SteynOnTheWorld
THE SEESAW BUCKLES
It was sobering, on reading the recent flurry of letters in this newspaper under the heading “Balancing The US Debate”, to discover that it was this column that had single-handedly unbalanced it. “If Steyn represents the American right, where is the spokesperson for the American left?” demands Conor McCarthy of Dun Laoghaire. The hitherto perfectly poised seesaw of press coverage of the United States is apparently all out of whack because my corpulent column is weighing down one end while on the other up in the air are the massed ranks of Irish Times correspondents, RTE, the BBC and 97% of the European media class, plus Anthony O’Halloran, who opined in these pages a few days ago that “anyone who cares to visit a small town in the Midwest will encounter what can only be described as ultra-right-wing thinking.” Prof O’Halloran didn’t cite any examples of this “ultra-right-wing thinking”, secure in his assumption that most readers would know the sort of thing he had in mind.
As the ne plus ultra of unbalanced right-wing thinkers, it’s not for me to suggest how the US debate might be balanced in these pages. I have only one theory on column-writing, which is this: at a certain basic level, a columnist has to be right more often than not, otherwise the reader (I use the singular advisedly) is just wasting his time. If I were Robert Fisk, the famed foreign correspondent with decades of experience in the Muslim world, I’d be ashamed to leave the house. Sample Fisk headlines on the Afghan war: “Bush Is Walking Into A Trap”, “It Could Become More Costly Than Vietnam”. Sample insight on the Iraq war: when the Yanks announced they’d taken Baghdad International Airport, Fisky insisted they hadn’t and suggested they’d seized an abandoned RAF airfield from the Fifties by mistake. It’s this kind of unique expertise that has made him so admired around the world, not least in Ireland.
By contrast, readers of this column may have gained the impression that George W Bush will win the Presidential election on November 2nd. If he doesn’t, I shall trouble readers of this newspaper no further. It would be ridiculous to continue passing myself off as an incisive analyst of US affairs after I’ve been exposed as a deluded fool who completely misread the entire situation. In the bright new dawn of the Kerry Administration, you’d deserve better. If that’s not an incentive for Irish citizens to smuggle a few illegal campaign contributions the Senator’s way, I don’t know what is.
But, if, on the other hand, Bush is re-elected, I make one small request of the Irish and European media: you need to re-think your approach to this Presidency. Consider, for example, the two elections this weekend: Afghanistan and Australia. In the former, they held the first direct Presidential election in the country’s history. Hitherto, if you wanted to become President of Afghanistan, you had to hang around till the incumbent’s term expired, which was generally when he did, usually at the next guy’s hand. King Zahir was deposed in 1973 by his cousin Daoud, who was killed by his successor Taraki, who was suffocated by his successor Hafizullah Amin, who was executed by the Soviets, who installed Babrak Karmal, who died in a Moscow hospital but in a rare break with tradition managed to outlive his replacement, Najibullah, whom the Taliban wound up hanging from a traffic post. So, in a break with tradition, Hamid Karzai is now the first elected head of state in the country’s history.
And yes, it was a flawed election: it emerged on polling day that the indelible ink used to mark voters’ thumbs could be rubbed off. And whose fault is that? Well, the election was managed by the UN, which evidently got its indelible ink from the book-keeping department of its Oil-for-Food program. That’s one more reason, in case we needed any, to dismantle the UN and all its bloated works. But, UN incompetence aside, Afghanistan is making steady progress, no thanks to the media naysayers, who assured us nearly three years ago that Karzai was little more than a ceremonial Mayor of Kabul and as soon as one of his many enemies got a good shot at him the country would be plunged back into its 1980s chaos. He represented nobody, he spoke for nobody. Robert Fisk again, in March 2002: “Hamid Karzai can scarcely control the street outside his office.”
Oh, really? Events in Afghanistan seem to be going Bush’s way, rather than Fisk’s.
Same in Australia, where John Howard’s conservative coalition was re-elected. It was supposed to be close, but Howard won comfortably, prefiguring similar victories to come by his fellow doughty warriors of the Anglosphere, Bush and Blair. Had Australia’s government gone the way of Spain’s, you can bet CNN and co would have played it up as a big loss for Bush, in the same way that they focused on those smudgy Afghan thumbs rather than the joyous Afghan faces – the young women voting for the first time on a polling day almost wholly free of violence.
