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  #11  
Old 05-22-2007, 11:00 AM
mjkidd mjkidd is offline
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Default Re: Brevity is the Soul of Wit

Independent of the orgin of the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis, I'm not a big fan of the way Carter handled the hostage crisis. He let an overt act of war go unpunished and allowed the United States to be humiliated in front of the entire world. This inaction led many to believe that direct threats to American interests abroad would be ignored by the United States.
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  #12  
Old 05-22-2007, 11:55 AM
clowntable clowntable is offline
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Default Re: Brevity is the Soul of Wit

I used to have friends who liked the US. Now I'm defending it far too often for my taste.
So from a strictly subjective point of view I'd say GW and his policies (powermongering is used quite frequently i belive) hasn't exactly been embraced by Europeans (danger, very generalized).

Also the theme "Americans are uneducated idiots" got a lot stronger for some....strange reason.
Not stricly foreign politics but more "the man" himself I guess [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]
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  #13  
Old 05-22-2007, 11:58 AM
mjkidd mjkidd is offline
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Default Re: Brevity is the Soul of Wit

Wait...Europeans don't like GWB?
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  #14  
Old 05-22-2007, 04:22 PM
latefordinner latefordinner is offline
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Default Re: Brevity is the Soul of Wit

Okay one of the 15 of you that voted Carter need to state your reasoning.
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  #15  
Old 05-22-2007, 04:30 PM
mjkidd mjkidd is offline
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Default Re: Brevity is the Soul of Wit

[ QUOTE ]
Okay one of the 15 of you that voted Carter need to state your reasoning.

[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
Independent of the orgin of the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis, I'm not a big fan of the way Carter handled the hostage crisis. He let an overt act of war go unpunished and allowed the United States to be humiliated in front of the entire world. This inaction led many to believe that direct threats to American interests abroad would be ignored by the United States.

[/ QUOTE ]
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  #16  
Old 05-22-2007, 04:37 PM
Grey Grey is offline
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Default Re: Who was worst in foreign relations: Carter or G.W. Bush?

[ QUOTE ]
This is true only in the most tenuous of ways and shows a complete lack of knowledge of the Iranian Revolution. The proximate cause of the hostage crisis was Carter's admission of the Shah to the U.S. for cancer treatment and his refusal to turn him over to Iran for trial and execution.

[/ QUOTE ]Taking the diplomats hostage was admittedly also a way to prevent the U.S. from overthrowing another Iranian government and installing another brutal pro-U.S. dictatorship in the direct aftermath of the revolution when things were still unstable. That's why it had public support in Iran. Maybe it worked. But still the U.S. tried to overthrow it again (after Carter was gone) by supporting Iraq's invasion of Iran in many different ways.

And no one said anything about the clerics restoring democracy. I don't know where you and Felix got that from. Certainly not my post.
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  #17  
Old 05-22-2007, 06:07 PM
Grey Grey is offline
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Default Re: Brevity is the Soul of Wit

[ QUOTE ]
He let an overt act of war go unpunished and allowed the United States to be humiliated in front of the entire world.

[/ QUOTE ]Uh was overthrowing their democratic government not an act of war on our part?

Seems to me Carter ended a war that the U.S. started and perpetuated for decades by training the Savak without getting anyone killed.

No wonder Americans are seen as idiots throughout the world. The conventional wisdom here is that Iran started this?

Imagine Russia overthrew JFK, and installed their own hand-picked government in the U.S. complete with continually training a secret police who killed thousands of us. Then imagine we finally overthrew the Russian government, and in doing so some college students took Russian diplomats in the U.S. hostage. Would you seriously accuse those U.S. students of starting a war, and call for Russia to retaliate?
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  #18  
Old 05-22-2007, 06:41 PM
*grendel* *grendel* is offline
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Default Re: Who was worst in foreign relations: Carter or G.W. Bush?

Carter also facilitated the US giving up control of the Panama Canal during his tenure. At the time, this was a big issue.

While I don't think "W" has done a good job, it's hard to imagine that his foreign policy record will be worse than Carter's.
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  #19  
Old 05-22-2007, 07:54 PM
mjkidd mjkidd is offline
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Default Re: Brevity is the Soul of Wit

[ QUOTE ]
Uh was overthrowing their democratic government not an act of war on our part?

Seems to me Carter ended a war that the U.S. started and perpetuated for decades by training the Savak without getting anyone killed.

No wonder Americans are seen as idiots throughout the world. The conventional wisdom here is that Iran started this?

Imagine Russia overthrew JFK, and installed their own hand-picked government in the U.S. complete with continually training a secret police who killed thousands of us. Then imagine we finally overthrew the Russian government, and in doing so some college students took Russian diplomats in the U.S. hostage. Would you seriously accuse those U.S. students of starting a war, and call for Russia to retaliate?

[/ QUOTE ]

I really don't care "who started it." If you're the president of the United States you can't just sit back and watch a bunch of pissant mullahs take our diplomats hostage without taking decisive action.
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  #20  
Old 05-22-2007, 09:15 PM
cpk cpk is offline
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Default Re: Who was worst in foreign relations: Carter or G.W. Bush?

Carter's negatives--

* Iran hostage crisis. Pretty much everyone knows what went wrong here.

* South Korea. He wanted to remove troops from SK, which would've left SK totally undefended from the aggressive North. He had to fire a general over it. Ultimately, he backed down, which looks inept.

Slight positives--

* Panama Canal. Objectively he did the right thing, but he had a number of PR problems because at the time Panama was locked in the hold of a brutal dictatorship. He was assaulted from both the right and left over the issue, but ultimately successful in getting the treaties ratified.

* SALT II. Reducing the number of nuclear weapons is always a good thing, but he never got this treaty ratified because the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. However, in subsequent years, both the USA and Soviets obeyed the treaty's stipulations anyway.

* Central America. In general, Carter began to weaken the US's policy of backing brutal dictators if they were hostile to Soviet interests, but he didn't go far enough.

* Rhodesia. He continued sanctions against Rhodesia, and a new government was elected, but the head of that government was Robert Mugabe. Hard to call that a win.

Positives--

* China. Carter's administration normalized diplomatic and trade relations with China, while at the same time maintaining economic ties to Taiwan. Nixon gets all the credit for normalizing our relations with China, but the reality is that Carter's team did all the dirty work.

* Afghanistan. The covert action sponsored by the Carter Administration was ultimately successful in denying the Soviets this territory, and it contributed ultimately to the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were numerous downsides to this action, to be sure, but on the face of it this was a foreign policy success attributable to Carter.

* Egypt and Israel. The Carter Administration was instrumental in this process, culminating in the Camp David accords.

-----

Some positives, a lot of almost-positives, and some negatives.

W's Negatives
-------------

* Iraqi occupation.

* Afghan aftermath.

* Guantanamo Bay and torture via waterboarding.

W's Slight Positives
--------------------

* Removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Hate all you want, it's difficult to say that the Iraqi people were better off with this brutal dictator in power. But the aftermath has not been very promising.

* Removal of the Taliban from power. Same as above.

* North Korean nuclear program shutdown.

I don't see how anyone would say that Carter is a worse foreign policy president than W. Carter accomplished a [censored]-load of stuff in 4 years. W's main legacies are mostly negatives--he gets some credit for removing Hussein and the Taliban, but he has been utterly inept in managing the aftermath.
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