Carter Urges Personal Mideast Role for Reagan

Former President Jimmy Carter, declaring his successor’s Mideast policy “a dead-end street,” urged President Reagan on Tuesday to try personally to mediate a peace agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors or pick a highly respected special envoy to do the job.

Without the help of a top-level U.S. go-between, Carter said, there is little chance that Middle Eastern leaders can overcome centuries of animosity to make progress toward a settlement. And without at least the possibility of success, he said, it is humiliating and sometimes dangerous for a politician in the region to take the initiative.

Carter said Reagan or Secretary of State George P. Shultz would be the best choices for the mediator role. But if the President is unwilling to make that move, he said, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger or former President Gerald R. Ford would have the necessary “political stature” to serve, if Reagan gave either a firm mandate to act in his name.

Hussein, Arafat Mentioned

“You have to acknowledge that there is a limit to what people like (Jordanian King) Hussein and (Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser) Arafat and (Israeli Prime Minister Shimon) Peres can do on their own initiative and in public without a response from the other side,” Carter said in an interview in the restored 19th-Century townhouse that serves as the Washington office for former Presidents.

“It’s embarrassing to be rejected,” he said. “You make yourself vulnerable to attacks at home. The militants are always in the wings waiting for any kind of mistake to be made.”

Encouraged by a recent poll indicating that the public considers the nation’s most successful foreign policy initiative in recent years to have been the 1978 Camp David conference, which he mediated between Israel and Egypt, Carter said it is vital for the United States to follow up on a recent agreement by Hussein and Arafat to pursue a negotiated settlement.

‘The Slightest Indication’

“We were always eager to take the slightest indication of accommodation and pursue it with the parties; that approach doesn’t exist (under Reagan),” said Carter, who is promoting his new book on the Middle East, “Blood of Abraham.”

Reagan has said it is up to the Middle Eastern leaders themselves to settle their differences. And Shultz has said the United States is prepared to play a role in the negotiations but wants the Israelis and Arabs to “put some more ante on the table” first.

In the interview, Carter also said he notified Iranian leaders during the hostage crisis of 1980 that if one of the U.S. diplomats was put on trial, “we would interrupt all commerce between Iran and the outside world” and that if a hostage was killed, the United States would launch a military attack.

Warning to Iranians

Carter’s comments came as U.S. officials confirmed that the Reagan Administration has warned Iran that it will suffer the consequences if any U.S. citizens held captive by Shia Muslim militants in Lebanon are harmed.

In a related development, the State Department, reacting to reports that Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi has called on Mideast guerrilla groups to launch “suicide operations” against moderate governments in the region, said the United States “will hold Kadafi fully responsible for Libyan terrorism against Americans and other U.S. interests, whether carried out abroad or in the United States.”