This was a remarkable weekend, but also a typical one, in that all the movement is in Bush’s direction. For a supposed “unilateralist” who’s turned “the world” against America (the basic Kerry indictment), he has a lot more reliable pals right now than, say, Jacques Chirac. The French President’s closest ally, Gerhard Schroder, is unlikely ever again to be booking the room for an election-night victory party. Some US presidents are content to enjoy the perks of office and treat their term as one long holiday weekend (Clinton); others see their task as one of managing historically inevitable decline (Carter) or living with an unsatisfactory status quo (Eisenhower). But Bush, like Reagan, is a transformative president. By the time he leaves office in 2009, the world will be very different.
And that’s all I’m asking for after November 2nd – that the Euroleft chuck the tired gags about “Shrub” the moron, the idiot, the stupid white man that saw them through his first term. Stow the pop psychology, too – the cracks about the “daddy complex” that supposedly led him to topple Saddam. It’s already obvious the 43rd Presidency is far more consequential than the 41st: George Bush Sr’s place in history will mainly be as the guy who warmed up the name for George Bush Jr. If you’re not prepared to give serious thought to the challenge Bush poses to the UN and EU complaceniks, you’re never going to understand the times we live in.
If Kerry wins, I’m outta here. If Bush wins, eschewing lazy European condescension for the next four years would be the best way of “balancing the US debate”.
The Irish Times, October 11th 2004
THE NEW AMERICA FIRSTERS
This was written after the Democrat but before the Republican Convention, but after that very moving speech by the Iraqi-American lady Zainab al-Suwaij and Rudy Giuliani's brisk trot across the grim victories of terrorism from the '72 Olympics on it seems even clearer which party is engaged in the world:
When did the left get so hicksville and parochial? They were always the most ostentatiously internationalist end of the spectrum, always asserting “solidarity” with the oppressed masses overseas. True, this internationalism derived mainly from their belief in big government, and world government as the biggest government of all. But by definition it obliged the left to embrace notions of common humanity, etc. Even their line-up of unsavoury Latin pin-ups – Fidel to Che, Allende to Ortega – required them at least to have a nodding acquaintance with the foreign pages of the newspaper.
Not any more. To be sure, John Kerry pledges that, under his leadership, America “will rejoin the world community”. But it remains to be seen how many members of the world community will still be on speaking terms with the party come November. The Democrats sneer about “nations you can buy on e-bay” and berate the President for his obnoxiousness to foreigners all in the same sentence. Bush has “alienated almost everyone,” Jimmy Carter told CNN, “and now we have just a handful of little tiny countries supposedly helping us in Iraq.”
“Little tiny countries”? Who do you have to be – other than Jacques Chirac – to get any respect from the Dems these days? I suppose the Kingdom of Tonga’s pretty tiny. Population 100,000. But they’ve just deployed 45 Royal Marines to Iraq, and good for them. A proportional deployment from France – supposedly the only ally that counts, to Carter, Kerry, Biden and co – would be 27,450 troops. No matter how much conversational ketchup Theresa drizzles over Chirac, that’s never going to happen.
Why would Jimmy Carter sneer at Tonga? Well, the answer is he wasn’t. The nickel’n’dime nowhere statelets he had in mind are Britain, Australia, Japan, Italy, Poland, and some 30 others. In the last year, the “tiny little countries” helping in Iraq comprised a majority of G7 nations, a majority of Nato members, and a majority of European Union countries. On the other hand, Carter is still fondly recalled by the Arab League.
I’d love the President to convene a grand Coalition of the Willing summit with a group picture of everyone from the British Prime Minister to the King of Tonga. It would be a useful reminder that the received wisdom – Bush the unilateralist, Democrats the global outreach crowd – is a precise inversion of reality. On the stump in South Dakota, for example, Tom Daschle has morphed into Charles Lindbergh, campaigning under the slogan “Put America First”. If that was Trent Lott’s campaign ad, he’d be denounced as a racist and Bush would be under pressure to get him to step down.
Senator Daschle is demanding to know why we’re building schools and roads in Iraq rather than South Dakota. I don’t know that we are, are we? When I was in Iraq, the roads struck me as being pretty good, aside from the odd bomb crater. But Daschle’s line is striking a chord among his constituents. “If we’re spending billions on improvements to infrastructure, we ought to be doing it in Brown County,” wrote Alex Kolb to The Aberdeen American News. “I’m glad our senator knows what our priorities should be.”
