Carter sold out Iran

Former President Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid is another contribution on his part toward destabilizing the Middle East as he makes the case for the radical Islamic Jihad against Israel. The timing is most inopportune as the United States and the western powers grapple with terrorism in Iraq and around the globe. Carter has poked his nose once again into Middle East affairs. The trend goes back to his presidency and his role in the Iranian revolution.

The Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, was no saint when it came to human rights but by Middle Eastern standards he was a moderate. The Shah presided over a government that was, for over twenty years, pro-American, pro-Israel, and western in its outlook. Certainly the Shah could have been encouraged, quietly, carefully, and behind the scenes, by the United States in the direction of implementing human rights reforms. This could have been done within the context of the neighborhood in which he operated and of the circumstances he confronted.

Instead, Jimmy Carter, upon becoming President in 1977, turned on the Shah by launching a deliberate and inexplicable public campaign to undermine his regime. The Carter policy of undermining our ally, the Shah, seemed to work in tandem with that of the Soviet Union. The end result was the establishment of a revolutionary Jihadist regime headed up by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Iranian revolution, besides enthroning one of the world's most oppressive regimes, helped to build the terror network that challenges the free world today.

At the time, a senior Iranian diplomat in Washington observed, "President Carter betrayed the Shah and helped create the vacuum that will soon be filled by Soviet-trained agents and religious fanatics who hate America." Under the guise of promoting" human rights," Carter immediately started making demands on the Shah while blackmailing him with the threat that if the demands were not immediately met, vital military aid and training would be withheld.

Carter pressured the Shah to release "political prisoners" including known terrorists and to put an end to military tribunals. The newly released terrorists would then be tried under civil as opposed to military jurisdiction, which meant that the trials could be used as platforms for propaganda against the government. This is one of the reasons why civil trials would be unwise today for many of the Guantanamo detainees. Liberal leaning media commentators at the time seemed to work hand in glove with Carter as the Shah, previously portrayed as a forward thinking and fashionable leader, suddenly was transformed by the pundits into a monster.

Carter pressured Iran to allow for "free assembly" which, under the circumstances, set the stage for anti-government rallies. Constitutional rights are the norm in the United States but no so in the Middle East as the introduction of rights ought to have been approached with caution and an eye toward consequences. The predictable results were an escalation of opposition to the Shah as Islamic fundamentalists, egged on by the Soviets, used the opportunity to foment revolution.

By the fall of 1977, Carter’s first year in office, Iranian university students, working in tandem with a Shi'ite clergy that had long opposed the Shah's modernizing policies, began a well coordinated and financed series of street demonstrations which found support in the international liberal press. The Shah was soon overwhelmed by the wave of violent street protests that rocked his country. Rumors circulated amongst Iranians at the time that Carter’s CIA had played a role in organizing the simultaneous protests.

In November 1977, during the height of the protests, the Shah and his Empress, Farah Diba, visited the White House where the Carter’s met them with hostility. They were greeted by nearly 4,000 Iranian students, many wearing masks, waving clubs, and carrying banners festooned with the names of Iranian terrorist organizations. The rioters were allowed within 100 feet of the White House where they violently attacked the many Iranians and Americans who gathered to welcome the Shah. Only fifteen protesters were arrested and quickly released. Meanwhile, inside the White House, and with the sound and clamor of the protesters bouncing off the walls, Carter pressured the Shah to implement even more radical changes. During this time, the Soviets were mobilizing a campaign of propaganda, espionage, sabotage, and terror inside Iran. The Shah found himself being squeezed on two sides.

In April 1978, Moscow backed a bloody coup in Afghanistan which installed the puppet regime of Nur Mohammad Taraki who proceed to call for a "jihad" against the "Ikhwanu Shayateen" which translates into "brothers of devils," a label he applied to the Shah’s government. Soviet-trained agents proceeded to cross the long border from Afghanistan into Iran to infiltrate Shi'ite mosques and other Iranian institutions. By November 1978, there was an estimated half a million Soviet backed Afghan operatives in Iran where, among other activities, they set up training camps for terrorists.

The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was poised to return from exile. The 78-year-old Shi'ite cleric, whose brother had been imprisoned for activities relating to his Iranian Communist party affiliations, had spent 15 years living first in Iraq and later in a suburb of Paris. In exile, Khomeini spoke of the creation of a revolutionary Islamic republic, one that would be anti-Western, socialist, and with total power in the hands of an ayatollah. Khomeini received the full support of the Soviet Union.

