PART 3 OF 3
BRZEZINSKI ORCHESTRATES THE IRAN HOSTAGE CRISIS
On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian militants seized the United States Embassy in Tehran Iran and took 60 American diplomatic personnel as hostages. This incident was cynically exploited by Brzezinski as a proto-September 11 pretext to create a strategic crisis in the Persian Gulf region. The pretext cited for the seizure of the embassy in the taking of the U.S. diplomatic hostages was the fact that the Shah of Iran had been admitted to the U.S. on October 22, 1979 in order to receive medical treatment. The Shah had been living in Mexico, and there was no reason why he could not have received top-flight medical care in that country. But Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller had demanded that the Shah be admitted to the United States. Since David Rockefeller was Brzezinski's boss on the Trilateral Commission, the orchestration of the seizure of the hostages becomes evident. Carter was dimly aware of the implications of admitting the Shah to this country and he did reportedly ask at a meeting, "when the Iranians take our people in Tehran hostage, what would you advise me then?"
At this very same time the Iranian Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi was in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly, where he inveighed against the United States as "the great Satan." But this posturing did not prevent Yazdi from holding a closed-door meeting with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. The London Financial Times reported on October 5, 1979 that, as a result of these meetings, the Carter regime had ordered the "resumption of large-scale airlifts of arms to Iran" and was considering dispatching a "limited number of technicians" to that country. Simultaneously, the U.S. military began a buildup in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. The Carter regime was in contact with Yazdi through former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark of the left wing of the U.S. intelligence community. Clark wrote to Yazdi: "it is critically important to show that despots cannot escape and live in wealth while the nations they ravaged continued to suffer." When this letter later became public, it was "taken as evidence that special envoy Clark had incited the Iranians to take over the embassy and demand the return of the Shah to Iran."
BRZEZINSKI AND YAZDI; BRZEZINSKI AND SADDAM HUSSEIN
On November 1, 1979 Zbigniew Brzezinski held a secret meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Yazdi in Algeria. "According to intelligence sources, it was during this last tete-a-tete that final details concerning the embassy takeover were hammered out." Further details of the embassy seizure and hostage-taking were discussed by Yazdi upon his return to Teheran with the U.S. charge d'affaires Bruce Laingen, who was a key operative in the political charade that was about to begin." (Robert Dreyfus, Hostage to Khomeini [New York: RTR 1981]. pp. 59-60)
Because U.S. hostages had been taken, Brzezinski circles were able to argue behind the scenes that it was imperative to keep up arms shipments to the Iranians, because this appeasement of the Khomeini regime was the only way to keep the hostages alive. At no point during the entire Carter administration were arms shipments by the United States to Iran ever halted. They were seamlessly maintained, and this is the beginning of the weapons trafficking which came into public view years later in the form of the Iran-Contra scandal of 1986. Another reason why Brzezinski wanted to arm Iran was that he was already planning to play Iran off against Iraq in the genocidal Gulf War, which went far towards destroying both of these countries.
The characteristic feature of Brzezinski's method is to avoid direct U.S. military intervention as long as possible, while attempting to destroy emerging Third World powers and other possible rivals of the United States by playing them off one against the other. (The Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980, as a result of the gullibility of the U.S. asset Saddam Hussein. Brzezinski's emissaries convinced Saddam that it would be easy to invade Iran and grab the oil province of Khuzestan or Arabistan, where the Abadan refineries and the Karg island tanker terminal are located. In reality, Brzezinski was seeking to consolidate and perpetuate the Khomeini regime, which by that point was in the process of internal collapse. The attack by a foreign enemy gave the Khomeini regime a second wind, and led to a bloody stalemate which lasted for eight full years, until September 1988. Iranian casualties in this war approached one million dead, with those of Iraq being estimated at about 400,000 fatalities. This is the characteristic handiwork of Brzezinski.)
