Writing in the Washington Post, former President Jimmy Carter says the advancement of human rights was a cornerstone of United States foreign policy until the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Yes and no. Carter wants us to believe that it all went rotten under George W. Bush, but the record is much more complex. Liberty, the basis of human rights, is a term both defined and refined by the American experience, certainly. But there are competing variables when it comes to foreign policy, as Carter, having occupied the Oval Office, should well know. Randomly, one can point to Iran in 1953 or Chile in 1973 as examples of Cold War coup d’etats which enjoyed US support - and where the end result was the contraction, not the advancement, of liberty. For good measure, The Contentious Centrist conveniently reminds us of Carter’s own role in the ascendancy of Robert Mugabe, the dictator whose latest contribution to Zimbabwe is a deadly cholera epidemic.

Carter advances a list of human rights priorities for the incoming Obama Administration. Darfur merits a mention, as does DR Congo, but only as examples of where timely intervention should have been carried out. No recommendations are made as to what should happen now.

When it comes to the Middle East, though:

Throughout the Middle East, there is hope that the United States will move more aggressively and persistently to help orchestrate a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the prism through which the region measures the U.S. commitment to human rights.

Here’s another highly questionable statement delivered as truth. Is the Palestinian issue really “the prism through which the region measures the U.S. commitment to human rights?” Democracy activists in North Africa don’t think that. Labor activists in Iran don’t think that. In bringing peace and stability to Iraq, the issue of Palestine barely figures. As for the Islamists, and especially those of the jihadi variant, they don’t much care for human rights or the US or, come to think of it, the Palestinian cause as traditionally conceived - just as some Marxists insisted that nationalism was a distraction from class struggle, so nations organized into independent states are, for the Islamists, an obstacle on the road to the Caliphate.

Those who assert the primacy of Palestine, and publicly judge the US through its prism, generally tend to autocratic Arab rulers. It’s easy and convenient to talk about Palestine, and far more preferable than talking about democracy in human rights in Sudan or Saudi Arabia or Syria or Lebanon.

Ah, Lebanon! Not a country mentioned in Carter’s article, but uppermost in his mind right now:

Leaders of the Lebanese Shi’ite Muslim group Hezbollah have turned down a request to meet former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit to Lebanon that began on Tuesday, a Carter spokesman said.

Carter had requested a meeting with the Iran-backed political and military movement, which is listed as a terrorist group by Washington, as part of a visit to assess whether his Carter Center will monitor a legislative election next year.

“I understand that some of the leaders of Hezbollah have said they were not going to meet with any president or former presidents of the United States,” Carter said upon his arrival at Beirut airport, adding that he would meet other leaders.

A Carter spokesman confirmed a meeting had been requested with Hezbollah, whose guerrilla army fought a 34-day war with U.S. ally Israel in 2006. “They said they were not able to meet,” Carter spokesman Rick Jafculca said.

All rather forlorn. One wonders what Carter would have said had the meeting been granted, given that Hezbollah - which has continually denied its responsibility for the terrorist massacre of 241 US Marines in Beirut in October 1983 - represents everything that a human rights advocate should be fighting against. (If I sound skeptical, it’s because I documented Carter’s meeting with Hamas, another Islamist group which loathes liberty, here.)

Carter’s next stop is Syria. He’s no doubt hoping that the Hamas leadership has a better grasp of etiquette than does Hezbollah.