The news of the death of former United States President Jimmy Carter on 29 December 2024 at the
age of 100 has ushered in an avalanche of memories in many people in my age
group - students of the 1970s who remember his presidency with a mixture of
nostalgia, bitter awakening and historic turning points in American and world
history.
Carter did not dramatically
change my politics. But he did help change the historical course of my
homeland, Iran, and I daresay American history after his
troubled one-term presidency from 1977 to 1981.
Both the Iranian Revolution
of 1977-1979 and the dramatic Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1981 happened on
Carter's watch. And it was also when I happened to arrive in the US.
I was born and raised in
southern Iran, graduated from university in Tehran in 1975, and soon after
received a US visa and admission to the University of Pennsylvania, where I
earned my doctoral degree in sociology of culture.
I landed in what was at the
time the tiny Philadelphia International Airport on 15 August 1976. I had flown
into the city of "Brotherly Love" while Americans were celebrating
their bicentennial.
A few weeks before, the first televised debate between President
Gerald Ford and Carter was held there.
I recall that my English was
still not good enough to follow the debate closely. But from that moment,
Carter became integral to my personal and political history.
Two other debates happened
between the presidential candidates that year, of which I have no clear
recollection - except for two famous takeaways. One was a derogatory aside that
Ford "could not chew gum and speak at the same time", referring to
his rather clumsy demeanour. And the other was that Carter was a peanut farmer.
Decades later, the man who
has now met his maker would be arguably the most consequential president of his
generation - not just by virtue of what he did or did not do - but by the
intended and unintended consequences of his actions, inactions, and, above all,
his misadventures.
Gathering storm
Those happy memories of my
earliest encounter with American presidential politics and folklore were
quickly overshadowed by the commencement of the revolutionary momentum in the
homeland I had just left behind.
The
Iran hostage crisis crippled Carter's final year in office until he lost to
Ronald Reagan and a calamitous turn to reactionary politics commenced in the US
Between 1977 and 1979, the
ruling Pahlavi monarchy was successfully challenged by an ageing Ayatollah
Khomeini and soon toppled and replaced by the Islamic Republic.
Meanwhile, in the US, the
newly-elected president and his administration would soon be dragged into a
foreign policy quagmire that arguably cost him his second term.
Iran's revolutionary
momentum resulted in the downfall of the Pahlavi monarchy - for which, to this
day, many conspiratorial royalists hold Carter responsible.
They are particularly
suspicious of the four-day Guadeloupe Conference in January 1979, where Carter
was joined by the leaders of Britain, France and West Germany to discuss
various world issues - among them, the Iranian revolution.
It is here that Iranian
royalists believe (without much evidence) that Carter had given the signal that
the shah had to leave.
Such conspiracy theories, of
course, are pervasive in Iranian (as indeed many other) political cultures and
rest on denying any agency to Iranian people themselves. Be that as it may, the
legacy of Carter is forever wedded to the revolutionary unfolding that still
affects Iran.
Just about a month after the
Guadeloupe Conference, the shah's regime fell in February of that year.
Khomeini returned to Iran, and the entire country was cast in a revolutionary
frenzy.
The following summer, I
returned to Iran to see the unfolding drama for myself. For about two months, I
was part of the revolutionary momentum that changed the fate of my homeland.
I would spend much of my
time on the Tehran University campus and adjacent areas and join debates and
discussions regarding the draft of the new constitution before dashing to the
Ministry of Justice, where women were demonstrating against the suggestion they
could not be judges in the new regime.
In early September, I
returned to my graduate studies. But soon after, the unrest in my homeland
again rippled across the globe to the unsuspecting University of Pennsylvania
campus, where student activists were busy debating the Iranian revolution.
During that fateful autumn,
the Iran hostage crisis - in which 52 Americans were held captive in the US
embassy in Tehran for 444 days from 4 November 1979 to 20 January 1981 -
crippled Carter's final year in office until he lost to Ronald Reagan and a calamitous
turn to reactionary politics commenced in the US.
US President Jimmy Carter, right,
and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, left, smile at one another as the
shah arrived for a state visit at the White House in Washington, DC, on 15
November 1977 (Benjamin E 'Gene' Forte/ CNP/Sipa USA)
One of the first things
Carter did in retaliation to the hostage crisis was to cancel Iranian student
visas. We had to report back to immigration services to be issued new visas and
were effectively stranded in the US until the end of the crisis.
The prominent newscaster Ted
Koppel became a household name during these tumultuous days, when every night
he had an ABC network television programme, Nightline, counting the days and
detailing the ordeals of the American hostages.
For years, there were
unsubstantiated but persistent reports that Reagan's presidential campaign was
in touch with Iranian revolutionaries to delay and postpone the release of
the hostages until he came to office, which is exactly how things unfolded.
More recently, even more
corroborating evidence has surfaced
supporting this possibility.
I recall walking out of
Penn's Van Pelt Library and hearing on someone's transistor radio (if people
still remember those gadgets) the news that the hostages were released right in
the midst of Reagan's inauguration ceremony.
'Vietnam Syndrome'
What seriously contributed
to Carter's defeat was the disastrous military mission he had authorised to
rescue the hostages.
Jimmy
Carter: A utopian dove or a shrewd driver of US empire?
Operation Eagle Claw, or
Operation Tabas in Iran, as it was codenamed, was an attempt on 24 April 1980
to rescue the hostages - from the very same embassy I had walked into just a
few years earlier to get my American visa.
