empower a local opposition and recruit foreign fundamentalist jihadists to join the struggle to topple the Communist regime.

“US foreign service officers had been meeting with Moujahedeen leaders to determine their needs at least as early as April 1979,” writes Blum. “And in July, President Carter had signed a ‘finding’ to aid the rebels covertly, which led to the United States providing them with cash, weapons, equipment and supplies, and engaging in propaganda and other psychological operations in Afghanistan on their behalf.”6

Blum says that intervention by the US and other countries worried Russia about what kind of government would end up on their borders. The Russians, Blum writes, “consistently cited these ‘aggressive imperialist forces’ to rationalize their own intervention in Afghanistan, which was the first time Soviet ground troops had engaged in military action anywhere in the world outside its post-World War II Eastern European borders.”7

Soviet troops would enter Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979. By the time they left in disgrace ten years later, the country was largely reduced to rubble. The devastation was so severe that the Taliban, who managed to displace the barbaric Moujahedeen, were seen by many as liberators.

It would be another 22 years before the U.S. experienced blowback on its home soil, when one of the “Anti-Soviet warriors” they had courted and helped train from Saudi Arabia would mastermind a plot to turn civilian airliners into missiles that were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

6. El Salvador, 1980

On February 19, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero, hugely popular among Salvadorans for his embrace of liberation theology, which sought to improve the socio-economic conditions of oppressed people, sent a letter to Jimmy Carter that is worth quoting at length:

In the last few days news has appeared in the national press that worries me greatly: according to the reports your government is studying the possibility of economic and military support and assistance to the present junta government.

Because you are a Christian and because you have shown that you want to defend human rights I venture to set forth for you my pastoral point of view concerning this news and to make a request.

I am very worried by the news that the government of the United States is studying a form of abetting the arming of El Salvador by sending military teams and advisors to ‘train three Salvadoran batallions in logistics, communications, and intelligence.’ If this information is correct, the contribution of your government instead of promoting greater justice and peace in El Salvador will without doubt sharpen the injustice and repression against the organizations of the people which repeatedly have been struggling to gain respect for their most fundamental human rights.

Romero went on to say that the junta had “reverted to repressive violence producing a total of deaths and injuries much greater than in the recent military regimes whose systematic violation of human rights was denounced by the International Committee on Human Rights.”

“I hope that your religious sentiments and your feelings for the defense of human rights will move you to accept my petition, avoiding by this action worse bloodshed in this suffering country,” Romero pleaded.

Romero’s letter to the President went unanswered. Nine days later, the Archbishop was gunned down at the altar by a death squad assassin while holding the Eucharist above his head. At his funeral, snipers opened fire on defenseless mourners, killing at least 30 people.

Carter responded by sending $5 million in aid to the junta. They would use it to escalate their bloody counter-insurgency campaign. Fueled by American money and arms, the Civil War in El Salvador would rage on for another 12 years. It would reach its horrific culmination with the massacre of six Jesuit scholars, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter in 1989.

Post-Presidency and Legacy

It should be noted that Carter’s actions after leaving the White House have been, by far, the most impressive of any ex-President. Most importantly, he was the first mainstream political figure to call Israel’s policies in the occupied territories Apartheid. This major paradigm shift has paved the way for the mainstream legitimacy of international Palestinian solidarity movements such as BDS to challenge the state of Israel’s crimes.

His Carter Center also has done extensive work studying voting systems and certifying the validity of electoral processes. In 2013, Carter debunked Secretary of State John Kerry’s description of the Venezuelan election of Nicolas Maduro as questionable by stating that the voting was “free and fair.” This was a strong counterweight to American state propaganda, which sought to empower the losing Venezuelan opposition by refusing to grant legitimacy to the socialist, democratically-elected government.

But Carter’s post-Presidency activism cannot bring back to life the millions of people whose lives he was complicit in extinguishing. Carter leaves behind a blood-soaked legacy strongly at odds with the view he evidently held of himself as a human rights champion. The fact that he is probably the least violent of American Presidents is as much an indictment of the American public – among whom he is still perceived as a pacifist – as it is on his murderous presidential peers.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/08/jimmy-carters-blood-soaked-legacy/

The Blood-Soaked Legacy of the Jimmy Carter Administration

Part Two

By Matt Peppe
Global Research, January 12, 2016
Dissident Voice 11 January 2016

Five months ago, I wrote an article titled “Jimmy Carter’s Blood-Soaked Legacy” about how the former President’s record in office contradicted his professed concern for human rights. Despite campaigning on a promise to make respect for human rights a central tenet of the conduct of American foreign policy, Carter’s actions consistently prioritized economic and security interests over humanitarian concerns.