SEIZING IRANIAN ASSETS TO ABORT EUROPEAN MONETARY REFORM
A key feature of the crisis was Carter's seizure of more than $6 billion in Iranian assets inside the United States. The new Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA, just founded by Brzezinski and Huntington, was a key part of the planning of this illegal move. The resulting turmoil in the international financial markets was useful to Brzezinski in that it blocked the development of the emerging French-German European Monetary System as a global alternative to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, both controlled by the Anglo-Americans. Only one month before the Iranian crisis erupted, French Foreign Minister Jean Francois-Poncet had told reporters at the United Nations in New York of the European "vision" that the EMS would come to replace the IMF and World Bank at the center of the world financial architecture. (Dreyfus 63)
As a result of the hostage crisis, Brzezinski was perfectly positioned to blackmail Western Europe and Japan on a series of points that were of interest to the Wall Street banking community. Brzezinski demanded that the Europeans and Japanese scrupulously observe the U.S. economic sanctions and economic blockade against Iran. The only alternative to economic sanctions and economic warfare, he argued, was a direct military attack by the U.S. on Iran. It was in this context that Brzezinski told the Frankfurter Rundschau: "It is now up to Europe to prevent World War III." (Dreyfus 66)
This was helped along by a pattern of U.S. military threats to bomb Iranian oilfields or tanker terminals as part of an alleged retaliation for the seizure of the hostages. It was clear that the main victims who would suffer from any U.S. attack on Iran were more the Europeans and Japanese than the Iranians themselves, since oil deliveries out of the Persian Gulf would be severely restricted.
Brzezinski's blackmail was clearly understood by European leaders, who had long despised him. A November 28, 1979 column published in the Figaro of Paris by Paul Marie de la Gorce is indicative in this regard. The author was widely regarded as speaking for French President Giscard d'Estaing. This column stated that any U.S. military attack on Iran would cause "more damage for Europe and Japan than for Iran." Those who propose such a strategy, the French observer noted, were quite possibly courting a new world war, and were "consciously or not inspired by the lessons given by Henry Kissinger." (Dreyfus 65) All quite correct, except for the fact that the crisis was being orchestrated by Brzezinski, an even greater madman and lunatic adventurer than Kissinger.
THE CARTER DOCTRINE OF JANUARY 1980: SOURCE OF THE IRAQ WAR
Brzezinski used the hostage crisis to promulgate the so-called Carter Doctrine on the Persian Gulf, which was included in the January 1980 State of the Union address. Brzezinski insisted against all objections on the inclusion of this critical passage: "Let our position be absolutely clear. 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." Columnist Joseph Kraft called this lunacy "a breathtaking progression from the dream world to the world of reality." (Rozell 161) This was a piece of incalculable folly, since it threw down the gauntlet to the Soviet Union in the most provocative possible way. This Carter doctrine has also provided the basis for every U.S. fiasco in the Persian Gulf region over the last several decades, including the first Gulf War to eject Iraq from Kuwait and the current Iraq war itself. If you don't like the Iraq war, you need to reserve a significant part of the blame for Brzezinski, who is so to speak the founder of the policy carried out by Bush the Elder and Bush the younger. The fact that Brzezinski today tries to acquire left cover by posing as a principled enemy of the Iraq war simply underlines his hypocrisy and guile, and the gullibility of the left liberals who believe him.
