Whatever else one has to say about the presidency of James Earl Carter Jr., one must admit that he was not a warmonger. A technocrat, yes; a utopian socialist, probably; a warmonger, no. The Carter presidency brought the United States as close as it has been to peace since the days of Herbert Hoover; sadly, with the cold war still raging and the Iranian people overthrowing the American puppet Shah, president Carter would find himself dragged into foreign entanglements all the same. Still and all, it was something close to peace, and that’s not nothing.
President Carter had the good fortune to be the first president since World War II not to inherit any military boondoggles in the far east. This was, in fact, part of the reason he won the election of 1976; as a relative unknown with no nationwide name recognition, he was at a steep disadvantage running against a sitting president during the bicentennial. However, the Carter campaign nimbly took advantage of president Ford’s two main areas of weakness: Watergate and Vietnam. As an outsider, Carter sold himself to the American people as a "reform" candidate who wasn’t enmeshed in any of the national political scandals, as against president Ford, who was still suffering from issuing the Nixon pardon two years prior. He was also able to tar Ford with the eventual final disgrace in Vietnam. In other words: Jimmy Carter ran on a "hope and change" ticket, spinning his inexperience and remoteness as a positive.
The only hot war during the Carter administration happened in Iran, and much of subsequent U.S. middle east policy becomes easier to understand with an appreciation for exactly what took place there during the Carter administration. It began, of course, with the uprising against the Shah, led by the cleric Sayyid Ruhollah Mūsavi Khomeini. This unrest began late in 1977, and intensified all throughout 1978; by late 1978, it appeared that the Shah’s grip on the country was failing. It was generally expected that the United States, the true power behind the Peacock Throne, would intervene and support the Shah, but president Carter balked due to his belief that any attempt to suppress the rebellion would necessarily entail a "bloodbath." As the president said in a press conference on 12 December 1978:
We have no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of Iran, and we have no intention of permitting others to interfere in the internal affairs of Iran. The difficult situation there has been exacerbated by uncontrolled statements made from foreign nations that encourage bloodbaths and violence. This is something that really is deplorable and, I would hope, would cease after this holy season passes.
This is one of the few times in American history that a president declared "no intention of interfering with the internal affairs" of a foreign country and actually meant it. Almost exactly a month later, on 16 January 1979, the Shah of Iran boarded his private jet and fled to Egypt, bringing the 2500-year-old Persian empire to its conclusion. He was expecting to be offered asylum by the United States, but president Carter once again confounded the game, not wanting the United States any more deeply entangled in the Iranian affair than necessary. In particular, following the attack on the American embassy in Tehran on 14 February 1979, Carter became convinced that harboring the Shah — who was wanted by the new government in Iran — would endanger the lives of the embassy staff.
The president may have wanted the Shah to stay out of America, but he was largely outside the mainstream of American political thought. In particular, the rising neoconservative movement — spearheaded by Republican bigwigs David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger — continuously lobbied the president to change his mind. To his credit, Carter held fast, and refused to be intimidated. His soft heart would be his undoing, however, as the Shah, having settled in Mexico, was suffering from Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia — a rare blood cancer. When he took a turn for the worse late in 1979, the president relented, and allowed him to enter the United States to receive treatment on 22 October. Two weeks later, on 4 November, exactly one year before the 1980 presidential election, president Carter’s fears would prove justified, as the Iranian revolutionaries seized the embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-five hostages. Many years after the fact, Journalist Robert Parry interviewed one of the revolutionaries, and learned that, according to his source,
The Iranian said the target of the raid was not the embassy personnel, but rather the embassy’s intelligence documents.
"We had believed that the U.S. government had been manipulating affairs inside Iran and we wanted to prove it," he said. "We thought if we could get into the embassy, we could get the documents that would prove this. We hadn’t thought about the hostages.
"We all went to the embassy. We had wire cutters to cut through the fence. We started climbing over the fences. We had expected more resistance. When we got inside, we saw the Americans running and we chased them."
The revolutionaries were planning a simple smash-and-grab, but, as the old saw holds, their plan did not survive contact with the enemy, and they soon found themselves in possession of the documents, the embassy, dozens of American hostages, and a crisis of far more sweeping proportions than they could have known. At first, the Carter administration attempted to negotiate with the Iranians; when that didn’t work, they tried the usual American tactics of freezing bank assets and applying trade embargoes. Those approaches also failed to get results, and this would serve as the catalyst for the one and only instance in which Jimmy Carter authorized offensive military action: the ill-fated Operation Eagle Claw.
