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The father of the Iranian Revolution is – Jimmy Carter. Jerusalem Post has the details.
We just don’t get it. The Left in America is screaming to high heaven that the mess we are in in Iraq and the war on terrorism has been caused by the right-wing and that George W. Bush, the so-called “dim-witted cowboy,” has created the entire mess.
The truth is the entire nightmare can be traced back to the liberal democratic policies of the leftist Jimmy Carter, who created a firestorm that destabilized our greatest ally in the Muslim world, the shah of Iran, in favor of a religious fanatic, the ayatollah Khomeini.
Carter viewed Khomeini as more of a religious holy man in a grassroots revolution than a founding father of modern terrorism. Carter’s ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, said “Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint.” Carter’s Iranian ambassador, William Sullivan, said, “Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure.” Carter adviser James Bill proclaimed in a Newsweek interview on February 12, 1979 that Khomeini was not a mad mujahid, but a man of “impeccable integrity and honesty.” …
David Warren, in the Ottawa Citizen, has more to add about Carter’s fecklessness
…. There is an interesting piece in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, by the Turkish writer, Ahmet Altan, on the important and still under-appreciated role Turkey may play in the coming disorder. He says his country has reached a demographic tipping point. Turkish society is divided between two electorates, culturally distinct — rather as, I would observe, Western societies have increasingly divided between traditional, conservative people with religious beliefs; and urban, liberal, “secular,” essentially rootless people. Two electorates that are mysteries to each other. …
… if any American president could legitimately claim to have “lost” the Middle East, it was Jimmy Carter, who put the skids under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, enabling the Islamist revolution in Iran, nearly three decades ago. Beneath that, we might look back to the success of the OPEC cartel, in creating the oil crisis of 1973, which the West accepted numbly, while the U.S. was navel-gazing through Watergate, and cutting and running from Vietnam. …
That was the Middle East. How was Jimmy in the Far East? Contentions Gabriel Schoenfeld has part of an answer.
… Then there is our friend Taiwan, a threat to no one, a stable and law-abiding country, threatened by its giant Communist neighbor, which has been engaged in an intense military build-up across the Taiwan straits. In the 1970’s, feeling increasingly isolated and vulnerable in light of Richard Nixon’s opening to Communist China followed by Jimmy Carter’s abrupt severing of diplomatic relations, the Taiwanese government launched a covert nuclear-weapons development program.
Fascinating newly declassified documents, some of them top-secret and just put on-line by the National Security Archive, a private research group, show that the U.S., particularly under Carter, came down hard, leading Taiwan’s premier to complain that Washington was treating Taiwan “in a fashion which few other countries would tolerate.â€
Whether the U.S. pushed too hard can be debated, but the pressure did achieve the desired result. Taiwan today does not have nuclear weapons.
Should we applaud? If so, only with one hand. Most of the criminals in this particular neighborhood now have the guns while one of its upstanding citizens was successfully disarmed.
The Australian has an op-ed by a Muslim woman who is offended by people always taking offense.
… I’m offended that every year, there are more women killed in Pakistan for allegedly violating their family’s honour than there are detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Muslims have rightly denounced the mistreatment of Gitmo prisoners. But where’s our outrage over the murder of many more Muslims at the hands of our own?
I’m offended that in April, mullahs at an extreme mosque in Pakistan issued a fatwa against hugging.
The country’s female tourism minister had embraced – or, depending on the account you follow, accepted a congratulatory pat from – her skydiving instructor after she successfully jumped in a French fundraiser for the victims of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. Clerics announced her act of touching another man to be “a great sin” and demanded she be fired.
I’m offended by their fatwa proclaiming that women should stay at home and remain covered at all times.
I’m offended that …
WSJ on how the internet helped end human trafficking in a Chinese province.
Instapundit posts on Congress at 14% approval. Perhaps finally the country has signed on to the wisdom of Mark Twain. “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
Roger Simon on same poll.
Power Line too.
Power Line also posts on the failure of mainline protestant churches to condemn Hamas thuggery.
Jeff Jacoby celebrates the fights on the right.
… On one important issue after another, the right churns with serious disputes over policy and principle, while the left marches mostly in lockstep. Liberals sometimes disagree over tactics and details, but anyone taking a heterodox position on a major issue can find himself out in the cold. Just ask Senator Joseph Lieberman .
In the liberal imagination, conservatives are blind dogmatists, spouters of a party line fed to them by (take your pick) big business, their church, or President Bush. Yet almost anywhere you look on the right these days, what stands out is the lack of ideological conformity. …
… From school vouchers to stem cell research to racial preferences to torture, the American right bubbles with debate and disagreement, while the left, for all its talk about “diversity,” rarely seems to show any. As National Review’s Jonah Goldberg points out, that may be because “liberals define diversity by skin color and sex, not by ideas, which makes it difficult to have really good arguments.”
Good arguments are no bad thing. They energize political parties and put convictions to the test. They illuminate the issues. They make people think. The debates on the right enliven the marketplace of ideas and enrich the democratic process. Some debates on the left would, too.
Maureen Dowd does Hillary.
Couple of posts from Carpe Diem show how ethanol foolishness has become embedded in our economy.
Power Line posts on the next climate problem – cooling.
WSJ does a story on Bill James, the statistician who helped bring a World Series win to Boston. Refreshingly modest, he brings interesting insight to baseball.
… “People think they understand how to win in baseball much more than they really do,” Mr. James says. This is true of the statisticians as much as it is of traditional scouts. While “Moneyball” treats scouts and analysts as at odds, Mr. James says he learns from the scouts all the time. “The scouts see a lot of things that I can’t see. And some of the things they see I have learned to see. But some of the things they see I can’t see at all. And I’m not suggesting it’s not real, it’s just that I can’t see it,” he says. “There is no reason for there to be a conflict. The conflict exists only when people think they know more than they do.”
After a lifetime of studying the game, Mr. James reckons he still has plenty to learn. The internationalization of the game is one source of new wisdom, he says. “One of the great things about the Cubans and the Japanese is that they develop their own traditions and a lot of the things we think they know they don’t necessarily buy into. Incorporating those other traditions is a source of wealth for baseball, and if we’re smart, we’ll do more of it.” …