Nureddin Klanuri, head of the Iranian Communist Tudeh Party, in exile in East Berlin at the time, stated, "The Tudeh Party approves Ayatollah Khomeini's initiative in creating the Islamic Revolutionary Council. The ayatollah's program coincides with that of the Tudeh Party." Khomeini's closest advisor, Sadegh Ghothzadeh, was well known as a revolutionary with close links to Soviet intelligence. In January 1998, Pravda, the official Soviet organ, officially endorsed the Khomeini revolution.

Liberal American leaders also supported the radical cleric. After the Pravda endorsement, Ramsey Clark, having served as Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson, held a press conference where he reported on a trip to Iran and a Paris visit with Khomeini. Clark urged the US government to take no action to help the Shah so that Iran "could determine it's own fate." Clark played a behind the scenes role in influencing members of Congress to keep the United States out of the growing crisis. Carter’s United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young expressed the thinking of many liberals at the time when he stated that, if successful, Khomeini would "eventually be hailed as a saint."

The rest, as they say, is history. The ayatollah went on to seize power in Iran and this was quickly followed by the seizure of the American Embassy and the hostage crisis. Carter responded to that internationally recognized act of war by doing nothing of substance. The Iranian jihadists, now in control of a very rich country, were emboldened by the victory and the free world is now reaping the harvest. Mahmud Ahmadinijad, Khomeini’s protégé, is now building a nuclear bomb. The Islamic jihad has been unleashed around the world with suicide bombers and hijackers. And Jimmy Carter is busy touring the country, selling a book, and pushing a new cause. ESR

Evidence Jimmy Carter abandoned the Shah

A recent article has provided some provacative information regarding former President Jimmy Carter and the Shah. While I had heard or read short articles regarding what is revealed here, the new piece by Alan Peters was an eye opener, and explained so much that I had suspected.

I must admit, I used to be a Jimmy Carter supporter. I voted for him to be re-elected. I cringe when people always refer to the Hostage Rescue Attempt as "Ill Fated", "Catastrophic", "Jimmy Carter's Diaster", when Carter is to be commended for at least actually going through with the attempt, while someone like Bill Clinton allowed the US to be attacked numerous times, only to respond when Monica appeared on television.

I disagree with his timing, I wish heauthorized the rescue earlier, but some accounts tell us that an individual escaped Iran with information as to the exact whereabouts of the Hostages only a week or two before the official date of the Rescue. Jimmy Carter did what he had to do, and so did the men.

The mission did not fail due to the actions of the men or Jimmy Carter, it failed because God did not want us to win that day. 8 Good men died trying to rescue our people in a bold, daring move that our country had no previous reason to prepare for, nor did they anticipate the incidents beforehand.

But, since I have grown up a little, and learned a few things regarding politics, I have learned that Jimmy Carter was one of the worst Presidents the United States ever had. Maybe THE worst. Carter's failure to order us into actual combat with Iran in 1979-1980 over the Hostage incident allowed the rise of radical Islam to begin. The snowball effect of that radical Islam was shown on September 11, 2001.

While I have personal feelings regarding whether we should have gone to war against Iran for the taking of our embassy back in 1979, I at least regarded the man as a decent man, a well meaning man.

Events in the last 10 years, however, and knowlege of events of the 1980's have shown Jimmy Carter to be a dishonorable man. In fact, if the accounts are corect, Jimmy Carter is a traitor.

It is reported that Jimmy Carer contacted the Soviet KGB in asking for help in defeating Ronald Reagan.

Jimmy Carter is the man Bill Clinton sent to North Korea to supposedly cause North Korea to give up their desire for nuclear weapons, only to have them re-start their program immediately after he left.

Jimmy Carter has also made disparaging comments about our present President, George Bush for Bush's efforts to stop terrorism.

Jimmy Carter must make such statements, because if the truth be told, the origin of terrorism worldwide was the fall of Iran, and that fall was hastened due to Jimmy Carter's direct actions and lack of action.

Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily

Volume XXII, No. 46 Monday, March 15, 2004
Founded in 1972 Produced at least 200 times a year

© 2004, Global Information System, ISSA

Exclusive:

Rôle of US Former Pres. Carter Emerging in Illegal Financial Demands on Shah of Iran

Exclusive. Analysis. By Alan Peters,1 GIS. Strong intelligence has begun to emerge that US President Jimmy Carter attempted to demand financial favors for his political friends from the Shah of Iran. The rejection of this demand by the Shah could well have led to Pres. Carters resolve to remove the Iranian Emperor from office.

The linkage between the destruction of the Shahs Government directly attributable to Carters actions and the Iran-Iraq war which cost millions of dead and injured on both sides, and to the subsequent rise of radical Islamist terrorism makes the new information of considerable significance.