The plan was simple enough. A base would be established in the Dasht-e Lut desert (to be known as "Desert One"), and a unit of American helicopters would blitz from there into Tehran, drop off a payload of American troops near the embassy, and the embassy would be sacked and the hostages freed all in one giant conflagration of American military power. It seemed nearly foolproof, but the Americans had failed to take into account the peculiar weather and terrain conditions in the Persian desert; the low-flying, rotor-powered aircraft blinded themselves with clouds of sand en route to Desert One, and one of the assault helicopters collided with one of the fuel tankers at the staging area. The ensuing explosion killed three marines and five airmen, along with destroying a huge portion of the operation’s fuel supply and creating a very large, highly visible signal that something was afoot out there in the desert. In the aftermath, the United States was forced to abandon Operation Eagle Claw before it even began, and the Iranian government, having been tipped off to the United States’ intention to mount a military rescue, responded by scattering the hostages among various sites, making a single extraction impossible.
President Carter was now getting a bit desperate. Remember, the clock was ticking; there were exactly 365 days between the capture of the embassy and the 1980 presidential election, and fully half that time had been spent already. This set the stage for one of the most despicably cynical games ever played in American politics, as the president planned an "October Surprise" — a release of the hostages just before voting day, to catapault himself to a second term — and the Republicans plotted their own "October Surprise," an attempt to sabotage Carter’s negotiations and delay the release until after the installation of the new president. Meanwhile, fifty-two Americans languished in Iranian captivity (the Iranians had already released thirteen of them, all women and black men, citing Marxoid hogwash about solidarity with "oppressed minorities," as though anyone being held captive at gunpoint is anything other than an oppressed minority). Unfortunately for president Carter — and for the captives — he had made too many enemies during his extensive bungling of the hostage crisis, and the Republicans were able to negotiate a crooked deal with the Ayatollah. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who was president of Iran at the time, explains it thusly:
Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 U.S. presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.
The Republicans had calculated correctly: Jimmy Carter’s failure to get the hostages released before the election cost him significantly, and Ronald Reagan was elected in a landslide. As though to place in stark relief just how corrupt this whole affair was, the hostages were finally released after Reagan’s inauguration — immediately after, in fact. He had just begun his inaugural address at the time.
President Carter also received a lot of flack for his policy of pursuing détente with the Soviet Union. Just as had been the case in Iran, however, the president proved himself fairly easy to maneuver. The neocons, through founding father Scoop Jackson, organized in 1972 what they called the "Coalition for a Democratic Majority," which was intended to manipulate the Democratic Party into becoming more generally favorable to the neocon fever dreams of militarism and socialism. This outfit leaned heavily on president Carter throughout his administration, as did another, similar group: the Committee on the Present Danger, a front organization concocted by the CIA’s "Team B," which existed for the sole purpose of exaggerating the threat posed by the Soviet Union. The generally peacelike president was under attack by these two factions, both of which wanted to see war with the Soviets, rather than the détente he had been pursuing, and they finally got the break they were looking for on 24 December 1979, when the Soviet 40th Army invaded and occupied Afghanistan. The neocons were unable to goad Carter into open war against the Soviet Union, but he was persuaded to break détente, complete with a rather childish boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics, which were held in Moscow. More importantly than that, this was the instigating event that convinced president Carter to begin a massive (and utterly wasteful) military buildup that would continue throughout the Reagan administration, complete with a reinstatement of the "Selective Service" draft registration, ended by president Ford only five short years prior. This was another nail in the coffin of Carter’s electoral chances, as the country, still reeling from the evils of the Vietnam-era draft, had no desire to see millions of young men again conscripted and sent to fight a pointless proxy war in Asia. Selective Service costs millions of dollars every year to administrate, does nothing of any value — even the military brass is against conscription these days — and creates endless controversies, most recently with the government’s insistence on registering females as well as males. It was entirely ended by president Ford, and there was no good reason for president Carter to recreate it.