I cited the examples of Carter’s administration providing aid to Zairian dictator Mobutu to crush southern African liberation movements; financially supporting the Guatemalan military junta, and looking the other way as Israel gave them weapons and training; ignoring calls from human rights activists to withdraw support from the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia as they carried out genocide in East Timor; refusing to pursue sanctions against South Africa in the United Nations after the South African Defence Forces bombed a refugee camp in Angola, killing 600 refugees; financing and arming mujahideen rebels to destabilize the government of Afghanistan and draw the Soviet Union into invading the country; and providing aid to the military dictatorship in El Salvador, despite a letter from Archbishop Oscar Romero – who was assassinated by a member of a government death squad weeks later – explicitly calling for Carter not to do so.

This list was not meant to be exhaustive, but merely to highlight some of the most prominent contradictions between Carter’s ideals and his actions. After subsequent research and reader feedback, I realized there were many examples I had not mentioned. Their significance to the history of American foreign policy, and the repercussions they produced, is worth exploring in a subsequent analysis.

Carter announced in early December that he is cancer free. Sadly, that news was followed shortly thereafter by the tragic, premature death of his 28-year-old grandson. But Carter seems to have maintained his positivity. He has kept up his public schedule and says that healthwise he still feels good.

A person’s record and legacy should be debated while they are still alive – rather than after they are gone, when nostalgia or reluctance to speak ill of the dead can easily lead to embellishment and historical revisionism. And a person should be able to defend himself and his actions. Otherwise, it is merely an academic exercise instead of a demand for accountability. In this spirit, I present six more foreign policy positions that demonstrate Carter’s prioritization of American political and economic hegemony over actual support for human rights while he held the highest office in the United States.

Vietnam

Article 21 of the Paris Agreement in 1973 stipulated that:

“the United States will contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and throughout Indochina.”

When asked in 1977 if the United States had a moral obligation to help rebuild Vietnam, Carter responded that:

“The destruction was mutual. You know, we went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people. We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese. And I don’t feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.”

The United States went to Vietnam after they could not convince the French to further continue a war to recolonize Vietnam. The Geneva Accords reached between France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1954 called for a temporary division of Vietnam pending unification, which was to take place after national elections two years later.

In 1955, the Eisenhower administration began granting direct aid and providing American military advisers to the Bao Dai monarchy. Ngo Dinh Diem assumed control later that year through a fraudulent election. Knowing he would be trounced by the Communist party, he declined to participate in reunification elections called for by the peace agreement..

The United States government was indispensable to the survival of the Diem regime – and after complicity in Diem’s assassination, the Theiu regime. They funded and organized the police, military and intelligence services and were complicit in the reign of terror they unleashed on the South Vietnamese. Throughout the military dictatorship, tens of thousands of people were imprisoned without charges or trial; tortured and held in notorious Tiger Cages; assassinated extrajudicially; and displaced forcibly from their homes and transferred to concentration camps as American forces “helped to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese.”

The South Vietnamese people are still suffering from the refusal to grant reparations for the devastation wrought by the U.S. military. More 100,000 Vietnamese have been killed or injured (an average of 2,500 per year) due to land mines and other ordnance dropped on Vietnam that did not explode on impact.

Residents also still suffer the horrific after effects of chemical weapons. The U.S. military sprayed millions of gallons of chemical defoliants, including Agent Orange, throughout South Vietnam. The President’s Cancer Panel in 2010 determined that “(a)pproximately 4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities and a half million children born with birth defects.”

Had Carter not so flippantly dismissed the U.S.’s role in the destruction of Vietnam and recognized its responsibility to uphold their obligation to pay reparations, likely tens of thousands of lives may have been saved with funds that could have been used for demining, and the cleanup and treatment of chemical agents that have gone on spreading the horrors of war for decades after the fighting ended.

Nicaragua

“Carter Must End Aid To Somoza,” proclaimed an editorial in The Harvard Crimson in September 1978. The paper demanded that the U.S. government cut off all forms of aid to the dictatorship of Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza, who was using indiscriminate force to try to crush a popular revolutionary movement to oust him, so the Nicaraguan people could choose their own manner of governance.

William Blum writes in Killing Hope that with the Somoza regime on the verge of collapse, “Carter authorized covert CIA support for the press and labor unions in Nicaragua in an attempt to create a ‘moderate’ alternative to the Sandinistas.” The Carter administration’s plan, according to Blum, was to allow the Somoza regime to take part in a new government, while leaving the state’s military and security institutions largely intact.

The Sandinistas were victorious in July 1981, as Somoza was forced to flee the country in disgrace. They were able to dismantle the dictatorship and create a new revolutionary government.

The meddling and funding for opposition organizations by the Carter administration, however, would pale in comparison to the full-scale terrorism and aggression that would follow under Ronald Reagan, who had by then taken over as President.

