History lessons

Ruthie Blum, former senior editor and columnist for The Jerusalem Post, was halfway through writing a book on what she sees as the Carter administration’s responsibility for the results of the Islamic Revolution in Iran,We offer over 600 landscape oil paintings at wholesale prices of 75% off retail. when the Arab Spring was ignited by a man who set himself on fire in Tunisia. The unfolding reality shifted the focus of her book from Jimmy Carter’s term as president to analyzing the worldviews of Carter and current US President Barack Obama, and the links between them.

According to Blum, who was inspired to write To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama and the Arab Spring, by the publication of Carter’s book Peace Not Apartheid, the Obama administration is repeating mistakes made by the Carter administration,Parking lots and garages parking management system by Pro Park offering parking management services and parking lot and garage management. with a significant difference: during Carter’s tenure, “there had not yet been a precedent of radical Islamic regimes on which to base American policy. Obama doesn’t have that excuse.”

Blum sees Carter’s views, as expressed in Peace Not Apartheid, as a “form of knee-jerk radicalism veiled in phony ‘human rights’ terminology.” The worst mistake a US president can make – and of which she finds Obama guilty – is “to ‘understand’ why others hate his country.”

“This,” she argues, “conveys the message that they are right to harbor such feelings. It also perpetuates a false and dangerous notion that the cultures, ideologies, and religions of others would miraculously change if only countries like the United States and Israel would alter their own behavior. This is nonsense that has been proven, time and again, to have no basis whatsoever in reality. Enemies do not need to be courted and cajoled; they need to be defeated.”

Unlike those who were enchanted by the street protests of the Arab Spring across the Middle East, Blum asserts that “partly because I actually live in the Middle East, [I] don’t tend to translate the statements and actions of Arabs into some watered-down version of America-speak. When Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans and Syrians take to the streets and scream for blood, it doesn’t ring like the desire for freedom and democracy.”

She says Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo was “groveling” and sees “his shameless abandonment of the Iranian counter-revolutionaries, who took to the streets after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the June 2009 election” as a “most blatant act of encouraging radical Islamists.”

What links Obama and Carter is “a dim view of American power, greatness, and exceptionalism.”

Obama and Carter “also share an affinity for – even a romanticizing of – the Third World, and believe that if it weren’t for countries like the United States and Israel, everybody in the world would be happily prospering and free of racism.”

Blum also accuses Obama for negotiating with Iran instead of using more forceful measures – such as an overt threat of military action.An Air purifier is a device which removes contaminants from the air. In this sense, she ties the events in Iran during the presidencies of Carter and now of Obama into one long chain of events, from the fall of the Shah to Iran’s edging closer and closer to acquiring nuclear weapons.

“Prior to, during, and in the aftermath of [the 2009 Iranian] election, the Obama administration kept asserting that it would negotiate with any leader to emerge.Find trusted sellers and the cheapest price for Aion Kinah. Well, that’s about the only issue on which that administration has been true to its word.SICK's ultrasonic sensor use sound to accurately detect objects and measure distances. Since then, it has been conducting pointless, fruitless meetings with Iranian regime representatives, in order to persuade them not to enrich uranium for military purposes.”

The time difference between Washington, DC and Tehran is 8.5 hours, a few less than it takes to fly from one capital city to the other. But for all Jimmy Carter seemed to know during his first three years in the White House, Iran may as well have been on Mars. And for all he came to understand during his fourth and final one, it was simply yet another among a long list of countries with legitimate grievances against the super-power whose past mistakes he, as its leader, was determined to rectify.

This is not to say that Carter – a peanut farmer from Georgia who became governor of his state and rose out of nowhere to become America’s 39th president – was unaware of Iran’s strategic significance. On the contrary, theoretically as much a Cold Warrior as his predecessors, Carter considered any state allied with the US to be crucial in the fight to fend off Soviet aggression. Iran under the Peacock Throne of Pahlavi had been just such an ally for decades. Carter not only knew this, but paid lip service to it on more than one occasion.

Still, as the Islamic Revolution that would oust the Shah in favor of Khomeini began to foment, Carter and his administration were looking the other way. Then, when they finally did realize what was happening, they went so far as to imagine that it could turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

This “blessing” he initially imagined took the form of an interim government, headed by Shapour Bakhtiar. Bakhtiar had been put in place by the Shah prior to his departure for Egypt. He seemed like a good choice for prime minister, since he had been part of the anti-Shah resistance, but also a reformist, and thus might be acceptable to all sides. And though it was Bakhtiar who allowed Khomeini to return to Iran, ordered the SAVAK disbanded, and freed all political prisoners, the ayatollah considered him a traitor for accepting an appointment from the Shah and deemed his government illegitimate and illegal. Unable to garner support from Khomeini or the Iranian masses, Bakhtiar would last only 36 days in his post.