Bracketing Defeat: From Carter to Obama
The Iranian mullahs and their maniacal front-man, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, must be happy: Allah appears to be answering their prayers.
Nearly three decades after the Jimmy Carter-assisted overthrow of the pro-American Shah, the former US President’s most favored White House hopeful, Barack Obama, seems poised to win the Democratic nomination. Should he succeed in his quest and go on to win the general election, the junior Senator from Illinois would be inaugurated exactly 30 years and four days after a combination of riots, street protests, and American pressure forced the ailing Iranian monarch into exile (on January 16, 1979).
Whereas Carter presided over the rise of radical Islam, or Islamism, in Iran, Obama, if elected, is likely to preside over the rise of Islamist Iran in the world. The Hitler-admiring, Holocaust-denying mullahocracy, which has threatened to destroy Israel, attack US forces in the Middle East, and drive the US from the region, is clearly determined to develop an arsenal of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. Iran’s foreign policy is fundamentally, frighteningly imperialist in the way Nazi Germany’s foreign policy was imperialist in the years leading up to World War II. Like Nazi Germany, Iran aims to radically change the international status quo—the power relations among nations—regionally and globally. Attempts to appease Iran are thus bound to fail, just as efforts to appease Nazi Germany failed. Instead of preventing war, appeasement of a rising imperialist power makes war inevitable.
Devotion to Appeasement
None of which matters to Carter, for whom appeasement is a kind of religion. He is surely looking forward to the Jan. 20, 2009 Presidential inauguration. Also looking ahead and dreaming of a return to proximity to power is Carter’s former National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who hated the Shah, and led Carter to believe that Washington could jump aboard the Islamist bandwagon. More recently, Brzezinski warned a Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February