AFTER... AFTER... Jimmy Carter left the presidency... He became a very good man... During his presidency... Nope... Not Really.
In a non-serious forum, polluted with noise from the unemployable who turn to gambling, I'm inclined to remain laconic and to drop a counterview here and there for balance. Perhaps better if one finds the evidence, readily accessible, for himself against and in support of the claim. For those who prefer a bit of a guided tour, Bowden in his Guests of Ayatollah said something along the lines of Carter’s inability to respond decisively to the Iranian Revolution (hostage crisis etc) weakened America’s position in the Middle East and emboldened revolutionary movements. Essentially criticism of Carter’s handling of the fall of the Shah of Iran, which created a vacuum for the rise of theocratic rule and anti-Western sentiment. In Charlie Wilson’s War the view was essentially that the seeds of America’s involvement in Afghanistan were planted by Carter when he began covertly arming the Mujahideen in response to the Soviet invasion. Essentially that Carter's policy, though aimed at countering Soviet influence, inadvertently empowered Islamist extremists who later formed groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda. There's more ofc but you get the idea. Even as a teenager, I remember Carter as uninspiring; dude spoke like HAL. It seems to me he was unprincipled, cloaked in religion, favoring pragmatism and arguments from emotion.
Thank you, it looks like the man had to follow an agenda like every other president, and when he managed to get back to his life, again, he started trying to make up for his actions. Politics must be horrible from the inside.
I remember talking with Nate on the school bus about the Carter/Ford choices. We did not want Carter thinking all of our favorite TV shows would be changed.
Not a great president while in office but a great former president out of the office. But why the hell is the stock exchange closed on that day? This would make you mistakenly think traders are the most patriotic of the bunch, when in fact it's the exact opposite. All they care about is money and they wouldn't even mind selling out the country if they could turn a profit.
Ah, but your recollection of history starts at the wrong period and wrong cause and effect. See, the religious revolution of the Ayatollahs is a consequence of the brutal nationalist dictatorship of the Shah who was propped up to power by the CIA after executing a coup against Mosaddegh, the recently elected leader of Iran whose socialist politics were deemed a threat to US oil interests. In effect, the ruthlessness of the Ayatollahs are a direct consequence of US intervention in Iranian affairs in 1953. To be fair, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviets and the US had no qualms removing and replacing leaders deemed unsympathetic to their interests and the spread of democracy wasn't one of them. The problem that strict law and order advocates don't seem to grasp is that it invariably leads to excesses and increasingly violent reactions that snowball into dictatorship and revolution regardless of the political affiliations. Would the world have been a better place had Mosaddegh been able to run a socialist democracy? The US cut that question short which led to the Ayatollahs 26 years later. It's a mistake to believe that we can change the world in our image.
The context here is the OP's open question on whether Carter is a great man. That there were causes of religious revolution prior to Carter taking office in 1971 does not relieve him of responsibility for the decisions he made contributing to further rise of theocratic rule and anti-Western sentiment, as outlined. If we had wanted to identify deeper root causes of theocratic rule, deeper than the 1953 actions you cite, we could cite Plato leading western civilization on a 2,000 year wild goose chase, yet that too would miss the context of the original question.