The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama by Eric Alterman & Kevin Mattson

Author:Eric Alterman & Kevin Mattson [Alterman, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101577134
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2012-04-12T05:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile, back in the Middle East, Anwar Sadat found himself returning to an Arab world increasingly incensed by his willingness to negotiate with Israel and America. His moderate version of Islam was being challenged not merely by Palestinian radicalism but also by a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism all across the Middle East. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi had been a model U.S. dictator. Placed in power by the CIA in 1953, the shah served as a beachhead against Soviet communism and appeared to be a modernizing, Westernizing force in the region, despite his liberal use of a hated secret police force (SAVAK) and his amassing of literally billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains for himself and his cronies.109 Carter’s willingness to indulge the shah was consistent with previous presidents’ policies, although in glaring contradiction to his own professed devotion to human rights.110 Whatever private communications Carter might have had with the shah regarding his treatment of his political opponents were vastly overshadowed by his toast to the shah on New Year’s Eve, 1977, in Tehran, in which he proceeded to describe Iran as “an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world” and Pahlavi as a great leader who had won “the respect and the admiration and love” of his people. Carter said these words in the midst of one of the shah’s increasingly brutal crackdowns on his opposition, which was fueling a theocratic revolution led by the exiled Muslim cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who denounced America as a satanic nation with Pahlevi as its puppet.

Carter was not much more consistent regarding America’s main adversary, the USSR. The decade of the 1970s might be best known as the era of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great dissenter who had exposed the brutality of the gulag prison system with the 1973 publication in the West of The Gulag Archipelago. Soviet dissidents dominated American consciousness throughout the decade, including Andrei Sakharov, the physicist turned antiarms race and human rights activist who was later arrested for protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Anatoly Sharansky, a Jewish activist who helped inspire the massive Save Soviet Jewry movement that turned many Jews against Carter and his policies.111 But despite the political gains to be found in taking on the cause of these dissidents—Democrats from the hawkish Scoop Jackson to the dovish Ted Kennedy had done so—Carter wanted an arms control treaty even more than he wanted to crusade for human rights. Given Soviet sensitivities on the issue, the two were incompatible, as Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev had already made clear on repeated occasions.

Carter’s own psyche was divided on this fundamental question, and the arguments of his advisers mirrored this division, especially two chief architects of Carter’s foreign policy: the patrician establishment lawyer and secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, and the brilliant fiery academic and adviser for national security, Zbigniew Brzezinski. The former, who had been deputy secretary of defense under LBJ and had helped wind down the Vietnam War, operated from a legalistic perspective and was extremely cautious about the use of force.

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