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A look at President Carter's Legacy

This article dates from October 2002 but it is relevant today and highlights just how much damage ex-President Carter has done to the USA with his policies during his one term in office. American Journal: Starring Jimmy Carter, in War and Peace

Now they've given Jimmy Carter the Nobel Peace Prize. Looking at the present, wretched incumbent, Democrats feel smug about their paladin of peace.

But there's continuity in Empire. Presidents come and Presidents go. There are differences, but over much vital terrain the line of march adopted by the Commander in Chief doesn't deviate down the years. Is George Bush "worse" than, say, Jack Kennedy, who multiplied America's military arsenal, nuclear and nonnuclear, and dragged the world to the edge of obliteration forty years ago? Sure, Carter wasn't as bad as Reagan. By the low standards of his office, he did his best in the Middle East. But how bad is bad? Carter's projected military budgets for the early 1980s were higher than the ones Reagan presided over. Remember his plan to run MX missiles by rail around the American West?

Recall when Carter said America would not stand idly by while Nicaragua tried to set forth on a different path after the Sandinistas threw out Anastasio Somoza? Carter told them they had to retain the National Guard, which had been Somoza's elite band of US-trained psychopathic killers. The Sandinistas said no. So Carter ordered the CIA to bring up the officers and torturers running the Argentine death squads to train a force of Nicaraguan exiles in Honduras scheduled for terror missions across the border. They called them the contras.

El Salvador? In October 1979, a coup by reformist officers overthrew the repressive Romero dictatorship and pledged reforms, including land reform. But within weeks, it became clear that the reformers among the new rulers had been outmaneuvered, so they resigned en masse as the real leaders stepped up frightful repression in the countryside, killing close to 1,000 people a month. Some 10,000 were killed in 1980, most of them peasants and workers.

The Carter Administration sent millions in aid and riot equipment to the Salvadoran military, dispatched US trainers and trained Salvadoran officers in Panama. The Administration cast the conflict as one between the "extremes" of left and right, with the junta trying to steer a "moderate" course. In fact, 90 percent of the killings were carried out by the army or paramilitary death squads acting under army or government supervision. The Carter Administration continued to push this line throughout 1980, not suspending aid until the killing of four Maryknoll nuns in December. It's all coming back to you? Yes, it was the Carter Administration that restored the Khmer Rouge to military health after the Vietnamese kicked them out of power in Cambodia.

Bad decision after bad decision after... You get the picture. The article also talks about his telling the military of South Korea to "hit back hard" at students protesting the dictatorship. They did on May 17, 1980 killing over 1,000. And then there is the selling of arms to Indonesia which had just invaded East Timor. Don't forget the covert CIA operations in Afghanistan. His constant public pronouncements of faith and his sisters work for the Christian Right gave this group the traction that they are enjoying to this day. So much damage in only four years... Posted by DaveH at August 7, 2005 12:58 PM