Jimmy Carter Responds To Article Comparing His Foreign Policy To President Obama's

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from Sam Stein at HuffPo: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/22/jimmy-carter-objects-to-o_n_472113.html


February 23, 2010

In last month's issue of Foreign Policy magazine, leading analyst and Iraq War supporter Walter Russell Mead opined that President Obama's foreign policy agenda was turning into a duplicate of Jimmy Carter's. (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/the_carter_syndrome)

The thesis was beyond speculative. Even by Mead's own admission, Obama's foreign policy is in its nascent stages. Right now, he writes, it "looks a little bit like that of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger." Mead even suggests that the president is trying to pursue a "Jeffersonian" worldview -- in which the U.S. is militarily formidable but unexposed to regional crises. Either way, the Carter comparison was clearly meant as an insult. After all, the piece was titled "The Carter Syndrome . . ."

The former president penned a 1,500-word letter to the editor complaining about the article's treatment of his foreign policy legacy. That's followed by a second letter to the editor from Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser.

"I won't criticize or correct his cute and erroneous oversimplistic distortions of presidential biographies and history except when he refers specifically to me," Carter writes. "I resent Mead's use of such phrases as 'in the worst scenario, turn him (Obama) into a new Jimmy Carter,' 'weakness and indecision,' and 'incoherence and reversals' to describe my service. An especially aggravating error is his claiming, 'by the end of his tenure he was supporting the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, increasing the defense budget, and laying the groundwork for an expanded U.S. presence in the Middle East.' None of these were late decisions based on a tardy realization of my earlier errors and misjudgments."

All of which was not enough to placate Mead, who responded in kind to Carter's own response . . .


read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/22/jimmy-carter-objects-to-o_n_472113.html