Cambodia

Starting in March 1969, President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger waged a massive, secret bombing campaign (Operation Menu) on Cambodia in which the U.S. military was instructed “anything that flies on anything that moves.”

The American aggression likely caused higher than official estimates of 150,000 Cambodian civilian deaths. When the operation was discovered by a Congressional Committee, it was not even included in the impeachment articles against Nixon, much less used as a basis to refer Nixon and Kissinger for prosecution for war crimes.

Radicalized, destitute and shell-shocked by the destruction wrought by the American bombing, Pol Pot and his previously marginal Khmer Rouge were able to rally enough recruits to seize control of the government in 1975.

It is generally accepted that the Khmer Rouge’s massacres in the Killing Fields and drastic measures to create a primitive agrarian society amounted to genocide. On the high end, two million deaths is a common number – though that number has likely been highly inflated for anti-Communist propaganda purposes. The American establishment and media were loudly outspoken against Khmer Rouge atrocities, especially considering the near unanimous silence regarding the nearly simultaneous genocide by the Indonesian military taking place in East Timor.

But, strangely, after a Vietnamese invasion in 1978 ousted them, the Khmer Rouge lost their status as evil Communists, as the official American foreign policy narrative recast them as victims of Vietnamese aggression.

The Carter administration began supporting the Khmer Rouge, who had been relegated to remote rural sections of the country, by financial and diplomatic means. Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski reportedly told an American journalist he “encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot… Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.”

According to columnist William Pfaff, financial support started by the Carter administration and continued by the Reagan administration to the Khmer Rouge totaled more than $15 million annually.

Despite the fact they had been driven from power, with American support the Khmer Rouge managed to maintain their UN seat – as the Carter administration had refused to recognize the government installed after the Vietnamese invasion.

The remnants of the Khmer Rouge fought a guerilla war until Pot’s death in 1998. There is no precise count of the dead and injured that resulted from the fighting so long after the regime was ousted, but it is known that hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from their homes and became refugees.

The Carter administration’s decision to fan the flames of violence for frivolous reasons – mainly to punish Vietnam for their defeat of American forces five years earlier – was a scandalous example of vindictiveness.

South Korea

In December 1979, the South Korean military led by General Chun Doo Hwan led a coup d’ état in which Chun imprisoned potential military rivals and cleared the way to his succession as dictator. On May 17, 1980, Chun declared martial law across the country. The next day, popular protests emerged in the city of Kwangju in opposition.

Chun’s support from the United States would be crucial to maintain legitimacy as he brought in the military to crush the uprising.

“The White House had tacitly shelved President Carter’s human rights campaign in its anxiety that nothing should ‘unravel and cause chaos in a key American ally’,” writes The Guardian.

“It agreed to continue supporting thuggish General Chun Doo Hwan, a major figure behind the coup who was by now imposing stringent military rule.”

Journalist Tim Shorrock studied more than 3,500 documents obtained by FOIA request and determined that more than mere complicity, the Carter administration played a “significant background advisory role in the violent 1980 military crackdown that triggered the May 18 citizens’ uprising.”

William Gleysteen, who Carter had personally appointed ambassador to South Korea, told Chun the U.S. would not object if he were to use the military to quell large-scale student protests.

Shorrock notes that declassified documents show that:

U.S. officials in Seoul and Washington knew Mr. Chun’s contingency plans included deployment of Korean Special Warfare Command troops, trained to fight behind the lines in a war against North Korea. The ‘Black Beret’ Special Forces, who were not under U.S. command, were modeled after the U.S. Green Berets and had a history dating back to their participation alongside American troops in the Vietnam War.

On May 22, Shorrock writes, “the Carter administration approved further use of force to retake the city and agreed to provide short-term support to Mr. Chun if he agreed to long-term political change.”

The Special Warfare troops carried out a massacre in which officially 200 people were killed, but estimates place the likely number of victims 10 times higher. Chun continued ruling as a dictator until 1988.

The George H. W. Bush administration would whitewash American involvement during the 1980 uprising by claiming the U.S. government had no knowledge of the use of the Korean special forces and did not approve of any such actions. Chun’s dictatorship in South Korea would continue until popular protests were able to force democratic elections in 1988.

Philippines

In September 1972, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in Proclamation No. 1081. It would not be lifted until three days before the end of Jimmy Carter’s tenure as President in 1981.

This would not prevent the Carter administration from continuing the billions of dollars provided by the U.S. government to the Marcos dictatorship in military aid. As he had with Indonesian Major General and President Suharto, Carter kept the spigot flowing to a dictator who demonstrated not just lack of respect, but outright hostility to the human rights of his subjects.

