It is now clear that in the years following September 11, 2001, the US government did everything it could to hide the role of the Pakistani military in proliferating weapons of mass destruction, while at the same time exaggerating that possibility with regard to Iraq, which possessed no such weapons.
Why the US practises double standards
(Daily Nation)By MAHMOOD MAMDANI
02/15/04:
Why are certain regimes allowed to reform while others are tagged as evil and considered incapable of reform? Was this an intelligence failure, as the Bush administration alleges, or was it a political failure, an attempt to shape intelligence to serve a political agenda that first came together during the Reagan administration?
A noted neo-conservative academic by the name of Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who served as US ambassador to the United Nations in the Reagan administration, laid the intellectual groundwork for this agenda.
In an article titled "Dictatorship and Double Standards" that appeared in Commentary magazine in 1979, Kirkpatrick connected global Soviet expansion with local Third World revolutions in a causal relationship. She claimed that Third World revolutions were illegitimate since they were products of Soviet expansion, rather than local historical forces fighting repressive dictatorships.
Kirkpatrick then drew a distinction between two kinds of dictatorships: left-wing (totalitarian) and right-wing (authoritarian). The difference, she argued, was that totalitarian dictatorships were incapable of reforming from within and so needed to be overthrown forcibly from without, whereas authoritarian dictatorships were open to internal reform, which could be tapped through constructive engagement.
The political importance of Kirkpatrick's argument cannot be overstated. By giving a rationale for making friends with dictators while doing everything to overthrow left-wing governments, she solved the moral problem with Reagan’s foreign policy.
Once Kirkpatrick had rationalised the dual strategy of embracing right-wing dictators while targeting left-wing regimes, a right-wing think tank called the Heritage Foundation translated the theoretical maxim into a practical proposal that identified nine countries for rollback: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iran, Laos, Libya, Nicaragua and Vietnam.
In March, 1981, CIA Director William Casey proposed to Reagan a counter-revolutionary offensive on eight countries – Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Iran, Libya and Cuba – six of which were taken from the Heritage Foundation's hit list. Only in the case of Grenada did the US dare lead an open invasion, on October 25, 1983. Elsewhere, it looked for proxies to attack left-wing regimes.
The search for proxies was world-wide and involved an embrace of rightist governments and movements. The object was to target post-revolutionary nationalist governments. Key to this was an alliance with apartheid South Africa that the Reagan administration rationalised as constructive engagement.
The rapprochement with Pretoria began long before Kirkpatrick theorised it in 1979. As early as 1975, when the US reeled from defeat in Indochina and neither domestic nor world opinion was ready to countenance US invasions overseas, American administrations looked for proxies to wage the Cold War in the Third World.
The alliance with Pretoria was triggered by the collapse of the fascist regime in Portugal: as Lisbon prepared to withdraw from one after another African colony, the US worried about whether African nationalists would turn into Soviet proxies.
Kirkpatrick not only confirmed this fear, she also theorised it. What had begun as a pragmatic move under Kissinger’s guidance gelled into an ideological embrace constructive engagement under Reagan.
Did constructive engagement facilitate or retard reform in South Africa? To answer the question, one needs to understand how the American connection affected prevailing trends in South Africa.
One needs to remember that the apartheid governments initial response to the approach of independence in Mozambique was not to withdraw into a tight defensive laager, but to open up to the possibility of regional reform.
Pretoria’s support for Ian Smith's Unilateral Declaration of Independence had included the provision of South African policemen, whose presence in Rhodesia had gone up to about 2,000 from 1967 to 1975. But instead of increasing this support, Pretoria prepared for a transition to majority rule in the former British colony. It was not for nothing that the head of Rhodesian intelligence wrote in his diary on December 1, 1974: "South Africa, in search of detente with Black Africa, is prepared to ditch us."
Washington’s constructive engagement with apartheid coincided with a period of rising popular resistance in the decade that followed the 1976 Soweto uprising. It also led to a regime debate in South African ruling circles on the most appropriate response to resistance, ranging from reform to repression.
The partnership with the US swung the pendulum in favour of those who called for greater internal repression and rationalised it as a contribution to fighting the Cold War. As voices calling for domestic reform got marginalised internally and were ignored internationally, the South African military tightened its hold over governmental processes and shifted its regional policy from detente to total onslaught. It echoed a similar global shift in the policy of the Reagan administration, from containment to rollback.
As the Bush administration’s War on Terror unfolds following a neo-Reaganite agenda, we need to beware of the many local alliances it is likely to forge, each thwarting reform in its own place.
From a post-Cold War perspective, we can see how self-serving were Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s two claims. The fact is that many left-wing regimes from the Soviet Union to China have successfully reformed from within. The prerequisite of reform was a defence of sovereignty and, in that context, the right to reform.
In contrast, Iraq was not allowed to reform from within. If North Korea has escaped that same fate, could it be because it possesses weapons of mass destruction, which Iraq did not?
The real irony is that the neo-conservative juggernaut invites the world to draw the lesson that the only effective safeguard of one's right to reform in the post-9/11 era may be the possession of weapons of mass destruction!
Prof Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman professor of government and director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University in New York.
Copyright ©2003, Nation Media Group Ltd.
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