Fierce Highway: Carter to blame for Hussein?
A college undergrad opines:
Is the recent Nobel Laureate Jimmy “Aww Shucks, Looky There Ah’m President” Carter to blame for our recent problems with Saddam Hussien? This editorial from UPI certainly thinks so.
President Carter’s shilly-shallying over Saddam in 1980 led to Western coffers being enriched by a $1,000 billion of Iranian/Iraqi arms purchases and uncounted millions of Iranian and Iraqi dead; fuelling Saddam’s conviction that he could get away with invading Kuwait as he had got away with invading Iran; U.N. sanctions at U.S. insistence that have killed close to a million Iraqi children to avenge Saddam’s capture of Kuwait, though that invasion ended more than a decade ago; and the impending destruction of a civilization where Hammurabi first taught humankind the Rule of Law. And this is the man now honored by a Nobel peace prize. O tempora! O mores!
Huh? Carter was out of office in January 1981, and the Iran/Iraq war continued until 1988, when Carter’s successor was completing 8 years in office. The next occupant of the White House had a Mideast adventure, which seems more of a root cause of the current situation than anything Carter may been done.
In reviewing this this document, I don’t see how the blame for Hussein’s current power can be laid at Carter’s door.
Further reading gives a different side to the story than this suggests.
In its war effort, Iran was supported by Syria and Libya, and received much of its weaponry from North Korea and China, as well as from covert arms transactions from the United States. Iraq enjoyed much wider support, both among Arab and Western nations: the Soviet Union was its largest supplier of arms.
So the US was supporting Iran, the nation which held US hostages for 444 days and humiliated its military, by selling it weaponry on the quiet (proceeds from this went to support insurgency in Nicaragua, investing in two wars for the price of one).
None of this happened on Carter’s watch, and as near as I can tell, his successors did little or nothing to halt the bloodbath (estimates of the dead are around 1.5 million): the US and then USSR got involved when oil shipments were imperiled by the increasing desperate combatants, but the spilled blood was of no interest.
Perhaps this is realpolitik at its purest. Sounds more like encouraging two kids to beat other up so you can take both allowances, instead of just one, and not having to bloody yourself into the bargain.