Jimmy Carter Wows the Brits with Speech- "10 minutes to change the world" [View All]

[Ichingcarpenter]

Carter: 10 minutes to change the world

Hay festival 2008: An inspiring address from a former US president left the audience wondering - can we have him back?


Tonight Hay offered a new collective prayer: if only we could have a man like Jimmy Carter back in the Oval Office. Now 83 years old, the former president - so often mocked by his countrymen and a victim of what he called an "involuntary retirement" when he was booted out in 1980 - held his audience spellbound as he set out a radically alternative vision of America's place in the world.

The emotional high point came when Carter seemed to be playing the fantasy game himself, offering the opening words of the speech the next president should deliver when he or she is inaugurated next January.

"When I'm the president of the United States," he intoned, the voice still strong,

"My country will never again torture a prisoner.

When I'm the president of the United States, we will never again attack another country unless our security is directly threatened.

When I'm the president of the United States, human rights will be the foundation of our foreign policy."

He went on in that vein, with ringing declarations on global warming, a promise to honour international agreements and to bring "security and peace to Israel and all its neighbours and treat them all on an equal basis."

The audience thundered its applause, signalling that this was the American speech they yearned to hear. Carter insisted that a new president would not need a hundred days to change America's image in the world,

just the "ten minutes" required to say those words.

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http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_freedland/2008/05/carter_10_minutes_to_change_th.html