TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101491/1014640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 132 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 93

The Man Who Loved Dictators


By Charles Krauthammer


    Just days after Boris Yeltsin risked his life to defeat
the August coup, anonymous White House sources were leaking
contempt and disdain for Yeltsin. A week earlier, the man had
saved not only his country but the entire Bush foreign policy
(which had placed all its bets on Gorbachev) and Washington was
already dumping on him.

    To be sure, a few days later the White House tried to take
it all back. But what was said was said, and it was not the
first time. Two years earlier, the White House had similarly
beaten up on Yeltsin, labeling him a lightweight and a
demagogue, a man unworthy of doing business with the President
of the U.S.

    Not that the White House favored the Stalinist coup
mongers (although the President's initial reaction to the coup
was, as Margaret Thatcher would have said, wobbly). But the
Administration's obvious favorite in Moscow is not Yeltsin but
Gorbachev.

    Gorbachev merits respect. History will honor him for
having set in train the second Russian revolution. The White
House, however, has favored him not for his historic qualities
but for his personal and political ones: he was the polished,
predictable, if dictatorial, leader of a unitary Soviet state.
Yeltsin was the crude, rash, populist leader of a new political
animal (Russia), a china-breaking democrat.

    This is an Administration that prefers strongmen and
dictators. Nothing entirely new here, but at least in the past
we supported the likes of Somoza and Marcos in the name of
anticommunism. What is the excuse now? One of Bush's favorite
dictators is Deng Xiaoping, a communist whose specialty is the
repression of democratic (and fervently pro-American) forces.
Even the massacre at Tiananmen Square seems to have had little
effect on the President's regard for Deng, except for requiring
some circumspection, given the heavy domestic opposition to
Bush's policy of appeasement.

    But the most egregious case of this preference for
dictators, particularly for their ability to bring "stability"
to those parts of the world deemed too primitive to tolerate
democracy, is Saddam Hussein. For it was Bush who saved Saddam.
In the crucial days after the gulf war, when the Shi`ite south
and the Kurdish north were in revolt, Saddam was hanging by a
thread. The Administration could easily have tipped the balance
against him. It chose not to. It stayed its hand -- muted its
threats and grounded its aircraft -- in the name of stability
and the unity of the Iraqi state.

    True, Bush would have preferred and called many times for
another Baathist to put a bullet through Saddam's head. His
first choice was Saddamism without Saddam. But his second choice
was Saddamism with Saddam.

    A few months later, Secretary of State Baker went to
Yugoslavia on the eve of civil war and gave the distinct
impression to all involved that the U.S. favored the unitary
Yugoslavian state, then controlled by Serbian communists. This
signal too had to be withdrawn when the Serbian-controlled army
set out to restore the unitary state with tanks and planes.

    Wrong every time. Every time favoring stability,
dictatorship, central rule over the messiness and uncertainty
that come with independence and democracy.

    Why? In some cases, sheer familiarity. Bush knows Deng
from his good old days as envoy to China. And he has an easy
rapport with Gorbachev. In some sense, he even thought he knew
Saddam, preferring the devil he knew to some unknown Shi`ite or
Kurdish revolutionary. There is an element too of snobbery. Bush
is comfortable with the club of world leaders of which he is
dean. He prefers men of rank to upstarts and pretenders. The
existing rulers may be quick on the trigger. But they know how
to hold a fork.

    Then there is sheer diplomatic laziness. It is much easier
to deal with one Yugoslavia, one Soviet Union, a unified and
dictatorial China than it is to deal with fractured countries
and a multiplicity of republics.

    But there is a deeper reason why the Administration
prefers dictators to democrats: for Bush, the central value of
the New World Order is order. Empires are better at it than
newborn democracies. (Consider India before and after British
rule, for example.) Dictators are better at it than democrats.

    But only in the short run. And that is where the Bush
policy fails, even on its own terms. It is a shortsighted,
short-run prescription for order. After all, is the Persian Gulf
more stable with Saddam and the Baath, or would it not have
been better to remove this artificial repressor and once and
for all allow Iraq to develop along more natural and
representative ethnic lines?

    Will China's communist neo-orthodoxy make for a more
stable future, or does it merely delay and aggravate the coming
postcommunist instability? We already know the answer to that
question for the Soviet Union: just a few too many years of
centralized control have made the transition to a looser
confederation infinitely harder. (Ukraine, for example, will not
today accept the limited sovereignty it would gladly have
accepted three years ago.) And the Yugoslav policy was so
shortsighted that it lasted but a few days longer than the
Soviet coup.

    This Administration has shown good judgment in some
foreign policy enterprises (German unification) and courage in
others (the gulf war). But its general foreign policy prowess
has been overrated. This has been the luckiest Administration
in American history. After 40 years of struggle against the
Soviet empire, it happened to be on station on the day the
empire collapsed.

    When it does exercise discretion trying to manage the
collapse, it operates under a monumental handicap. This is the
age of revolution, and Bush does not much like revolutionaries.