Obama, like Carter,wrong-headed; hope that, like Carter, he will be ineffective

http://tinyurl.com/rx49f9 podcast of Taranto on Carter/Obama=wrong/wrong=ineffective/ineffective. Taranto points out that Carter deserved no credit for the Camp David accords, having opposed them, and didn't share in the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Sadat and Begin. Taranto plausibly says that the later Nobel prize awarded to Carter was, in fact, for his anti-Americanism.
Peace Despite Jimmy Carter
Yesterday we noted reports that Arab regimes, alarmed by the woo President Obama is pitching at Iran's hateful regime, have been contemplating a more reasonable attitude toward Israel, their sworn enemy but, like the Arabs, a prospective target of Iranian aggression. We argued that, as feckless as the Obama Iran policy may seem to be, if it results in a softening of Arab attitudes, this would be good for regional peace and Arab, Israeli and U.S. interests.
Several readers wrote to point out that there is a precedent: President Carter's feckless Middle East policy.
As detailed in op-eds by Yossi Alpher in the Forward and Arthur Herman in The Wall Street Journal, Carter's Mideast policy was originally driven by his naiveté toward the enemy of that time, the Soviet Union. Carter proposed a "regional peace conference" in which the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would work out a comprehensive agreement between Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
As Alpher writes, "It would have been an invitation Israel could not refuse, much as it would like to. The hostile Soviet presence in the region, the reality of negotiating opposite not one but a host of Arab countries, and the Carter administration's ideological orientation all seemed to ensure that Israel would be subject to awesome pressures to make concessions that it deemed dangerous."
But Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt, had different ideas. When he took power in 1970, Egypt was a Soviet client state, but Sadat had shifted Cairo's allegiance to the U.S. and had no wish to re-enter the Soviet camp. He undertook private talks with the Israelis, followed by his own visit to Jerusalem in November 1977. "Even after Sadat's trip to Jerusalem," Herman notes, "Mr. Carter announced that 'a separate peace agreement between Egypt and Israel is not desirable.' " But a year later, with his foreign policy in shambles, "Carter finally decided to elbow his way into the game by setting up a meeting between Sadat and Begin at Camp David." That meeting resulted in the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state.
One hesitates to put Jimmy Carter forward as a model for anything. To the extent that the success at Camp David mitigated the disaster that was his presidency, it was only because he proved so ineffective at carrying out his initial reckless policy.
Still, if one assumes Obama's policies are as reckless as Carter's, one can certainly hope that the current president will be as ineffective as his predecessor in carrying them out.