Jimmy Carter's Legacy? Countless Deaths in the Middle East

By Chuck Warren

Ronald Reagan won the 1980 race in a landslide. He won 44 states in part due to his charismatic personality and campaigning on a freedom platform. But credit goes where it’s due: Jimmy Carter helped Reagan a lot.

During the four years of Carter’s presidency, stagflation got worse.

Because of the détente policy of Nixon and Ford, tensions with the Soviet Union had gone down, and Carter thought that he could reach a peaceful end to the Cold War by being soft on the Soviet Union. In shocking news, that didn’t work! The communists invaded Afghanistan, which forced Carter to admit that he had been wrong about the Soviet Union.

Carter had promised that human rights would be his foreign policy priority. So he pulled the rug from under two important U.S. partners, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah in Iran. The result was a civil war in Nicaragua that risked Soviet domination in our own backyard led by junta leader Daniel Ortega. (Reagan undid the damage, and Nicaragua became a democracy aligned with the U.S. Because of the incompetence of the Obama administration, the same communists, with the same leader, Daniel Ortega, are back in power. Nicaragua is no longer a democracy, and it is aligned with China and Russia against us.)

The other failure was in Iran. Carter traveled to Iran in 1977 and promised the Shah that he would continue to support him no matter what. A year and a half later, Carter was secretly getting assurances from Ayatollah Khomeini that Iran would continue to produce oil if Islamists ascended to power. (One wonders if during these secret talks Carter’s emissaries asked Khomeini, “So what do you really mean when you say death to America?”) So he backed out of his promise. He told the Shah’s military to stand down and told Shah to leave Iran. So a stalwart U.S. partner was replaced by a sworn enemy of America.

Within months, Iran attacked the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took our diplomats hostage for 444 days—until the day Reagan was inaugurated. Oil prices went up. Then Iran also got into a war with Iraq a year later. The result was gas shortages all over America and a drop in U.S. oil imports and production, worsening stagflation. It also caused gas shortages, making long gas lines the symbol of the Carter years.

Carter responded by asking people to use less gas and lowering the thermostat! One wonders if he’d ever met an American in his life.

Then he launched a rescue mission to get back our hostages in Iran. The mission was abandoned after a helicopter crashed into a military plane. Later findings showed that it had been poorly planned and was doomed from the start. But it humiliated America and showed us to be weak.

In 1979, Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, met with the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) against U.S. policy that didn’t recognize the group as legitimate. The damage was done. From that day, PLO, a terrorist group, was legitimized. Ever since, the U.S. government has treated PLO as the “good guys” at the behest of actual good guys who would rather build something among Palestinians than just kill Israelis.

Humiliation abroad, economic problems at home, long gas lines, cold winters, and elevating terrorists in Israel, Iran, and Nicaragua. These are the legacies of the Carter years and Reagan’s key to the White House. And believe it or not, it was about to get worse!

Carter is remembered as a humble man from a modest background. Baloney! Humble men don’t run to become the president of the most powerful country in history. And out of the exclusive league of the 45 men who’ve become president, few had a larger ego than Carter.

Having failed to fix America, Carter’s egotism led him to heal the entire world, the humble man that he was, making his post-presidency even worse than his presidency.

Right after leaving office, Carter began attacking Reagan’s policies, from economics to foreign affairs. He held press conferences and gave interviews on what Reagan was doing wrong.

As president, Carter had a particular distaste for the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin. He also had strange views of Jews, once asking Golda Meir if she worried that God was punishing Israel because of “the secular nature of her government.” As an ex-president, he began attacking Begin publicly. Some historians believe that this was exacerbated by his loss, which he blamed the Jews for. This turned him into an outright anti-Semite.

Carter met with Hamas leadership several times. He claimed that Hamas wanted to live with Israel peacefully and blamed Israel for not cooperating with Hamas to find peace. He also called Israel an apartheid country, akin to the white supremacist state of South Africa. He even went on to write a book about how Israel was an apartheid state. He also talked about “powerful political forces” preventing members of Congress from criticizing Israel. Jews secretly manipulating things behind the scene, where have I heard that before?

