(IX) FROM THE COLD WAR TO THE "WAR ON TERROR"
In Potsdam (July-August 1945), neither the USA nor Great Britain challenged Soviet political hegemony in eastern Europe. The latter designation was vague. If Germany was part of western Europe, then Czechoslovakia had as much or more right to that condition. But eastern Germany was occupied by the USSR. Czechoslovakia was in a grey area and could politically tilt either way although militarily it had been invaded by the Soviets. The Sudeten Germans had been expelled and the Czechoslovak communist movement was strong enough to obtain a plurality of votes, possibly because American planes had bombed Prague heavily a few months before the end of the war. Klement Gottwald, the Soviets’ Czech agent, forced his way into government (February 1948). Jan Masaryk, the Czechoslovak foreign minister, son of Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, the founder of post-World War I Czechoslovakia, was very likely defenestrated by the communists. The official version was that he committed suicide. The communist take over was not opposed by the Americans, who were occupying Bavaria, the part of Germany contiguous to Bohemia. If any one started pushing in Europe after World War II it was the Soviets in Czechoslovakia. The Red Army had a corridor to Prague in Ruthenia. Later, Ruthenia was also used by Soviet tanks against Hungary and to snip the Prague Spring in the bud. Greece was definitely not supposed to be within the Soviet sphere of influence. The British had exerted themselves to save Greece from Nazi Germany. This was the doing of Churchill, who always had a thing for the Balkans. In World War I the Gallipoli disaster (1915-1916) was a consequence of Churchill's strategic thinking, which was to knock Turkey out of the war and open a third front against the Central Powers. The idea wasn't bad but the generalship, which mucked about giving the Turks time to fortify the heights, was egregious. The immense reputation of German Gen. Erwin Rommel can be attributed indirectly to Churchill, who weakened Egypt to succor Greece. In 1944 in Moscow, Churchill is said to have exchanged Greece for Romania with Stalin. Yugoslavia was apportioned on a fifty-fifty basis. Upon Germany's surrender, Greece was in British hands, although not quite the entire country, because Greek communist partisans were strong in the mountains to the north and had the support of Tito's Yugoslavia.
In America itself, the fight against internal communism got its head of steam in the HUAC, especially when a communist party courier, Elizabeth Bentley, who had been ditched by her Soviet handler-lover, began naming names in August 1945. She identified practically all of the party members who had served in the American government during the war. But it was the hard stance of the Truman administration against communists or suspects that really tightened security inside the government and dismissed residual Soviet penetration, which anyway by then, with the defeat of Nazism, had little appeal to fellow travelers or communist sympathizers. The HUAC gained a great deal of publicity when it investigated communists or sympathizers in Hollywood. The big studios defended themselves by arguing that for three films that depicted the USSR favorably many more were anti-Soviet. But individual screenwriters and actors were mentioned, questioned, and blacklisted when they refused to testify against others by invoking the Fifth Amendment. The more talented among the accused remade their careers, but most of those questioned were permanently banished by the film industry. Charlie Chaplin was among those who emigrated and worked under his own name in Europe. Others assumed pseudonyms, famously Dalton Trumbo, who spent some time in a penitentiary, but was gradually rehabilitated by the quality of the scripts he wrote, notably for the films Exodus and Spartacus. Most of the big names in Hollywood readily testified against others. Elia Kazan’s testimony was particularly resented in the industry and he defended himself in the excellent film On the waterfront (1954). Another highpoint in the HUAC investigations was the testimony of Whittaker Chambers, a former communist, who largely confirmed what Elizabeth Bentley had said, but who also identified Alger Hiss, an important functionary in the State Department, as a communist, a charge that the latter contested to his dying day. But Chambers produced some documents which showed that Hiss had perjured himself, for which he spent 44 months in a federal penitentiary. In 1949, the Smith Act was used to decimate the Communist Party, which was outlawed in 1954. Further convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court in 1957, but the Smith Act is still in the books. The most controversial or infamous of the trials during the Red hysteria was that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In Britain, Fuchs had identified Harry Gold as his American courier. Gold in turn implicated David Greenglass, a minor technician at Los Alamos, as a spy. Perhaps in exchange for his own life, Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, accused Julius of running a spy network. Julius was arrested with his wife in 1950, six months after Fuchs in Britain. They were accused of conspiracy to commit espionage for the USSR on the atomic bomb. Since any information that Julius Rosenberg-his wife stood by him although she was not strictly speaking a working spy-might have gathered would have come from Greenglass, whose knowledge of how the atomic bomb worked, was scant, the substance of the accusation was without merit. But it is certain that Rosenberg was a spy. He was tried with his wife and both were sentenced to death in 1951. Despite world-wide clemency pleas, Eisenhower did not budge. It is widely believed on the basis of controversial decrypts that Julius provided the Soviets with a specimen of a proximity fuze or fuse, which is a device installed in projectiles allowing them to explode near a target without having to actually hit it. It is usually mentioned in connection to this that Gary Power’s U2 spy plane was downed by a missile with a proximity fuse, but this happened in 1960. Since there are at least five methods of making proximity fuses it is highly unlikely that the USSR used the exact type of proximity fuse that Rosenberg gave it, or that it would not have developed one on its own.
