Jimmy Carter, crusading troublemaker

I wonder what is in the mind of this former president, who works tirelessly to undermine American and British foreign policy:

Tony Blair’s lack of leadership and timid subservience to George W Bush lie behind the ongoing crisis in Iraq and the worldwide threat of terrorism, according to the former American president Jimmy Carter.

	Outspoken: Jimmy Carter condemns the Iraq invasion

“I have been surprised and extremely disappointed by Tony Blair’s behaviour,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

“I think that more than any other person in the world the Prime Minister could have had a moderating influence on Washington - and he has not. I really thought that Tony Blair, who I know personally to some degree, would be a constraint on President Bush’s policies towards Iraq.”

Why does Carter purposefully ignore the deeply considered and thoughtful explanations that Blair has repeatedly and patiently laid out?—explanations that offer the perspective we in the West need to see in order to understand the world we live in.

I am amazed at how many people will say, in effect, there is increased terrorism today because we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. They seem to forget entirely that September 11th predated either. The West didn’t attack this movement. We were attacked. Until then we had largely ignored it.

The reason I say our response was even more momentous than it seemed at the time, is this. We could have chosen security as the battleground. But we didn’t. We chose values. We said we didn’t want another Taleban or a different Saddam. Rightly, in my view, we realised that you can’t defeat a fanatical ideology just by imprisoning or killing its leaders; you have to defeat its ideas.

There is a host of analysis written about mistakes made in Iraq or Afghanistan, much of it with hindsight but some of it with justification. But it all misses one vital point. The moment we decided not to change regime but to change the value system, we made both Iraq and Afghanistan into existential battles for Reactionary Islam. We posed a threat not to their activities simply: but to their values, to the roots of their existence.

We committed ourselves to supporting Moderate, Mainstream Islam. In almost pristine form, the battles in Iraq or Afghanistan became battles between the majority of Muslims in either country who wanted democracy and the minority who realise that this rings the death-knell of their ideology.

Well, it turns out that Carter has become such a pacifist that he would only have considered going into Afghanistan after 9/11—an action endorsed wholeheartedly by the vast majority of Americans.

But had he still been president, he says that he would never have considered invading Iraq in 2003.

“No,” he said, “I would never have ordered it. However, I wouldn’t have excluded going into Afghanistan, because I think we had to strike at al-Qaeda and its leadership.

Carter, whose geopolitical sophistication resembles Cindy Sheehan’s, is trying to shame Blair into changing his foreign policy. What a joke—from the president whose policies and actions buried us in the quicksand of the Middle East.