Jimmy Carter’s signature domestic issue was the "energy crisis:" an entirely phony crisis manufactured by government price controls, deepened by government supply restrictions, and tarted up with government rhetoric. It is not overstating the case to say that, had the government merely left well enough alone, there never would have been an energy crisis to begin with. The gasoline lines in the early seventies had been a direct result of the Nixon administration’s gasoline price controls (exacerbated, to be sure, by the 1973 Arab oil embargo), and the energy crisis brewing in the late seventies was, just as before, caused by the government attempting to control the price of oil and natural gas. This is about as basic an economic concept as there is: if the government forces sellers to sell a product at a price lower than what they could get on the free market, less of that product will be produced. If the government applies price controls in response to a price "shock" — brought on, for example, by a foreign embargo — then the effect will be even more pronounced, as forcing prices to fall when they should be rising is going to drive many suppliers out of the market entirely. This is utterly straightforward supply-and-demand analysis, but it appears that it was entirely lost on president Carter, who responded to the burgeoning energy crisis by urging Congress to tighten the price controls; apparently the president was more outraged by the idea of "those people" making money than he was by the thought of the American people going without heat and light! The best one can say for Jimmy Carter in this area is that, unlike Richard Nixon, it appears that he sincerely did not understand basic economics; Nixon clearly did — in fact, he had cogently explained the problem with price controls years prior to applying them — and chose to do what he knew to be the wrong thing in order to score political points. Carter I believe was honestly ignorant, as is reflected in his famous "unpleasant talk," delivered on 18 April 1977:
I know that some of you may doubt that we face real energy shortages. The 1973 gasoline lines are gone, and our homes are warm again. But our energy problem is worse tonight than it was in 1973 or a few weeks ago in the dead of winter. It is worse because more waste has occurred, and more time has passed by without our planning for the future. And it will get worse every day until we act.
The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out. In spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily at about six percent a year. Imports have doubled in the last five years. Our nation’s independence of economic and political action is becoming increasingly constrained. Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption, we now believe that early in the 1980s the world will be demanding more oil that it can produce…
Each American uses the energy equivalent of 60 barrels of oil per person each year. Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth. We waste more energy than we import. With about the same standard of living, we use twice as much energy per person as do other countries like Germany, Japan, and Sweden.
This was utterly boilerplate government cluelessness: president Carter blamed all the problems on "waste," and told the common people they need to learn to sacrifice for the greater good. He mentioned that domestic oil production was falling, but failed to consider why that might be the case (to wit, the price controls making it uneconomic to produce more oil), and he declared the now-infamous incorrect prediction that "peak oil" would be reached sometime in the 1980s, after which the world would swiftly run out of oil. For those who are out of the loop: it is presently well past the 1980s, and oil production is currently higher than it has ever been, and shows no signs of running out. The worst part of president Carter’s speech, however, was one infamous paragraph near the beginning:
Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war" — except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.
This section is the reason this is known as president Carter’s "Moral Equivalent of War" speech, which became a political weapon used against him for the very, very most trivial of reasons: the acronym for "Moral Equivalent of War" is "MEOW," and, indeed, the president’s political opponents (and their media flacks) referred to this as the president’s "meow" speech, in a remarkably successful attempt to make him look silly. Funny though that may be, it’s a bit of a shame, since the popular fixation on the crouching meow distracted attention from a hidden dragon. The phrase "moral equivalent of war" is not original to James Earl Carter Jr. Rather, it was first coined by the utopian socialist philosopher William James in 1910, who wrote:
If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man’s relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.
Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one’s life. I spoke of the "moral equivalent" of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until and equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skilful propogandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.
What James had in mind when he wrote of the search for a "moral equivalent of war" was his desire to find an end other than war which the state could use to coerce people into sublimating their own desires in favor of the preferred "discipline." When president Carter spoke of "uniting our efforts" against the energy crisis, this is exactly what he had in mind. It was the tyrant’s age-old dream of creating the perfect, centrally-directed hive society, and nobody noticed because everybody was too busy picking on him for almost saying meow.
Not that it was too difficult to make president Carter look silly. One need look no farther than his stated drive for government transparency — at least when it came to UFO sightings. Jimmy Carter, in fact, personally saw a UFO, and one of his campaign promises was to get the government to release all the information it had about UFOs. This was a promise he was not to keep; once elected, he immediately began walking back all UFO-talk, with deputy press secretary Walter Wurfel stating that "whatever statement you saw concerning President Carter’s view on UFOs was not exactly what he said. He had seen something that he thought was unexplainable that possibly might have been a UFO and he will certainly disclose and describe any unusual phenomena he might see." The administration’s official line, then, was the the president saw a flying object that he could not identify, but that it wasn’t necessarily a UFO. This is government doublespeak at its finest. Wurful would also state that "[president Carter] did not, however, pledge to ‘make every piece of information concerning the UFOs available to the public.’" This is true, but only technically; the actual words spoken by president Carter on 31 March 1976 to Thomas Heiman, Associate Director of the UFO Education Center in Appleton, Wisconsin, were:
I don’t know what to make of it. However, some of the sightings have been witnessed by 20 to 25 people, law enforcement officers, and everyone in the cockpit of a major airplane, and so forth. But I can’t tell you what to make of it. If I knew, I’d be the only one in the world who does. But, yes, I would make these kinds of data available to the public, as President, to help resolve the mystery about it.
