Jimmy Carter and human rights

Good intentions aren't enough, especially when coupled with bad ideology

During the late 1970s, large numbers of Iranian students in Washington, DC would march down Pennsylvania Avenue chanting, “the Shah is a U.S. puppet, down with the Shah.” A liberal friend of mine who was with me when one of these marches passed by asked, “if the Shah is a U.S. puppet, why should we want him overthrown?”

The question, a good one, may not have occurred to Jimmy Carter. Or maybe he dismissed it as immoral.

Carter, who died yesterday, was a man of good intentions. He also accomplished some worthwhile things as president. The peace agreement between Israel and Egypt was a major triumph. It holds to this day.

Deregulating airlines and other transportation industries was also a significant accomplishment — the precursor of the healthy deregulation campaign waged by the Reagan administration.

The left, which generally views Carter favorably, is not fond of Carter’s efforts at deregulation. I doubt that Carter in his later years took much pride in them, either.

Carter was most proud of his record on human rights. This became clear as I watched a series of his old interviews on C-SPAN yesterday.

During one of these interviews, Carter claimed that his decision to give away the Panama Canal was a major victory for human rights. He argued that the giveaway not only promoted such rights in Panama, but also led to the democratization of Latin America.

Carter did not explain how giving away the Canal could have spurred democracy in the rest of the region. As for Panama itself, it was ruled throughout most of the 1980s by a repressive military dictator, General Manuel Noriega. Only after the U.S. deposed him in 1989 (for reasons unrelated to his status as a dictator and record on human rights) did democracy return to Panama, at least to some degree.

I also was puzzled by what Carter said in an interview that took place late in George W. Bush’s second term. In this one, Carter fretted that Bush’s war on terror was turning into a disaster for human rights.

There’s much to criticize about our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Iraq is much better off in terms of human rights than it was under Saddam Hussein. And for nearly two decades, Afghanistan was vastly better in this regard than it was under the Taliban.

If Carter’s Panama policy was a net zero for democracy and human rights, his Iran policy was an enormous minus — and a huge stain. By failing to support the Shah, Carter paved the way for the theocrats who have made Iran one of the worst human rights offenders in modern history.

In my view, Carter was responsible for the fall of the Shah. A report by the BBC in 2016 stated that the Carter administration held extensive talks with Ayatollah Khomeini and his crew in the prelude to the Iranian revolution. According to the report, which was based on newly declassified U.S. diplomatic cables, Khomeini "went to great lengths to ensure the Americans would not jeopardize his plans to return to Iran - and even personally wrote to US officials" to assure them not to worry about their interests in Iran, particularly oil. In turn, Carter and his team assisted Khomeini and made sure that the Iranian army would not stand in his way.

According to the declassified documents, in January 1979, Carter's government de facto admitted that it would have no issues with the abolition of the Iranian monarchy and its military, as long as the eventual result would come gradually and in a controlled way. Khomeini and his entourage now realized that Carter had discarded the Shah.

So did the Iranian military. I have family members (through my wife who lived in Iran during the revolution) who socialized with some of the Shah’s top military men. These family members told me that it’s impossible to underestimate the demoralizing effect of the Carter administration’s decision not to back the Shah. To these leaders, as to Khomeini, that decision meant the game was over. It also meant that these leaders were likely to be killed, as some were.

The Shah was no champion of human rights. On the contrary, his regime was repressive.

But the Shah’s human rights abuses pale in comparison to those committed by the mullahs who replaced him. And, of course, the degree of personal freedom in Iran has been reduced by orders of magnitude.

Under the Shah, people had considerable freedom, far too much for the mullahs, as long as they did not oppose the government. Under the mullahs, the government, in addition to imprisoning and sometimes executing its political opponents, imposes and brutally enforces strict rules of personal conduct over many aspects of life having nothing to do with politics.

Jimmy Carter bears considerable responsibility for this. Thanks in large measure to him, Iran is a far worse violator of human rights than it was under the Shah.

And just so he record is complete, Iran has also become a threat to Israel’s existence and America’s number one enemy (number two, at worst). Did this matter to Carter? I don’t know.

Carter did not intend to turn Iran into hell or, for that matter, into a U.S. enemy. He thought the demise of the Shah would be a win for human rights in Iran and, given Khomeini’s assurances, not a serious threat to the U.S.

Thus, the easy lesson to extract here is that good intentions aren’t enough to prevent bad outcomes. The world is too complex and unpredictable for such a happy dynamic.

But in Carter’s case, the lesson, I think, is a little different. There was more than just bad luck behind what he did to Iran. And it wasn’t just naivety that made Carter think that Khomeini’s revolution “would come gradually and in a controlled way.”

Carter was operating from a false premise — the premise that the U.S. is the unprovoked bad guy on the world stage and that seemingly hostile forces are just victims looking for justice. When Carter said that America needs a foreign policy as good and decent as the American people, he wasn’t just flattering Americans. Behind that statement was his view that America was a force for no-good, maybe even evil, in the world and that our nation had to redeem itself.

Carter would be the redeemer. Starting with Iran.

Carter’s view of America wasn’t (and isn’t) unique to him. Think, for example, of Barack Obama’s “apology tour.” Think, too, of Obama’s far-too-sunny view of Iran.

But Carter did more harm than Obama. Without Carter, Obama probably wouldn’t have had a mullahcracy in Iran to appease.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, especially when good intentions are coupled with a seriously misguided view of the world and one’s own country.