BRZEZINSKI'S DESERT ONE DEBACLE
By the spring of 1980, it was clear to the world that the Carter regime was preparing a desperate military launch into Iran under the pretext of freeing the hostages. In an article that hit the streets on April 22, 1980, the Executive Intelligence Review reported that the Carter regime "has begun a headlong drive towards a Cuban missile crisis-style nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union over Iran, timed to occur between late April and May 11, for the purpose of blackmailing Western Europe and Japan into submitting to Anglo-American political dictates." (Dreyfus 65) The Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda editorialized on April 11, 1980: "Washington is not only aiming at aggravating its conflict with Teheran. Judging from everything, it is venturing a risky bluff: blackmailing Iran, as well as America's allies who depend on oil deliveries from the Persian Gulf with the threat of direct military intervention." The Soviet commentary saw that "this strategy puts Western Europe and Japan in the position of being forced participants in a game designed to strengthen the shaken position of U.S. imperialism in the near and Middle East." This Moscow observer concluded that "the prospect of being deprived of Iranian oil does not provoke any enthusiasm, especially not in Tokyo, Bonn, or Paris." (Dreyfus 66)
VANCE FEARED WORLD WAR III WITH MOSCOW
The tragic failure of the hostage rescue mission at Desert One, a rendezvous point inside Iran, was on the surface yet another proof of the incompetence and chaos of the Carter administration. There was some question as to whether the rescue mission had been sabotaged by CIA forces loyal to the Bush political machine to abort a pre-October surprise by Carter, since George H. W. Bush was now on his way to becoming Reagan's vice presidential running mate. This may have been what Iraqi state radio was driving at when it alleged that the failed U.S. attack was "playacting carried out in orchestration between Washington and Tehran." Secretary of State Cyrus Vance resigned in protest at the rescue mission, although this fact was not made public until after the mission had failed. "We haven't begun just an attack on Iran," Vance reportedly commented, "We may have started World War III." Rumors swirled around Washington to the effect that the failure of the hostage mission had been caused by a direct Soviet military intervention including MIG-21 aircraft, and according to some unconfirmed accounts the Soviet bombardment of the Desert One site. But this may have been an obvious enough cover story to hide the actions of the Bush crowd, or of deliberate sabotage by Brzezinski networks. (Dreyfus 67-68) With the failure of the hostage rescue mission at Desert One, some key Wall Street backers of the Carter administration such as George Ball and Averell Harriman bolted for the exits, abandoning the peanut farmer to his fate. Brzezinski, by contrast, constituted a stay-behind operation to run the Carter administration to its bitter end, which he personally had done so much to hasten.
At about the same time that the Soviet Union was moving into Afghanistan, fundamentalist fanatics attacked the grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest shrine of Islam, holding hundreds of pilgrims as hostages. In Pakistan, a mob of 20,000 Muslim rioters attacked and destroyed the American embassy in Islamabad, killing two Americans. The rioters had been told that the U.S. had orchestrated the attack on the grand Mosque in Mecca. Another serious incident was an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, which resulted in the murder of the U.S. ambassador. Given Brzezinski's commitment to crisis and confrontation, it is not difficult to establish him as a prime suspect in the orchestration of all these attacks.
PD-59: BRZEZINSKI STRIVES FOR TACTICAL NUCLEAR WAR, COUNTERFORCE STRIKES
In the wake of the failed hostage rescue mission, Brzezinski promulgated a new piece of strategic insanity and brinksmanship in the form of Presidential Directive 59, issued in August 1980. This document called for the United States to adopt a policy of limited or tactical nuclear war wherever needed to be able to deal with Soviet strategic moves. It was the brainchild of Brzezinski and Carter's Defense Secretary, Harold "Bomber" Brown, one of the Strangeloves who had helped carry out strategic bombing during the Vietnam War.
PD-59 represented a giant step away from the doctrine of deterrence, otherwise known as mutually assured destruction (MAD), which had been the only means of keeping the peace of the world after the late 1950s. PD-59 talked about the possibility of counterforce attacks against Soviet nuclear assets in addition to the long-standing targeting of population centers as part of a so-called counter-value strategy. Brzezinski and Brown claimed that this harebrained scheme meant that the United States nuclear deterrent would continue to be credible even in the face of a Soviet military buildup. But sane observers pointed out that the PD-59 policy vastly increased the chances of crossing the nuclear threshold into the unthinkable realm of nuclear exchange, because it made atomic hostilities easier to start. The Soviet news agency TASS described this new strategy as "madness," while Pravda attacked it as "nuclear blackmail" destined to cause a new acceleration of the arms race.
BRZEZINSKI'S EUROMISSILES CRISIS, 1979-1983
In 1979, NATO had decided under prodding by Brzezinski to begin the process leading to the stationing of U.S. Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe as a counter to the deployment of Soviet SS 20 intermediate range ballistic missiles. Carter had held a very public discussion with himself about building the neutron bomb, which further inflamed the suspicions of Moscow. He then decided to build and deploy the MX multi-warhead ICBM. All of these moves were dictated by the insane warmonger Brzezinski, and they helped to move the world towards the brink of general thermonuclear war, as the French and German governments noted with alarm. Combined with events in Afghanistan and in Iran, the new U.S. doctrine of counterforce combined with tactical nuclear warfare had created a superpower crisis of the first magnitude, all within about 36 months of the Carter Brzezinski regime coming into power.
