The death of the former US President Jimmy Carter was to a large extent a death that was expected bearing in mind that the man was 100 years old at the time of his death. As also could be expected there was an outpouring of tributes to the man from various world leaders and political figures.
In the United Kingdom everyone of any stature, from current and former Prime Ministers up to the King have made condolence statements following the death of President Carter. Some of the comments about Mr Carter have been fully justified. He did do a lot for various charities after his time in office and he was loved by his family and it’s fair to say that due to no fault of his own his term in office coincided with severe economic challenges that were being faced by the United States. He, like all US Presidents did some things right but other things he got wrong.
Although I generally do not like to speak ill of the recently dead I have also to be honest about the Carter administration. As someone who lived through President Carter’s singular term in office when I was a very young man, my abiding memory of the Carter administration was one of failure both nationally and internationally. Carter’s administration did not rebuild the American economy like he may have hoped he could have done and that revival of the US economy had to wait until the revolution of the Ronald Reagan years.
The biggest failure of the Carter term in office as I recall it was in the field of international relations. His administration was very poor with regards the upheavals in Iran and foolishly took on trust comments made by the Islamic regime in Iran that deposed the Shah of Iran that the Mullahs wanted good relations with Iran. The result of Carter’s naivety in trusting the Khomenists in Iran was that the people of Iran have been held in a horrific hyper-oppressive purgatory since 1979 until today. Also the Khomanists who took over Iran have continued to be active anti-peace agents in the Middle East supporting terror groups in multiple other countries including in Lebanon and Yemen.
Then there was the disastrous attempt by the Carter administration, towards the end of his term, in 1980 to rescue 53 American hostages that had been held since November 1979 by Khomenist Islamic radicals in Tehran. The operation, called Operation Eagle Claw, was a disaster. The attempt was abandoned when a US helicopter collided with a US aircraft in Iran. Eight US service personnel were killed in the aborted rescue attempt and the failure embarrassed the US government.
The embarrassing failure of the Carter administration’s attempt to rescue the US hostages being held in Iran did a lot to turn American’s against Jimmy Carter. This showed at the Presidential election that followed shortly after the bodged hostage rescue attempt when Carter lost to the Republican Ronald Reagan.
However if the Americans and many Britons have bad memories of the Carter administration then those from religious minorities in Iran have even more bad stuff to remember about Carter. Some of them see Carter as being instrumental in ousting the Shah and imprisoning them in a horrific Islamic regime that to this day treats minorities in Iran like dirt.
Here’s a long form comment from a commentator on X called The Persian Jewess whose view of Carter and his government is a world away from the sugary comments being made by world leaders.
The Persian Jewess said:
*Jimmy Carter destabilized Iran and helped overthrow the Shah, resulting in the Islamic Revolution and the loss of one of the most important allies of the US in the Middle East.
In 2016, the BBC published a report that exposed the Carter admin’s extensive contact with Khomeini prior to 1979. According to the report, Khomeini went to great lengths to convince the US not to jeopardize his plan to rule Iran: “It is advisable that you recommend to the army not to follow [Shah’s prime minister Shapour] Bakhtiar,” Khomeini said in one message, according to the BBC. "You will see we are not in any particular animosity with the Americans," said Khomeini in another message, pledging his Islamic Republic will be "a humanitarian one, which will benefit the cause of peace and tranquillity for all mankind".
In another message sent via a US emissary, Khomeini assured the Carter admin that their economic interests would not be impacted if he was granted power in Iran: “There should be no fear about oil. It is not true that we wouldn’t sell to the US.” According to the report, in turn, Carter helped Khomeini and made sure that the Imperial Iranian army would not launch a military coup. Khomeini returned to Tehran on February 1, 1979, just two weeks after Carter convinced the Shah to take a “vacation” and leave Iran. The Iranian military, which was under US influence, surrendered, and within months Khomenei was declared the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Regime was born. *
The Persian Jewess is somewhat correct. The Carter administration failed to see that the Islamists who were opposing the Shah were a much bigger international problem than the admittedly oppressive regime of the Shah of Iran. Carter’s actions during that period in connection with Iran have had long term negative consequences not just for ordinary Iranians but for the entire world.
It is probably correct to remember Carter’s beloved position in his family and his support of housebuilding projects and other charitable work but let’s not those positive things blind us to the man’s failures. This is because Carter’s failures with regards to Iran have created monstrous mountains of dead throughout the Middle East and Iran has played a major role in keeping going and encouraging conflicts that might in better circumstances been either totally or at least partially resolved.
I will admit that President Jimmy Carter was probably a very nice man and some of the plaudits given to him by others with regards to this area were probably deserved. But it has to be said that he was a terrible leader of the US and we are living today with many of the international problems that his administration left the world with. Jimmy Carter can be basically summed up by the phrase that I’ve seen being used since Mr Carter’s death which is: ‘He was a decent enough bloke mostly, but a terrible President and politician’.
