Carter ostracizing Castro Ever the Cold Warrior

Sometimes, it's hard to make it all the way through a MSM "news" article without finding something laughably silly. Today's dose of unreality comes courtesy of the Baltimore Sun.

While covering the flap about Carter's non-attendence of the Pope's funeral, the Sun quotes Douglas Brinkley -- most recently famous as John Kerry's biographer -- and then adds:

Historians like Brinkley argue that Carter's presence at the funeral would have underscored his role in the fight against communism in Eastern Europe, a cause the pope forcefully championed. Brinkley, the Carter biographer, noted that Carter's threat of economic sanctions kept Soviet troops out of the pope's native Poland during the Solidarity strike in 1980 - a movement that bound the two leaders together in history.

"Historians like Brinkley"? What -- they interviewed many such historians and they all absolutely agreed? As it is, it isn't even clear Brinkley even made that argument. This is a classic example of a reporter wanting to say something, and thus working his own beliefs and feelings into a news story by attributing them an anonymous body of "experts" out there, somewhere.

Carter: the penultimate symbol to underscore "the fight against communism"? You've got to be joking! You mean, the same Jimmy Carter who dismissed the threat of Soviet expansion in 1978, saying:

Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear...

Later, in the same speech, Carter also derided as false...

... [the] belief that Soviet expansion was almost inevitable but that it must be contained, and the corresponding belief in the importance of an almost exclusive alliance among non-Communist nations on both sides of the Atlantic... Historical trends have weakened [these beliefs'] foundation. The unifying threat of conflict with the Soviet Union has become less intensive...

He followed by asserting that we needed to stop looking to free nations as the guarantors of peace -- "We can no longer have a policy solely for the industrial nations as the foundation of global stability" and asserted confidently that mere "words" would be enough to change the behavior of the Communists:

We have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon. But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody.... words are action, much more so than many of us may realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted... we can already see dramatic, worldwide advances in the protection of the individual from the arbitrary power of the state. For us to ignore this trend would be to lose influence and moral authority in the world.

No, Carter, words are words, only actions are actions. Carter, leader of "the fight against communism", publicly called off the military, economic, and political dogs and told thus Soviet leaders that he felt the tounge alone was mighty enough to contain them.

And what was this "dramatic, worldwide advance" in human rights to which Carter referred? Perhaps the writings of a persecuted dissident somewhere?

Certainly, it couldn't be the expansion of human rights or democracy. As Mona Charen notes, between 1974 and 1980 ten nations -- Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Grendada, Laos, Mozambique, Nicaragua, South Yemen, and Vietnam -- fell into communist hands, with many more in Asia, South America, and Africa under siege by Soviet-funded and controlled guerillas.

Jean Kirkpatrick described the situation as follows:

... between '75 and '80... [in] Laos, Cambodia, those dominos in Southeast Asia whose existence was widely doubted, fell rather quickly after the American withdrawal from Saigon, in fact, and the most direct and clear were Saigon... were Laos and Cambodia, but the Soviets were also pushing Soviet extension of power in the Middle East, for example, in Yemen, and they were developing friendship, so-called, treaties which were treaties of military alliance with Sadam in Iraq, for example and pressing their presence, their military presence and reach in the Middle East. They were developing sort of terrorist networks, working with Qadafi and Nasser and the least attractive people in the Middle East, the dictators in the region. They were expanding their support for communist parties and groups in Africa and Angola, Mozambique and Algeria, and they were expanding their efforts to establish political power and conquest, I believe, in the Caribbean and in Central America....

Yet Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, publicly characterized this situation as nothing more than a time of harmless political experimentation:

... the developing countries in the arc from northeast Asia to southern Africa continue to search for viable forms of government capable of managing the process of modernization. [Mona Charen, Useful Idiots, p. 82]

And Carter's director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Paul Warke, insisted we had no business preventing the spread of Communism:

Neither we nor any other outsiders are wise enough to decide for another people the course to which their aspirations should lead them. The continuing penumbra of the illusion that somehow we know best can only blur a sound perception of our true foreign policy interests... [Idiots, p. 83]

Of course! These people are just "searching" for new forms of government. Never mind that all the "searching" was being done by heavily armed men, backed and funded from the Kremlin, who had only one very non-democratic form of government in mind. Never mind that the average citizen of these countries has no say whatsoever in this process.

