Carter Bashes Bush:There He Goes Again
NewsMax.com
Saturday, Feb. 23, 2002 4:38 p.m. EST
In the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, "There he goes again."
Yes, there was good old ex-President "Jimmah" Carter on Thursday, stepping up to the plate to deliver comments that are sure to delight America's enemies and further unnerve European allies about President Bush's description of terrorist states as the "Axis of Evil."
"I think it will take years before we can repair the damage done by that statement," Carter told an audience at Atlanta's Emory University, adding that he thought the phrase was "overly simplistic and counterproductive."
This from the former president whose own mishandling of the 1979 hostage crisis perpetrated by "Axis" country Iran got him booted out of office. And lest it be forgotten, Carter offered his wisdom in the midst of the U.S.'s war on terrorism, with thousands of American soldiers in harm's way - and while President Bush was still on foreign soil in China.
But the same journalists who routinely describe Carter as "America's best ex-president" have largely given him a pass on his unpatriotic outburst.
It isn't the first time. In fact, Carter has made quite a habit of heckling Republican presidents whenever the chips are down.
When Bush's father was preparing for the U.S.'s last major military conflict, the Gulf War, the sage from Plains couldn't wait to chime in.
"We are not planning now a defensive deployment of U.S. forces. We are now planning an offensive operation," he told the National Journal in November 1990, as Bush 41 was trying to persuade the world that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had to be dealt with militarily.
A few days later Carter warned a conference at New York's Hofstra University that if Bush attacked Iraq, the U.S. would "reap great and very serious deleterious consequences politically."
Even after the war commenced, Carter couldn't manage to hold his tongue, telling an audience at Carolina State University that in the previous 10 years the U.S. had been too eager to cross borders in world conflicts.
"If you look to see who is responsible in attacks across international borders, you would see that in all but two instances it was the United States," he told one questioner.
America's leading foreign policy moralizer wasn't much better while Ronald Reagan was battling the Sandinista communist scourge in Central America a few years earlier.
In 1984 he told a group of businessmen in Cairo, Egypt, that Reagan "is more inclined to form a Contra army to overthrow the Sandinistas or inject the Marines into Lebanon or use American battleships to shell villages around Beirut" than to seek negotiated settlements to problems.
Even as Reagan was staring down Mikhail Gorbachev at the Reykjavik nuclear disarmament talks over plans for a U.S. missile shield, Carter was sniping from the sidelines.
"I have always thought 'Star Wars' was a big mistake. My judgment is President Reagan missed a wonderful opportunity," he told The Atlanta Journal Constitution a few days after his successor refused to cave on the issue.
Now that "America's best ex-president" has once again entered the fray on history's wrong side, let's hope it doesn't take the U.S. "years to recover" from his ill-advised comments on the war on terror.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
War on TerrorismA product that might interest you:
Get "The Map" - Bush Country T-Shirt