Jimmy Carter, Sanctimonious Hypocrite

What’s most noteworthy about Jimmy Carter is his sanctimonious hypocrisy, a trait in which he excelled all other politicians of his era. I cannot think of even one who comes close. The first chapter of his life was to play the liberal anti-segregationist in Georgia state politics while carefully avoiding giving offense to segregationists. The second chapter was to play the efficient technocrat as President while fumbling pretty much everything he tried. Both as President and former President, he played the noble champion of freedom around the world while giving comfort and support to autocrats, Islamists, and communists so long as they were sufficiently anti-American. And over his entire life he played the devout evangelical Christian while blending in with whatever religious position was to his personal advantage— Southern Baptist, generic Christian, or liberal supporter of homosexual marriage and abortion. Some politicians may have matched him in hypocrisy, but his sanctimoniousness throughout it all was unequalled.

I actually was within fifty feet of Jimmy Carter once, when he was running for the Democratic nomination for President in 1976. I was a high school senior, and I saw him speak when he was a minor candidate, in one of the lounges of the Illini Union in Urbana, Illinois. His pamphlets had a photo taken to make him look like John F. Kennedy, the Democrat elected in 1960, and his big shtick was “zero-based budgeting”, the idea that each year the budget planning would start with a budget of zero for each agency and the President would decide how much it needed, rather than starting with the previous year’s budget and adjusting it up or down. Nobody ever has used zero-based budgeting, because it’s a stupid idea— you don’t start with a Social Security Administration budget of zero, and then then figure out how many workers you need for the agency, and what salaries you’d have to pay to hire them, and add it all up and see how it relates to the number of workers the agency employed last year and what their salaries were. It was all humbug. So was his calling himself “Jimmy”. It was not to be folksy; he would rather have looked more presidential, given that his image was supposed to be that of a nuclear engineer technocrat. But since James Earl Ray had assassinated Martin Luther King eight years previously, James Earl Carter had to become Jimmy Carter if he was going to get enough black votes to win (or white votes, for that matter).

Jimmy Carter was the conservative Democrat in the primary in 1976, and he was running as someone who who was liberal for a southerner, but not too liberal, and as an outsider to Washington politics. That’s why he was outspoken about being a born-again Christian. It gave him the South in the primary, and in the general election too, even though the Democratic Establishment laughed at him for it. It perhaps did not hurt that in 1970 Carter was the candidate of the segregationists for Governor of Georgia. He was not a sincere segregationist, to be sure— remember, I said he was a hypocrite, not a racist— and is said to be one of only three members of his church to vote to allow blacks as members. Nonetheless, he portrayed his opponent in the Democratic primary, Carl Sanders, as an Atlanta big-city guy who was friendly to blacks and hostile to the 1968 segregationist candidate for President, George Wallace. Carter got only 7% of the black vote, won the rural white vote overwhelmingly, and was endorsed by the segregationists, whose support he actively sought.

As President, Jimmy Carter was incompetent in foreign affairs and ineffective in domestic. He was actually good on economic policy, continuing the deregulation that had started under the Republicans. But he really *was* an outsider, who was just as bad as Donald Trump at dealing with Washington politicians and bureaucrats and who didn’t have Trump’s dealmaking ability to pull out when he met foreign affairs for the first time in his life.

That includes what I always thought Jimmy Carter’s was biggest accomplishment as President, the Camp David Accords. These were a great accomplishment, to be sure, but they were accomplished in spite of Jimmy Carter, I recently discovered, not because of him. This requires some background explanation.

In 1978 the Camp David Accords indeed brought peace to the Middle East. We have forgotten how bad things were. There were four Arab-Israeli Wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. There have been no wars since that are worthy of the name. There has been much bloodshed, to be sure, but it has not been between two armies, but between the Israeli army and various groups of civilian terrorists, scum unworthy even of the name of guerillas, bandits in the service of their bosses rather than of any nation. I gave credit to Carter for that.

But I was wrong. Carter should not get credit. Now that he’s died at age 100, I discovered an article by David Harsanyi talking about what actually happened in 1978, and it turns out Carter was the biggest obstacle to the peace deal, even though he took credit for it. I looked into it a bit and see Harsanyi was right. Here’s the story.

Israel inflicted humiliating defeats on various combinations of Arab nations in the three wars of 1948, 1956, and 1967. Egypt was one of those defeated nations in all three wars, and was by far the richest, most populous, and most powerful of Israel’s adversaries. Jordan and Lebanon are minor countries; Syria is only about as big as Israel and is poorly run; Iraq and Iran and the Gulf States and Saudia Arabia and Kuwait and Libya and Sudan and Pakistan and Afghanistan and Morocco and Cuba are too far away for conventional warfare;¹ Turkey has not been hostile to Israel until the 2020’s. Egypt is big and close and could eliminate Israel from the map, even though it had been badly defeated so many times.

In 1973, though, in the Yom Kippur War, Egypt showed it could defeat Israel’s army. Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on a Jewish holiday, and though Syria didn’t do very well, Egypt gained considerable territory in the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel was occupying. This was not the Egypt of 1967, of the Six Day War. Israel survived only thanks to an all-out emergency airlift of weapons and ammunition ordered by America’s President Nixon, at the time in the middle of the Watergate scandal but still in control of foreign policy. Our NATO allies all refused to help us send arms to Israel, so it was a difficult airlift for the United States, but it worked. The Israeli army rallied and counterattacked, and surrounded one of Egypt’s armies in the Sinai. At that point, President Nixon told Israel to stop, rather than completely crush Egypt, even though they could have sent tanks into Cairo if they’d kept going.