Pres. Carters anti-Shah feelings appeared to have ignited after he sent a group of several of his friends from his home state, Georgia, to Tehran with an audience arranged with His Majesty directly by the Oval Office and in Carters name. At this meeting, as reported by Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda to some confidantes, these businessmen told the Shah that Pres. Carter wanted a contract. previously awarded to Brown & Root to build a huge port complex at Bandar Mahshahr, to be cancelled and as a personal favor to him to be awarded to the visiting group at 10 percent above the cost quoted by Brown & Root.

The group would then charge the 10 percent as a management fee and supervise the project for Iran, passing the actual construction work back to Brown & Root for implementation, as previously awarded. They insisted that without their management the project would face untold difficulties at the US end and that Pres. Carter was trying to be helpful. They told the Shah that in these perilous political times, he should appreciate the favor which Pres. Carter was doing him.

According to Prime Minister Hoveyda, the Georgia visitors left a stunned monarch and his bewildered Prime Minister speechless, other than to later comment among close confidantes about the hypocrisy of the US President, who talked glibly of God and religion but practiced blackmail and extortion through his emissaries.

The multi-billion dollar Bandar Mahshahr project would have made 10 percent management fee a huge sum to give away to Pres. Carters friends as a favor for unnecessary services. The Shah politely declined the personal management request which had been passed on to him. The refusal appeared to earn the Shah the determination of Carter to remove him from office.

Carter subsequently refused to allow tear gas and rubber bullets to be exported to Iran when anti-Shah rioting broke out, nor to allow water cannon vehicles to reach Iran to control such outbreaks, generally instigated out of the Soviet Embassy in Tehran. There was speculation in some Iranian quarters as well as in some US minds at the time and later that Carters actions were the result of either close ties to, or empathy for, the Soviet Union, which was anxious to break out of the longstanding US-led strategic containment of the USSR, which had prevented the Soviets from reaching the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

Sensing that Irans exports could be blocked by a couple of ships sunk in the Persian Gulf shipping lanes, the Shah planned a port which would have the capacity to handle virtually all of Irans sea exports unimpeded.

Contrary to accusations leveled at him about the huge, megalomaniac projects like Bandar Mahshahr, these served as a means to provide jobs for a million graduating high school students every year for whom there were no university slots available. Guest workers, mostly from Pakistan and Afghanistan were used to start and expand the projects and Iranians replaced the foreigners as job demand required, while essential infrastructure for Iran was built ahead of schedule.

In late February 2004, Islamic Irans Deputy Minister of Economy stated that the country needed $18-billion a year to create one-million jobs and achieve economic prosperity. And at the first job creation conference held in Tehrans Amir Kabir University, Irans Student News Agency estimated the jobless at some three-million. Or a budget figure of $54-billion to deal with the problem.

Thirty years earlier, the Shah had already taken steps to resolve the same challenges, which were lost in the revolution which had been so resolutely supported by Jimmy Carter.

A quarter-century after the toppling of the Shah and his Government by the widespread unrest which had been largely initiated by groups with Soviet funding but which was, ironically, to bring the mullahs rather than the radical-left to power Ayatollah Shariatmadaris warning that the clerics were not equipped to run the country was echoed by the Head of Islamic Irans Investment Organization, who said: We are hardly familiar with the required knowledge concerning the proper use of foreign resources both in State and private sectors, nor how to make the best use of domestic resources. Not even after 25 years.

Historians and observers still debate Carters reasons for his actions during his tenure at the White House, where almost everything, including shutting down satellite surveillance over Cuba at an inappropriate time for the US, seemed to benefit Soviet aims and policies. Some claim he was inept and ignorant, others that he was allowing his liberal leanings to overshadow US national interests.

The British Foreign & Commonwealth Office had enough doubts in this respect, even to the extent of questioning whether Carter was a Russian mole, that they sent around 200 observers to monitor Carters 1980 presidential campaign against Ronald Reagan to see if the Soviets would try to buy the presidency for Carter.

In the narrow aspect of Carter setting aside international common sense to remove the US most powerful ally in the Middle East, this focused change was definitely contrary to US interests and events over the next 25 years proved this.

According to Prime Minister Hoveyda, Jimmy Carters next attack on the Shah was a formal country to country demand that the Shah sign a 50-year oil agreement with the US to supply oil at a fixed price of $8 a barrel. No longer couched as a personal request, the Shah was told he should heed the contract proposal if he wished to enjoy continued support from the US. In these perilous, political times which, could become much worse.

Faced with this growing pressure and threat, the monarch still could not believe that Iran, the staunchest US ally in the region, other than Israel, would be discarded or maimed so readily by Carter, expecting he would be prevailed upon by more experienced minds to avoid destabilizing the regional power structure and tried to explain his position. Firstly, Iran did not have 50-years of proven oil reserves that could be covered by a contract. Secondly, when the petrochemical complex in Bandar Abbas, in the South, was completed a few years later, each barrel of oil would produce $1,000 worth of petrochemicals so it would be treasonous for the Shah to give oil away for only $8.

