WI Jimmy Carter re-elected

While Iran is the most visible failure of Carters policies, it is not the be all and end all of his foreign policy fuck ups. The man needed to choose to be a hardass, the way he was when he sanctioned the Timor invasion, or the good christian and stick with it. Frankly Carters main foreign policy issue came from the skitzo nature of his decisions, half the time coming off as the coldest of cold warriors the other half coming off as a complete push over. It was a reoccuring theme in his administration.

To get Carter re elected from a foreign policy prospective you need for him to pick on or the faces he showed to the world and stick with it. Thats going to take a POD thats way before Iran. Secondly, i know its popular to say that he started Reagans build up, but the man was a technocrat. He, despite having been a serving officer, completely missed the depredation in quality that made US ground forces equal or lesser then, to use a bit of hyperbole, their third world cousins. The US army in the eighties had very deep problems, ones that were not solved until Reagans second term. Carter was a systems guy, not a people person, when it comes to the military.
 
I think the most advanced form of game theory right now is tournament poker. And a strategy of being new sheriff on the block typically doesn't work real well. Instead, it is a matter of picking your spots.
 
Indonesia invaded former Portuguese colony and briefly independent East Timor on Dec. 7, 1975, which in a sad irony was Pearl Harbor Day. President Ford backed Indonesia, including with continued military aid. They were a major cold war ally, of course we backed them, the hell with East Timor. In addition, in some slopsville fashion the label of "left-wing" or "communist" could be applied to East Timor so that really slammed it shut. And there had been some military fighting within Timor in the six months or so since independence, but things got far worse with the Indonesian invasion.

Noam Chomsky basically said President Carter was a hypocrite, especially in regards to Timor. Not only did we roll forward with normal military aid, but Carter provided Indonesia with some kind of land rovers so they could more effectively get to the remote areas. Seems like a rather significant claim and have only seen this in Chomsky, but I've only read a medium amount about Timor, and there might be much more out there.

And we continued to support Indonesia all through the Reagan, Bush, and early Clinton years. Around '98, nonviolent action and a citizens' movement did work against Indonesian strongman Suharto, probably in large part because he was then an older man. And then we kind of celebrated East Timor becoming independent, although we didn't and haven't really acknowledged our ugly history.

East Timor brings up the G word for genocide. And it also illustrates that genocide sneaks up on you. It doesn't announce itself. I've read estimates for East Timor of 100,000 persons killed and of 200,000 persons killed, this out of a population of 600,000. As always, if we overstate the case by one-tenth of one percent, people feel worked and played and reject the whole thing. This is almost a cognitive processing error on the part of us human beings. And because of this, we're usually better off going with the more conservative estimate.
 
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