Don’t Appear Weak!
Carter and President Gerald Ford debating at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, September 1976 – Public Domain
“Since his death, Jimmy Carter has been lauded for brokering the Camp David Accords and for his post-White House mission to help the poor and battle disease. But glossed over amid all the tributes is the burdensome legacy that Mr. Carter left for his Democratic Party: a presidency long caricatured as a symbol of ineffectiveness and weakness.”
“This perception has shadowed the party for nearly 40 years. It was forged in the seizure of American hostages by Iranian militants in 1979 and the failed military attempt to free them, as well as the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. And it lingered in memories of Mr. Carter wearing a cardigan as he asked Americans to conserve energy, or bemoaning what he called a “crisis of confidence” in an address to the nation that became a textbook example of political self-harm”
(“A Legacy From Carter That Democrats Would Prefer to Escape,” New York Times, January 8, 2025).
Nowhere in the Times article is there any mention of the facts that led radical students in Iran to take over the US embassy in Tehran along with hostages. The history of the overthrow of the democratic government in Iran in 1953 in a CIA operation is erased from history. The US does not need an explanation to overthrow governments or conduct endless wars. That’s what American Exceptionalism is all about. That’s what at its very essence bullying is all about. It’s as if the US is addicted to an enlargement of Richard Nixon’s: “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” When the US does it, then it must be just and legal. It, militarism, is also very profitable, so the power elite, who pull the mannequin strings of politicians, really love it. Thousands of years of the development of international rules of behavior in war are thrown on the trash heap of history. How else, besides abject stupidity, can Trump’s latest pronouncements about Panama and Greenland, even if for hype and diversion, be seen as anything else? We’re exceptional, so we’ll do anything that we please and we’ve got the armaments and allies to back us up. It is the logic of the wilderness, without the natural balance of nature. Nowhere is there any mention that Carter began the support for radical religionists in Afghanistan that led to the devastating attacks in the US on September 11, 2001. The article jettisons everything that a first-year student in a survey course of world history learns and that is events are both preceded, and have a direct impact on, future events. Carter’s anticommunism was in full display in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but no one cares to note that now because he was seen as weak. It seems as if the “newspaper of record” doesn’t realize there are cause-effect relationships in history and lots of cogent facts that come into play within and between nations. It’s more than Orwellian that Times journalists seem to be intent on writing history as if it has no antecedents or consequences. George Orwell’s character Winston Smith, in Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), knew about burning the pages of history and torture. Bishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador may have been able to tell the story of torture there if US-trained death squads had not murdered him while he celebrated Mass. That atrocity took place under Jimmy Carter’s so-called watch.
Indonesia was also no exception. The Carter administration bankrolled the arms leading to atrocities in East Timor. This, militarism, is what empires are all about and all presidents are in the “game.”
Israel/Palestine seems to be one of many areas of foreign policy where the US can’t get it right, and the US seems never to have taken Carter’s correct assessment of the apartheid regime in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. The US and its allies throw billions at genocide and the newspaper of record has nothing intelligent to say. Do schools of journalism teach anything meaningful these days? Do they teach about the importance of facts?
The abysmal policies of Jimmy Carter in Central America are discussed in “Jimmy Carter’s ‘Decency & Humanity’ Came with Deadly U.S. Policies in Latin America: Greg Grandin” (Democracy Now, January 8, 2025). While Trump will seek to reverse Carter’s legacy in Panama, the arming of death squads in El Salvador under Carter and the pushback against the revolution in Nicaragua represented the other side of Carter’s legacy reflected in his administration’s support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan. His national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, could have easily served and advised about the march toward encircling the former Soviet Union in successive Republican and Democratic administrations. The march of militarism was and is reflected in the duopoly’s militaristic view of the world and the US role in it.
The Times article cited above is not wrong. Presidents and presidential candidates can’t be weak. Better, even if eventually being blindsided by the far right like John Kerry in 2004 over the Swift Boat debacle, to show up at a presidential nominating convention and declare “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty,” or, Kamala Harris declaring that she owns a Glock pistol. The Beatles sang: “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” No matter in a society governed by guns, endless gun violence against the innocent, and endless wars both proxy and open without rules of war. The point is not to appear weak.
“Democrats have become the party of war. Americans are tired of it” (Guardian, January 9, 2025). That’s been pretty obvious during the Biden administration.
One way of understanding American exceptionalism, at least in its current form, is as an affirmation of faith that the US is always on the side of good, that while the US may make mistakes, it always has good intentions. American exceptionalism allows a president to spout lines about “the power of our example” (Guardian) while backing war crimes and welcoming those accused of them to the White House. American exceptionalism is a way of not really having to look at policies and the outcomes they produce, or to ask if they’re working. One upside of Trump, and I use that term advisedly, is that he’s made it impossible not to look.
If those in the US are tired of war, then why are these figures from US recent spending on support for Israel and its genocide in Gaza and other operations so easy to access? These are the costs of US supported war in the region as compiled by the Watson Institute’s Costs of War Project: “U.S. spending on aid for Israeli military operations in Gaza and elsewhere between Oct. 7, 2023 – Oct. 7, 2024 is over $17.9 billion. Spending on related U.S. operations in the region is over $4.86 billion…”
This is where US taxpayers’ money has gone since the September terror attacks: “The U.S. budgetary costs of the war in Afghanistan from FY2001-FY2022 totaled over 2.3 trillion dollars. The estimated U.S. budgetary costs of the wars in Iraq and Syria from FY2003-FY2022 totaled 2.9 trillion dollars. These make up a part of the larger eight trillion dollars of U.S. post-9/11 war spending” (Costs of War Project).
“The number of people killed directly in the violence of the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere are approximated here. Several times as many civilians have died due to the reverberating effects of these wars. The methods of accounting are described in this paper. The Costs of War Project estimates these post 9/11 wars have caused between 905,000 and 940,000 direct deaths.”
US presidents are always involved in planning for war and conducting war. When presidential candidates like Eugene McCarthy (1968) and George McGovern (1972) are even remotely close to the levers of power, they are dispatched by the system by various means by the oligarchs in the power elite.
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