It didn’t end with Israel. During the Persian Gulf War, Carter wrote letters to U.S. wartime allies telling them not to support America against Saddam Hussein in U.S. pursuit of liberating Kuwait.

During the Clinton administration, Carter began siding with North Korea as Clinton was trying to put pressure on North Korea to end its nuclear program. He even traveled to North Korea on a freelance diplomatic trip. The relations between Carter and Clinton soured so much so that Clinton didn’t even invite Carter, the only former Democratic president at the time still alive, to the Democratic Convention in 1996.

Having never met a dictator enemy of America he didn’t like, Carter traveled to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro during the George W. Bush administration. Then he called on the United States to lift the embargo on the communist regime in Cuba.

As the United States was preparing for a war with Iraq in 2003, he again tried to kneecap the U.S. efforts. He wrote an op-ed saying that, as a Christian, he believed that the war was unjust.

In 2004, the communist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, was recalled. The official results showed that he had survived the recall, but there was widespread evidence of fraud. The Carter Center immediately said that the referendum was fair, and the day after Carter personally said that Venezuelans should accept the results. Thus began Venezuela’s dark descent into tyranny.

During his post-presidency, Carter called himself “a fellow citizen of the world.” Pardon my Americanism, but I like my presidents to be citizens of the United States.

In many ways, we’re still living with Carter’s legacy even today, especially in the Middle East and Nicaragua. But worse, at least two million people—likely much more—but at least we live to suffer. At least two million people—likely much more—have died because of his abandoning Somoza and the Shah.

Somewhere between 60,000 to 120,000 were killed during a decade of civil war in Nicaragua. The Sandinista communists who are back in power are still killing people decades later. Just two years ago, they executed 40 people during anti-government protests and ordered hospitals not to treat wounded protesters, some of whom died as a result. It is impossible to count how many more have died since the civil war ended—or how many were executed during the civil war or died indirectly as a result of it in addition to the number I cited here. And for what? So a communist regime even crueler than Somoza’s would come to power.

It’s much worse with Iran. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have lost their lives because of the economic mismanagement of the Islamic Republic for half a century. Cancer rates have increased because the government uses cancerous technology to jam satellite signals—and then it spends money it doesn’t have on missiles that don’t work instead of on medical goods, so the cancer patients can’t be treated either.

In 1988, within two months, the government executed up to 10,000 political prisoners. In 2019, it killed 1,500 protesters within ten days. These are just the Iranian people.

Now think about people in the region.

First and foremost, Iran is responsible for killing hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq. Iran also instigated a two-year civil war in Iraq in 2006, and between 200,000 to a million people died during the civil war.

Iran approved of and sponsored Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel, which resulted in 1,200 Israeli deaths and tens of thousands of Palestinian lives.

In Syria, Iran was the main patron in keeping Bashar al-Assad’s regime in power and together with the Assad regime killed 600,000 people and at least 100,000 more in Assad’s prisons.

Iran is currently helping Russia kill Ukrainians by giving Russia drones and missiles.

But worse than all these was the Iran–Iraq War. Right after coming to power, Khomeini began talking about causing a similar revolution to his own in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, who was scared of the Shah, sensed an opportunity to annex parts of Iran while also being provoked by Khomeini’s rhetoric and new regime, and he invaded Iran. Between one and two million people died during the Iran–Iraq War.

When you add up these numbers, you end up with at least 2 million people who died directly as a result of the regimes in Nicaragua and Iran which Carter helped bring to power. The worst case is several millions more, half a century of misery in the Middle East and Nicaragua, and ongoing wars. And the peoples of Nicaragua and Iran are far worse off.

There’s been a lot of nauseating celebration of Carter for the past few days. Volunteering at Habitat for Humanity and teaching at Sunday schools are good virtues for private citizens, but those have no relevance to what makes a good president—or ex-president.

Carter was bad at both, and I’m not sure that I can even call him a good man given how much he disliked Jews and loved dictators who were America’s enemies.

Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.