Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Repent, or else

Or, perhaps, what's mine is mine, and what's yours is negotiable? More on this theme from Spencer and Taheri.
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3 comments:

Tecumseh said...

Aahhh, those were the days... Jimmah, we need you back!


In 1979, soon after the mullahs seized power, Mr. Carter sent Ayatollah Khomeini a warm congratulatory letter. Mr. Carter's man at the U.N., a certain Andrew Young, praised Khomeini as "a 20th-century saint." Mr. Carter also tapped his closest legal advisor, the late Lloyd Cutler, as U.S. ambassador to the mullarchy.

A more dramatic show of U.S. support for the mullahs came when Mr. Brzezinski flew to Algiers to meet Khomeini's prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan. This was love at first sight--to the point where Mr. Carter approved the resumption of military supplies to Iran, even as the mullahs were executing Iranians by the thousands, including many whose only "crime" was friendship with the U.S. The Carter administration's behavior convinced the mullahs that the U.S. was a paper tiger and that it was time for the Islamic Revolution to highlight hatred of America. Mr. Carter reaped what he had sown when the mullahs sent "student" fanatics to seize the U.S. embassy compound, a clear act of war, and hold its diplomats hostage for 444 days. "The Carter administration's weakness was a direct encouragement to [anti-American] hard-liners," wrote Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, one of the hostage-takers, years later.

5/11/2006 12:27 AM
Mr roT said...

Whoa! Andrew Young was part of the Clinton Admin also, before getting tied up in a court case. What does it take to blow it in this country?

5/11/2006 1:00 AM
Tecumseh said...

This was beyond appeasement. For all his faults, at least Chamberlain didn't fall in love with Hitler at Munich, nor did the Brits sell arms to the Reich after that.

Remember also that it was Carter's manifest weakness (and pusillanimity) that enncouraged (at least in part) the Soviets to invade Afghanistan soon thereafter. And the Taliban and bin Laden were an unintended consequence of that.

We're still paying dearly for Jimmah's mistakes, after all those years.

5/11/2006 8:31 AM

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