Oh? That was his idea? His crazy crackpot scheme that he forced upon his military advisers by sheer force? Really?
What did these accords end up accomplishing? {I ask as a loaded question.}
In the long, run very little. This is his great accomplishment as POTUS. Meh
I like Carter the Ex-President. I really respect him, but Carter as President was so bad that the country lept at the chance to put Reagan in power. If you are a Dem that hates Reagan the way most Dems hated Reagan, you should at least hold that against Carter. He accomplished almost nothing with party control of both houses.
I hate the Bush admin, but with his party control both houses, they got many of his fucked-up policies into place. (Excuse the language please). Carter really accomplished almost nothing and **Airman ** is correct about the Helicopter Rescue Disaster. This was perhaps the low point in our military; a lame, dangerous, ill conceived and embarrassing plan.
Carter thankfully did far less harm than this President did, but really, was there a more inept POTUS in the last 40 years except for this Shrub.
Jim
The buck rests with him on that one, but if he could have pulled it off it would have been a triumph. But compare what he did to what he could have done. Does anyone think that we’d be better off if we had invaded Iran in the late 1970s? What was the Republican plan to bring the hostages home?
The thread linked in that one is even better:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=169260
That’s a new one. He was forced to do it, so it wasn’t his fault! They forced his hand to the paper and made him sign off on it. I wonder how many agents of the US Secret Service were in cahoots with the military cabal that they would allow such forceful measures in their presence. We were one step away from a military coup, and history has never mentioned it. It must be another one of those coverup things that I keep hearing about but have never actually seen work (except in the case of the Kennedy assassination). Damn, but those Democrats are good at those! They could teach the Republicans a thing or two!
I suspect, many Republicans were planning on an invasion if needed. There were jokes making the round about
“What is big and flat and Glowing?”
“Iran on Election Day”
In retrospect I now believe an invasion might have been a disaster, but at the time, it seemed like the correct response if any of the hostages were harmed.
Jim
Well, whatever. But just see if we don’t end up doing it – you know, when Bush finally emerges from his long winter’s nap and decides that it’s time to reveal the Plan.
1 - Become President of the United States.
2 - ???
3 - VICTORY!
Of course not. History has shown us that if a mideast country does something bad, we should invade Iraq.
Never mentioned…? Oh, wait. That’s right. You grew up thinking Ronnie Ray Guns was the kindly old grandfather who loved his country and would never do anything to hurt a single American [url=http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_cr/h920205-october-clips.htm]for anything as crass as winning an election[/ulr]. SURPRISE! He was an actor. Why do I constantly have to remind people of this? Of course he looked sincere! It’s what he did! You trusted that?
Crap. fixed link. Fucking Dyslexia.
Saw Laura Bush in an interview this morning.
I think even she’s having some difficulty with this, and is of course blaming the media for only covering the bad stuff.
Wonder what’s going through her mind?
Q
[Laure Bush on]
Must smile for cameras …
Don’t think about George …
Just smile and wave …
George can’t help it …
Just don’t embarrass yourself and George
Must smile for the cameras …
[LB off]
I concede that this takes me into tinfoil hat territory, but what’s the plausibility that the present chaos was regarded internally as a likely and even not-undesirable outcome by the Bushiviks?
I mean, I have enormous difficulty believing that so many people could have been, and can continue to be, so incredibly idiotic. What has happened was entirely predictable, and should not have been a surprise to anybody who has more than a handful of functioning brain cells; and moreover the reality of what’s going on is so horrifying that even the truest of true believers are being forcefully shocked into full awareness. That the Bushiviks are so steadfastly flying in the face of actual events and steering unwaveringly into mounting catastrophe indicates one of two things: the entire leadership has gone screamingly, stupidly insane, or this is what they really wanted.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the Bush clan, and these people, the Bushes and the Walkers, have been involved in some heinous shit, going way back. Their infiltration of government power centers appears to have been an organized family goal for the last four generations. The Bush/Walker industries are big manufacturing (including arms) and petroleum, for the most part, and they recognized early on that to maximize revenue, they had to entangle themselves with, and ultimately subvert, the mechanisms of the state. This effort has culminated in their current dominance of the public sphere.
Now consider: among the goals of their ideological ilk are (a) weakening and shrinking the federal government, to reduce regulatory oversight and “unchain industry,” and (b) increasing penetration of their capitalist organs into third-world countries.
Point (a) is obvious: they’re spending the state into oblivion, and they’re overcommitting the resources they have, hoping to precipitate a collapse. They’ve discovered they can’t simply and directly carve down the government, a la Mr. Norquist’s much-quoted aphorism about “strangling it in the bathtub,” but they can go the other direction, making it so large and unwieldy that it falls apart on its own.
On point (b), the Gordian knot of modern and historical alliances, enmities, loyalties, and hatreds in the Mideast has defied the best efforts of the best statesmen to untangle. So why not just push it over and hope for the best? Take advantage of the existing antipathies, and remove one of the stabilizing factors in the region; Saddam Hussein was a cruel thug, but he was a solid block in the Jenga tower of the Mideast, and as we’ve seen, yanking him out without replacing him with anything has caused the whole structure to tremble. If Iraq descends beyond its current low-level civil war and falls into outright madness, one inevitable result will be, flowing across its borders, not just huge numbers of refugees seeking shelter in neighbors with roughly equivalent sectarian sympathies but hardened and experienced guerillas and mercenaries of opposing sympathies with agendas of their own.
