|
Don't know if anyone read the NYTimes this weekend, but there was a pretty good piece in there that addressed this issue a bit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/w.../29sanger.html?
| quote: |
There's Democracy, and There's an Oil Pipeline
By David E. Sanger
The New York Times
Sunday 29 May 2005
Washington - Samuel Bodman, the new secretary of energy, led the United States delegation to Azerbaijan last week to celebrate a huge moment in America's effort to diversify its sources of oil: The opening of a pipeline that will carry Caspian oil to the West, on a route that avoids Russia and Iran.
Mr. Bodman delivered a message from President Bush: "As Azerbaijan deepens its democratic and market economic reforms, this pipeline can help generate balanced economic growth, and provide a foundation for a prosperous and just society that advances the cause of freedom."
Just a few days earlier, the Azerbaijani police beat pro-democracy demonstrators with truncheons when opposition parties, yelling "free elections," defied the government's ban on protests against President Ilham Aliyev. Mr. Aliyev is one of President Bush's allies in the war on terror, even though he won a highly suspect election to succeed his father, a former Soviet strongman. |
Hey, ain't that great? What a swell fella to do business with! I mean, he really sounds pretty darn pro-democracy to me. How 'bout you? Doesn't he fit that bill that Bush talked about spreading democracy around the globe in his Jan. inaugural address?
| quote: | | Every week, the White House seems to find itself in a balancing act between promoting democracy, on one hand, and supporting friends in combustible but strategically important parts of the world. In recent days, the issue has been how hard to press for an international inquiry into the massacre of civilians in Uzbekistan this month; or how to press Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, into facing real challengers in his country's coming election; or how to challenge the resurgence of central control in Russia and China while gaining their cooperation to stop nuclear proliferation. |
Yes, it must be damn hard to be such a hypocritical ass, or at the very least talking out of both sides of your mouth, Mr. President.
| quote: | | It all has shades of the cold war. From 1946 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, American presidents embraced - sometimes unhappily, sometimes enthusiastically - dictators from Latin America to the Philippines to South Korea in the name of stopping Communism. |
Yes, our government made strange bedfellows, including Saddam himself which we looked the other way when he gassed his own people.
| quote: | Now, even brutal leaders have discovered that if they cooperate in the war on terror Washington is unlikely to squeeze them too hard, or at least too publicly, on other issues. Pakistan has led in this strategy. When President Pervez Musharraf decided late last year not to relinquish his military posts, as he had once promised to do, no one from the White House denounced him.
The president and his aides have never said it would be easy to reconcile Mr. Bush's clarion call for democratic change worldwide with reality on the ground. But at least one past member of the administration says they have made a basic mistake.
"Look, I was part of the incubation of this policy," said Richard N. Haass, who was head of policy planning in the State Department from 2001 to 2003, referring to the decision to make democracy a major theme of the Bush presidency. "But I don't think you can make it the controlling issue. The administration has set itself up for inconsistency." In fact, Mr. Bush has started to talk about the need for patience as Americans wait for democracy to take hold elsewhere. His wife, Laura, took up the theme this month on a trip to the Middle East. Asked about the difficulties of mounting any real challenge to President Mubarak in Egypt, she said, "To act like you can just go from here to there overnight is naïve." Full democracy, she said, is "not easy and we know that it's, in many cases, not even possible."
Mrs. Bush went further in that comment than most White House policy makers will, at least in public.
But Stephen R. Sestanovich, who served as the Clinton administration's specialist on the former Soviet republics in the 1990's, said it is becoming clear that not all revolutions are what Americans would like them to be.
"Georgia and Ukraine were good examples of the model working as we think it should: Popular outrage, the right result," he said. "But Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan show you something different, the prospect of sheer chaos." In the first, President Askar Akayev fled, leaving competing groups to fight each other. In the second, Mr. Sestanovich said, President Islam Karimov is dealing with "the complete lack of popular confidence" after his troops shot hundreds of civilians after an armed uprising that he said was the work of Islamic terrorists - his favorite choice of culprits.
Russia distanced itself from Mr. Karimov, and he seemed unlikely to win another invitation to the White House, which he visited after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But he may not need the American welcome. Last week in Beijing, the Chinese gave him a 21-gun salute and praise for his steadfastness against "the three forces of extremism, terrorism and separatism." By the time Mr. Karimov headed home, he had a deal for a $600 million joint venture in oil.
That, in short, is the new Great Game Americans find themselves playing in Central Asia: Competing with the Chinese for oil supplies; with the Russians for influence in their backyard; and all the while talking about spreading democracy. |
All the while the gullible public thinks we're so darn successful at spreading "democracy" at all costs.
| quote: | Paul Goble, an expert on the former Soviet Union who used to work for the State Department, summarized the conundrum in the region this way: "As soon as you get rid of the ex-Communist thugs, you will get Muslim governments there."
That is one reason Mr. Bush takes every chance to highlight the success stories, even at the risk of offending Russia.
Mr. Bush's aides describe him as deeply engaged in the strategy, down to choosing exactly where he would go on his five-nation trip earlier this month. On that trip, the president spoke from the square in Tbilisi where Georgians staged demonstrations that ousted a leader in 2003. The warning he was sending to Vladimir V. Putin of Russia about centralizing power in the Kremlin was clear, if never explicitly stated.
But Mr. Goble remembers how thinly democracy was consolidated in the region after the Berlin Wall fell, despite American wishes. "Our tendency is to declare victory and move on," he said. "It doesn't work that way." |
Good luck, Mr. Goble, in trying to convince our Administration of this.....
___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...
|
