- George Bush has exploited the suffering of September
11 and turned back decades of efforts to make the world a safer place,
the former president Jimmy Carter says in an interview with the Guardian
published today.
-
- Attacking Mr Bush and Tony Blair over Iraq, Mr Carter
calls the war "a completely unjust adventure based on misleading
statements".
-
- He also criticises Mr Bush for "lack of effort"
on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and accuses him of abandoning nuclear
non-proliferation initiatives championed by five presidents.
-
- The US "suffered, in 9/11, a terrible and shocking
attack ... and George Bush has been adroit at exploiting that attack, and
he has elevated himself, in the consciousness of many Americans, to a
heroic
commander-in-chief, fighting a global threat against America," Mr
Carter says.
-
- "He's repeatedly played that card, and to some
degree
quite successfully. I think that success has dissipated. I don't know if
it's dissipating fast enough to affect the election. We'll soon
know."
-
- Mr Carter, 80, was president from 1977-1981, but did
not win re-election amid the US hostage crisis in Iran. By comparison,
support for Mr Bush's Iraq invasion is widespread, something Mr Carter
attributes to a transformation in America's national mood.
-
- "When your troops go to war, the prime minister
or the president change overnight from an administrator, dealing with
taxation
and welfare and health and deteriorating roads, into the
commander-in-chief,"
he says. "And it's just become almost unpatriotic to describe Bush's
fallacious and ill-advised and mistaken and sometimes misleading
actions."
-
- Mr Bush and Mr Blair are blamed for helping to fuel the
depth of anti-American feeling in the Islamic world. Denying any link
between
his handling of the Iranian crisis and the present threat, Mr Carter says:
"The entire Islamic world condemned Iran. Nowadays, because of the
unwarranted invasion of Iraq by Bush and Blair, which was a completely
unjust adventure based on misleading statements, and the lack of any effort
to resolve the Palestinian issue, [there is] massive Islamic condemnation
of the United States."
-
- American media organisations, he adds, "have been
cowed, because they didn't want to be unpatriotic. There has been a lack
of inquisitive journalism. In fact, it's hard to think of a major medium
in the United States that has been objective and fair and balanced, and
critical when criticism was deserved".
-
- On nuclear proliferation, the issue that the Democratic
contender John Kerry has identified as the single most serious threat to
national security, Mr Carter attacks Mr Bush for abandoning "all of
those long, tedious negotiations" carried out by presidents
Eisenhower,
Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan and himself.
-
- In recent weeks he has also warned of the possibility
of a new election fiasco in Florida.
-
- The two presidential candidates spent the weekend
focusing
their resources and words even more tightly on the small number of swing
states considered crucial to the election on November 2.
-
- Mr Bush told supporters in Florida that "despite
ongoing violence, Iraq has an interim government. It's building up its
own security forces. We're headed toward elections in January. You see,
we're safer, America is safer with Afghanistan and Iraq on the road to
democracy. We can be proud that 50 million citizens of those countries
now live as free men and women".
-
- Mr Carter's interview marks the UK publication of his
book The Hornet's Nest, a story of the American revolutionary war and the
first novel to be published by a former president. Ironically, he notes,
those fighting for US independence could never have triumphed were it not
for an alliance with the French.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections
- 2004/story/0,13918,1335333,00.html
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