The below excerpt is from former President Jimmy Carter’s column today in the New York Times. He seems genuinely befuddled as to why Americans are upset with him for going off on his one-man Shadow State Department trip to hold photo-ops with Hamas. In a bizarre effort to explain himself, he notes that the United States also refused to negotiate with communist guerrillas in Nepal but that didn’t stop him and Foggy Bottom South at the Carter Center from plowing defiantly forward:
About 12 years ago, Maoist guerrillas took up arms in an effort to overthrow the monarchy and change the nations political and social life. Although the United States declared the revolutionaries to be terrorists, the Carter Center agreed to help mediate among the three major factions: the royal family, the old-line political parties and the Maoists.
In 2006, six months after the oppressive monarch was stripped of his powers, a cease-fire was signed. Maoist combatants laid down their arms and Nepalese troops agreed to remain in their barracks. Our center continued its involvement and nations though not the United States and international organizations began working with all parties to reconcile the dispute and organize elections.
The Maoists are succeeding in achieving their major goals: abolishing the monarchy, establishing a democratic republic and ending discrimination against untouchables and others whose citizenship rights were historically abridged. After a surprising victory in the April 10 election, Maoists will play a major role in writing a constitution and governing for about two years. To the United States, they are still terrorists.
If Carter weren’t such a parody of himself, and the weak American foreign policy of his disastrous presidency, you’d be tempted to wonder whether he realizes that those other “Maoists,” you know of Mao’s China, also claimed to be ushering in a great new era of egalitarian utopia and people’s “democracy.” Just avert your eyes from the re-education camps and executions of political prisoners. Lenin, Stalin, Castro, and so nauseatingly on … all claimed to be standing up for those citizens whose rights were “historically abridged.” Just before they liquidated them all.
Mr. Carter’s revisionist history reminds one of the international bullying of Maoist China and the Soviet Union’s fearless invasion of Afghanistan under his presidency. It’s as if the former president is sleepwalking through history, in a lovely dream of righting all the wrongs he failed to right as president. What a nightmare for the rest of us.