Less than one year after the USSR tested its own atomic bomb (August 1949), communist North Korea invaded the south. In Potsdam also, the USSR was committed to declaring war on Japan after Germany surrendered. It did so on the day it said it would, which was one day before the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The Soviets quickly occupied Manchuria, the southern half of Sakhalin Island, the Kuriles Islands, and northern Korea. They turned Manchuria over to the Chinese communists. Korea was divided along the 38th parallel. Communist Korea was armed to the teeth but American forces had largely evacuated South Korea. The North Korean communist supremo, Kim Il-Sung, who had actually spent most of World War II in Khabarovsk, Siberia, pestered both Stalin and Mao Zedong to let him invade South Korea and finally was given the go ahead, though the Chinese were not enthused. The attack on South Korea began on June 1950. During a Soviet boycott of the UN Security Council because of its non-recognition of Communist China, the North Korean invasion was declared an aggression. Although the war was mainly carried on by the United States, it was officially an UN operation and troops from many countries participated. The communists reduced the South Koreans and the Americans to the Pusan perimeter, a quadrangle of land in southeastern Korea that was gradually stabilized by injecting enough American troops to match the communist forces. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the commander of all USA forces in the Far East, ordered the landing at Incheon, west of Seoul, which pulled the rug from under the invading Korean armies. MacArthur, who was always a self-admitted glory-hound, diverted forces to liberate Seoul and then casually ordered the invasion of North Korea along two fronts: north towards the Yalu river frontier with China and north east towards the Chosin reservoir, and both dangerously overstretched and unprepared for winter. MacArthur’s arrogance had never before been humbled and he was certain that he had won the war, a sentiment that his military minions echoed. He liked to pride himself on his privileged knowledge of the "oriental mentality".
(1) MacArthur’s discomfiture in Korea
The Chinese had warned the Americans to steer clear of Manchuria. It was only a small vanguard force that actually reached the Yalu river, where it celebrated by pissing into it. It is impossible to know whether the Chinese would have been mollified if they had received American assurances of some sort or whether they intended invading under any circumstances, but invade they did in surreptitious and interminable waves of massed soldiery in quilted winter uniforms armed with Soviet standard-issue machine guns. The Allied advance northwards was ambushed at a place called Unsan. This was possible because the Chinese at first infiltrated rather than attacked massively. But even when their presence in Korea was becoming irrefutable, MacArthur chose to disregard the incoming intelligence. The force that arrived at Chosin was commanded by Gen. Ned Almond, a MacArthur unconditional who felt he was under-ranked because he had commanded a Black division during the Italian campaign, an experience which exacerbated his already ingrained racism. Under pressure from MacArthur, Almond wanted to press ahead from Chosin, but the Marine division under Gen. Oliver Prince Smith, who outranked Almond but whose force was part of Almond’s command, assumed a defensive position and was intact and ready to retreat in good order when the Chinese unleashed a large-scale attack (November-December 1950). The entire Allied front was forced by the Chinese and the reformed North Koreans to backtrack to a line south of Seoul. MacArthur had been making claims of imminent victory, but now that he saw the Allied situation deteriorating he began speaking out of order: blaming Washington for lack of support and demanding an attack on China itself. It wasn’t MacArthur who first mentioned the use of atomic weapons, but he strongly concurred. When Gen. Walton Walker, the nominally supreme land commander in Korea-MacArthur did not like him and gave him little leeway in planning-was killed in an accident, he was replaced by Gen. Matthew Ridgway, under whose command the front was stabilized and the Allies started advancing again, eventually to the to the line which still separates the Stalinist-type North Korean state and the southern Republic of Korea, which for a long time was paranoid about North Korea and draconian to its own dissidents. MacArthur’s disrespect for the authority of the president was so palpable that Truman relieved him as supreme allied commander in Korea in April 1951 and named Ridgway to substitute him. MacArthur returned to a big hero’s welcome in America, but under questioning in Congress he had few arguments to justify his mistakes in Korea. Militarily, he is most admired for the Incheon landing, which itself is blemished by his orders to Almond to give Seoul priority over trapping the entire North Korean army in retreat. The Berlin Blockade and the Korean war-the latter lasted until a truce was signed in Panmunjon in July 1953-demonstrated that neither the United States nor the USSR were disposed to be drawn lightly into war. But the hostility between the two countries, while Stalin lived, was unmitigated. The situation did not improve that much after Stalin died and was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev. But the emphasis was now on words, as when Khrushchev said of capitalism that "we will bury you", which the American press interpreted as killing first and burying afterwards, but probably meant that in the Marxist logic of history communists would be around to bury capitalists after the exhaustion of their economic system. It turned out to be the other way around.
