The-Hogs.net - Washington Football Discussion, Redskins to Commanders Era

There are constant and vehement political and media debates in Israel concerning its policies in the West Bank, but because of powerful political, economic, and religious forces in the United States, Israeli government decisions are rarely questioned or condemned, voices from Jerusalem dominate in our media, and most American citizens are unaware of circumstances in the occupied territories.

At the same time, political leaders and news media in Europe are highly critical of Israeli policies, affecting public attitudes. Americans were surprised and angered by an opinion poll, published by the International Herald Tribune in October 2003, of 7,500 citizens in fifteen European nations, indicating that Israel was considered to be the top threat to world peace, ahead of North Korea, Iran, or Afghanistan.

The United States has used its U.N. Security Council veto more than forty times to block resolutions critical of Israel. Some of these vetoes have brought international discredit on the United States, and there is little doubt that the lack of a persistent effort to resolve the Palestinian issue is a major source of anti-American sentiment and terrorist activity throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world.
LINK HERE

he makes our current president look brillant.

ATV wrote:Boy this post bothers me. You dorks ragging on Cater aren't half the man Carter has been. Neither am I.

Tell me, what makes Carter such a GREAT man?

ATV wrote:

Tell me, what makes Carter such a GREAT man?

What doesn't?

I think Carter is best known as the president before Reagan and not much else.

One of Carter's most important accomplishments as President was the Camp David Accords. The Camp David accords produced peace between Egypt and Israel that has lasted to the present. (2006)

dnpmakkah wrote:

One of Carter's most important accomplishments as President was the Camp David Accords. The Camp David accords produced peace between Egypt and Israel that has lasted to the present. (2006)

I don't know about you guys but I think that deserves a "job well done". He helped negotiate a peace between to countries who were at odds with eachother at that time. Something our current president has no concept of. "We're going to smoke em out" Yea whatever cowboy.

ATV wrote:

I think Carter is best known as the president before Reagan and not much else.

This is your quote. You're also the one who introduced the word "great".

I'll bite though, because IMO he IS great. Why not start here....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter

TincoSkin wrote:two things people look poorly at carter for,
1 iran hostage crisis. when the sha was overthrown by muslim extreamists and the country was going crazy, carter let the sha (a friend of america) come the the US for medical treatment. as a reasult the iatolla khomani (sp?) attacked the US embassy.. thus starting a hostage crisis that would not end till years and years later.

2 he didnt stand up against the soviets when they invaded afganistan. over amillion people died and people say its his fault.
it is said to have ended detante and further the cold war.

now, people who love reagan hate jimmy carter because one, they didnt like his humanitarian first ideals and two, it was carters presidency that set the stage for reagans triumph and if they cant let it go.. jimmy famously said we were living in a state of political malaise, as a country we did not know what we stood for after the turbulent 60s. the nation was exhausted after the civil rights revolution and were searching for meanning. reagan gave them meaning with the backing of the moral majority/relgious right.

so, people hate jimmy because the reagan lovers (and there a lot of them) wont let his 2 mistakes die.

he was a good president. he did a lot of good things but his two mistakes will haunt him forever..

he has been one of the best ex presidents ever though.. he is more suited in that regard. not as a person with military power but one with a kind heart and a will to make the world a better place.


personally i think he was trying to be like JFK and bobby but they were way tougher when it came to forgin policy and carter never got that. he thought you could change the world will love with out a big gun behind it.

his actions in Iran are a large part of why we are constantly targets of terrorism now.

Considering him a better man than the rest of us for doing his job to the best of his abilities doesn't mean that he is actually better than any of us that do the same thing.

1 iran hostage crisis. when the sha was overthrown by muslim extreamists and the country was going crazy, carter let the sha (a friend of america) come the the US for medical treatment. as a reasult the iatolla khomani (sp?) attacked the US embassy

2 he didnt stand up against the soviets when they invaded afganistan.

it is said to have ended detante and further the cold war.

ATV wrote:Where do some of you people get your facts from? Do you just make this stuff up? Are you simply writing what you WANT to be reality? Truely, I don't get it.

The Iranian Revolution
Fast forward to New Years Eve, 1977: President Carter toasted the Shah at a state dinner in Tehran, calling him "an island of stability" in the troubled Middle East. What the president also knew, but chose to ignore, was that the Shah was in serious trouble. As opposition to his government mounted, he had allowed his secret police, SAVAK, to crack down on dissenters, fueling still more resentment. Within weeks of Carter's visit, a series of protests broke out in the religious city of Qom, denouncing the Shah's regime as "anti-Islamic." The popular movement against the Shah grew until January 16, 1979, when he fled to Egypt. Two weeks later, thousands of Muslims cheered Khomeini's return to Iran after fourteen years in exile.

