Jimmy Carter is not an expert in Middle Eastern foreign policy. Or, at least, he wasn’t an expert when Middle East foreign policy was happening to him. But now, after decades away from the limelight, after building countless homes for America’s impoverished families and speaking regularly on the scourge of Israel’s right to self-defense, Jimmy Carter has, apparently, acquired enough foreign policy acumen to entice CNN to interview him on the current situation with ISIS.
Or they figure if anyone would know how to functionally dismantle an entire region, it would be Jimmy Carter.
Either way, Jimmy Carter, the man best known for messing up our Middle East foreign policy, cannot begin to explain to you how badly President Obama is messing up our Middle East foreign policy.
Former President Jimmy Carter said President Barack Obama “waited too long” to go after ISIS and criticized what he described as the president’s changing foreign policy.
“First of all, we waited too long. We let the Islamic State build up its money, capability and strength and weapons while it was still in Syria,” Carter told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in an interview published Tuesday. The 39th president was in Texas working on a Habitat for Humanity project.
“Then when [ISIS] moved into Iraq, the Sunni Muslims didn’t object to their being there and about a third of the territory in Iraq was abandoned,” he continued.
It says a lot when Jimmy Carter understands the foreign policy landscape well enough to provide an articulate criticism while Secretary of State John Kerry is touring the Western world claiming that global warming is the most pertinent threat to our safety. Granted, Jimmy Carter has his concerns about melting ice caps and displaced sea mammals as well, but at least he’s aware enough to suggest we might want to worry about rising sea levels after the threat of a world war with radical Islam is out of the way (though he, like John Kerry, is still not quite sure how to accomplish that, and won’t say the words “radical Islam”). But hey. Small favors.