The dispatched helicopters ran into mechanical failures, and the operation had
to be aborted. As the forces were withdrawing from their rendezvous spot, there
was a midair collision between a helicopter and an aircraft, and eight US
servicemen were killed.
We first heard of the Texan
billionaire and future presidential candidate Ross Perot during this time when
he arranged for a successful rescue mission of his own.
He successfully pulled two
of his employees out of Iran, using his company's resources and a retired US
Army colonel, Arthur D "Bull" Simons, as recounted in Ken Follet's
best-selling book, On Wings of Eagles, and
later depicted in a two-part movie starring Burt Lancaster.
Meanwhile, the humiliation
of Carter's military fiasco provoked what at the time was called the
"Vietnam syndrome", meaning the reluctance of the US to engage in
military operations in faraway lands.
In the years to follow,
Reagan's singular mission was to overcome that syndrome with a massive increase
in military spending.
The US invasion of Grenada
on 25 October 1983 began to define the military culture of the Reagan era.
Codenamed Operation Urgent Fury, it
reasserted US supremacy in the region that soon developed into full military
engagements around the globe - most publicly during the 1986 US bombing of Libya.
I still remember Clint
Eastwood's 1986 film Heartbreak Ridge,
which lent a Hollywood hand to re-militarising American foreign policy under
Reagan.
What
seriously contributed to Carter's defeat was the disastrous military mission he
had authorised to rescue the hostages
Lancaster, Eastwood, Reagan
and a mismatched southern peanut farmer were the cast of my youthful encounter
with American politics and Hollywood at the same time.
What was eventually to be
called the Iran–Contra affair further
exacerbated this militarisation trend of the Reagan doctrine when, between 1981
and 1986, senior US officials were secretly and illegally engaged in the sale
of arms to Iran, the proceedings of which were to be used to fund the
right-wing Contras in Nicaragua.
For days in July 1987, I was
glued to the television, watching the testimonies of Lieutenant Oliver North in
a US congressional hearing about his role in the scandal.
It was a crash course on the
US and world politics.
Right-wing swing
Things began to snowball
into a right-wing swing in American politics. Reagan's presidency eventually
led to the emergence of the neoconservatives and the Project for a New American
Century during the George W Bush era.
From there, it continued to
the rise of the Tea Party and, eventually, the Maga movement that defined
Donald Trump's presidency.
The events of 9/11 on Bush's watch
resulted in two massive military operations - first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. American politics was
now fully recovered from its "Vietnam syndrome".
Our
son of a bitch: Is Sisi a good bet for Trump? Just ask Jimmy Carter
Iran was not spared from
this turn to reactionary politics.
The ruling Islamists used
the US hostage crisis to destroy their domestic ideological opponents and then,
before the crisis was over, turned to prolong the Iran-Iraq war that Saddam
Hussein had started in September 1980, which could have ended within a few
months but lasted for eight bloody years.
The Israeli genocide in Gaza is
today the final butterfruit of that era, with Carter spearheading the Camp David Accords, resulting
in the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.
The shameful role and complicity of Egypt in
Israel's starvation of Palestinians and
man-made humanitarian crisis has
been well documented.
It is perhaps too much to
think that all of these developments are rooted in the presidency of Jimmy
Carter.
Still, the fact is that
something innocent and intensely fragile broke in the period between the civil
rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s - culminating in the end of the
Vietnam War - and the radical right turn of American politics beginning with
Reagan.
And that something happened
during the time of one idealist peanut farmer who first dared to call the
Israeli regime's treatment of Palestinians Apartheid and who became
the US president almost at the same time that I began my own American sojourn.
The views expressed in this article
belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of
Middle East Eye.
The following is an overview from the New York Times.
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By Anna Marks Opinion Staff Editor |
Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday at 100,
spent much of the latter half of his life eclipsing his cardigan-wrapped, conflict-laden
presidency with a glowing reputation as one of America’s pre-eminent
humanitarians.
This country’s highest office
encourages the lionization of those who hold it. As a result, our public
imagination often crystallizes presidents’ posthumous identities into a sort of
virtuous mythology that can easily occlude reality. Times Opinion offers an
exploration of Carter’s life and legacy in several essays. To what
extent did the man meet his mythos?
The Times editorial board writes that,
despite his tumultuous final year as president, Carter amounted to
“a disciplined man of integrity and rock-solid values whose vision was to
restore honor to government.” After the presidency, the board says, he set his
sights on “waging peace,” a mission that even he could not finish.
Samantha Power, the administrator of
the United States Agency for International Development, evaluates Carter’s
signature, even radical emphasis on human rights. She attributes much of his
approach to his deeply held evangelical faith and his “empathy for individuals
who had suffered human rights abuse,” at home and abroad.
The Times columnist Carlos Lozada
read Carter’s autobiographical works and found someone who
frequently wrestled with the weight of his office and his unique position in
the world. “Carter’s writings,” Lozada says, “reveal a man striving to earn
trust from others, displaying unerring trust in himself and forever trusting in
a country that did not always return the favor.”
And the columnist Nicholas
Kristof writes that his
admiration for the former president came after traveling with him to Africa as
part of a campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease. “I admire a man who seeks
out suffering children, weeps unashamedly with them — and then does his utmost
to eradicate the parasite that torments them,” writes Kristof.
In each of these essays about Carter,
I encountered a man who chose to pursue the betterment of the human condition
over his own aggrandizement, enrichment or legacy. Americans love to imagine
ourselves as noble leaders deeply committed to generosity, tolerance and
the greater good. As these essays argue, Carter was the rare one of us who
actually met that image’s challenge, to the benefit of the world.