To further antagonize the Soviets, Carter slapped a total grain embargo on the Soviet Union, and boycotted the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Relations between Washington and Moscow reached an absolute nadir. Although he is approaching 80 years of age, it is a safe bet that the aging Strangelove Brzezinski will still be capable of taking today's world to the brink in even less time under a future Obama administration.
THREE MILE ISLAND ON CARTER'S WATCH
Perhaps the event which best symbolized and summed up the abyss of cultural pessimism and historical despair into which the Carter administration had led the United States was a nuclear incident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in late March, 1979. A malfunction at a nuclear reactor was used by the controlled corporate media to unleash a wave of panic and hysteria which gripped the United States for several days. Not one person was killed in the entire incident. Nevertheless, the Three Mile Island affair was used to solidify and consolidate the post-1968 cultural paradigm shift away from traditional notions of science and progress in that direction of historical pessimism and the limits of growth which had been proclaimed by the neofascist Club of Rome just a decade earlier. Carter had come into office with the firm intent to sabotage the nuclear modernization of the developing countries, and this Three Mile Island incident allowed him to shut down the nuclear reactor industry inside the United States. Since the Three Mile Island media circus, not one new nuclear reactor has been completed and placed online in this country. The incident inside the reactor was extremely suspicious: the entire fiasco came just two weeks after the premiere of a film entitled The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon. This was an obvious scenario film which showed a devastating incident at a nuclear reactor.
It is a good rule of thumb to assume that when a scenario film appears on television or in the movies, and the actual event then occurs soon afterward, an intelligence network has used the scenario film to prepare public opinion for the real-world event. Just a few months before the events of September 11, 2001, for example, Fox television broadcast the scenario film The Lone Gunmen, which showed a hijacked airliner almost colliding with the World Trade Center towers in New York City. With a few variations, the plot was broadly similar to what then happened on September 11. It was known at the time of Three Mile Island that the most likely cause of this incident had not been a mechanical failure of the reactor itself, but rather deliberate sabotage by one of the employees at the plant, obviously enough in the framework of a covert operation designed to paralyze or destroy the nuclear power industry in the United States.
The Carter administration failed miserably in determining what had actually happened at Three Mile Island, and eagerly embraced the thesis that nuclear energy was inherently unsafe. Together with the Volcker interest-rate policies at the Federal Reserve, Three Mile Island was a principal factor in the de-industrialization of the United States carried out during the Carter years. Here again, this country has not recovered to this day from the destruction wrought under the Carter regime. Those who are concerned about greenhouse gases today should recall that it was under Carter that the fateful decision against nuclear energy and in favor of coal-fired plants was made.
Speaking on the National Public Radio Diane Rehm program on February 27, 2008, correspondent Joe Hebert of the Associated Press speculated that another incident on the scale of Three Mile Island would essentially doom the nuclear power industry in the United States, putting an end to the current trend for nuclear power to make a comeback in this country. This raises the obvious question: is a new nuclear reactor incident being planned for a future Obama administration? We can be reasonably sure that if such an incident were to occur, Obama would be just as hostile to finding out what had really happened as Bush was in regard to September 11.
GLOBAL 2000: GENOCIDE AS OFFICIAL U.S. POLICY
It was during the Jimmy Carter regime that policies of population reduction in the Third World, amounting to thinly veiled genocide, were instituted as the imperative doctrine of the United States government. Many of the documents in question, such as Global 2000 and Global Futures, were produced in the State Department under Carter's second secretary of state, Edmund Muskie, who replaced Vance in 1979.