To counter the open or insidious spread of communism, containment was the obvious American Cold War strategy because the world was mostly with America. Tito's non-alignment movement had many immediate co-sponsors, but these-notably Nasser of Egypt, Nehru of India, and Sukarno of Indonesia-were not buying into communism. Marxist ideological absolutism, extreme political tyranny, and especially the legal abolition of property rights did not constitute a doctrinal triad that would sway, not just ruling classes anywhere, but even the masses, even when they toiled and were brutalized by ruling classes. Communism was not a political choice with a "natural" appeal. Peasants might have been exploited in much of the non-communist world but most anywhere they could be as superstitious and as benighted as they wished and they could own with full rights a large work-animal or a shanty, if they could afford them, and even if they couldn't, they could still believe that some time they would be able to. Shanty-owners in poor countries are considered landlords and in Third World cities there normally exists a snappy trade in the sale and rental of shanties, usually without land deeds. But communism was aggressive. It recruited aggressively. It appealed to political and moral consciences. It subverted when and where it could. That it couldn't subvert India was evidence of how unappealing it was. But communist subversion did not make ruling easy. It made for instability. It had to be contained. Each country could by itself probably do a good job of containing communism. But behind the individual communist movements there was the power, first, of the USSR, and then, of China; and America was the only capitalist power capable of standing up world-wide to empires that did not accept capitalist rules of behavior, such as keeping macro-economic balances, sustaining the value of currencies, etc., because they had little respect for individual human life. In a command economy, if supply did not meet demand, rationing was decreed. Investments did go not where they might be more profitable, but where the government decreed they should, regardless of consequences. Perhaps the two greatest abuses of the command economy were Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture and Mao’s Great Leap Forward, both deadly failures. The international value of currencies was set at fixed rates by communist bureaucrats and modified according to circumstances. It did not much matter because people were not going anywhere. Inflation was kept under control by keeping wages at appropriate levels. The USA had to take on the role of sustaining an informal world empire. Containment was the strategy for a super-power that had world imperialism thrust upon it. But containment had as a corollary the "theory of falling dominoes", which made guns nearly unavoidable.
Domino Theory consisted in the reasoning that if you allow communists to gain power in one country they are sure to do so in the next one geographically and so on until the American informal empire was undermined and the world had turned completely Soviet red. It is not clear how the theory arose. Some trace it to the Truman doctrine, but this makes no sense if only because of the fact that of Greece's four land neighbors three were already communist and the other one was Turkey, which was not likely to accept Soviet dictates at any time. The takeover in Czechoslovakia was not accompanied by any further communist territorial gains in Europe. The Korean War was naked aggression and it was contained. Communists could no more have annexed South Korea by other means than they could really deify Kim Il Sung. American informal imperialism, precisely because it was not the T-rex type of imperialism that the USSR preferred, relied on regional alliances. NATO was the first of these alliances. The rock-solid bilateral USA-UK alliance might have a longer history, but NATO has been the most successful multinational alliance in history. As Finland's independence was the USSR's unspoken tribute to capitalism, so the Warsaw Pact was Soviet imperialism's recognition of the efficiency of American strategic leadership. Unlike what it might seem, Warsaw was not, like East Germany in respect to Federal Germany, an immediate response to NATO but a belated realization that it did not look good that the USA had allies in Europe whereas the USSR had satellites. NATO was supposed to be the prototype for other regional alliances that America sponsored. Even though it started under president Truman, containment was such a consensual American response that its greatest exponent was the Republican John Foster Dulles, secretary of state during most of president Dwight D. Eisenhower's two presidential terms. Dulles was also the begetter of another foreign-policy truism that when first enunciated sounded terribly risky. This was "brinkmanship", which in essence meant that America was disposed to go the distance (massive retaliation) to contain the USSR but that it would try to keep well short of nuclear war. Brinkmanship was the forerunner of MAD (mutually assured destruction). Dulles was famous as a traveling secretary of state. Before he had been named ambassador at large by Truman, in which capacity he negotiated the peace treaty with Japan. This was important because Japan had renounced war and America was given military bases in perpetuity on Japanese territory.
