They just can't help comitting political suicide.
And Klintoon can't save them!
Posted on 01/31/2003 5:26:00 PM PST by nwrep
They just can't help comitting political suicide.
And Klintoon can't save them!
Those ties had been tarnished by the Koreagate scandal of the mid-1970s, when the Korean CIA was involved in a covert attempt to influence U.S. legislation by bribing U.S. lawmakers, and President Carter's aborted plan to withdraw U.S. ground troops from South Korea. They were also marred by President Park's authoritarian policies under the Yushin system, which were sharply criticized by President Carter as part of his emphasis on human rights.
By February 1979, U.S-Korean relations were back on course. The key goals and objectives of the United States were laid out in a secret cable from Secretary Vance to the U.S. Embassy in Seoul and the Pacific Command in Hawaii. The U.S. goals, said Mr. Vance, were peace and stability on the Korean peninsula, gaining a "maximum U.S. share of economic benefits from economic relations with (an) increasingly prosperous South Korea;" and "improvement of the human rights environment through evolution of a liber al, democratic political process," in that order. Despite the tumultuous events of the next 18 months, those policies did not change.
In June 1979, after extensive negotiations between Washington and Seoul, President Carter visited South Korea and met with President Park. During that visit, President Carter declared an end to his troop withdrawal policy and the two countries agreed to f orce closer military ties to counter what was perceived as a growing Soviet and North Korean military threat. President Park responded by relaxing some political controls.
The political unrest that erupted in the fall of 1979 and the shocking assassination of Mr. Park on October 26, 1979, disrupted those plans. The events also created a sense of panic within the administration that, at a time of rising tensions with Iran and the Soviet Union, a political confrontation in South Korea could spark an explosion and precipitate a third crisis point in the world. Above all else, U.S. officials said repeatedly, the United States must avoid another Iran in Korea.
Ensuring that political instability in South Korea did not trigger another crisis point for the United States became the overriding policy goal throughout the Chun period. U.S. officials expressed that policy by dealing with Mr. Chun at arm's length and occasionally expressing to him their dismay at his actions. At the same time, the Carter administration grew increasingly wary of the opposition's tactics and tried hard to persuade dissidents not to press too hard for democratic change.
The deepening sense of anger and frustration was echoed in several cables to Seoul from Mr. Holbrooke, who presided over U.S. Asia policy in the Carter administration. The cables convey his disgust for South Koreans who did not share his concerns that maintaining stability was essential for U.S. national security.
For example, in a Cherokee cable dated Dec. 8, 1979, Mr. Holbrooke asked Mr. Gleysteen to send a direct message to Korean Christians that they should not expect long-term support for their struggles. Mr. Holbrooke wrote the cable after a period of discussing the Korean situation with Congress, including top Democrats involved in East Asian affairs, Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio. "We have their full support at this time," Mr. Holbrooke wrote. "Their attitudes, like everyone else, are dominated by the Iranian crisis, and, needless to say, nobody wants 'another Iran' - by which they mean American action which would in any way appear to unravel a situation and lead to chaos or instability in a key American ally."
Mr. Holbrooke said he was encouraged by "many of the things the Korean leadership has done." But he added that "certain events have caused us to share our concern over the potential polarization that exists as a result of the actions of what appear to be a relative handful of Christian extremist dissidents."
To deal with those "hard-liners" Mr. Holbrooke proposed a "delicate operation designed to use American influence to reduce the chances of confrontation and to make clear to the generals that you (Gleysteen) are in fact trying to be helpful to them provided they in turn carry out their commitments to liberalization."
The United States, Mr. Holbrooke said, should send a direct message to the dissidents that "in this delicate time in Korean internal politics, the United States believes that demonstrations in the streets are a throw-back to an earlier era and threaten to provoke retrogressive actions on the part of the Korean government." "Even when these meetings are in fact not demonstrations but rather just meetings in defiance of martial law, the U.S. government views them as unhelpful, while martial law is still in effect," Mr. Holbrooke said. Mr. Gleysteen was shown this cable in his interview with Sisa Journal and asked if he had followed up on Mr. Holbrooke's advice. "No, that was too tricky," Mr. Gleysteen replied. "This was an armchair suggestion from Washington, something we just couldn't do."