By the spring of 1980, the resident Strangelove of the White House, who had now outlasted his rival Cyrus Vance, had also become a huge public relations liability, both in terms of his track record and in terms of his personality. Newsweek magazine wrote that: ''as things now stand, the president's uncertain diplomatic strategy has left allies perplexed, enemies unimpressed, and the nation as vulnerable as ever in an increasingly dangerous world." One prominent historian of the Carter presidency writes that: "because of his high profile and combative Cold War views, Brzezinski came under particular attack, prompting Jody Powell to urge Carter to curb the NSC adviser's public appearances. 'To put it bluntly,' Powell stated, 'Zbig needs to almost drop from public view for the next few months at least.'" (Kaufman 176)
This analysis was correct: when Brzezinski appeared at the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York City, he was heavily booed, especially by Kennedy delegates. Brzezinski was widely recognized at that time as the most unpopular member of the Carter administration -- no mean feat, given how much Carter and some of his underlings were hated. It may well be that Brzezinski was the most unpopular figure in any Democratic administration since Johnson left office in January 1969 until of course Zbig rehabilitated himself by becoming a critic of the Iraq war. Today, Obama is wisely keeping Brzezinski in the closet and denying his relationship with the Polish incendiary.
BILLY CARTER AND BILLYGATE
Yet another factor dragging down the Carter regime was the dubious role of the president's younger brother, Billy Carter. Billy had attracted notoriety by attempting to market a brand of beer bearing his own name, the so-called Billy Beer. He had also undertaken a highly publicized trip to Libya in 1978 to meet with officials of the regime of Colonel Moammar Gaddafi. Soon the Justice Department had to ask Billy to register as a foreign agent for the Libyan government. One of Billy's missions was to procure an increase in Libyan oil deliveries to the Charter Oil Company. By July 1980, it became known that Billy Carter had received $220,000 from the Libyan government. Zbigniew Brzezinski had had a role in the scandal, and may have been one of the leakers who had started the ball rolling. A White House statement specified that Zbigniew Brzezinski had met with Billy Carter and a Libyan official in November 1979 to talk about the possibility of getting Libyan help to release the U.S. hostages held in Iran. This idea had been endorsed by First Lady Rosalind Carter. When Billy had traveled to Libya for his second trip in early 1980, he had taken with him some confidential cables from the State Department. This dose of new corruption evidence was yet another blow to Carter's popularity. "That damn Billy Carter stuff is killing us," commented Hamilton Jordan of the Carter White House. (Kaufman 191)
THE CARTER REGIME: AUSTERITY, PAIN AND SACRIFICE
Perhaps another of the reasons that Carter and Brzezinski did not in fact pitch the world into all-out thermonuclear war during 1980 had to do with the precipitous collapse of the Carter regime on the home front. In November 1980, Eizenstat warned Carter that in the public perception, his economic policy was "viewed solely as austerity, pain, and sacrifice." (Kaufman 179) Carter had been programmed as an austerity president, and he was now the target of widespread popular rage and resentment for precisely that reason. He had betrayed his own political base. In early 1980, Carter secured the creation of the Synthetic Fuels Corporation with authority to spend $88 billion over the next decade to develop alternative energy sources. This is yet another precursor to the current alternative proposals pushed by Bush and Obama. Carter during early 1980 was also demanding a 10 cents per gallon surcharge on all imported oil. He also demanded the creation of an Energy Mobilization Board, to override state laws and regulations on matters pertaining to energy supplies. He was doing this a few months before a general election, and despite his own wretched popularity ratings in the public opinion polls.
On June 4, 1980, both houses of Congress repudiated Carter by approving a joint resolution killing the proposed oil import tax. The vote was 73 to 16 in the Senate and 376 to 30 in the House, in spite of the three-to-two Democratic majority in the Senate, and a two-to-one edge in the House. It was the first time that a two-thirds majority of the Congress had overwritten the veto of a president from the same party since Harry Truman in the early 1950s, and showed that Carter had so alienated and antagonized the Democrats on Capitol Hill that he had no working majority. Carter whined that his defeat represented a new low in congressional performance during his time in office. Fortunately for the world, Carter settled into the status of a lame duck and concentrated on his doomed reelection effort against the Republican Reagan-Bush ticket.
NOVEMBER 1980: CARTER CARRIES FIVE STATES AND D.C.
In the November 1980 elections, Carter was able to carry the District of Columbia, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Georgia, Minnesota, and Maryland for a total of 49 electoral votes to the 489 rolled up by Reagan Bush. This landslide marked the beginning of a reactionary nightmare in American politics which continued unmitigated until the arrival of Bill Clinton in 1992, and has continued to exercise a profoundly negative influence on the United States until this very day.
DID BRZEZINSKI RECRUIT OBAMA IN 1981-83?