Oh, well. Daschle’s just a fringe figure in the Democratic Party, he’s only the Senate Majority Leader. But here’s the Presidential candidate himself reprising one of his lamest stump lines in his big convention speech: “We shouldn’t be opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them in the United States of America.”
Who’s doing either end of that non-sequitur? The firehouse in my corner of New Hampshire is the responsibility of the town government and the firehouse in Mosul is the responsibility of Mosul’s government. Neither falls under the jurisdiction of the President of the United States. So all it boils down to is a cheap crack that a bunch of Arab spongers are hoovering up all your Federal gravy like a lot of useless layabout warfare queens. In his shriveled contribution to the politics of envy, the worldly sophisticated cosmopolitan Senator sounds like a Doonesbury caricature of a redneck Republican. As Christopher Hitchens wrote, “There is something absolutely charmless and self-regarding about this pitch.”
The lesson of 9/11 is that failed states export their problems: That morning, the fellows in the cave in the Hindu Kush came to the heart of New York. One day they might even show up in South Dakota. Going to where the problem is and fixing it at source is the surest way to “Put America First”. This lesson doesn’t apply merely to terrorism. Had America fixed Mexico a century ago, half its population wouldn’t be living in California and Texas, corrupting the foundations of US citizenship. John Kerry’s firehouse jibe is a particularly crude example of Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic: the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Thus the post 9/11 Democrats’ indifference to the world. Theresa Heinz Kerry can speak five languages, and say “shove it” in every one.
National Review, August 23rd 2004
~ Mark's "Happy Warrior" column can be read every two weeks in National Review . In the current issue, don't miss Steyn's take on the seared Senator, only in the print edition of a speciall all-Kerry National Review, on sale now - or save over 40% and subscribe.
FOUR BAD SIGNS
A couple of months back, Sudan took time out from its hectic schedule of ethnic cleansing in Darfur to get elected to a three-year term at the UN Human Rights Commission. The US representative protested this move by walking out before the final vote.
Big deal. The Sudanese ambassador had a much droller reaction. Following his election, he immediately announced his major concern was the human rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
At such moments, I find myself thinking: Do they know us much better than we know them? Take, for example, four small items in the news. Like Sudan’s man at Turtle Bay, they’re all revealing:
1) German prosecutors announce they’re dropping all the most serious charges against the only terrorist convicted for the 9/11 attacks, and releasing him.
2) The Philippines, in order to obtain the release of one hostage, pull their troops out of Iraq and, so it’s reported, pay the terrorists a ransom of $6 million.
3) The UN Oil-for-Food program turns out to be funding the insurgents in Iraq.
4) A band of Syrian musicians terrifies passengers aboard a flight from Detroit to Los Angeles.
Those are four good reasons why I’m in favor of the US going to terrorist-sponsoring states and dropping bombs on them. John Kerry, among others, believes that the war is “primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation”. If it is, we’ll lose. The prosecutors in Hamburg decided to drop charges against Mounir Motassadeq because “they fear” the crucial American evidence against him was obtained by torturing detainees at Guantanamo. That’s all: just a casual assumption that the Great Satan was up to his old tricks.
“No doubt they will complain bitterly,” said a German “anti-terrorist” official, sounding awfully pleased with himself. “Let us say we have different views on how to handle this problem.” Three of the 9/11 “pilots” lived in Hamburg. But the Germans have pretty much made clear to Washington that trying to “handle this problem” at the Hamburg end is not an option. There’s going to be a whole lot of days like that if we try to fight a war with subpoenas: “The judge has thrown out the mass murder charges, but the DA says we can still nail him on mail fraud.”
What’s impressive is the way these supposedly unassimilated outsiders pick up on our weaknesses so quickly – the legalisms, the ethnic squeamishness, the bureaucratic inertia. As Claudia Rosett has demonstrated, when Saddam went the UN route, he played it more skillfully than Clinton or Bush. As with law enforcement, the transnational organizations’ distinctive combination of western sloth and thug-state corruption ensures that all you do by entering that arena is even the playing field to the enemy’s advantage.
In crude, hard ways, the Islamists have shown from Spain to the Philippines the leverage they can wield. Has the world’s only hyperpower no pressure of its own to apply? Bush spelt it out three years ago: you’re either with us or against us. In Manila, Gloria Arroyo has just switched sides. Bankrolling the enemy to the tune of six million bucks may not be much in US terms – in West Virginia, it’d barely cover the foundation of another Robert C Byrd Institute of Time-Servers public building – but it would be enough to fund another 13 9/11s. If the Philippines is now objectively “against us”, there has to be a price to pay; Bush’s words have to mean something.
