Jimmy Goes (Pea)Nuts

Jimmy Carter, our 39th President and man who ran the most disastorous presidency of the 20th century, has come out today calling President Bush's foreign policy the worst in our nation's history. He has equally kind and uplifting words for Tony Blair.

One wonders what is going on with Mr. Carter. His presidency was an utter catastrophe. In his post-presidency years, Mr. Carter actually accomplished far more for humanity building houses and erradicating parasites in Africa then he ever did as President. Why he did not maintain some dignity and stick with what has worked for him is a mystery.

Please note that I am not criticizing Mr. Carter solely to make an ancillary attack on his veracity and judgment. Rather, Mr. Carter's history and his view of acceptable foreign policy must be considered in assessing the worth of his judgment. And that assessment can only be that Carter's judgment of Bush's foreign policy is worthless as a valid criticisim. Actually, one could even go beyond that and argue that Carter's censure is actually to be taken as a sign that Bush is doing all the right things in the foreign policy arena.

Carter, besides domestically presiding over double digit inflation and the worst economy since the depression, was a tsunami of disaster in foreign policy. His one success was the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. For a general walk down bad memory lane, here is a retrospective on the Carter years from 2002 by Jay Nordinger.

Perhaps President Carter's most infamous contribution to the mess that is the world today was his enablement of Khomeini's revolution in Iran and Carter's refusal to take effective action to end the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. As Amir Taheri recently explained:

The first contact between the US and the mullahs was established in November 1978, soon after Khomeini set up shop in a suburb of Paris. George Cave, the CIA's Iran specialist traveled to Paris and met Khomeini's close aides at the time: Abol-Hassan Banisadr and Ibrahim Yazdi. The message from President Jimmy Carter was one of support for the ayatollah and his Islamic Revolution.

When the Shah's regime collapsed, the early signs were encouraging for Carter. Khomeini's first Cabinet, under Mahdi Bazargan, included five ministers who had immigrated to the US from Iran and had become US citizens.

The Carter administration saw the Khomeinist revolution as the first step towards creating what Zbigniew Bzrezinski, the National Security Advisor, described as "a green Islamic belt" around the Soviet Union. The idea was that, in time, the "belt" would, become a noose that, when pulled, would strangle the Soviet empire.

Eight months after Khomeini had seized power, Bazargan met Bzrezinski in Algiers and obtained promises of US aid, and a resumption of military supplies, in the context of shared anti-Communist sentiments. Bzrezinski told Carter that Bazargan was "a man with whom we could do business."

A few days later, however, a band of militants raided the US Embassy in Tehran and seized its diplomats hostage. Bazargan and Yazdi, foreign minister at the time, were kicked out, never to return to power.

See here. And, for those of us who lived through the next 444 days, treated to video of our citizens paraded on t.v. while Khomeini consolidated power and made speech after speech about the Great Satan America, Carter's ineffectualness is seared into our consciousness. It is not unfair to say that Carter was midwife to the birth of political and radical Islam in the modern era.

Carter's recollection of events varies somewhat. According to Carter, he was responsible for ending the hostage crisis by his noble efforts.:

President Carter committed himself to the safe return of the hostages while protecting America's interests and prestige. He pursued a policy of restraint that put a higher value on the lives of the hostages than on American retaliatory power or protecting his own political future. The toll of patient diplomacy was great, but President Carter's actions brought freedom for the hostages with America's honor preserved.

That from an article on the subject available at the Carter Library. It's not even good fiction. Actually, the hostages were not released until the day Ronald Regean was sworn in as President. Only a fool would credit Carter with ending the crisis rather then Khomeini's calculus of Regean's likely response to Iran on Day 2 of his Presidency.

Possibly just below Iran on the scale of calamity, there was Carter's disastorous meddling in North Korea. In 1994, Clinton was in the midst of addressing North Korea's nuclear program when Carter, on his own initiative, travelled to North Korea and negotiated an utterly worthless agreement with North Korea that has, today, resulted in North Korea attaining nuclear weapons capability.

I could go on, but the legacy has been covered in far greater detail by far better authors then I. I would recommend that you go to Powerline and do a search for Jimmy Carter. The bottom line is, for Jimmy Carter to criticize Bush's foreign policy is the height of lunacy.

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U.S. Unilateral Sanctions Are Having An Effect

It is somewhat ironic that, in all this rush to negotiate sanctions at the UN Security Council to deal with Iran, and before them North Korea, the most effective sanctions appear to be those we can - and have - taken unilaterally using the powers of the Patriot Act. David Ignatius explains in the Washington Post:

USA Patriot Act, which in Section 311 authorizes Treasury to designate foreign financial institutions that are of "primary money laundering concern." Once a foreign bank is so designated, it is effectively cut off from the U.S. financial system. It can't clear dollars; it can't have transactions with U.S. financial institutions; it can't have correspondent relationships with American banks.

Given that the U.S. banking system is at the heart of the world's economy, such sanctions, or the threat of sanctions against institutions that cooperate with the money laundering designee in spite thereof, have proven remarkably effective.

The new measures work thanks to the hidden power of globalization: Because all the circuits of the global financial system are inter-wired, the U.S. quarantine effectively extends to all major banks around the world. As Levey observed in a recent speech, the impact of this little-noticed provision of the Patriot Act "has been more powerful than many thought possible."

Treasury applied the new tools to North Korea in September 2005, when it put a bank in Macao called Banco Delta Asia on the blacklist. There was no legal proceeding -- just a notice in the Federal Register summarizing the evidence: Banco Delta Asia had been providing illicit financial services to North Korean government agencies and front companies for more than 20 years, according to the Treasury notice. The little Macao bank had helped the North Koreans feed counterfeit $100 bills into circulation, had laundered money from drug deals and had financed cigarette smuggling. North Korea "pays a fee to Banco Delta Asia for financial access to the banking system with little oversight or control," Treasury alleged.

Wham! The international payments window shut almost instantly on Pyongyang's pet bank. Transactions with U.S. entities stopped, but the Treasury announcement also put other countries on notice to beware of Banco Delta Asia. The Macao banking authorities, realizing that they needed the oxygen of the international financial system to survive, took regulatory action on their own and froze the bank's roughly $24 million in North Korean assets. And around Asia, banks began looking for possible links to North Korean front companies -- and shutting them down.

A similar financial squeeze is being applied to Iran. Here again, the impact has come from the way private financial institutions have reacted to public pressure from Treasury. "As banks do their risk-reward analysis, they must now take into account the very serious risk of doing business in Iran, and what the risks would be if they were found to be part of a terrorist or proliferation transaction," says Kimmitt.

Treasury began squeezing Iran last September, when it accused Bank Saderat, one of the largest government-owned banks, of financing terrorism by funneling $50 million to Hezbollah and Hamas since 2001. The Treasury order cut the bank off from any access to the U.S financial system, direct or indirect. A similar ban was imposed in January on Bank Sepah, which Treasury alleged was a key intermediary for Iran's Aerospace Industries Organization, the agency that oversees the country's ballistic missile program.

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