Which Jimmy Carter will history remember, the Carter whose name is associated with peace between Egypt and Israel? Or the Carter of the American retreat in the face of the "Islamic Republic" in Iran, which during his reign recorded the first of a series of victories over the United States?
There is a Carter success story and there is a failure story of an American president who knew how to devote himself to peace in this world throughout the 44 years after leaving the White House.
President Jimmy Carter, who served one term of four years (1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980) in the White House, achieved a lot in the Middle East. He played a pivotal role in reaching the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the first peace treaty between an Arab country and the Hebrew state. It was not about any Arab country, but about Egypt, the largest Arab country that offered the largest number of victims for Palestine and spent the cheap and the expensive for it.
The role of Carter, who died at the age of 100, in achieving this breakthrough, whose true hero was Anwar Sadat, cannot be ignored. Sadat knew how to exploit the October War, or the October War of 1973, in a political project that served Egypt’s interests instead of continuing to exploit the Palestinian cause as Hafez al-Assad, his partner in that war, did. Moreover, Sadat sought to help the Palestinians without any notable results after Yasser Arafat preferred to remain in Hafez al-Assad’s captivity due to his insistence on remaining militarily in Lebanon and in the alleys and corridors of Beirut.
Carter had protected Anwar Sadat since he decided to go to the Israeli Knesset and deliver a speech calling for peace, “the peace of the brave, not the peace of the defeated.” That was in November 1977. Between the late Egyptian president’s speech in the Knesset and the signing of the peace treaty in March 1979, the American president had rescued the fragile peace process that the Egyptian president had initiated, a process that Israel was looking for an excuse to exit and avoid withdrawing from Sinai.
It cannot be ignored that Israel was living under a right-wing government headed by Menachem Begin, who was not enthusiastic about peace with Egypt or making any concessions in the West Bank for the benefit of the Palestinians. The Arab position, and the Palestinian position in particular, towards Anwar Sadat helped to put the West Bank issue aside and free Egypt from its obligations towards the Palestinians.
Israel embarrassed Egypt in the period following Sadat's visit to Jerusalem. But Carter was able to save the peace process at the Camp David Conference held in September 1978. At Camp David, he negotiated with the American president on behalf of Egypt after Sadat informed him that he would accept whatever he would accept. Carter was fair. He knew that Egypt could not sign a peace treaty without regaining its lands occupied in the 1967 war. He was helped in this by the presence of ministers Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman alongside Begin. Dayan and Weizman knew the historical dimension of signing an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and its regional significance. The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was signed six months after the Camp David Conference, which ended with two agreements signed by Sadat and Begin under Carter's auspices. The first related to relations between Egypt and Israel, and was actually implemented, and the other related to Palestinian self-rule, which remained ink on paper.
Jimmy Carter succeeded in Egypt and the Middle East and failed in Iran. He did not realize at any moment the depth of the change that Iran would witness in 1979, which would alter the regional balance in the direction of more unrest, the basis of which was the promotion by the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, after overthrowing the Shah’s regime, of “exporting the revolution”… starting with Iraq, which had a Shiite majority, of course.
The Carter administration failed to comprehend what was happening in Iran and the significance of declaring the establishment of the "Islamic Republic" according to a constitution tailored to Khomeini and his ideology based on the theory of "the Guardian Jurist". He did not realize that raising the slogan of hostility to America and Israel was a requirement of the regime and its toolkit. The first test that Carter failed came when the "revolutionary students" held hostage the diplomats and employees of the American embassy in Tehran for flimsy reasons. This lasted for 444 days. Throughout that period, signs of weakness appeared within the Carter administration, which failed to rescue the hostages by military means at first and then by political means later. The American president at the time suffered from the Vietnam War complex on the one hand and from the conflicts within his administration on the other. Within the administration was National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who called for dealing firmly with Iran, while there were those who refused to resort to any threats for fear of the lives of the hostages.
Jimmy Carter failed to win a second presidential term because of his ignorance of Iran, which he visited a year before the fall of the Shah and said from Tehran that it was an "oasis of stability" in the region. He fell to Ronald Reagan, whose team negotiated secretly with the Iranians in Paris, as it later turned out, in order not to release the embassy hostages before the US presidential elections. The "Islamic Republic" played its cards well with all US administrations since it succeeded in subduing Carter... until the day it clashed with Donald Trump, who surprised it by assassinating Qassem Soleimani, its man in managing the region's wars.
Carter paid the price for his ignorance of Iran and the change that took place there in 1979. Iran is now paying the price for its ignorance of the change that took place in America, including the change that took place in Israel since the “Al-Aqsa Flood” on October 7, 2023...
Few days ago Jimmy Carter passed away, considered by many as a success presidency with many progressive domestic and international policies, that eventually led to a Nobel peace price, still many think of him as a failure and weak, even the Israeli political leadership criticized him later for his pro Palestinian rights and a country of their own, Mr. Khairallah describes it all well with sound descriptions, I'm copying his article from the Lebanese Annahar leading paper....
My many thanks to all my good readers.
No comments:
Post a Comment