If this happens, will any government in the area survive unscathed? The conflict will resonate from Egypt to Kyrgyzstan, and possibly beyond, and every state will be weakened, if it doesn’t crumble entirely.
And then, ten years later, the multinationals, operating as largely stateless entities beyond the influence of any particular country (including, per the first point above, the greatly weakened United States), will march into the smoking, groaning ruin that used to be the Mideast, and offer their assistance, in the form of manufacturing infrastructure and private militaries (which we can see even now on the ground in Iraq). The desperate people of the region will happily sign away generations of profits in exchange for some peace and security, and the multinationals can then prop up a patchwork of warlords in order to drain the area of every petrodollar available for extraction.
Incidentally, to anticipate one major objection:
While this may seem on the surface to be irresponsible conspiracy-mongering, and while it may appear that I’m looking at the Bushiviks as cartoonish, mustache-twirling villains bent on committing evil on a massive scale, it seems to me that the above can be fairly easily justified from a realpolitik standpoint. Consider this argument:
“The people of the Mideast are suffering under the boots of an endless series of tyrants and fools. Decades of diplomatic chin-wagging have done nothing to improve their quality of life. On other hand, centuries of experience prove that the best route to freedom and prosperity is found in the unshackling of capitalism. It’s time to end the pointless talk, and take action. All we have to do is pull a couple of well-chosen props from the structure, and let existing hostilities tear down the whole rotten edifice from the inside. Many, many people will suffer greatly in the short term, which means we cannot openly state our strategy, for we will be strongly condemned for deliberately fomenting war. These condemnations will come from weak-minded people whose lack of both long-term vision and stomach for painful conflict have caused them to appease the dictators of the status quo, and we will find our best efforts to do what we all know needs to be done will be directly opposed. Instead, let us cut their legs out from under them, by pretending to be pursuing peace. Better to be labeled incompetent and condemned weakly for our ‘failure,’ and face no serious opposition, than to be painted as villains, and find ourselves blocked entirely. And in a hundred years, the descendants of today’s children will enjoy the benefits of our foresight and our willingness to act. When that day arrives, we may be lauded as geniuses and prophets, or we may be consigned to the dustbin. Which interpretation prevails is immaterial; what matters is the practical outcome.”
Put that way, I can see a lot of people signing up. And, indeed, much of what the Bushiviks have been doing is entirely consistent with such an agenda.
It’s either that, or all of them have lost their fucking minds in almost exactly the same way.
Honestly, I don’t know which is more plausible.
Now, I am not a fan of conspiracy theories; I believe that the undirected chaos of the world is frightening and intimidating to a lot of people, and that they respond by inventing frameworks of behavior that seek to make sense of what is inherently insensible. They need to reassure themselves that there really is a plan, that somebody really is guiding things behind the scenes, and that everything that’s happening is not just a crazy heap of random interaction steered only intermittently by bursts of greed and incompetence. And I’m very aware that the scenario I’ve laid out above falls squarely into that territory, as an interpretive imposition of a found pattern on a crazy-quilt mosaic of enormously disparate events.
On the other hand, I am similarly unwilling to make the simplifying leap by which an adversary is labeled simply “insane.” For example, I don’t think Kim Jong-Il is flat-out nuts, as in disconnected entirely from reality. He wouldn’t be able to maintain power if that were the case. He may be sadistic, or sociopathic, but delusional? I seriously doubt it, because it just doesn’t seem realistic. It’s a cop-out, I think, by which we can save ourselves the work of trying to figure out how he sees the world, and what his objectives might be; by reducing him to mere insanity, we dismiss him as a rational being, and free ourselves to treat him however we like, without the need to take his point of view into account. (Whether we respect his point of view, or honor it, is beside the point. This way, we don’t even have to bother including it.)
In the same way, I’m reluctant to say that Bush and his cabal are stupid and/or crazy, full stop. There are too many of them, with their fingers in too many pies, for every single one to have abandoned his or her cognitive faculties in approximately the same way. That, to me, is just as unbelievable as whatever conspiracy might be required to pursue a hidden agenda.
Which leaves me, unfortunately, standing between two equally unpalatable conclusions.
Actually, now that I think about it, there’s a third alternative.
It goes like this:
“Fuck it. I need a drink.”
Who’s with me?
You sure you read that right? Seems as though you got it bass-ackwards.
In this instance, it falls under the category of one is too many, ten not nearly enough.
Maureen, you might be giving him too much credit. Have you ever watched his movies?
He was never believable once. 
When I was but a lad, “studying for the gallows”, I never missed his western TV series for 40 Mule Team Borax. His portrayal of a soap salesman was utterly convincing.
Oh, c’mon! He was completely convincing as a professor trying to teach morals to a chimp. I think of it every time GW talks about his “greatest role model.”
Yep. I read that exactly right. I don’t remember the last time the Republicans engaged in a successful coverup, but now <tinfoil hat> we have two examples of the Democrats pulling off such a feat </tinfoil hat>. Unless, of course, they actually weren’t coverups and your assertion was totally incorrect.