NYPost

CARTER BLASTS BUSH OVER ISRAEL POLICY

By DEBORAH ORIN

July 25, 2001 -- WASHINGTON - Ex-President Jimmy Carter has touched off a storm by blasting President Bush, saying Bush should get tougher on Israel.

"I have been disappointed in almost everything [Bush] has done," said Carter - breaking the unspoken rule that ex-presidents don't try to bloody their successors.

Carter charged Bush is getting nowhere in the Middle East and should follow Bush's dad - and Carter - and demand that Israel remove Jewish settlements from the West Bank.

"George Sr. took a strong position on that issue and so did I," Carter told Knight-Ridder reporters in an interview marking Bush's sixth month in office.

Carter helped broker the Israel-Egypt peace deal at Camp David, but his Mideast policies drew criticism from Israel supporters like Ed Koch, who accused him of undermining U.S. support for the Jewish state.

Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations said Carter's remarks show "poor judgment and poor taste and poor policy."

But Jim Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute, said Carter is "justifiably concerned about the settlement issue."

Zogby said he sees politics as the reason Bush is more pro-Israel than his dad. He must hold onto his conservative core supporters, including the Christian right and neo-conservatives who are "extraordinarily pro-Israel," Zogby said.

-- Anonymous, July 25, 2001

Answers

NYPost

THE SAGE OF PLAINS

July 26, 2001 -- Somebody put a microphone in front of ex-President Jimmy Carter the other day, and the former peanut farmer found fault with President Bush.

After just six months, "I have been disappointed in almost everything he has done," says Carter.

He complained - among other things - about the administration's Middle East policy, negotiations with the Russians, not paying enough attention to human rights and for "strictly conforming" to the views of conservative Republicans.

First of all, Carter shouldn't be talking. Period. Former presidents don't publicly criticize the current occupant of the White House.

Protocol aside, Jimmy Carter is attacking George W. Bush on foreign policy?

It is to laugh!

This is the president who admitted "surprise" at the Soviet Union's aggression into Afghanistan - which even Ted Kennedy mocked.

Meanwhile, Bush has met with Vladimir Putin twice and managed to bring the Russian leader a fair way toward the U.S. position on missile defense.

Carter says that Bush isn't being tough enough on Israeli settlements.

Then he said that " . . . Africa is much more serious than the conflicts in the Middle East."

Not to take lightly the continuing tragedy that is sub-Saharan Africa, but if Carter actually means that, he's simply lost his mind.

America has vital strategic interests in the Mideast. Not so in Africa.

Regarding U.S. foreign policy, hardly anything is "more serious" than Mideast stability.

Carter, of course, was the first U.S. president to be euchered by Yasser Arafat - and the world is living with the consequences of that momentous miscalculation to this day.

It's sad to see the former president being (pardon us) held hostage to the memory of his own policy failures.

Indeed, he didn't have much to say on the economy. Perhaps it's because that would remind everyone that Bush passed the biggest tax cut in 20 years. (The previous cut - Ronald Reagan's - was of course necessary to get America out of the high-inflation/high-interest "malaise" that marked his tenure.)

For sure, Carter is entitled to his views.

But he should keep them to himself.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001