Perhaps we should treat president Obama more kindly in regards to his bogus "transparency" promises; president Carter couldn’t even manage government transparency on the entirely silly subject of UFO sightings.
The Carter administration also was the first to bail out an automobile manufacturer, when, on 7 January 1980, the president signed into law the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979, complete with arguably the most excessive hyperbole ever attached to a signing statement:
This legislation, the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979, is extremely important not only for Chrysler and its employees, its dealers, its suppliers, not only important for Detroit but for all the people of our country and, I think, almost every State in our Nation, in fact, almost every community.
President Carter had the most wonderful combination of ignorance and gall. Almost every community in the nation! Clearly, if almost every community in the nation truly benefited from Chrysler, Chrysler would have been able to sell its cars. The fact that Chrysler was losing money hand-over-fist indicates that a substantial number of those communities considered it to be of far less importance than many other things — not that their choices were to be allowed to matter, as their money would be taken and spent on Chrysler whether they liked it or not. At least president Carter assured the American people that "this legislation does not violate the principle of letting a competitive free enterprise system in our country function on its own, because Chrysler is unique in its present circumstances;" otherwise, I’d have begun to worry that car companies would get bailed out again twenty years later.
Not all of president Carter’s domestic policies were bad. His administration began a few initiatives that had positive results, and that the succeeding Reagan administration would claim all the credit for. Under the Carter administration, substantial deregulation of air travel, trucking, and telecommunications took place, resulting in prices tumbling and quality greatly increasing in those areas. In particular, prior to the Carter deregulation, air travel was the exclusive domain of the very wealthy; following the Carter deregulation, the Civil Aeronautics Board (and its attendant price controls) was abolished — a government agency actually closed down! — and the market was opened to competition, resulting in more accessible, more affordable air travel for ordinary Americans. President Carter also deserves credit, in spite of his earlier contrary rhetoric, for ending the price controls on oil and natural gas — relics from the Nixon administration that, as we’ve already seen, led to one "crisis" after another. In addition, in an attempt to get to grips with the out-of-control "stagflation" of the 70s — a period during which inflation and unemployment were both in the double-digits, which is meant to be impossible according to standard Keynesian analysis — president Carter appointed Paul Volcker as the head of the Federal Reserve; Volcker almost immediately began contracting the money supply (which had been expanding at a prodigious rate since the Nixon administration), creating a sharp recession that Carter took the blame for, but successfully ending the stagflation and returning the economy to health. Carter also had a success, though bittersweet, in foreign policy: the Camp David Accords successfully brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, but at tremendous cost: Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated shortly afterward by dissidents within his own country; Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin was enraged by Carter’s terms, and thus was driven directly into the arms of the Republicans, laying the groundwork for Iran-contra, and the continued domination of American politics by Israeli interests; Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, emboldened by the collapse of Egypt as a regional power following the death of el-Sadat, began strengthening his military to fill the power void; and Palestine and Jordan, whose fates were dictated to them by a treaty they had no part in, were increasingly radicalized and set against Israel and the United States. That’s quite a few unintended consequences by any measure.
President Carter has been almost uniquely active in the years since he left office. He’s written twenty-one books, traveled the world promoting his political causes, and started a foundation, the Carter Center, devoted to the promotion of human rights. For his efforts, he’s been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, putting him in company with three other United States presidents; the fact that the other three are Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Barack Obama is perhaps a more stinging condemnation of the Nobel Peace Prize than anything else one could say. At the time of this writing, president Carter, now ninety-one years old, is still alive and still working. His is perhaps an underappreciated legacy; through his bungling in the middle east, he set the stage for the last forty years of turmoil and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, while his William James-influenced ideals of the utopia of Socialist Man can be seen working in the background of schemes like the Universal National Service Act, a truly atrocious piece of legislation that floats back toward the surface every three years or so, and would force all Americans to waste two years of their lives working on government projects. Truly this is an example of a man who meant well, but who failed to appreciate the true complexity of human society. Perhaps it would have been well had president Carter spent less time reading William James, and more time reading Friedrich Hayek, who wrote, in The Fatal Conceit, that "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."