The quid pro quo in the Philippines was a Military Bases Agreement agreed to in December 1978. The Filipino-American socialist newspaper the Katipunan said that after signing the agreement, the Carter administration ignored Marcos’s many human rights violations.

“Especially now, in light of renewed threats to its imperialist hegemony of the world, the Carter administration has made it very clear that such considerations as human rights, democracy, etc., take a back seat, to the protection of American global interests, insofar as U.S.-R.P. relations are concerned,” the paper wrote in April 1980.

The Katipunan said that political considerations led Carter’s State Department to reverse their previous condemnation to claim the Marcos regime was improving its record. “The State Department might as well have congratulated Marcos for torture, salvaging, mass arrests, indefinite detention, etc.,” they wrote.

The Middle East

No one is more responsible for the vast proliferation of foreign U.S. military bases – now about 800, compared to about 30 for the rest of the world combined – than Jimmy Carter.

Any rational geopolitical analysis of the post-war period until Carter’s presidency would have concluded the Soviet Union had absolutely no intention of military expansion beyond their immediate satellite states. But Carter – like each of his predecessors since World War II – was delusional in his imagination of a Soviet threat behind every corner. His anti-communist, Cold-War strategy called for a military presence everywhere American economic interests existed. Using the phantom “Soviet threat,” Carter laid out what became known as the Carter Doctrine.

“In his January 1980 State of the Union address, President Jimmy Carter announced a policy change that rivaled Roosevelt’s destroyers for bases deal in its significance for the nation and the world,” writes anthropologist David Vine in Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. “Carter soon launched what became one of the greatest base construction efforts in history. The Middle East buildup soon approached the size and scope of the Cold War garrisoning of Western Europe and the profusion of bases built to wage wars in Korea and Vietnam. U.S. bases sprang up in Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the region to host a ‘Rapid Deployment Force,’ which was to stand permanent guard over Middle Eastern petroleum supplies.”

Post-Presidency

In my first article on Carter’s legacy, I wrote that he has – by far – the most impressive record of any American President after leaving office. I cited the examples of his condemnations of Israel’s policies in the occupied Palestinian territories and his Carter Center’s work independently verifying voting systems and electoral processes – specifically their endorsement of Venezuela’s 2013 election – as invaluable accomplishments for social justice.

Since then, Carter has bolstered his already impressive post-Presidency record even more. First, Carter told Oprah Winfrey in a September interview that:

“We’ve become now an oligarchy instead of a democracy. And I think that’s been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards of the American political system that I’ve ever seen in my life.”

His summation of the state of the American sociopolitical system is both precise and brutally honest. While academic studies have already reached the same conclusion, Carter putting the issue in simple terms for a mainstream audience demonstrates his willingness to take on matters that would be considered taboo for the rest of the elite class. We can hope that the impact of his statement will be similar to his calling Israeli rule over Palestinians apartheid, something also taboo among elites at the time but increasingly gaining currency in mainstream discourse.

In October, Carter wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times calling for “A Five-Nation Plan to End the Syrian Crisis.” Carter writes that since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, the Carter Center had explained to Washington that the Obama administration’s demand for Bashar al-Assad’s removal would preclude the achievement of a political solution.

Meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin led Carter to believe that a peace proposal endorsed by the United States, Russia, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia would gain enough support among the Syrian parties to end the fighting.

“The involvement of Russia and Iran is essential. Mr. Assad’s only concession in four years of war was giving up chemical weapons, and he did so only under pressure from Russia and Iran. Similarly, he will not end the war by accepting concessions imposed by the West, but is likely to do so if urged by his allies,” Carter writes.

The peace plan that Secretary of State John Kerry essentially copied from Russia – and has now endorsed as his own at the United Nations – looks very much like that laid out by Carter. There is good reason to think that if the Obama administration had not stubbornly ignored Carter’s advice four years ago – when they still believed, before Russia’s military intervention on Assad’s behalf, that they could overthrow the regime by force through proxy groups like the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army – the unimaginable violence and devastation could have been largely been avoided.

While in power, Carter and the officials he hand-picked to serve in his administration acted with the same Cold War zeal as their predecessors to relentlessly combat – with overwhelming force and the power of the U.S. government’s diplomatic muscle- threats to global corporate capitalist dominance, both real and imagined.

What accounts for the discrepancy between Carter’s actions in and out of office is a matter of speculation. Was it merely a change of heart? A reflection of the nature of authority? Or of the limits of the office of President and its subordination to the power of unelected, entrenched bureaucracy?

The bottom line is that, unfortunately, when Carter was afforded the opportunity to change the direction of U.S. foreign policy after receiving a mandate from the American voters, he was unable or unwilling to do so. We can only hope this missed opportunity will not be the last.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/jimmy-carters-blood-soaked-legacy/5500898