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2 Jimmy Carter's heart of
dorkiness By Spengler
Jimmy Carter's timing is dorky, as always.
The same sanctimonious ineptitude that made him
the least successful president in US history
prompted him to wager the remains of his
reputation on advocacy for the Palestinians,
precisely when the Palestinians have shown
themselves to be their own worst enemies. Carter's
obsession with justice in Palestine has the same
source as George W Bush's obsession with democracy
in Iraq: horror in the face of the alternative has
overwhelmed their better judgment.
Horror
is the ultimate weapon of the Muslim world against
the West, I long have argued. [1] Traditional
society is crumbling, and
with
it identities of peoples who comprise a good
one-third of the world's population. Many rather
would perish than give themselves over to a world
that offers them neither hope nor consolation.
Suicide bombing is the least expression of their
despair, which impels them toward perpetual war.
If entire peoples are bent on self-destruction, no
outside agency can prevent it. But the destruction
of whole peoples overwhelms the Western mind.
Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of
Darkness gave us the archetype for fatal
abhorrence: the degenerate Belgian colonial
official Kurtz, who dies muttering, "The horror!
The horror!" T S Eliot referred to Kurtz' horrible
end in the epigraph to his poem "The Hollow Men",
which concludes with the unpleasant thought: "This
is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a
whimper." The difference between Bush and Carter
is that Bush is horrified by the prospective fate
of the Iraqis, whereas Carter is horrified by his
own history. Bear with me, and I will try to make
this clear.
Some of Carter's Jewish
associates have broken with him loudly over his
new book, Peace Not Apartheid, observing
that it is unfair to Israelis. Carter, though, is
more consistent than the Jewish liberals who now
reject him. What is happening to the Palestinians
is horrifying, by which I mean not simply
unpleasant, but subversive of identity, in the
sense of Sigmund Freud's das Unheimliche.
It is not nearly as horrifying as what will
happen next, however. Carter could not bring
himself to confront Soviet aggression during the
1970s for the same reason that he cannot abide the
predicament of the Palestinians. As he looked down
the river to the end of the journey, the former
president muttered, "The horror! The horror!" By
deluding himself that the Palestinian predicament
is something else than it really is, Carter
attempts to keep the horror away.
It is
easy to dismiss Carter as the most egregious dork
in US politics. He nearly lost the Cold War, and
nearly destroyed the US economy. By the most
objective measurement of failure, namely margin of
loss in a failed bid for re-election, Carter
stands at the absolute bottom of the list of all
US presidents. In 1980 he lost to Ronald Reagan
with 49 electoral votes to Reagan's 489. The
next-worst performer, Herbert Hoover, had a
stronger showing against Franklin D Roosevelt
during the depths of the Great Depression in 1932
(49 electoral votes to FDR's 472).
John
Lewis Gaddis summarizes the Carter administration
as follows:
Americans seemed mired in endless
arguments with themselves, first over the
Vietnam War, then Watergate, then, during
Carter's presidency, over charges that he had
failed to protect important allies like the Shah
of Iran ... The low point came in November of
[1979] when Iranians invaded the United States
embassy in Tehran, taking several dozen
diplomats and military guards hostage. This
humiliation, closely followed by the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan a few weeks later, made
it seem as though Washington was on the
defensive everywhere, and Moscow was on a roll.
[2]
After Iran let the diplomats go,
the provincial peanut farmer who stumbled into the
presidency flew to the US air force base in
Germany to meet them. He asked the Central
Intelligence Agency psychiatrists who were
debriefing the hostages, "Didn't the Iranians know
what they were doing was wrong?" Call it the heart
of dorkiness: Carter was so horrified by the
Iranians' capacity for evil that he could not
absorb the information, even when it grabbed him
by the scruff of his neck and threw him out of the
White House.
Where the Palestinians are
concerned, Carter keens the same trope. It is
repulsive to think that a people of several
millions, honeycombed with representatives of
international organizations, the virtual stepchild
of the United Nations, appears doomed to reduce
its national fever by letting blood. The 700,000
refugees of 1948, hothoused by the UN relief
agencies, prevented from emigrating by other Arab
regimes, have turned into a people, but a
test-tube nation incapable of independent national
life: four destitute millions of third-generation
refugees in the small and barren territories of
Gaza, Judea and Samaria, which cannot support a
fraction of that number.
The project of a
Palestinian economy based on tourism and light
manufacturing is a delusion in the globalized
economy of Chinese-dominated trade in
manufactures. The subsistence-farming
fellahin should have left their land for
economic reasons, like the Okies during the 1920s
and 1930s, and dispersed into
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