TWO JIMMY CARTERS: A LOOK AT DIPLOMACY

About former President Jimmy Carter's mission to Haiti and its remarkable aftermath, much has been written, yet much remains to be said. Herewith, a summary.

There are at least two Jimmy Carters. One is a sincere, honest, decent human being and a devout Christian. His dedicated service in building houses for poor people has been much remarked upon. Justly so.

The Carter record in international diplomacy and as commander in chief leads to the examination of the other Jimmy Carter. In international diplomacy that record is decidedly mixed. On the plus side, there are the successful Camp David accords of 1978. That's about it for the plus side, or it was until the recent mission to Haiti, if you want to call that effort a success. More on Haiti shortly.

As president, Carter's most memorable confrontation was with an Iranian ayatollah straight out of the Middle Ages, and the old crank just flat humiliated him for 444 days. For more than a year, Carter mostly sat helpless, once declaring himself a virtual White House prisoner. The ayatollah responded by whipping up mobs, brazenly violating international law and humiliating the United States in an extended act of war known to history as the Iranian hostage crisis.

Recall that within weeks of the Iranians' seizure of our embassy, Leonid Brezhnev sent Red Army divisions brutally crashing into Afghanistan. Carter pronounced himself "surprised" before responding with an Olympic boycott and a grain embargo. While the latter didn't much inconvenience the Russians (they easily found other suppliers), it devastated our Farm Belt, which in some cases lost this market for good. I know Bootheel grain producers who lost six figures.

For those whose memories don't reach back 15 years, there is the chilling Carter performance this year in North Korea. Having begged to go to that remote Communist backwater, Carter displayed his usual excess of good intentions where clear, cold-eyed realism is called for. In the bargain, Carter got into an embarrassing dispute with the president who authorized his trip, dithering away a week, cravenly placating some of the world's most bloodthirsty tyrants. It was, in Yogi Berra's phrase, "deja vu all over again", a thoroughgoing embarrassment.

Then, we have Haiti.

It is doubtful that any American president has ever tolerated such effrontery as President Clinton has suffered at the hands of his only surviving Democratic predecessor. Clinton should get used to it.

In 1980, the voters having tired of his grim sermonizing about an era of limits, Carter was unceremoniously dumped, as Ronald Reagan won 44 states and swept in a Senate majority. During the eight years of the Reagan ascendancy, Carter could regularly be found on foreign soil, issuing public denunciations not only of the sitting president, but also of American policy. Perhaps I will be corrected by someone more knowledgeable of American history, but I believe this embarrassing and insulting behavior to be unique in all American history. It went largely unremarked by a liberal media that loathed Mr. Reagan's assertive policies and identified, if not with the pathetic Carter personally, then certainly with his neo-pacifist world view.

Nor did Carter's meddlesome volunteerism end there. It was recently revealed that during the runup to the Gulf War, Carter pleaded with President Bush, asking to be authorized to go to Baghdad and beg Saddam Hussein for peace. Properly, Bush rejected the Carter overtures, whereupon Carter wrote letters to world leaders denouncing American policy. This, on the eve of the commander in chief's committing American forces to war.

Anyone who thinks it was improper for Bush to ignore Carter might ask Bill Clinton what it felt like to have his newly returned emissary insult him while a guest in the Lincoln bedroom. Ensconced there, Carter not only repeated his denunciations of U.S. policy, he pointedly refused to stand next to President Clinton at an East Room ceremony. When Gen. Colin Powell motioned for Carter to move over and stand next to President Clinton, Carter vigorously shook his head, "no", as TV cameras recorded the whole astonishing episode. President Clinton displayed no small amount of self-control in not blowing his stack at that moment.

All this was too much even for Carter admirers such as the reliably liberal Mary McGrory. She wrote last week about Carter's "bizarre behavior" and pronounced him "unnerving, ... a deacon run amok," displaying a "fondness for dictators," as when he invited the Haitian thug Gen. Cedras to Atlanta "to teach his Sunday School class."

This Jimmy Carter displays a mean-spirited nature, often hidden beneath the countenance of a grinning dunce. His dimwitted churlishness confirms the wickedly funny Washington columnist Wes Pruden, who wrote of the former president that he's "Jimmy ... more nerd than wimp, the pious poet of the peanut patch."

Peter Kinder is associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.