Chibli Mallat is a Lebanese lawyer and legal scholar, who was a candidate for the Lebanese presidency in 2005–2006. He is the author of numerous books, including The Renewal of Islamic Law: Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr, Najaf and the Shi’i International (2004, Cambridge University Press), Introduction to Middle Eastern Law (2009, Oxford University Press), and Philosophy of Nonviolence: Revolution, Constitutionalism, and Justice Beyond the Middle East (2015, Oxford University Press). Diwan interviewed Mallat on his interactions over the years with former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who recently announced he would be receiving hospice care.
Michael Young: Why is Jimmy Carter important when it comes to the Middle East, a region to which the former president devoted quite a bit of his time?
Chibli Mallat: Obviously because of the Camp David Accords of 1978, which he helped broker. Carter visited the region regularly after that and wrote two books about it: The Blood of Abraham in 1985, which is mostly about the Camp David negotiations, and Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, in 2006, which triggered a strong Israeli backlash. Mind you, Carter wrote over 20 books, yet his only two “regional” books were on the Middle East. Part of his devotion came from his strong faith and interest in the Bible.
MY: How did you first meet him?
CM: I was still a graduate student in London when I participated in a Carter Center “consultation” on the Middle East in 1987.* I was hoping to cover the event for the Financial Times thanks to Edward Mortimer, at the time the paper’s leader writer and a close friend. However, the plan fell through. I went anyway, and had a good friend who had just been hired by the center, Richard Brow, who facilitated my view “from within.” The visit was quite an experience for me, a first look at the sinews of U.S. power. I met Carter briefly on that trip, but I developed a rich correspondence with Hermann Eilts, who for a time served as Carter’s ambassador to Egypt, though he had been appointed by the Nixon administration.
MY: Do you have a personal recollection that can provide more insight into Carter’s attitudes toward peace in the region, beyond what he published?
CM: Nothing direct. However, the exchanges with Eilts at the first meeting opened remarkable vistas for me. Lebanon was sacrificed on the altar of Camp David, which was a peace plan involving three parties only—Israel, Egypt, and the United States. Israel’s then prime minister, Menahem Begin, was left free to invade Lebanon in summer 1982. But Egypt’s separate peace was unnecessary. Begin had accepted the October 1, 1977 Carter-Brezhnev agreement to convene a Geneva conference that involved all the Middle Eastern parties. It is Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat, not the U.S. or Israeli government, who abruptly killed this idea. That was my point to Eilts, and I had just published a paper at London University pushing for the revival of an international conference. Eilts wanted Carter to listen to my argument, but, interestingly from a historical perspective, he explained that Washington had concluded that Syria’s then president, Hafez al-Assad (more specifically when I recall Eilts’ letter, “the Baath Party”) did not wish to go to Geneva. I still believe this was a misreading of Syrian intentions by the Americans.*
MY: While Carter wasn’t really known as someone who had a particular interest in Lebanese affairs, he was briefly involved in Lebanon in the late 1980s. What was the nature of his involvement, and where might it have led?
CM: After my first visit, I developed quite a few contacts with influential people at the Carter Center, and then with former ambassador Richard Murphy, who spent a year in London after retiring from the State Department. You recall that Murphy had tried to resolve the deadlock in Lebanon over the election of a president to succeed Amin Gemayel. He had proposed Mikhail al-Daher, though this had failed. Instead, Gemayel appointed Michel Aoun as the head of a military government, and Lebanon fell into a vortex of violence. With my family in Beirut under relentless bombing, I felt compelled to try to do something. I wasn’t thrilled about an “Arab solution,” which became the Taif Accord. However, shortly after Taif, the Carter Center held a meeting in Atlanta, with Carter, Murphy, and the Arab League envoy to Lebanon, Lakhdar al-Ibrahimi co-chairing the session. I had been asked by the center to write a preparatory policy paper for the meeting. I suggested that the next meaningful step was elections, and that the Carter Center could help guarantee their fairness by monitoring the process. Carter and Murphy were excited by the idea, but the Syrians would not allow any interference from outside parties after they ousted Aoun in October 1989.
MY: You saw Carter again in summer 2005. There, you had a closer look at the man. What struck you about that occasion and about Carter himself?
CM: After the “Cedar Revolution” in 2005, Carter invited me to a different type of meeting at the Carter Center, one that was far more international, involving “leading human rights defenders.” I discovered an altogether new dimension in the man after spending some quality time with Carter. He had a great sense of humor, for instance deadpanning that the Republicans had stolen the presidency twice from the Democrats. He was referring, in part, to 1980, when he was defeated by Ronald Reagan following the so-called “October Surprise.” This was an alleged deal between Republican operatives and Iran’s regime, in which the U.S. hostages held by Iran were released after the elections, so that Carter would not benefit from it in the presidential race. Gary Sick, who served in Carter’s National Security Council as principal White House aide for Persian Gulf affairs, wrote a book about it.
More seriously, the meeting in Atlanta put forward Carter’s human rights dimension, which was the hallmark of his presidency. People like Noam Chomsky tend to see the U.S. government as wholly cynical, in that it refers to freedom and human rights only when convenient. And in the Middle East, where Israel’s exactions never trigger any accountability from the Washington, it is hard to disagree. But when I met Carter, I saw someone genuine and forthcoming. His book on Israeli apartheid is evidence of this attachment to principles. It took decades for human rights organizations to rally to his view. Carter was ahead of the curve.
This led me to ask: What has been the United States’ greatest success since the end of World War II? The evident answer was the U.S. victory over the Soviet bloc in 1989–1991. Which U.S. president was most responsible for that victory? And here there are two schools of thought: The dominant one puts victory squarely in Ronald Reagan’s corner, following his development of what would be known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a missile defense system that could protect the United States from Soviet nuclear missiles. This forced the Soviet Union to invest in systems to counter SDI, which effectively broke the country’s economy.
However, I subscribe to the minority view that the Soviet Union collapsed because of the human rights agenda put forward as a priority by Carter. Once this became a mainstay of U.S. policy and was institutionalized in the Helsinki process, the Soviet Union’s legitimacy was hollowed out from within. If this interpretation is correct, then Jimmy Carter is perhaps the greatest American president in my lifetime.
*The passages with an asterisk were corrected at the request of the author.
