Jimmy Carter Blasts Bush Foreign Policy And “Subservient” Tony Blair | The Moderate Voice

Jimmy Carter Blasts Bush Foreign Policy And “Subservient” Tony Blair | The Moderate Voice

Jimmy Carter Blasts Bush Foreign Policy And “Subservient” Tony Blair

By Joe Gandelman

Former President Jimmy Carter, a thorn in the side and a pain in a certain southerly part of the anatomy for many Presidents since he left office, has opened up both verbal barrels in a broadside against the foreign policy of President George Bush and the political choices of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

And a biographer says the force of Carter’s denunciations is not business as usual for the former President:

Former President Carter says President Bush’s administration is “the worst in history” in international relations, taking aim at the White House’s policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy.

The criticism from Carter, which a biographer says is unprecedented for the 39th president, also took aim at Bush’s environmental policies and the administration’s “quite disturbing” faith-based initiative funding.

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper’s Saturday editions. “The overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.”

Carter spokeswoman Deanna Congileo confirmed his comments to The Associated Press on Saturday and declined to elaborate. He spoke while promoting his new audiobook series, “Sunday Mornings in Plains,” a collection of weekly Bible lessons from his hometown of Plains, Ga.

He also lambasted the administration’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which helped religious charities get $2.15 billion in federal grants in fiscal year 2005:

“The policy from the White House has been to allocate funds to religious institutions, even those that channel those funds exclusively to their own particular group of believers in a particular religion,” Carter said. “As a traditional Baptist, I’ve always believed in separation of church and state and honored that premise when I was president, and so have all other presidents, I might say, except this one.”

The AP piece quotes David Brinkley, a Tulane University presidential historian and Carter biographer, as calling Carter’s comments unprecedented: “When you call somebody the worst president, that’s volatile. Those are fighting words.” To be sure: former Presidents usually have a tradition of (a) not criticizing other Presidents or, if they do, (b) criticizing other Presidents with a bit of diplomacy.

And Blair? He didn’t fare much better, in Carter’s eyes. Carter called his support of Bush

“Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient…..And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world,” Carter told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.”