As for those 14 Syrian musicians on a NorthWest flight, they had a grand old time, going to the washrooms in groups, back and forth, taking along bulky hand luggage and returning to their seats with the bags mysteriously empty, etc, etc. After their fellow passenger Annie Jacobsen wrote it up for Women’s Wall Street, there was much speculation: Was it a dry run, such as James Woods witnessed before 9/11? Were they terrorists posing as musicians?
Here’s one thing I’ve come to appreciate in the last three years: the tremendous cultural confidence of young Muslim males. On September 11th, they celebrated in the streets of Copenhagen and at Concordia University in Montreal. In Bradford, Yorkshire, they roamed the town, banging on the hoods of passing cars, forcing them to stop and making the drivers shout “Osama is a great man.” They understood, even on the day, that nothing would be done to them.
I don’t know why Syrian musicians are touring the US. Notwithstanding the doubtless vibrant music scene, Syria remains a terrorist state and its citizens should be subject to particular scrutiny. But, if I were a Syrian musician let into America, it’d be a hoot to wind up the soft paranoid Americans by making them think you’re a terrorist. And, if two or three harmless Syrian beat combos get hassled by the authorities, James Zogby and CAIR and the other efficient lobby groups will kick up a fuss, and Norm Mineta will fine the airlines and impose mandatory sensitivity-training on the cabin crews. And the next time a stewardess sees something funny going on, she’ll think, “Do I really want to get mixed up in this? Who needs another Islamophobia re-education class?”
The self-imposed constraints of this war – legalistic, multilateral, politically correct – are clearer every day. “Know your enemy,” they say. They know us pretty well.
National Review, August 9th 2004
~ Mark's "Happy Warrior" column can be read every two weeks in National Review . In the current issue, don't miss Steyn on the new America Firsters, only in the print edition of National Review, on sale now - or save over 40% and subscribe.
MEANINGLESS MULTILATERALISM
I was heartened to hear, if only according to The Times of London, that George W Bush is planning on overthrowing the Iranian mullahs as soon as November’s election is out of the way. Over on this side of the Atlantic, the assumption is that regime toppling’s been moved to the back burner.
According to the conventional wisdom, Bush has embraced conventional wisdom. Sadder but wiser after the vicissitudes of his unilateral pre-emptive neocon adventuring, the chastened warmonger has come home to multilateralism. The other week, he had the G8, US-EU summit and Nato back to back and, bounced from Sea Island to Shannon to Istanbul for the privilege of shaking hands with the same gaggle of duplicitous Europeans in three different time zones, the President did a passable impression of someone who was pleased to be there.
In fact, most of Bush’s present difficulties come not from swaggering cowboy unilateralism but because of excessive deference to multilateralism in the run up to the Iraq war. Instead of deposing Saddam before the first anniversary of 9/11 (as yours truly urged), Bush was prevailed upon to “go the UN route”, mainly to provide his most important ally, Tony Blair, with some multilateral cover. As I wrote in March 2003, “The end result is that we’ll be going to war with exactly the same participants as we would have done last August, and the one person weakened by going the UN route is the very one it was designed to protect: Mr Blair. The best way to help Blair would have been to get the war over six months ago.”
That would also have been best for Bush. As Michael Ledeen always advises, “Faster please.” Had Iraq followed hard on Afghanistan, it would have been trickier for the Dems to present it as a separate adventure disconnected from the war on terror. In the 17-month hiatus between the falls of Kabul and Baghdad, the anti-war movement ballooned, and the “what war?” movement – those devoted followers of Michael Moore who believe the whole thing’s just some scam got up by Bush’s Halliburton puppeteers - ballooned even more.
Or, to put it another way, in adopting Mr Blair’s priorities, the President wound up with Mr Blair’s problems. Once Mr Bush decided to “go the UN route”, he was playing not to his ally’s strengths but to his ally’s weaknesses, and those weaknesses became his, too.
That’s a cautionary tale for those who insist America fall in line with modern multilateral pieties. “I don’t know when in the history of the alliance we’ve seen so many successes!” gushed the neo-multilateralist Rumsfeld at the Nato summit in Turkey. The Defense Secretary was using “success” in the multilateral-speak meaning of the word, which roughly translates into English as “failure”. The greatest of these many successes was the decision by the Alliance to expand its role in Afghanistan beyond Kabul to the country’s somewhat alarmingly autonomous regions. So the enlarged Nato mission ought to be great news, right?