Apologists, while acknowledging that Carter had caused the destabilization of the monarchy in Iran, claim he was only trying to salvage what he could from a rapidly deteriorating political situation to obtain maximum benefits for the US. But, after the Shah was forced from the throne, Carters focused effort to get re-elected via the Iran hostage situation points to less high minded motives.

Rumor has always had it that Carter had tried to negotiate to have the US hostages, held for 444 days by the Islamic Republic which he had helped establish in Iran, released just before the November 1980 election date, but that opposition (Republican) candidate Ronald Reagan had subverted, taken over and blocked the plan. An eye-witness account of the seizure by students of the US Embassy on November 4, 1979, in Tehran confirms a different scenario.

The mostly rent-a-crowd group of students organized to climb the US Embassy walls was spearheaded by a mullah on top of a Volkswagen van, who with a two-way radio in one hand and a bullhorn in the other, controlled the speed of the march on the Embassy according to instructions he received over the radio. He would slow it down, hurry it up and slow it down again in spurts and starts, triggering the curiosity of an educated pro-Khomeini vigilante, who later told the story to a friend in London.

When asked by the vigilante for the reason of this irregular movement, the stressed cleric replied that he had instructions to provide the US Embassy staff with enough time to destroy their most sensitive documents and to give the three most senior US diplomats adequate opportunity to then take refuge at the Islamic Republic Foreign Ministry rather than be taken with the other hostages. Someone at the Embassy was informing the Foreign Ministry as to progress over the telephone and the cleric was being told what to do over his radio.

The vigilante then asked why the Islamic Government would bother to be so accommodating to the Great Satan and was told that the whole operation was planned in advance by Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargans revolutionary Government with Pres. Carter in return for Carter having helped depose the Shah and that this was being done to ensure Carter got re-elected. He helped us, now we help him was the matter-of-fact comment from the cleric.

In 1978 while the West was deciding to remove His Majesty Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi from the throne, Shariatmadari was telling anyone who would listen not to allow Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his velayat faghih (Islamic jurist) version of Islam to be allowed to govern Iran. Ayatollah Shariatmadari noted: We mullahs will behave like bickering whores in a brothel if we come to power ... and we have no experience on how to run a modern nation so we will destroy Iran and lose all that has been achieved at such great cost and effort.2

Pres. Carter reportedly responded that Khomeini was a religious man as he was and that he knew how to talk to a man of God, who would live in the holy city of Qom like an Iranian pope and act only as an advisor to the secular, popular revolutionary Government of Mehdi Bazargan and his group of anti-Shah executives, some of whom were US-educated and expected to show preferences for US interests.

Carters mistaken assessment of Khomeini was encouraged by advisors with a desire to form an Islamic green belt to contain atheist Soviet expansion with the religious fervor of Islam. Eventually all 30 of the scenarios on Iran presented to Carter by his intelligence agencies proved wrong, and totally misjudged Khomeini as a person and as a political entity.

Today, Iranian-born, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the dominant Shia leader in Iraq faces Shariatmadaris dilemma and shares the same quietist Islamic philosophy of sharia (religious law) guidance rather than direct governing by the clerics themselves. Sistanis Khomeini equivalent, militant Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, was gunned down in 1999 by then-Iraqi Pres. Saddam Husseins forces. Sadrs son, 30-year-old Muqtada al-Sadr, lacks enough followers or religious seniority/clout to immediately oppose Sistani but has a hard core of violent followers biding their time.

According to all estimates, the young Sadr waits for the June 2004 scheduled handover of power in Iraq, opening the way for serious, militant intervention on his side by Iranian clerics. The Iranian clerical leaders, the successors to Khomeini, see, far more clearly than US leaders and observers, the parallels between 1979-80 and 2004: as a result, they have put far more effort into activities designed to ensure that Reagans successor, US Pres. George W. Bush, does not win power.

Footnotes:

1. © 2004 Alan Peters. The name Alan Peters is a nom de plume for a writer who was for many years involved in intelligence and security matters in Iran. He had significant access inside Iran at the highest levels during the rule of the Shah, until early 1979.

2. See Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, March 2, 2004: Credibility and Legitimacy of Ruling Iranian Clerics Unraveling as Pressures Mount Against Them; The Source of Clerical Ruling Authority Now Being Questioned. This report, also by Alan Peters, details the background of Ayatollah Khomeini, the fact that his qualifications for his religious title were not in place, and the fact that he was not of Iranian origin.

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