Posted on 10/24/2004 4:21:00 PM PDT by LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget
George Bush has exploited the suffering of September 11 and turned back decades of efforts to make the world a safer place, the former president Jimmy Carter says in an interview with the Guardian published today.
Attacking Mr Bush and Tony Blair over Iraq, Mr Carter calls the war "a completely unjust adventure based on misleading statements".
He also criticises Mr Bush for "lack of effort" on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and accuses him of abandoning nuclear non-proliferation initiatives championed by five presidents.
The US "suffered, in 9/11, a terrible and shocking attack ... and George Bush has been adroit at exploiting that attack, and he has elevated himself, in the consciousness of many Americans, to a heroic commander-in-chief, fighting a global threat against America," Mr Carter says.
"He's repeatedly played that card, and to some degree quite successfully. I think that success has dissipated. I don't know if it's dissipating fast enough to affect the election. We'll soon know."
Mr Carter, 80, was president from 1977-1981, but did not win re-election amid the US hostage crisis in Iran. By comparison, support for Mr Bush's Iraq invasion is widespread, something Mr Carter attributes to a transformation in America's national mood.
"When your troops go to war, the prime minister or the president change overnight from an administrator, dealing with taxation and welfare and health and deteriorating roads, into the commander-in-chief," he says. "And it's just become almost unpatriotic to describe Bush's fallacious and ill-advised and mistaken and sometimes misleading actions."
Mr Bush and Mr Blair are blamed for helping to fuel the depth of anti-American feeling in the Islamic world. Denying any link between his handling of the Iranian crisis and the present threat, Mr Carter says: "The entire Islamic world condemned Iran. Nowadays, because of the unwarranted invasion of Iraq by Bush and Blair, which was a completely unjust adventure based on misleading statements, and the lack of any effort to resolve the Palestinian issue, [there is] massive Islamic condemnation of the United States."
American media organisations, he adds, "have been cowed, because they didn't want to be unpatriotic. There has been a lack of inquisitive journalism. In fact, it's hard to think of a major medium in the United States that has been objective and fair and balanced, and critical when criticism was deserved".
On nuclear proliferation, the issue that the Democratic contender John Kerry has identified as the single most serious threat to national security, Mr Carter attacks Mr Bush for abandoning "all of those long, tedious negotiations" carried out by presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan and himself.
In recent weeks he has also warned of the possibility of a new election fiasco in Florida.
The two presidential candidates spent the weekend focusing their resources and words even more tightly on the small number of swing states considered crucial to the election on November 2.
Mr Bush told supporters in Florida that "despite ongoing violence, Iraq has an interim government. It's building up its own security forces. We're headed toward elections in January. You see, we're safer, America is safer with Afghanistan and Iraq on the road to democracy. We can be proud that 50 million citizens of those countries now live as free men and women".
Mr Carter's interview marks the UK publication of his book The Hornet's Nest, a story of the American revolutionary war and the first novel to be published by a former president. Ironically, he notes, those fighting for US independence could never have triumphed were it not for an alliance with the French.
Maybe it's time to have this senile blowhard's big fat lips sewn shut.
I have a question... the hostages that were in Iran for 444 days while Jimmy Carter was president... have any of them ever spoken out about former Pres Carter's inability to deal with the situation?
Jimmah exploits stupidity...
Carter...on foreign policy....hahahahahaha.....
Kerry exploited Vietnam, until it backfired on him.
Failed president Jimmy Castro. The scum of the earth.
Carter on Diplomacy. Next up, Abdul the Suicide Bomber on Personal Relations! (And Andrew Sullivan on How to Pick Up Girls! And Tad Devine on How NOT To Sneer!)
Exactly what I was thinking--strange how he never decided to make THAT a campaign issue!
"Maybe it's time....lips sown shut"
No way!! Let the old geezer ramble, the more he and "Teerraaaza" flap their moronic gums, the better it is for "W".
It is time to seriously lay the Middle Eastern fiasco at the feet of Jimmy Carter. He has been allowed to slide for too long. Because he has not been chastised formally, he feels that what he did was totally accepted by the US citizenry.
Uh, Jimmah, maybe the failed decades of efforts are at fault here. The attacks were planned long before GWB took office. Maybe we could trace it back to when Iran was turned over to a theocracy. Any idea who did that?
Did he forget what a failure his own presidency was, or does he just have a different opinion about it than all the other people who lived through it?
Figures, Jimmah Cahtah has to get that disgarded fish-n-chips wrap, the U.K. Guardian, to carry his leavings.
#1 Jimmy Carter
We'll figure out the rest later.
Doesn't Carter have a legal guardian who can get one of those Hobbes&Warren forms, fill it out, and get him someplace where he will not hurt himself or Society???
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