Er, up to a point. After the Secretary-General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, put the squeeze on Nato’s 26 members, they reluctantly ponied up an extra 600 troops and three helicopters for Afghanistan. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. Credit where it’s due, the three Black Hawks all come from one country – Turkey. But it wants them back in six months’ time.
Now I very much like Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. I’ve met him a couple of times before his present eminence, and he’s one of the most thoughtful of European politicians – well disposed toward America, not into stringing along with Chirac and the other Europoseurs for the sake of it. But he finds himself presiding over a sham alliance. Theoretically, it has millions of conscript troops at its disposal. But it has no ability to project more than a few thousand out of area – ie, to any of the places anyone’s likely to need them in the years ahead.
In other words, if a military alliance means a press release and a black-tie banquet for Bush, Chirac, Schroder and co once a year, Nato works fine. If a military alliance means functioning armed forces capable of fighting side by side and killing the enemy, Nato is a post-modern joke. The big burly Fijians who’ve done such a splendid job guarding currency convoys in Iraq have made a greater contribution than many of America’s supposedly “major” allies. And, from a cost-benefit analysis, they didn’t require months of endless diplomatic schmoozing by Bush, Powell, Rice and Rumsfeld, all consuming valuable time and money which, when you add it all up, makes it cheaper to add another 600 men to the New Hampshire National Guard rather than chase round a dozen European capitals trying to crowbar them out of Nato barracks.
If America fights the war on terror this way, she’ll lose. Nonetheless, that’s what John Kerry has just proposed in his exciting ten-point plan for Iraq:
1) Give France and Germany “fair access to the multibillion-dollar reconstruction contracts.”
2) “Give them a leadership role in pursuing our wider strategic goals in the region.”
3) “Realistically call on NATO to step up to its responsibilities.”
4) Er, well, if we come up with a fourth point, we’ll get back to you.
That’s it? Bribe Chirac and Schroder with taxpayer dollars and a couple more summits to swank around at in the hope of getting them to promise military contributions they don’t have? Even by Kerry’s standards, this is lazy.
If Bush survives the Blairization of his war presidency and wins in November, he needs to embark on a campaign of gently putting to sleep America’s pantomime alliances. The US requires real allies with real assets: Meaningful multilateralism.
National Review, July 26th 2004
~ Mark's "Happy Warrior" column can be read every two weeks in National Review. In the current issue, don't miss Steyn on four bad signs in the war on terror, only in the print edition of National Review, on sale now - or save over 40% and subscribe.
SOUTH OF THE BORDER
Mr Liam Quaide of Co Limerick has complained on this newspaper’s letters page that my “second eulogy in a week to Ronald Reagan addresses none of the main charges against the former president.” There then follows a somewhat lengthy list of charges he wishes me to address, and, alas, a columnist can’t write about everything. But for the sake of argument let’s take the first of my omissions from the Reagan record: “the oppression and poverty inflicted on Central America as a direct result of his foreign policies”.
A few months before 9/11, I went to the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, a rather somnolent affair aside from the anti-globalisation mobs hurling concrete across the perimeter fence. The assembled heads of government were there to plan for a hemispherical free trade area, and I spent a catatonic 48 hours listening to eminently reasonable Foreign and Finance Ministers eager to explain at length why Costa Rica and Bolivia were now open for business. The summit was attended by every President and Prime Minister in the region except one: Fidel Castro. Comrade Fidel had been ruled ineligible to attend because Cuba was not a democracy. Everywhere else was.
One can argue that things have slipped a little in the last three years: fiscal woes in Argentina; the grubby thug Chavez in Venezuela. But still, even by the most pessimistic reading, an area that 30 years ago was wall-to-wall dictatorships is now overwhelmingly democratic. Whatever the continent’s fate, it won’t include a return of the puffed-up bemedalled El-Presidentes-For-Life, like General Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, who abolished Christmas and banned Donald Duck.
That’s what makes Latin America relevant to the Bush project in the Middle East. For much of the last century, the region was mired in the same dead-end victim complex as the Arab world. The celebrated Brazilian sociology professor Fernando Henrique Cardoso was a famous proponent of “Dependency Theory”, which blamed the woes of everybody south of the Rio Grande on Uncle Sam, in much the same way that Arab regimes, invited to explain why they’re sewers of corruption and brutality, bore on about the Great Satan and the Zionist Entity.
