Here's a stop-what-your-doing-and-read-this-now great editorial by Bret Stephens on Jimmy Carter's moral bankruptcy:

Former President Jimmy Carter has an interesting way of saying more than he intends. He lusts in his heart. He turns to his 13-year-old daughter for foreign policy wisdom. He titles a book, "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid." What Mr. Carter means to say is that he is a flesh-and-blood human being, a caring father, a missionary for peace. What he actually communicates is that he is weirdly libidinal, scarily naive and obsessively hostile to Israel.

Now the 2002 Nobel laureate is in reprise mode. "In a democracy, I realize you don't need to talk to the top leader to know how the country feels," he said over the weekend, responding to a question from an Israeli journalist who noted that Mr. Carter had been snubbed by most of Israel's top leadership and reprimanded by its president, Shimon Peres. "When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that's the dictator, because he speaks for all the people."

Come again?

Mr. Carter is on a tour of the Middle East, the most newsworthy aspect of which is a scheduled meeting in Damascus with Khaled Mashal, the head of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. More on that below. For now, ponder what he could possibly have meant by this statement. On a charitable view, what Mr. Carter had in mind is that in a democracy it is the people who ultimately make the policy, whereas in a dictatorship it is only the dictator's opinion that counts. Or as W.H. Auden put it, "Only the man behind the rifle [has] free will."

That's not quite what Mr. Carter said, however. He said the dictator "speaks" for "all" the people, just as the people in a democracy speak for themselves. Taken at face value, this is a reflection of every dictator's conceit: that his will is also the general will, whether the people agree with him or not. This is what Fidel Castro meant when he praised Cuba's elections, in which only the Communist Party is on the ballot, as "the most democratic in the world." Perhaps Mr. Carter has harbored similar views about the relative merits of his opinion versus the people's since he was turned out of high office by 44 states.

Yet a dictator does not speak for the people. Properly speaking, a dictator speaks for none of the people. A dictator speaks only for himself, while "the people" are transformed, through force and fear, into an abstraction, an instrument, a rhetorical trope. On the contrary, it is only in a democracy where the government can morally and lawfully be said to speak for the people, since it was morally and lawfully chosen by the people to speak for them. Which means that Mr. Carter has matters precisely backwards: It is in democracies such as Israel where the views of the leadership matter most, and in dictatorships such as Syria where they matter least.

Besides Israel, Mr. Carter's trip will take him to the West Bank, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. What would the logic suggested above mean in terms of his choice of interlocutors?

- In Egypt, Mr. Carter could give an address at the newly established Middle East Freedom Forum. He could call for the immediate release of George Ishak, a lawyer and democracy activist who helps coordinate the liberal Kifaya ("Enough") movement and was arrested by security forces last Wednesday. He could pay a call to journalist Gameela Ismael, the wife of Ayman Nour. Mr. Nour, who contested the 2005 election against President Hosni Mubarak and took 8% of the vote, has spent the past two years in prison on trumped-up charges of electoral fraud.

- In Saudi Arabia, Mr. Carter could raise the case of Fawza Falih, an illiterate woman who was convicted of "witchcraft" and sentenced to death on charges that she used sorcery to render a man impotent. He might also seek out the now famous "Qatif Girl," the woman who was gang-raped by seven men and, as a result of her "crime," sentenced to 200 lashes.

- In Jordan, Mr. Carter might find time for Jihad Momani, editor of the weekly "Shihan," who in 2006 was arrested for reprinting the Danish cartoons of Prophet Mohammed. "Muslims of the world be reasonable," he wrote in an editorial that ran alongside the cartoons. "What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony in Amman?"

- With the Palestinians, Mr. Carter could denounce the Hamas-operated Al Aqsa TV, whose programming includes a Sesame Street-like show that urges its young viewers to "get rid of the Jews."

- In Syria, Mr. Carter could ask to meet with representatives of the National Council of the Damascus Declaration for Democratic Change. A dozen leaders of this pro-democracy umbrella group were arrested in December on charges of "spreading false or exaggerated news which would affect the morale of the country"; Human Rights Watch charges that at least eight of the men signed false confessions under torture.

Will Mr. Carter do any of this? The odds are long. Instead, he will meet with Mr. Mashal, author of the murder of several hundred Israeli civilians and not a few Americans, too. On a visit yesterday to Sderot, the besieged Israeli town near Gaza, the former president denounced the "despicable crime" of Hamas's incessant rocket attacks of the past several years. Yet he continues to defend the view that all relevant parties, including Hamas, must be partners in a negotiation to bring about a peaceful settlement.

