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There He Goes Again: Jimmy Carter, our 'model ex-president'
National Review, May 20, 2002 by Jay Nordlinger
If there's one thing everyone "knows" about Jimmy Carter, it's that he's been an excellent ex-president -- a "model ex-president," everyone says. But some of us have to wonder, sometimes.
Carter has resurfaced in recent weeks, sounding off on the Middle East and preparing for a trip to Castro's Cuba. The 39th president is never far from the surface, of course. He has often been an irritant to his successors in the White House. He exasperated Clinton on North Korea and Haiti, and he appalled the first Bush. In the run-up to the Gulf War, as the administration was trying to assemble a coalition against Iraq, Carter sent a letter to members of the U.N. Security Council, urging them to thwart the administration's effort. Some around Washington were heard to mutter "treason."
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Whatever the weather, Carter has enjoyed a reputation as a Middle East sage, owing to his role in the 1979 Camp David accords. Yet that reputation rests on shaky ground. The painful truth is, Sadat and Begin had their deal worked out before ever approaching Washington. Prof. Bernard Lewis, dean of Middle East scholars, put it this way to PBS's Charlie Rose recently: "The popular mythology is that Sadat made this enormously courageous and imaginative gesture of offering peace. . . . [Sadat and Begin] then went to the United States to discuss it further, and thanks to the wise statesmanship of Jimmy Carter and his staff, they were able to bring [their work] to a successful conclusion, to a peace treaty." Why, in fact, did the two principals ring the White House? "Well, obviously," explained Lewis, "they needed someone to pay the bill, and who but the United States could fulfill that function?"
Still, Carter is immensely proud of his rendezvous with Middle East history, and he trades on it constantly. No one should assume, however, that he's an honest broker -- at least anymore. For the past many years, he has been passionately anti-Israel, more or less embracing the PLO line. He has repeatedly been at the service of Yasser Arafat. After the Gulf War, the PLO chief was on the outs with Saudi Arabia, because he had backed Saddam Hussein. So he asked Carter to fly to Riyadh to smooth things over and restore Saudi funding to him -- which he did. Arabs are also robust funders of the Carter Center, the ex-president's redoubt and vehicle in Atlanta.
While Carter has many warm words for Arafat and for dictators around the world (as we will see shortly), he has nothing but contempt and scorn for the democratic leader in Israel, Ariel Sharon. In Carter's eyes, the Arab-Israeli conflict is not unlike the pre-civil-rights South, with the Israelis as the oppressive whites and the Palestinians as the innocent blacks. As he told his chronicler, Douglas Brinkley, "The intifada exposed the injustice Palestinians suffered, just like Bull Connor's mad dogs in Birmingham."
Last month, Carter penned a remarkable op-ed piece for the New York Times, entitled "America Can Persuade Israel to Make a Just Peace." In it, he let it all hang out as an apologist for Arafat and a bulldog against Sharon. Before getting to that piece, however, we should be clear about just how attached to Arafat and his cause the ex-president is. As Brinkley writes in his book The Unfinished Presidency -- about Carter's celebrated post-White House years -- "there was no world leader Jimmy Carter was more eager to know than Yasir Arafat." The former president "felt certain affinities with the Palestinian: a tendency toward hyperactivity and a workaholic disposition. . . ."
In their first meeting -- held in 1990 -- Carter boasted of his sternness toward Israel. For example, he said, "When I bring up the [PLO] charter, you should not be concerned that I am biased. I am much more harsh with the Israelis." Arafat, for his part, complained about the Reagan administration's alleged "betrayals." Rosalynn Carter, who was taking notes for her husband, interjected, "You don't have to convince us!" which, as Brinkley records, "elicited gales of laughter all round." The ex-president "agreed that the Reagan administration was not renowned as promise keepers" (this, to Arafat).
Later on, the parties exchanged gifts. "When Arafat presented Rosalynn with a dress for daughter Amy, decorated with Palestinian embroidery, he mentioned that he had followed Amy's political activities with great interest, especially her anti-CIA stance in Nicaragua and antiapartheid activities in South Africa." Then,
. . . in the course of conversation, Rosalynn began describing her revulsion and dismay over a story about Israeli troops dumping garbage in front of a Palestinian orphanage during the Carters' trip to the West Bank. Innocent Palestinian children were being treated as trash. As she recalled the inexcusable humiliation of their treatment, her eyes filled with tears. And the men, too, began to sob. Carter grasped the hands of his companions, and the three briefly prayed together. Then they dried their tears, embraced, and said farewell.