As for Carter, he became a virtual pariah after leaving office, taking no part whatsoever in the 1984 Democratic national convention or in the campaign of his former Vice President Walter Mondale. He seemed to retreat into the argument that the United States had become ungovernable during his time in office, and that there was nothing that he could have done differently. As for Brzezinski, he went back to Columbia University and by all indications busied himself with the recruitment of a stable of new Manchurian candidates on the Carter model to be deployed farther down the line, in a total political and economic crisis which Samuel Huntington was then predicting for the years between 2010 and 2030. Among the bright young men on the make that Brzezinski began to draw into his orbit at this time was, in all probability, the youthful Barack Obama, who had transferred to Columbia University in 1981, and who graduated in 1983 with a degree in political science, a specialization in international relations, and a thesis topic involving Soviet nuclear disarmament -- a topic that represented Brzezinski's personal area of interest as the boss of the Columbia Institute for Communist Affairs.
CARTER AS HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL PESSIMIST
In an essay entitled "Jimmy Carter and the Post-New Deal Presidency," the new deal scholar William E. Leuchtenburg cites an important line from Carter's inaugural address of January 1977: "we have learned that 'more' is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits." Leuchtenburg then goes on to quote the following comment by Carter in his later memoirs: "Watching the sea of approving faces [on Inauguration Day], I wondered how few of the happy celebrants would agree with my words if they analyzed them closely. At the time, it was not possible even for me to imagine the limits we would have to face. In some ways, dealing with limits would become the subliminal theme of the next four years and affect the outcome of the 1980 election." Carter evidently knew well enough right at the outset that he had hoodwinked the American people. Leuchtenburg quotes a remark by Michael Malbin that "Americans remain a people of the Enlightenment who find it hard to accept the postmodern (or ancient) view of a world of limited possibilities." In other words, a presidency founded on historical and cultural pessimism, most notably in the form of Malthusian austerity, is unlikely to be accepted by Americans, and leads to failure and ungovernability. Despite indications of ideological decadence and moral senility in the American people around the turn of the 21st century, it is very likely that the tendency to reject historical and cultural pessimism remains surprisingly strong, and could emerge powerfully under conditions of crisis. A resurgence of scientific optimism and activist government is precisely what synthetic candidates like Carter and Obama have been designed to sabotage. Leuchtenburg cites a reporter who summed up the conclusion of the Carter presidency by remarking: "He preached to us constantly about sacrifice and limitations, which none of us wanted to hear."
The tremendous demoralization and despair associated with the Carter presidency opened the door for the right-wing reactionary Ronald Reagan, who went to the White House wearing a mask of sunny optimism. Leuchtenburg quotes the comment of one scholar that "whatever Reagan did, many Americans felt, would be better than the handwringing, sermons, and demands for sacrifice of the last four years." One former Carter official summed up his boss's message in the following terms: "in order to be a good American ... You've got to drive cars you don't like ... And turn up the thermostat in the summer and down in the winter. You're a pig, you've been using too much energy all your life and you've got to change." (Leuchtenburg 22-23)
CARTER AND THE DEMOCRATS' RETREAT FROM THE NEW DEAL
The Carter presidency inaugurated a retreat from the heritage of the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal which has been disastrous for the Democratic Party. It was under Carter that the great U-turn in American life, from rising standards of living to falling standards of living, became evident and institutionalized. From the Carter era onwards, American living standards have been in a process of precipitous decline, down to the current level of barely a third of the Eisenhower-Kennedy norm. When Walter Mondale ran for president in 1984, he began including trade unions and teachers' unions among the sinister interest groups whose influence in Washington had to be contained, as if they were big oil or big pharmaceuticals -- he was carrying on the same process. When Michael Dukakis in 1988 said that the main issue in the election was competence and not ideology, this was another coded repudiation of the Roosevelt tradition. Dukakis ostentatiously refused to offer any promise of increased federal spending to fight poverty.
Bill Clinton declared that the era of big government was over, embraced free trade sellouts, and abolished the welfare system, abandoning millions of poor children to a grim fate. These wretched policies could never take the place of FDR's New Deal, JFK's New Frontier, and LBJ's Great Society.
