Jacob Montag
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter died at the age of 100 on Sunday (12/29). As Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism from 1977 to 1981, Carter was the perpetrator of several grave crimes and horrendous atrocities, and the bitter enemy of the working class across the world.
The Carter administration, like the Biden administration today, was a major sponsor of Israeli atrocities in the Middle East. Carter quadrupled U.S. military aid to Israel, facilitating its invasion of Lebanon to fight the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1978 and later in 1982. This series of aggression by Israel against Lebanon killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese and displaced hundreds of thousands. Israel would continue to occupy southern Lebanon until being driven out by Hezbollah in 2000.
In 1978, at the height of the atrocities committed by Indonesian forces in East Timor with the backing of U.S. imperialism, Carter increased the shipment of weapons to the Indonesian military regime. The death toll of the genocide perpetrated in East Timor with the backing of the Carter administration is estimated to have been as high as 300,000. Later on, when Congress placed certain restrictions on weapons shipments to Indonesia, the Carter administration arranged for Israel to act as a middle-man so U.S. arms could continue to reach the genocidal dictatorship.
In Iran, Carter supported the fascist regime of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, until the bitter end. In 1978-79, the Iranian regime faced a widespread popular uprising culminating in a general political strike against the Shah’s rule, which Pahlavi’s security forces unsuccessfully sought to crush by forcing the Iranian people back to work at the point of a gun. When the regime ultimately fell, Carter granted asylum to Pahlavi in the United States, facilitating the creation of a government-in-exile by his son, which continues to attempt to co-opt the Iranian opposition to the Islamic Republic of Iran to this day.
When Soviet social-imperialism launched its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, it was met with the popular resistance of the Afghan people. The armed resistance to social-imperialism in Afghanistan was led by a mixture of Communists and Islamists. Under the direction of the Carter administration, the CIA launched a clandestine campaign known as Operation Cyclone, in which they coordinated with Saudi intelligence and the Pakistani ISI to arm the Islamist forces and isolate the Communists from the leadership of the struggle to repel the Soviet invasion. The end result of this campaign was that when Soviet forces were finally driven out of Afghanistan in 1989, the Communist forces had been decimated while the U.S.-backed Islamist forces took power, leading to years of instability and internecine warfare until the Taliban finally took power in 1996.
In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Carter administration established the prevailing U.S. military doctrine towards the Persian Gulf, known as the Carter Doctrine. Established in 1980 by Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, the doctrine states that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” The Carter Doctrine, along with the later addition of the Reagan Corollary that the United States would intervene in the event of any threat to the sovereignty of Saudi Arabia, a key semi-colony of U.S. imperialism in the region, laid the basis for the Gulf War in 1990. This imperialist war initiated the campaign of U.S. aggression against Iraq that has claimed the lives of millions of Iraqis through a series of invasions, bombing campaigns, and sanctions that continue to this day.
On the domestic front, the Carter administration sought to overcome the deepening general crisis of U.S. imperialism represented by the end of the post-WWII economic expansion in 1973 and the following stagflation crisis by reducing wages, worsening working conditions, attacking unions and deregulating several industries, such as airlines, trucking, railroads, energy, and communications. Carter appointed Paul Volcker as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who infamously stated that “the standard of living of the average American has to decline”. To this end, Volcker dramatically increased both the federal funds rate and the prime rate, leading to a massive increase in unemployment and the 1980-82 recession in the U.S.
While delivering windfall bailouts and subsidies to monopolies, Carter’s campaign promises regarding legislation for increased public funding for healthcare, education, and poverty reduction went almost entirely unfulfilled.
Photo: Jimmy Carter with Iran’s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