In the Seventies, the west’s foreign-policy elites were happy to take the losers at their own estimation: just as the so-called “realists” insist today that Islam is incompatible with liberty, so three decades ago there were wise old birds who said the same thing about Catholicism. Easy to scoff now, but back then, remember, the dictators ruled not just Latin America but also Spain and Portugal. Cultures can change.
Pre-Reagan, nobody thought much about this. The defeatist Democrats of the Carter era took it for granted that Communism would advance across the hemisphere, and some of them frankly found it a bit of a turn on: dig out that old picture of a starry-eyed Senator Kerry with Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. Twenty years ago, the Commie cutie was the darling of the salons of the west: On one memorable occasion, he turned up in Holland Park, in his best-pressed Sandinista fatigues, to take tea with Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser, plus Salman Rushdie, Melvyn Bragg, etc.
Meanwhile, the more subtly defeatist Republicans of the Nixon era thought the best bulwark against Communism was strongmen of various degrees of unsavouriness. This is the doctrine to which John Kerry, having gotten over his crush on Comrade Ortega, now subscribes to for the Middle East: he may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch. And, as I’ve been saying since 9/11, the opposite is more to the point: he may be our sonofabitch, but he’s a sonofabitch. I remember years ago hearing some CIA guy talking about Washington “getting in bed with Noriega”. You wouldn’t be so blasé with your metaphors if you’d literally had to get into bed with him: for 30 years he routinely raped prisoners of both sexes.
More to the geopolitical point, in most cases you were trying to prop up the unprop-upable. The Latin American state existed strictly for the enrichment of the extended family of whoever was President-for-Life that week. So they had bloated bureaucracies and oversized militaries that had to be supported by almost wholly unproductive economies. The classroom with no desks and the hospital ward with no beds were common features, regardless of whether the passing dictatorship was of left or right. If Mr Quaide seriously believes “oppression and poverty” were “inflicted” on Central America by President Reagan, I highly recommend Manual del perfecto idiota latinoamericano (Manual for the Perfect Latin American Idiot), an entertaining round-up of the good old days by three reformed lefties, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Alvaro Vargas Llosa. “I confess here that I only have one pair of shoes,” the corrupt Peruvian President Alan Garcia touchingly declared. “I really do not need more.” A casual glance at the week’s official photographs revealed that his footwear inventory was as unreliable as the rest of the government statistics.
What changed the dynamic in the region? Two things: Mrs Thatcher’s Falklands War, which was a decisive defeat for Latin-American macho militarism; and Ronald Reagan’s determination to roll back Communist expansion, at a time of Castro-friendly coups in Grenada and elsewhere. After the 1982 US-backed elections in El Salvador, Reagan addressed Parliament in London and committed America to a “campaign for democracy”. This was as big a break with the realpolitik crowd on Central America as last year’s Bush speech - also at Westminster, also on liberty - was with the realpolitik crowd on the Middle East.
If you think the democratization of Arabia is a long shot, so was the democratization of Latin America. But it happened. And the only thing to argue about is how much credit you want to give the Reagan Doctrine. You want to blame the US for acts of genocide against the Mayans by the Guatemalan military? As you wish. But that, in fact, is an example of what happens when Washington is absent. The Guatemalans reckoned they could handle the insurgency and buy arms on the international market, so they set to it, without any pesky foreigners around to complain about human-rights abuses (unlike, say, the Balkans, where the atrocities occur in plain sight of the UN peacekeepers).
But anyone who thinks Reagan wanted to oppress Central Americans and keep them in poverty doesn’t understand his profound belief in economic prosperity as the engine of peace and freedom. Central America in the first half of the Eighties had negative GDP growth: minus one per cent. In the second half, there was annual GDP growth of two per cent; in the Nineties, five per cent. Throughout Latin America, voters turned to parties who promoted privatization, free trade, hard currencies – or, in a word, Reaganomics. Ask yourself this: does today’s Latin America incline closer to western values or Che and Fidel’s?
Fernando Henrique Cardoso knew the answer. He wound up as President of Brazil, abandoned “Dependency Theory”, embraced globalization, and advised his people to “forget everything I wrote”. They did. Maybe the west’s dewy-eyed liberation theologists still mooning for Daniel Ortega should do the same.
The Irish Times, June 21st 2004
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