Leadership: On President Jimmy Carter's watch, more territory was lost to tyranny than at any other time since Yalta. And he'd have us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear.
Profile In Incompetence: Fifth In A Series
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Old communists must still be reminiscing about the good old days of the Carter administration. Thirty years ago next month, our worst president proudly proclaimed: "We are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear."
And as Carter rang the dinner bell, the evil empire was listening.
Not that Carter was above embracing dictators. In June 1979, at the signing of the Salt II accords in Vienna, he kissed Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev on each cheek. Surprisingly, they did not break into a waltz.
A few short months after that, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Carter expressed shock, saying "I can't believe he lied to me."
As we have noted, it was Carter's proudly displayed naivete that gave Brezhnev a green light to engineer a KGB-assisted coup in April 1978 and a full-scale invasion on Christmas Eve 1979. Less than a week after his inauguration, Carter had written the communist dictator: "As I understand your important speech in Tula, the Soviet Union will not strive for superiority in arms." Or use them, Jimmy?
More recently, Carter also kissed Fidel Castro when he trekked to give aid and comfort to that communist thug. No doubt they reminisced about the days when Carter initiated diplomatic relations with Castro's Cuba, looking the other way as thousands of Cuban troops tried to impose Marxist rule in Africa.
Carter's policy consisted of doing nothing while Castro kept Cuban soldiers fighting in Angola and sent 16,000 more to Ethiopia to support the Marxist Mengistu regime. Others were scattered throughout the continent — from Guinea Bissau to Burkina Faso to Sierra Leone to Mozambique to Zimbabwe.
While Carter sat in his thick sweater in front of a fireplace complaining of our "malaise," the Soviet Union was using Cuban troops as a sort of communist foreign legion to plant the hammer and sickle around the world.
Castro sent 50,000 troops to aid the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola and fight the pro-Western anti-communist forces of Jonas Savimbi's UNITA in its efforts to foist communism in the former Portuguese colony. At one point, Cuban troops were stationed in 20 sub-Saharan African nations.
Invoking the same "human rights" doctrine he used to topple the Shah of Iran and usher in the dawn of the Islamofascists, Carter withdrew support from the Somoza government in Nicaragua and facilitated the coming to power of the Marxist Sandinistas in 1979.
Almost immediately, the Ortega brothers allied themselves with their Cuban communist brethren to help launch and support Cuban-inspired insurgencies in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Costa Rica.
Carter cut off aid to El Salvador, which was fighting a communist insurgency, but he welcomed the Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua and gave Daniel Ortega's dictatorship more than $90 million in aid.
In 1979, Castro protege Maurice Bishop staged a military coup to overthrew the democratically elected government of Grenada. He immediately sought Castro's aid in building airfields. Ostensibly for the tourist trade, the fields could accept high-performance military aircraft, including Soviet-built long-range bombers.
On Oct. 25, 1983, President Reagan sent 5,000 U.S. troops to liberate Grenada. They engaged roughly 800 Cuban troops and found enough military equipment to equip thousands of soldiers, perhaps as many as 10,000 to 20,000.
Castro sent weapons via Cairo to the Marxist National Front for the Liberation of South Yemen on the strategic Horn of Africa. South Yemen was briefly the only declared communist state in the Arab world. A permanent communist satellite there would have posed a strategic threat to the Suez Canal and oil shipments from the Middle East.
The heirs of the czars gobbled up or consolidated their hold on country after country like there was a "buy one, get one free" sale: Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Grenada and Nicaragua. And it was Carter gave up control over the strategically vital Panama Canal.
Shortly before he was removed from office in massive voter expression of no confidence, even the Washington Post was editorializing about Carter's "willingness to engage with any dictator, no matter how odious."
Not just any dictator, just the Marxist kind. Lowell Ponte of Frontpagemagazine.com has suggested that if the Shah of Iran had been a Marxist friend of the Soviet Union and had renamed his country the People's Socialist Republic of Iran, Carter would have forgotten about charges of the Shah torturing political prisoners and the Ayatollah Khomeini would have died of old age in France.
Carter's naivete encouraged the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. His myopic view of human rights led him to undercut a pro-Western ally in Nicaragua. Knowing we would not resist, communism went on the march throughout the Americas and in Africa and reached its zenith.
In 1982, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's U.N. ambassador, perfectly summed up the Carter administration:
"While Carter was president there occurred a dramatic Soviet military buildup, matched by the stagnation of American armed forces, and a dramatic extension of Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, southern Africa and the Caribbean, matched by a declining American position in all these areas."
Had Reagan not beaten Carter in 1980, there's no telling how far the unraveling of freedom would have gone.
Instead of Reagan going to Berlin to tell Gorbachev to tear down that wall, Carter in his second term might have had to go to Moscow to negotiate our capitulation in the Cold War.
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