Did the Carter administration "lose" Iran, as some have suggested? Gaddis Smith might have put it best: "President Carter inherited an impossible situation -- and he and his advisers made the worst of it." Carter seemed to have a hard time deciding whether to heed the advice of his aggressive national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wanted to encourage the Shah to brutally suppress the revolution, or that of his more cautious State Department, which suggested Carter reach out to opposition elements in order to smooth the transition to a new government. In the end he did neither, and suffered the consequences.

The Crisis
Even after it became known that the Shah was suffering from cancer, President Carter was reluctant to allow him entry to the United States, for fear of reprisal against Americans still in Iran. But in October, when the severity of the Shah's illness became known, Carter relented on humanitarian grounds. "He went around the room, and most of us said, 'Let him in.'" recalls Vice President Walter Mondale. "And he said, 'And if [the Iranians] take our employees in our embassy hostage, then what would be your advice?' And the room just fell dead. No one had an answer to that. Turns out, we never did."

When students overran the embassy and seized more than sixty Americans on November 4, it was not at all clear who they represented or what they hoped to achieve. In fact, a similar mob had briefly done the same thing nine months earlier, holding the American ambassador hostage for a few hours before members of Khomeini's retinue ordered him released. But this time, Khomeini saw a chance to consolidate his power around a potent symbol, and issued a statement in support of the action against the American "den of spies." The students vowed not to release the Americans until the U.S. returned the Shah for trial, along with billions of dollars they claimed he had stolen from the Iranian people.

Carter's Response
President Carter felt the plight of the hostages deeply, and considered their safe return his personal responsibility. On November 11, he embargoed Iranian oil. On the 17th, Khomeini announced that female, African American, and non-U.S.-citizen hostages would be released, because women and minorities already suffered "the oppression of American society." Fifty-three Americans (including two women, Elizabeth Ann Swift and Kathryn Koob, and one African American, Charles Jones) remained as hostages.

Deciding military action was too risky, Carter tried to build pressure on Iran through economic sanctions, and froze its assets in the U.S. While Secretary of State Cyrus Vance led the official diplomatic effort, Hamilton Jordan spent thousands of hours working secret channels. For the first few months, the American public rallied around Carter, who had clearly made freeing the hostages his number one priority. "Having a crisis, where you have to stay in Washington and deal with this crisis all the time, and be a statesman, can work to your advantage -- rally around the president in a crisis," says political scientist Betty Glad. "What Carter didn't foresee is, this enormous investment means you have to have a resolution to the issue."
As winter turned to spring, and negotiations failed to produce a deal, frustrated Americans demanded stronger action. "No one can know how much pressure there was on Jimmy to do something," Rosalynn Carter recalled. "I would go out and campaign and come back and say, 'Why don't you do something?' And he said, 'What would you want me to do?' I said, 'Mine the harbors.' He said, 'Okay, suppose I mine the harbors, and they decide to take one hostage out every day and kill him. What am I going to do then?'"

Desert One
Finally, with the Iranians showing no signs of releasing the hostages, Carter decided to take a risk. On April 11, 1980 he approved a high-risk rescue operation, called "Desert One," that had been in the works for months. Though the odds were against its success, the president was devastated when he had to abort the mission due to three malfunctioning helicopters. When another helicopter crashed into a C-130 transport plane while taking off, eight servicemen were killed and three more were injured. The next morning, gleeful Iranians broadcast footage of the smoking remains of the rescue attempt, a stark symbol of American impotence.

The Hostages' Release
Relatively little happened during the summer, as Iranian internal politics took its course. In early July, the Iranians released hostage Richard Queen, who had developed multiple sclerosis. In the States, constant media coverage -- yellow ribbons, footage of chanting Iranian mobs, even a whole new television news program, ABC's Nightline -- provided a dispiriting backdrop to the presidential election season. As Carter advisor and biographer Peter Bourne put it, "Because people felt that Carter had not been tough enough in foreign policy, this kind of symbolized for them that some bunch of students could seize American diplomatic officials and hold them prisoner and thumb their nose at the United States."

Finally, in September, Khomeini's government decided it was time to end the matter. There was little more advantage to be gained from further anti-American, anti-Shah propaganda, and the ongoing sanctions were making it harder to straighten out an already chaotic economy. Despite rumors that Carter might pull out an "October Surprise" and get the hostages home before the election, negotiations dragged on for months, even after Republican Ronald Reagan's landslide victory in November. Carter's all-night effort to bring the 52 hostages home before the end of his term, documented by an ABC television crew in the Oval Office, fell short; the Iranians released them minutes after Reagan was inaugurated.