I read a lot of Science Fiction and one of the sub genres of SF is alternate history when the author examines what might have happened if one particular event had turned out the other way. Or sometimes a bit more interestingly what happens when someone provides future knowledge to some chap in the past.. Good examples might be Eric Flint's 1632verse and his (+ David Drake) Belisarius series, other's might be the various alternate worlds of Harry Turtledove. Various people have recently got into the act such as Phillip Roth and now it appears a certain former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner.
CARTER: Well, one parallel is that the Revolutionary War, more than any other war up 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 colonial‘s 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 nonviolent 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.
Aside from the minor fact that the revolutionary war was nowhere near the bloodiest war fought by America - some bloody civil war battles killed as many soldiers as the entire revolutionary war - this indicates a certain optimism of the facts of life at the time. Carter has written a historical novel about that time which makes his naivite even less excusable.
I am an Englishman and in the main proud of it, however I am forced to admit that certain of my ancestors were precisely the sorts that were abusing the American colonies*. I am not particularly proud of their behaviour - I can think of excuses along the lines of "everyone else does it", "why not we do it here in England too" and "we're not as bad as the French" - but the fact remains that the rulers and merchants of late 18th century England were very clear about their rights and privileges, which included, as far as they were concerned, the right to enforce their will on anyone weaker.
Carter say that the "British were mislead" in going to war, which just shows his ignorance. The assumption here is that Britan was as it is today, a democracy in which all could vote or express their opinion. This is simply laughable. The ruling aristocracy along with its country gentlemen, city merchants and newly rich industrialists oppressed and abused the rest of the inhabitants of Britain in all sorts of ways. There was, as far as I can see, no way that these people were going to let a bunch of grubby colonials dictate terms and even had the original gripes been responded to I just cannot see the situation lasting. Either there would have been an English revolution to match the one going on across the channel or the American colonies would have revolted over some other issue (or both). The idea that the US would have somehow come into being is utter BS.
The rest of the Hardball interview shows that Carter is just as wrong about more modern events when he claims that "tens of thousands" of Iraqi civilians were killed during the invasion. Not even the most strident anti-war group has been able to claim more than 5000 or so civilian deaths during the invasion. And his echoing of the Moorean opinion that the Iraqi resistance can be compared to the revolutionary militias is a further example of his general cluelessness. As more informed observers have noted the "resistance" in Iraq has been limited to a) Sunni former Ba'athists in conjunction with Al Qaeda linked foreigners and b) Muqtada Al Sadr and his followers. If there were a general desire to overthrow the coalition then we'd see a different distribution in attacks and far fewer Iraqis willing to work for the coalition.
My only conclusion is that Jimmy Carter is in fact an inhabitant of an alternate reality, which is fine if you are a fiction writer, but not so fine if you desire to comment upon and influence events in the real world.
* For those interested some of my ancestors of the time include an Admiral Lord Gambier and the architect Sir William Chambers as well as various merchants, lawyers, priests and bankers who sucked up to influential people such as George Canning including a Napoleaonic era ambassador to Constantinople - William Turner.