Hamas, it is true, fairly won a parliamentary election in January 2006. It is also true that nobody elected Mr. Mashal to his position, that he is another of Auden's men behind the rifle, and that Hamas has never accepted the Oslo Accords that are the legal basis of the Authority they seek to govern, much like other totalitarian parties of yore that participated opportunistically in a democratic process – cf. Weimar Republic. They do not seek an entente with the Jewish state but its elimination. In meeting with a former U.S. president, they seek to burnish their reputations as legitimate Mideast players, not outlaws. Perhaps Mr. Carter knows this, or perhaps he doesn't. Whichever the case, his actions bespeak more than he intends.

Labels: carter, Israel

Is it just me, or might Colin Powell take the torch handoff from Jimmy Carter as the next most irrelevant but nonetheless irritating post-political voice?

KUWAIT CITY - Iran is far from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and despite U.S. fears about its atomic intentions, an American military strike against the Islamic Republic is unlikely, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday... I think Iran is a long way from having anything that could be anything like a nuclear weapon," said Powell, who was invited by the National Bank of Kuwait to speak on economic opportunity and crisis in the Middle East.
Seriously, how the heck would Powell know anything about Iran with any certainty? Our intelligence services certainly don't.

Labels: carter, Iran, powell, proliferation

Jimmy Carter's latest diatribe:

"He's [VP Dick Cheney] a militant who avoided any service of his own in the military and he has been most forceful in the last 10 years or more in fulfilling some of his more ancient commitments that the United States has a right to inject its power through military means in other parts of the world," Carter told the BBC World News America in an interview to air later on Wednesday.

"You know he's been a disaster for our country," Carter said. "I think he's been overly persuasive on President George Bush and quite often he's prevailed."
Jimmy Carter is hardly one to be criticizing others for being a "disaster."

It's typical of the extreme left wing of American politics to resort to ad homonym attacks, particularly the Chickenhawk argument -- that those urging military action are never in the military.

Carter uses personal attacks because that's all he has, because it is he who has been the "disaster." The current administration has certainly failed in many ways but at least they didn't allow some two-bit Ayatollah to hold 52 of our citizens as hostages for 444 days. And this former president, so often praised for his peace promotion, has been just as much a disaster since he left office. He's an embarrassment.

One should never confuse "peace" with refusal to take significant action.

Liberals like Carter claim conservatives see only black and white, but fail to acknowledge the "shades of grey." It's not that conservatives don't see the grey, but rather in the end -- and especially as president -- one has to make a damn decision. The world's Carters use shades of grey as an excuse for inaction. The words every murdering dictator loves to hear are: "It's just all so complicated. We need more dialogue."

Carter's reaction to genocide in Sudan was to ignore it for years and then partake in a highly publicized "shouting match" with some low-level security guard. After he called his meeting with Sudan's dictator "constructive," even actress Mia Farrow termed Carter's comments "disappointing, offensive, arrogant and unconscionably ignorant."

You know your foreign policy priorities are out of wack when you make a Hollywood liberal look hawkish. Or is Ms. Farrow a "militant" too?

It shouldn't be a surprise. This is the same guy who recently labeled the Nazi's systematic extermination of 6 million Jews as "the so-called Holocaust," which is straight out of the playbook of an Iranian mullah. Nice, eh?

If promoting peace means coddling dictators who slaughter their own populations then may we all be warmongers.

Intentions do matter. Carter, like so many other liberals, would morally equate a Palestinian suicide bomber who targets a bus stop with an Israeli soldier who misses the Hamas terrorist with an M-16 shot and accidentally hits the kid the terrorist was hiding behind.

Then, as he does above with Cheney, he would label anyone demanding action more substantial than, say, a UN debate, as a "Chickenhawk," one who "avoided any service of his own." Yet, simultaneously Carter and other liberals cut the budget for the military as they did, and would again.

There are currently 2.33 million Americans in both active and reserve military service combined. Yet there are 134 million Americans available for military service. This means that less than two percent of Americans ever serve, while the remaining 98 percent do not.

So by Jimmy Carter's liberal Chickenhawk logic 98 percent of the US population should have no say in military matters.

Carter might want to read some Madison or Jefferson in his spare time, because the military as the sole power over all foreign policy is exactly what the founders chose to avoid.

But I hear Carter's philosophy works wonderfully in Egypt, Burma, Sudan, and a slew of other illegitimate regimes worldwide.

Labels: antiwar loonies, burma, carter, Cheney, Iraq, sudan