Jimmy Cater still thinks he handled the Iran Hostage Crisis just fine:
CHIANG MAI, Thailand – Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said Monday he had no regrets about his handling of the Iran hostage crisis more than 30 years ago, saying he didn’t attack the country as his advisers proposed because thousands of people would have died.
Islamic militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, and seized its occupants. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days.
Carter acknowledged that his failure to bring the hostages home — including a botched rescue mission in which eight U.S. servicemen died — led to his election defeat to President Ronald Reagan in 1980. The hostages were released on Jan. 20, 1981, just minutes after Reagan was sworn in as the new president.
“I don’t have any doubt that was the main factor in my defeat,” Carter told reporters in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, where he was helping build houses for Habitat for Humanity. “Obviously, if I had rescued the hostages or they had not been taken, I would have been re-elected.”
Carter said one proposed option was a military strike on Iran, but he chose to stick with negotiations to prevent bloodshed and bring the hostages home safely.
“My main advisers insisted that I should attack Iran,” he said. “I could have destroyed Iran with my weaponry. But I felt in the process it was likely the hostages’ lives would be lost, and I didn’t want to kill 20,000 Iranians. So I didn’t attack.”
And America was humiliated.
I’m not sure that a full-scale military attack was the answer, but the seizure of the American Embassy certainly called for a stronger response than Carter ever came up with.
November 16th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
During my first year of law school, in 1986, I heard Carter speak at Emory, where he was a “Distinguished Professor.” He spoke about Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union. By 1986, it was of course clear that Reagan’s policy was working.
It was also quite clear that Carter hadn’t learned a damn thing.
November 16th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Carter’s a liar anyway. His “main advisors” were deeply divided about what to do (thus SecState Cy Vance resigned in a huff over the Desert One attempt). No doubt the Pentagon dusted off plans to give him military “options,” but the primary course of action pushed by Brezinsky (against Vance) was a series of warnings accompanied by a step-by-step diplomatic and military squeeze. The first step was to be a show of naval force led by carrier groups. Carter refused to do that. The Iranians caught on quickly to the fact that they could daily parade at the US Embassy with “death to America” theater and command a worldwide audience to humiliate the US. Most importantly, giving the mullahs freedom of action enabled the to out maneuver and isolate other anti-monarchist forces — communists, leftists, liberals — and consolidate power.
It was a spectacularly incompetent and spineless showing.
But I don’t agree that Carter would have been reelected sans Iran. Ted Kennedy made a major run at him in a bitter primary battle, which weakened Carter a lot and suppressed Dem support in the general. And while John Anderson, a Republican running as an independent, drew moderate GOP votes away from Reagan, he took a lot of disenchanted Dem voters from Carter and helped build the case that it was time for a change.
November 17th, 2009 at 10:15 am
I’ve long thought that if Carter had responded in some kind (ANY kind) of firm way to that hostage-taking, we would probably now have a lot less trouble with middle-easterners. That was when they learned to stick it in our face. And they have long memories over there.
No, he wouldn’t have won otherwise. That was the last big recession. Did he forget about it?