Carter as historian: pot calling the kettle black…

I used to like Jimmy Carter…until his bitching – as an (energizer-bunny) arm-chair ex-president – prevailed upon a thin-skinned and fickle President Bill Clinton to diss members of his own administration to quell Carter’s vainglorious criticisms.

And, his bitching was never more persistent, and Clinton’s appeasement of it never more egregious, than when Carter ingratiated himself as de facto US Secretary of State to lead a delegation to negotiate peace with Haiti in 1994. Of course, this was much to the eternal chagrin of Clinton’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell – who thought a more sustainable peace would have been secured if it were negotiated more from a position of overweening military power than through supplicating moral appeals. (And Powell’s resentment has been vindicated by the menace of street thugs who have made a mockery of Carter’s peace deal by keeping Haiti mired in conflict and economic stagnation ever since.)

Now comes Carter again…this time bitching at George W Bush and no doubt hoping that Bush too will diss members of his own administration to gain his good graces. And isn’t it ironic that, in this case, the person most undermined by Carter’s meddling, and the one who will surely resent it eternally, is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Meanwhile, anyone with high-school knowledge of US history will appreciate the shameless, hypocritical and sanctimonious nature of Carter’s criticisms. After all, if the Bush administration is the worst in history (and, arguably, it is), then the Carter administration must rank in a tie for this dubious distinction….