Stopping was a wise decision. Egypt’s President Sadat was a hero. He had lost the war, but the Egyptian army had erased its humiliation in 1967 under the bombastic President Nasser. It ended the war in possession of most of the east bank of the Suez Canal, which it had completely lost in 1967.

Jimmy Carter wanted Israel to give back its 1967 conquests. He wanted the Sinai and Gaza returned to Egypt, and the Golan Heights returned to Syria. He wanted the West Bank not to be returned to Jordan, but to be made an independent state under the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization. And he wanted the Arab countries not to invade Israel and the PLO not to blow up Jewish civilians. This would all be in accord with various United Nations resolutions, and U.N. resolutions were very important to him.²

So Jimmy Carter and the State Department pressed for multilateral negotiations between all the Middle Eastern Countries, Russia, the United States, and the PLO. The U.S. reluctantly said the PLO shouldn’t be formally represented until it agreed that Israel had a right to exist, but only because the previous U.S. Presidents, Nixon and Ford, had put that requirement in place and it was too embarassing to retreat from it and allow the terrorists to be at the negotiating table without even having them renounce genocide.

Egypt and Israel had other ideas. Egypt emphatically did not want to have to take Gaza back. Gaza was a giant slum full of terrorists, and no rational nation would want Gaza within its borders. Jordan didn’t want the West Bank back either, for basically the same reason, but Jimmy’s plan was to let the terrorists be the government for the West Bank. Egypt also did not care about the Palestinians, or, if it did, it knew that the Palestinian people would be better off under Israeli rule than under rule by plutocratic terrorists living abroad in luxury on the tax revenues and bribes, and so it thought the status quo was just fine. And Egypt did not care about whether it was Syria or Israel who controlled the Golan Heights, with the caveat that if there was another war, Egypt would prefer that Syria control them so as to make the conquest of Israel easier. Israel, of course, wanted the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank for self-defense, to provide a buffer zone and keep its enemies from being able to drive to Tel Aviv in 47 minutes. And Israel wanted the West Bank because that was the most important part of ancient Israel, the medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem, and modern Palestine under Turkish and British rule.

So Egypt and Israel got together to make a side deal. President Sadat asked to be invited to fly to Jerusalem, and his invitation was accepted. What he wanted was the Sinai and money, which he needed because he had broken off his alliance with Russia. What Israel wanted was peace with Egypt. Israel could trade the Sinai for peace. They needed America to get the money. So they asked President Carter to set up talks in Camp David and to supply the money.

The PLO was pointedly not invited. Neither Israel nor Egypt wanted the issue of the West Bank to make trouble for their win-win deal. But Jimmy Carter and the U.S. State Department wanted to negotiate on behalf of the PLO, since Yasser Arafat, their corrupt pervert of a terrorist, couldn’t be there himself. Carter, I suppose, felt sorry for the Palestinians. The State Department wanted to please the Arab oil states, and in particular to please Saudi Arabia, which was at the extreme Islamist end of Islam, so extreme that besides sincerely hating Jews and Christians, they hated Shiite Persia and secular Iraq, Egypt, and Syria. Saudi Arabia would not be happy with peace between Israel and Egypt, but creation of a terrorist state next to Tel Aviv would somewhat mollify them. So Jimmy Carter did his best to pressure Israel to pull out of the West Bank. In the end, he failed. As a compromise, Israel agreed to what it had always refused before: self-government for the Arab towns in the West Bank, but with Israeli police, Israeli ownership of unoccupied wasteland, and the Israeli army in place to defend the Jordan River against attack or infiltration.

And so it turned out. Although President Sadat was assassinated by Islamists for making peace between Egypt and Israel, that peace has endured. The United States has effectively made both countries allies, giving both of them the gobs of money that are a major reason for Egypt not to make trouble or turn to Russia for help.

Carter himself, though, was unhappy with the result. His books The Blood of Abraham and Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid show that his affection for Islamist terrorists continued. He upgraded it to include not just the PLO, which in all fairness is less Islamist than simply leftwing, corrupt, and anti-Christian, but also Hamas, which ranks Islamistism right up there with the other three features, possibly even ahead of them. Carter had deep “fondness” for Yasser Arafat that “transcended politics” and was “based on their emotional connection and the shared belief that they were both ordained to be peacemakers by God,” according to historian Douglas Brinkley. But after Arafat died (very likely of AIDS), Carter met with Hamas in 2008 and said how peaceful Hamas was even as as it was launching hundreds of missiles per month at civilian targets in Israel. In 2014, after a major Hamas attack, he called on the U.S. to recognizeHamas as the “legitimate political actor” that represented “the Palestinian population.”

I’ll stop here, since you can read elsewhere of Jimmy Carter’s praise of Poland’s dictator, Edward Gierek, Yugoslavia’s dictator, Joseph Tito, Romania’s dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s dictator, Hugo Chavez, and Nicaragua’s dictator, Daniel Ortez. But he didn’t like the Shah of Iran. A sanctimonious hypocrite, as I have said.

Footnotes

1. Cuba? Yes, Cuba sent about 1,000 troops to fight Israel in the 1973 war. Morocco sent 5,000, and Saudi Arabia sent 25,000. Iraq had 1,000 troops killed or wounded. See Wikipedia’s “Yom Kippur War.”

2. I suspect he also didn’t like Jews very much, as one might expect of a Georgia Democrat, whether his anti-semitism was of the old-fashioned rural white variety or the newer urban black variety. It is worth keeping in mind that Carter was despised by the Northeastern Establishment Democrats, the Edward Kennedy wing, with whom he openly warred. Many of them were Jewish and all of them were pro-Israel at the time, though by 2024 a majority of them are anti-Israel.