Nevertheless, throughout this period, Mr. Gleysteen continued to press Korean dissidents to take a moderate approach to the military and avoid confrontation. While warning the military to be tolerant, "on the left, we tried to get the message across to t he moderates that they should keep down their inflammatory actions," Mr. Gleysteen explained. This effort was so successful, he said, that by December 1979, "people were beginning to talk about a 'Seoul Spring'" as Kim Dae Jung was released from prison an d other dissidents were freed to take part in political activities.
Even the December 12 incident, when Mr. Chun and Noh Tae Woo seized control of the military command, did not dampen the U.S. enthusiasm that democratic change might come to South Korea. To be sure, Gen. Chun's deployment of Korean troops on the DMZ withou t the permission of the U.S.-Korean Combined Forces Command deeply angered the Carter administration and U.S. military officials in Korea. "There was highest level concern over the apparent violation of the CFC structure and over any backtracking from mov ement towards civilian governments," Mr. Holbrooke cabled Mr. Gleysteen in a Dec. 18, 1979, message signed by then-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.
But the Carter administration saw the incident as a temporary setback, not a dangerous signal that Gen. Chun was preparing the way for a military takeover. According to the cable, Mr. Holbrooke's primary concern was that dissidents might use the Dec. 12 i ncident as an excuse to "take the offensive" against the Choi government. "If that occurred at a time of instability within the military, North Korea might be tempted "to test the waters for meddling in the south," he said. With that in mind, Mr. Holbrooke instructed his ambassador to extract a promise from President Choi for eventual democratization, even if the promise was vaguely defined and meant only for public consumption.
If President Choi demurred, Mr. Holbrooke argued, "you could even point out, if you were a very cynical person, that setting a date now does not necessarily mean that this date will be kept...but that setting a specific date is more important than exactly when that date is." Apparently, President Choi agreed to that reasoning. On December 19, according to a classified cable, Korean ambassador Kim Yong-Shik called on Mr. Holbrooke and reassured him that the political process would continue. Mr. Kim's actu al statements are censored by the State Department, but Mr. Holbrooke's reply is not.
According to the cable, Mr. Holbrooke said he "found the ROKG message reassuring and hoped that it would be possible to carry out the commitment to broadly based political development. He then "assured Amb. Kim that the USG would not publicly contest the ROKG version of recent events, but he would not wish to see further military changes of command 'Korea style.'"
By making that assurance, Mr. Gleysteen said in his interview, the United States was saying "we won't argue about who did what to whom." Although U.S. policy makers, including Mr. Gleysteen himself, had "the deepest suspicions" about Mr. Chun, "we still had that hope that he could be constrained by the total situation to behave himself in a capable manner."
....Dealing with Mr. Chun in this way, Mr. Gleysteen said, was a "distasteful process, and he hated me for it." Several times, Mr. Chun called Mr. Gleysteen "governor-general," he recalled. Ms. Derian, the human rights official, scoffed at the idea that Mr. Chun was threatened by this policy. "This was not a slap of the wrist, it was more like a wave of the hanky," she said. "I find the whole thing not credible."
Damn, this crap is getting old!
Jimmah was a lousy president and his asinine attacks against President Bush, show what a small man he really is. Bush has made the case for war against Iraq, on numerous occasions. Carter wouldn't understand that, because he was an incompetent CIC.
Carter's legacy of pacifism and appeasement, didn't make him worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Reagan kicked his butt in 1980 and then proceeded to win the Cold War. Reagan derserved the Nobel Peace Prize, not Carter!
Jimmuh Critter never met a raghead terrorist that he wasn't scared spitless of.
He was so weak and pathetic its a miracle he didn't give Alaska back to the Russians.
FREE THE HOSTAGES JIMMY!!!!!!
Nuff said.
That was shortly after Ayatollah Khomeini had seized power in Iran, riding the slogan "Death to America" - and sure enough, the attacks on Americans soon began. In November 1979, a militant Islamic mob took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran, the Iranian capital, and held 52 Americans hostage for the next 444 days.
The rescue team sent to free those hostages in April 1980 suffered eight fatalities, making them the first of militant Islam's many American casualties. Others included:
April 1983: 17 dead at the U.S. embassy in Beirut.
October 1983: 241 dead at the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.
December 1983: five dead at the U.S. embassy in Kuwait.
January 1984: the president of the American University of Beirut killed.
April 1984: 18 dead near a U.S. airbase in Spain.
September 1984: 16 dead at the U.S. embassy in Beirut (again).