A FITTING MONUMENT TO CARTER: A BOTTOMLESS PIT
After the Carter administration had left Washington, the prominent trade unionist William R. Winpisinger of the International Association of Machinists was asked for his evaluation of Carter's place in history. He replied: ''as presidents go, he was on a par with Calvin Coolidge. I consider his abilities mediocre, his actions pusillanimous, and his administration a calamity for America's working people. Since an obelisk soaring 555 feet into the air symbolizes the nation's admiration and respect for George Washington, it would seem the only fitting memorial for Jimmy Carter would be a bottomless pit." (Leuchtenburg 17)
MALTHUSIANISM SPELLS DOOM FOR DEMOCRATS
Jimmy Carter is of course not the only failed president of the last several decades, but he is the only Democrat other than Clinton to reach the White House since the end of the Johnson administration in 1969. Carter's administration is today little understood by younger voters, and older voters are not anxious to remember the agony of the Carter years. The Democratic Party has had its share of failed and dysfunctional presidential candidates -- George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry come to mind. All of these figures shared the same essential crippling flaw: they could not understand that an embrace of the ideology of the limits of growth and the inevitability of scarcity had to doom any concerns about the alleviation of poverty, the defense of the middle class, or the provision of adequate education, health care, housing, transportation, and other social services -- to say nothing of improving the lot of the impoverished masses of the developing countries.
Before 1968, Malthusianism was considered an alien doctrine among American leftists. It was after all the New Deal and not any free-market orgy that for the first time in human history unlocked the secrets of the atom, put human beings on the moon, and opened the era of computer technology. It is only as a result of the disorientation, disillusionment, defeat, and despair of the late 1960s and early 1970s that ideas about the limits of growth and the impossibility of making people's lives better through science, technology, and progress became pervasive. During his first year in office, French President Nicholas Sarkozy told the French that they are now living in an "age of scarcity." Yet, there is no objective reason why this should be so. The age of scarcity ideology represents a self-imposed block, a universe in which no progressive causes can survive. Jimmy Carter's greatest failing was his intellectual incapacity to reject the ideology of scarcity and austerity. Today, under circumstances which have qualitatively deteriorated since Carter's time, the Obama candidacy proposes a final capitulation to these reactionary and inhumane ideas.
OBAMA: A NEW DISASTER A LA CARTER
It is hoped that this retrospective summary of the Carter-Brzezinski-Volcker Trilateral administration of 1977 to 1981 will help the public to identify the Obama candidacy as a warmed-over version, more sophisticated and elaborate to be sure, of the same sinister methods which made the Carter regime such a nightmare. Far from being fresh and new, Obama represents a thoroughly discredited model which has already been tried and which has failed. In spite of his own reckless folly, Carter was nevertheless able to complete four years in office. There is, however, no guarantee that the United States of America could survive an Obama-Brzezinski presidency for that long.
THE BRZEZINSKI PLAYBOOK -- HINTS OF THE FUTURE UNDER OBAMA
This brief retrospective of the 1977-1981 Brzezinski-Carter administration can perhaps provide us with a repertoire of tricks and tactics in which Brzezinski can be considered well-versed, and which we may therefore expect may well be carried out during a possible Obama administration. We can call this brief catalogue the Brzezinski Playbook.
1. Economic stagflation was a new term that had to be invented to describe the Carter-Brzezinski Volcker Trilateral combination of unprecedented unemployment and high inflation. Now the newspapers are full of dire predictions of stagflation. This time, Brzezinski's policies will consummate the existing tendencies toward hyperinflationary depression, something like the Carter economic crisis raised to the third or fourth power.
2. Brzezinski is a past master of orchestrating and exploiting for political purposes attacks on embassies and the seizure of diplomatic personnel as hostages. On his watch, the U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan was murdered, and the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan attacked by a large mob. The most celebrated example of Zbig's handiwork in this department was of course the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and the taking of the 52 U.S. personnel there as hostages from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981. This was a complex operation arranged via many channels, but the finishing touches were applied when Brzezinski met with Iranian Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi in Algeria on November 1, 1979. Shortly after the Serbian province of Kosovo declared its independence in February 2008, a strange attack on the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia occurred which could not be assigned to any known Serbian group. This had all the earmarks of a Brzezinski operation.
