Yesterday, I made a comment with regards to the culpability of Jimmy Carter ^[1] as regards our current troubles with Iran.  As you may imagine I managed to get some email commentary on that charge.  For the most part, the mails chided me for rendering such a verdict against so great a president.  Apparently, the people writing, have learned nothing from reading this site, over the years.  In any event, Michael Evans, in an OP/Ed piece in the Jerusalem Post ^[2], nails it down quite nicely ;

We just don’t get it. The Left in America is screaming to high heaven that the mess we are in in Iraq and the war on terrorism has been caused by the right-wing and that George W. Bush, the so-called “dim-witted cowboy,” has created the entire mess.

The truth is the entire nightmare can be traced back to the liberal democratic policies of the leftist Jimmy Carter, who created a firestorm that destabilized our greatest ally in the Muslim world, the shah of Iran, in favor of a religious fanatic, the ayatollah Khomeini.

Evans goes on at some length looking at Carter’s misguided liberal policies and their results the Islamic revolution in Iran, the subsequent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (to which you will recall Carter’s response was to boycott the Olympics that year… Boy, I’ll bet that bothered the Soviets…) but for all that the patterns were there for everyone to see….

…. Carter never got it that Khomeini, a cleric exiled to Najaf in Iraq from 1965-1978, was preparing Iran for revolution. Proclaiming “the West killed God and wants us to bury him,” Khomeini’s weapon of choice was not the sword but the media. Using tape cassettes smuggled by Iranian pilgrims returning from the holy city of Najaf, he fueled disdain for what he called gharbzadegi (“the plague of Western culture”).

…

Carter’s belief that every crisis can be resolved with diplomacy – and nothing but diplomacy – now permeates the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, Carter is wrong.

There are times when evil must be openly confronted and defeated.

The lack of understanding of those points, is precisely why we are the situation we’re in today. I would urge you to read the entire article and keep it bookmarked, because I’m going to be referring back to it frequently.

Jimmy Carter is, in fact, the father of the Iranian revolution, and bears direct responsibility for current events in that region. As I said yesterday ^[1], the sad part of this is every time somebody takes Carter seriously, good people die.