The Carter administration didn't merely deny or excuse the expansion of totalitarianism -- in many cases they encouraged it. Besides helping undermine the Shah of Iran (who was replaced with an even worse despot), Carter supported Indonesia's genocidal annexation of East Timor (which just recently regained independence):

Carter authorized increased military aid to Indonesia in 1977 as the death toll approached 100,000. In short order, over one-third of the East Timorese population (more than 200,000 humans) lost their lives due to war-related starvation, disease, massacres, or atrocities. [source]

When the Sandanistas took power in South America, Carter assured the American public that it would be "a mistake" to suspect they might somehow be in league with the USSR -- which, of course, they were.

After the Sandanistas promised to someday hold elections, Carter shipped lots of US taxpayer dollars to them...

The Carter administration provided $118 in direct aid, negotiated with the international development banks for an additional $252 million, and arranged for refinancing of $500 million in private banks. This was more aid than any other nation provided to Nicaragua, and more than the U.S. had contributed to Samoza in the previous four years. [Idiots, p. 205]

The Sandanistas then used these Carter-supplied funds to support similar would-be communist guerilla coup d'etats in neighboring countries, such as El Salvador Guatemala, and Honduras. Some anti-Communist!

It was only when Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan -- undoubtedly enboldened by a well-founded persuasion that the international community, under the leadership of Jimmy Carter, would offer no serious opposition -- that Carter realized the extent to which he'd misunderstood Soviet expansionism. Assuming the rest of the world had been equally clueless, he declared, on ABC News:

It is only now dawning upon the world the magnitude of the action that the Soviets undertook in invading Afghanistan.... This action of the Soviets has made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time I’ve been in office.

Good morning, Mr. Carter.

Carter responded with economic sanctions, which ultimately proved to be no more persuasive with the Soviets than they had been in convincing Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini to release American hostages. By the end of his term, Carter had approved minimal covert aid to the Afghan mujahadeen.

Thus is it absurd to imply that Carter's threat of economic sanctions protected Lech Walesa and Solidarity. Only in 1980, in the last days of the Carter presidency, did the Solidarity strikes occur. There was no reason for the Soviets to invade yet, over such minor scuffle, and there was no reason to think mere economic sanctions would have been any more effective at protecting Poland than they'd been in thwarting Soviet aggression against Afghanistan.

The serious crackdown only came the next year, in 1981, under the Reagan administration, when martial law was declared, Solidarity was outlawed, and Walesa was arrested. Eight years later -- all of them under the Reagan administration -- the situation had reversed, with Solidarity, the Catholic church, and the Communists having round table talks. In 1990, Walesa was elected president of Poland.

So what kept the Soviets at bay during this more turbulent era? A threat of economic sanctions -- which had never worked against them in the past -- from a president who had long since left office?

No, I think this had a little something to do with it.

Advisor: Reagan Threatened War Over Poland

As early as 1981, the Reagan administration had warned both Moscow and the Polish government against taking action against Poland's growing Solidarity movement.

When the Russians appeared to be on the brink of an invasion – similar to ones they had launched to crush freedom movements in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, President Reagan's White House made clear the U.S. would not be acquiescent again.

Judge Clark told NewsMax bluntly, "We in the Reagan administration were prepared to recommend the use of force if necessary to stop such an invasion."

(Too bad the reader is left with the false impression a Carter-issued threat of mere economic sanctions protected Poland and stayed a Russian military invasion. How can readers learn if they are kept so uninformed?)

Surely it is possible to praise Carter for speaking about human rights. And surely we can say positive things about his history-making outreach to the Pope. But to praise Carter for his "fight against Communism" strikes me as egresious historical revisionism.

I'll leave the last words about the Carter era to US UN Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick:

I believe that American passivity and sort of retreat in the face of growing confidence and assertiveness on the part of the Soviet Union, was in fact encouraging further expansion and aggression, and I was not surprised when they turned down Carter's [arms control] proposal, because I believed that their policy was becoming progressively demanding, assertive and expansionist, and that they frankly sought military superiority over the United States in the West, and we were co-operating in this, unfortunately. I think one of the principal effects of détente had been the weakening of Western power and the increase in Soviet military power.