Jimmy Carter passed away yesterday at age 100, and I have already seen press pieces intended to rehabilitate his image in the public's mind. 

Carter's record is so abysmal that few, if any, will argue that his presidency was a success--that is farther than even the more ambitious hagiographers can plausibly go--but at least a few are already trying to rehabilitate his image to elevate him to the middle ranks of presidents. 

Jonathan Alter: Jimmy Carter "was an inspirational former president, but he was also an outstanding president, if measured a certain historical yardstick...He was a substantive and, in many ways, a visionary success...Everything, except the Iranian hostage crisis, benefited from… pic.twitter.com/MpzT61tAfd

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) December 29, 2024

I appreciate the impulse to not speak ill of the dead--and I am not going spend a piece ranting about just how awful Carter was. As a man, he was probably above average for a politician, but as a president, he was every bit as awful as people remember and even more than most seem to think. 

Carter's domestic record will garner the most negative attention and his foreign policy the least. This has his legacy exactly backward. Domestically, Carter was dealt a bad hand, and he played it poorly, but later in his term, he made moves that freed some parts of the economy. That is about as nice a thing as I can say about him. 

He may have had only one term as president, but Jimmy Carter was no failure. Look at some of what he did and achieved. pic.twitter.com/XTD8WGIZ7f

— Howard Sherman (@HESherman) December 29, 2024

Carter's longer-term legacy is chaos on the world stage, only some of which was reversed by Ronald Reagan. For all the mistaken domestic policies, his record there is no worse than Nixon's, or at least not much worse. 

But on the international stage, Carter was nothing short of a disaster. His defenders will point to the Camp David Accords--which no doubt helped stabilize Israeli-Egyptian relations--but they soft-pedal his real legacy: an Iran that for nearly 50 years has been exporting terror and destabilizing the Middle East and the world. 

The current chaos in the Middle East is Jimmy Carter's legacy most of all. The Iran-Iraq war? He did that. Hamas? Thank Carter. The Houthis? Carter. Hezbollah? Jimmy did that, too. 

Carter, you see, had extensive dealings with the Ayatollah Khomeini prior to the Iranian Revolution and helped him come to power. 

In a first-person message, Khomeini told the White House not to panic at the prospect of losing a strategic ally of 37 years and assured them that he, too, would be a friend.

"You will see we are not in any particular animosity with the Americans," said Khomeini, pledging his Islamic Republic will be "a humanitarian one, which will benefit the cause of peace and tranquillity for all mankind".

Khomeini's message is part of a trove of newly declassified US government documents - diplomatic cables, policy memos, meeting records - that tell the largely unknown story of America's secret engagement with Khomeini, an enigmatic cleric who would soon inspire Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Americanism worldwide.

This story is a detailed account of how Khomeini brokered his return to Iran using a tone of deference and amenability towards the US that has never before been revealed.

The ayatollah's message was, in fact, the culmination of two weeks of direct talks between his de facto chief of staff and a representative of the US government in France - a quiet process that helped pave the way for Khomeini's safe return to Iran and rapid rise to power - and decades of high-stakes tension between Iran and America.

In the official Iranian narrative of the revolution, Khomeini bravely defied the United States and defeated "the Great Satan" in its desperate efforts to keep the Shah in power.

But the documents reveal that Khomeini was far more engaged with the US than either government has ever admitted. Far from defying America, the ayatollah courted the Carter administration, sending quiet signals that he wanted a dialogue and then portraying a potential Islamic Republic as amenable to US interests.

Carter, whose guiding principle was promoting human rights around the world, abandoned the Shah of Iran and basically cut a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini, paving the way for the zealous tyrant to ascend to power. 

To this day, former Carter administration officials maintain that Washington - despite being sharply divided over the course of action - stood firm behind the Shah and his government.

But the documents show more nuanced US behaviour behind the scenes. Only two days after the Shah departed Tehran, the US told a Khomeini envoy that they were - in principle - open to the idea of changing the Iranian constitution, effectively abolishing the monarchy. And they gave the ayatollah a key piece of information - Iranian military leaders were flexible about their political future.

Carter and his foreign policy doves were offended by the Shah's record of suppressing political dissent--dissent that largely stemmed from the movement that Khomeini led--and the prospect of working with the Ayatollah was too tempting to the idealists in the Carter administration. 

How did that work out for human rights? Are women better off under Khomeini? Dissidents? Anybody at all?

Obviously not, and the world is a much worse place for it. There would likely be peace in the Middle East, but for the rise of Khomeini. It's hard to know what an alternate history would look like, but it's difficult to imagine things could have worked out worse for human rights or international security had Carter not backed Khomeini. 

A military coup would have provided bad optics for Carter but a better future for Iranians, almost certainly. And a militarily strong Iran--which it was during the Shah's reign and would likely have been under a military government, would have averted the war with Iraq. That war cost around a million lives and included the use of chemical weapons. 

That, I am afraid, is Carter's enduring legacy. The "peacemaker" and promoter of human rights gifted the world a massive war, terrorism, instability, and perhaps, unless we act, a nuclear Iran. 

Forgive me if I look back on Carter's legacy harshly, but any retrospective that ignores Carter's role in the rise of the Ayatollahs in Iran is fiction.