I often thought at the time that JC was the penultimate appeaser for not having a muscular response to the blatantly criminal actions and that his inaction has caused us no end of troubles. But what astounded me was the left's reaction: their beloved International Law was violated, yet because it was the US who was attacked they were more than willing to excuse the events. JC didn't lose the election big enough, and that indicated that not enough folks had learned that appeasing carries a high cost.

VDH overlooks how bad our military was at the time, however. The training and equipment levels were quite poor at the time in comparison with present levels, so any sort of effect response would have been quite difficult had that been attempted. The military wasn't really reformed until well after Reagan had given the military the support they needed and the military itself radicially improved the quality of their recruits. Not that JC would have done given a muscular response; his response was more typical of the Kerry it's-a-police-matter school of thought that pervades the leftist thought model.

It is interesting, however, how the Kerry/leftist "police" model fits with the Left's agenda: it relegates fighting terrorism to some vague international law enforcement, which is something they desire so much. Never mind that it has never been shown to work...

What at bunch of crap. If you want to paint an accurate portrait of history, you have to go farther back than JC. It was Eisenhower who got down on his knees in front of the British and allowed them to use the CIA to overthrow Mossadegh in August of '53 and install the Shah. Truman had been against the coup, because he knew is was anti-American, in several different senses of the word. He stood up to the British, and told them in no uncertain terms he would not agree to an installation of the Shah, who was a tyrant of the first order.

Had the Republicans not been such idiots in the 50's and not installed the Shah, had they actually had the wisdom and the backbone to stand up to the British, then the ayatollahs would not have had the grass-roots support to take over in the 70's. Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers are the ones who were responsible for the Iranian revolution, not JC.

Mitch, your condescending attitude would be funny if you weren't so seriously misinformed. The Shah was a tyrant of the first order. The Repulbicans put him on the throne in '53. You can draw a straight line from this act to 9/11. It showed the Muslim world that we were not for democracy in the Middle East, but were instead on the side of the tyrants. And that is the message we continue to send. Just look at the cozy relationship between the Bush family and the House of Saud. The Saudi Arabian regime is the most corrupt, tyrannical regime in the Middle East. And yet, the Bushies have no greater friends in the Middle East. (And VDH has the nerve to criticize Carter?????.) And let's not forget that Reagan propped up Saddam in the 80's.

Mossadegh was an elected leader. The Republicans did everything in our power to undermine him. They did, again at the behest of the British. They put a tyrant on the throne. In the process, they planted the seed of Middle-East terror that plagues us now.

And now the Bushies make nice-nice with an equally dictatorial and tyrannical regime in Saudi Arabia. Let's face it: The Right casts aspersions on the Left for not protesting enough,
and yet it was the Right - not the Left - that propped up the Tyrannical Shah in the 50's, the tyrannical Saddam in the 80's, and the tyrannical Saudis in the present.

But of course it is the Left's fault. It always is.

mkultra,

There are parts of your screed I can't disagree with.

From roughly McKinley through Clinton, our main policy in the Third World was to favor stability over democracy. Eisenhower's fear of the "elected" Mossadegh (there were many irregularities in that election) being toppled by a communist (as was distinctly likely - Kruschev had major designs on Iran) led him to install Pahlavi. Pahlavi, of course, was a monarch - but he governed like a Kommissar, embarking on a modernization plan not much less draconian than Mao or Stalin, and not much more subtle. His leftist methods were every bit as much his undoing as his autocratic nature(although history glosses that pretty badly these days). Would I have rather that the US stood for democratic principle from 1945 on? Absolutely. But I didn't have much policy impact in those years long before I was born, now, did I?

The left was no less supportive of Pahlavi, by the way; they saw his Ataturk-like "liberalizing" influence (imposed very autocratically) as being positives. Iranian women, after all, were among the free-est in the Moslem world until the fall of the Shah, and the social welfare state, modeled on European lines, created warm fuzzies on the left, too.

Propping up Hussein? Strawman. The reaosns were purely realpolitik, not ideology. And the "support" was a pittance, although the lefty press never mentions it...

Don't like how we're dealing with the Saudis (ie, vastly tougher than *any* previous administration)? OK, sport, show us a better plan.

However, yes; as a general rule, everything bad IS the left's fault.

Well, it IS what you think I believe, isn't it?

The fear of global nuclear holocaust made for strange bedfellows indeed. Regime change via the use of military force, while certainly scratching our "gotta have it now itch" should always be (and I think still is) our last resort. If the current administration can succeed at shoring up the erosion of respect for our wishes facilitated by the former administration and successfully plant the seeds of democracy in the sandy regions, they will be able to hold their heads high regardless of the outcome in November. To word it slightly differently...Hopefully "bloody the US's nose and they'll quit" is no longer a valid tactic in anyone's playbook. Further, a little fear of swift, violent reprisal (if used but rarely) appears to have gone leagues beyond what years of UN grovelling has gotten us. Mitch, your thoughts?

One might not be able to blame Carter for the Iranian Revolution, but it is entirely proper to blame him for his feckless response to it.

He does a lot of good with Habitat for Humanity, and he's supposed to be a pretty good fly fisherman (give or take a killer rabbit or two), but James Earl Carter is probably the worst president of the 20th Century--on balance worse than Nixon, worse than Harding.