[hoosier]

Jimmy Carter seems determined to surpass John Tyler as the most anti-American ex-president ever. Tyler, who served from 1841 through 1845, died in 1862, after being elected to a seat in the Confederate congress. Now Carter tells MSNBC's Chris Matthews that the Revolutionary War was a mistake:

Matthews: "As an historian now and studying the Revolutionary War as it was fought out in the South in those last years of the war, insurgency against a powerful British force. Do you see any parallels between the fighting that we did on our side and the fighting that is going on in Iraq today?"

Carter: "Well, one parallel is that the Revolutionary War more than any other war until recently has been the most bloody war we've fought. I think another parallel is that in some ways the Revolutionary War could have been avoided. It was an unnecessary war. Had the British Parliament been a little more sensitive to the colonials' really legitimate complaints and requests the war could have been avoided completely and of course now we would have been a free country now as is Canada and India and Australia, having gotten our independence in a non-violent way. I think in many ways the British were very misled in going to war against America and in trying to enforce their will on people who were quite different from them at the time."

So Carter views the American revolutionaries as the equivalent of the enemy in Iraq--never mind that America's goal in Iraq is precisely to install an independent democratic regime there.

And this "historian" doesn't seem to know much about history. The Revolutionary War "the most bloody" until "recently"? According to the Defense Department (link in PDF), American forces suffered 4,435 combat deaths in the Revolutionary War, a figure far surpassed by the 140,414 in the Civil War.

- Opinion Journal