December 1984: Two dead on a plane hijacked to Tehran.
June 1985: One dead on a plane hijacked to Beirut.
After a let-up, the attacks then restarted: Five and 19 dead in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, 224 dead at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 and 17 dead on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000.
Simultaneously, the murderous assault of militant Islam also took place on U.S. soil:
July 1980: an Iranian dissident killed in the Washington, D.C. area.
August 1983: a leader of the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam killed in Canton, Mich.
August 1984: three Indians killed in a suburb of Tacoma, Wash.
September 1986: a doctor killed in Augusta, Ga.
January 1990: an Egyptian freethinker killed in Tucson, Ariz.
November 1990: a Jewish leader killed in New York.
February 1991: an Egyptian Islamist killed in New York.
January 1993: two CIA staff killed outside agency headquarters in Langley, Va.
February 1993: Six people killed at the World Trade Center.
March 1994: an Orthodox Jewish boy killed on the Brooklyn Bridge.
February 1997: a Danish tourist killed on the Empire State building.
October 1999: 217 passengers killed on an EgyptAir flight near New York City.
In all, 800 persons lost their lives in the course of attacks by militant Islam on Americans before September 2001 - more than killed by any other enemy since the Vietnam War. (Further, this listing does not include the dozens more Americans in Israel killed by militant Islamic terrorists.)
And yet, these murders hardly registered. Only with the events of a year ago did Americans finally realize that "Death to America" truly is the battle cry of this era's most dangerous foe, militant Islam.
In retrospect, the mistake began when Iranians assaulted the U.S. embassy in Tehran and met with no resistance.
Interestingly, a Marine sergeant present at the embassy that fateful day in November 1979 agrees with this assessment. As the militant Islamic mob invaded the embassy, Rodney V. Sickmann followed orders and protected neither himself nor the embassy. As a result, he was taken hostage and lived to tell the tale. (He now works for Anheuser-Busch.)
In retrospect, he believes that passivity was a mistake. The Marines should have done their assigned duty, even if it cost their lives. "Had we opened fire on them, maybe we would only have lasted an hour." But had they done that, they "could have changed history."
Standing their ground would have sent a powerful signal that the United States of America cannot be attacked with impunity. In contrast, the embassy's surrender sent the opposite signal - that it's open season on Americans. "If you look back, it started in 1979; it's just escalated," Sickmann correctly concludes.
To which one of the century's great geostrategist thinkers, Robert Strausz-Hupé, adds his assent. Just before passing away earlier this year at the age of 98, Strausz-Hupé wrote his final words, and they were about the war on terrorism: "I have lived long enough to see good repeatedly win over evil, although at a much higher cost than need have been paid. This time we have already paid the price of victory. It remains for us to win it."
Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and author of "Militant Islam Reaches America."
Who really cares what he has to say?
Today in Odd History, Jimmy Carter was attacked by a rabbit during a fishing trip in Plains, Georgia. The rabbit, which may have been fleeing a predator, swam toward his boat, "hissing menacingly, its teeth flashing and nostrils flared." President Carter was forced to swat at the vicious beast with a canoe paddle, which apparently scared it off.
People, this is the SAME Jimmy Carter who declared war against an brown eyed, furry, cuddly, little rabbit when he did NOT have evidence that the rabbit was going to attack him or even cause harm. Carter should be ashamed of himself with his double standard.
And who in their right mind would believe that this war-with-rabbit monger Carter's statement "hissing menacingly, its teeth flashing and nostrils flared?" What a nut-job he is. I think this war for rabbit oil.
Moronic Georgians (Atlanta liberals and rural puppets) and moronic members of the pundit class the world over have incessantly declared this dunderhead the best ex-president ever. I ask you, what ex-president has ever taken his successors to task in this way, usurping their mandate to power and undermining their agenda? I belive this man Jimmy Carter is the WORST ex-president ever and his behavior borders on anti-Americanism. He accepted a Noble prize that was designed to stab a sitting president in the back for crying out loud.
Jimmy Carter should be very ashamed of himself.
Not to mention that to save on energy all businesses had to keep their air conditioners not lower than a certain setting or if caught the business owner would pay fines and maybe go to jail.
Highest tax bracket was 70%.
The Carter and Clinton admins were communist nightmares. It would be great if they'd find dark holes to climb back into but I guess this is what we have to put up with in order for the American sheeple to truly understand who and what these people are.
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