3. Brzezinski is also an expert in the use of color revolutions and people power coups. The most notable example on Brzezinski's watch remains the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the installation of the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, whom Brzezinski wanted to use as a means of popularizing Islamic fundamentalism, which he wanted to use as a weapon for the subversion of the USSR. The March 2008 Tibet insurrection is a typical Brzezinski gambit, aiming at the destabilization and weakening of China as a whole. The fact that the vehicle is that feudal monster and parasite, the very spiritual NATO agent and provocateur who calls himself the "Dalai Lama," only increases the gusto for Brzezinski, who is a low-level Polish nobleman. Look for color revolutions in Syria, Venezuela, and other countries. Pakistan is experiencing the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto's failed color revolution, and is being pushed into breakup by the U.S.-U.K.
4. Playing one country against another in an attempt to destroy both is one of Brzezinski's favorite ploys. He boasts that he played the USSR against Afghanistan and destroyed the Soviet regime in the process. He also played Saddam Hussein's Iraq against Iran, to weaken both countries and also to consolidate the Khomeini fundamentalist dictatorship in Iran, which probably would have fallen without the extra cohesion afforded by a foreign aggressor. The playing of Ethiopia against Somalia in late 2006-early 2007 and of Colombia against Venezuela in the spring of 2008 are typical examples of Brzezinski's handiwork. Look for him to attempt to play Syria and Iran against Russia. His larger goals include playing Europe and China against Russia in the huge pincers operation. This ploy is likely to blow up in his face -- the last world war grew out of the British attempt to play Hitler against Stalin, an equally crackpot scheme.
5. Olympic boycotts for political purposes are a Brzezinski specialty; he led the effort by the U.S. and other countries to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the USSR invaded Afghanistan in response to Brzezinski's own subversion operations there. In 2008, look for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics to make the Chinese leaders lose face. Consider Mexico City 1968 and Munich 1972 for possible variations. The U.S. will face the later harvest of hate, but Brzezinski hardly cares about that.
6. As a fanatical feudalist, Brzezinski hates science and progress. The deliberate sabotage of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor was played out on Brzezinski's watch in 1979. The incident had been immediately preceded by the release of the film The China Syndrome, which provided an accurate scenario for the staged incident that was about to happen. With Obama heavily in debt to the coal mine owners, a new sabotage of a nuclear reactor, this time perhaps with real victims, might well be on the agenda, in a bid to end the U.S. nuclear industry forever, condemning this country to fall farther and farther behind the rest of the world, which is going for nuclear energy on an unprecedented scale.
7. To increase environmentalist-Malthusian hysteria and increase public willingness to accept carbon taxes and the burdens of a "cap and trade" speculative market, Brzezinski might well opt for a new fake energy shortage like that of the summer of 1979, complete with endless gas lines stretching over the horizon.
8. Brzezinski's tenure at the NSC also coincided with the great European terrorist offensive of 1977-78 against the European Monetary System and the Schmidt-Giscard-Moro push towards European self-assertion. In Germany in 1977, the Baader-Meinhof group, a tool of NATO intelligence, murdered state prosecutor Buback, the business leader Schleyer, and the banker Ponto, while CIA-controlled Palestinian crazies hijacked a German plane to Mogadiscio, Somalia. In 1977, gun-toting extremists engaged in firefights with police in the center of Rome, and in March 1978 the CIA's own Red Brigades kidnapped and later murdered former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Watch therefore for a new wave of terrorism against those who oppose Brzezinski's plans.
This brief account is indebted to the following works:
William E. Leuchtenburg, "Jimmy Carter and the Post-New Deal Presidency," in Gary M. Fink and Hugh Davis Graham, eds., The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998)
Charles O. Jones, The Trusteeship Presidency: Jimmy Carter and the United States Congress (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1988)
Mark J. Rozelle, The Press and the Carter Presidency (Boulder Colorado: Westview Press, 1989)
Burton I. Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter Jr. (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1993)
Robert Dreyfus, Hostage to Khomeini (New York: Executive Intelligence Review, 1981)
Jules Witcover, Marathon: the Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976 (New York: Signet, 1977)