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•Supported massive bloodshed in Nicaragua by the Somoza regime. In June 1978, Carter sent a private letter to the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza lauding Somoza for his "human rights initiatives" while he criticized Somoza publicly. Carter was the first president to make "human rights" a centerpiece of his interventionist propaganda, a staple in public relations strategies of future administrations. This two-faced policy occurred during one of the bloodiest periods of Somoza's rule when he was bombing cities sympathetic to the revolution. Carter's rhetorical declaration of concern for human rights was for public consumption, his private assurances to Somoza encouraged the dictator to continue his scorched earth policy. •Supported the brutal Indonesian war on East Timor, where the killing had reached genocidal levels in the 1970’s. Carter supplied a Steady Traffic in Arms to Jakarta throughout his presidency. Unfortunately, despite its professions of support for human rights in Indonesia, the Carter Administration picked up where Kissinger and Ford had left off. In 1977, Indonesia found itself short of weapons, an indication of the scale of its attack on the East Timorese, and the Carter administration responded by accelerating the arms flow. US arms sales hit $112 million in 1978, and averaged nearly $60 million per year for the four years of the Carter administration, more than twice the level of weaponry supplied by the Ford Administration. During a visit to Jakarta in May, 1978, Vice President Walter Mondale offered to sell Indonesia 16 A-4 "Skyhawk" attack planes, a principle counterinsurgency aircraft that was used by US forces in Vietnam, capable of spraying weapons fire and explosives over wide areas. Delivery of the "Skyhawk" attack planes as well as a brand new batch of 16 Bell UH-1H "Huey" helicopters proved essential to Suharto's rearmament effort. •Signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the Soviet-allied government in Kabul despite, or perhaps because of, a memo from Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski that stated that such a move may "induce a Soviet military intervention." American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, Brzezinski wrote to President Carter: "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War." Many of the individuals trained and funded by Carter's action would later become wanted terrorists by the US. In the late 1970's Afghanistan was ruled by a nationalist secular regime allied with the Soviet Union. The regime promoted gender equality, free universal education for women and men, agrarian reform including the redistribution of feudal estates to poor peasants, the separation of religion and the state and adopted an independent foreign policy with a Soviet tilt. Beginning at least as early as 1979, the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia orchestrated a massive international recruiting campaign of Islamic fundamentalist to engage in a "Jihad" against the "atheistic communist regime." Tens of thousands were recruited, armed by the US, financed by Saudis Arabia and trained by the CIA and Pakistani Intelligence. Pakistan opened its frontiers to the flood of armed invaders. Internally the displaced Mullahs, horrified by the equality and education of women, not to speak of the expropriation of their huge land holdings, joined the Jihad en masse. National Security Adviser, Brzesinski later wrote of the US-Afghanistan campaign as one of the high points in US Cold War diplomacy - it provoked Soviet intervention on behalf of the secular Afghan ally. Even when confronted with the consequences of the total devastation of Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and 9/11, Carter's former National Security Adviser, Brzesinski replied that these were marginal costs in comparison with a war that successfully hastened the fall of the Soviet Union. President Carter's intervention in Afghanistan initiated the Second Cold War, which was pursued with even greater intensity by Reagan. Carter backed a series of surrogate wars in Angola, Mozambique, Central America, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Carter was clearly an advocate and practitioner of the worst kind of imperial intervention and a master of public relations: he was an early practitioner of "Humanitarian Imperialism" - humane in rhetoric and brutally imperialist in practice.
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