If American informal imperialism was to work against Soviet Korea-type militarist imperialism, it would have to count with the cooperation of its allies all over the world. In his travels Dulles tried to replicate NATO. But this was a hard act to accomplish because NATO was such a real, well-engineered war machine that you were not likely to build anything like it anywhere else. NATO had an unified command structure and only France under de Gaulle contested America's right to preside it as a matter of course. With the rise of communist China, South East Asia seemed to be at risk. In the past, when China was a real empire, that region was known as Nanyang and was considered tributary to Chinese dynasties. The Philippines, for example, which is said to have Spanish (weak) and American (strong) cultural influences, was subject to Chinese ethnic and cultural penetration centuries before an European ship hove in sight. One of the largest permanent exhibitions of Chinese art in the superb Shanghai museum of art, was donated by a Filipino of Chinese ancestry. Dulles prodded friendly governments into establishing SEATO (South East Asia Treaty Organization) in September 1954. The members of SEATO were Australia, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the USA. Pakistan's presence in it was ambiguous. The country then consisted of western Pakistan (west of India) and eastern Pakistan (almost entirely inside east India) and its two sides didn't get along. Once France opted out of Indochina, it had no business being in SEATO. Australia and New Zealand weren't involved, and did not want to be involved, in South East Asian affairs. They were also, especially New Zealand, very far away, although the SEATO treaty had a rider about the Pacific ocean that made New Zealand's participation less irrelevant. SEATO's legacy was the American commitment to Vietnam.
In the Middle East, Israel was already a firm American ally, but it hadn't yet the military power, including nuclear bombs, that it has today, so Dulles sponsored the Baghdad Pact, which comprised Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and the UK (1955). Pakistan's simultaneous presence in two American-backed alliances is proof positive that Islam was not militantly anti-American and that the phenomenon of Islamic (as distinct from Arabic) anti-Americanism is of recent origin. Considering its problems as an unified nation, Pakistan was overcommitted. Also, despite the superficial modeling after NATO, the Baghdad Pact, like SEATO, did not have an unified command. A few years after the Baghdad Pact was signed, the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown and its king, Faisal II, a Hashemite cousin of Hussein of Jordan, was killed (1958). Iraq went radical but not communist. It had been a reluctant party to an alliance sponsored by the USA, Israel's main ally, and Israel was considered by Iraqis as evil incarnate. The political stability just wasn’t there but Americans did not perceive this. With his good instinct for political survival, Hussein had good reasons not to join the Baghdad Pact. Self-evidently, "Baghdad Pact" was now a misnomer. The alliance was renamed the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and was headquartered in Ankara, capital of Turkey, which was a member of NATO, and CENTO was never a Turkish priority. Dulles' strategy of having a chain of alliances from Turkey to New Zealand was definitely not an workable goal. CENTO was not operative. Turks and Iranians were not about cede anything to each other, much less military rankings, which most Europeans had no problems with vis à vis America. Pakistan split into Pakistan proper and Bangladesh. CENTO hobbled on until Iran went theocratic.
One of the fundamentals of the Baghdad Pact and especially of SEATO was Domino theory. After de-colonization, there were "socialist" states springing up here and there all over the "Third World", the phrase that underdeveloped countries chose for themselves suggestive of an international non-aligned position. When "socialist" Third World states called on the USSR, they were heard and provided with weapons and some aid. But this was as threatening to America as bilharzia or the tsetse fly. Besides, these "socialist" countries did not even follow a domino pattern, just the opposite. When Somalia went "socialist" it tried to take the Ogaden from Ethiopia. When Ethiopia then went "socialist" the USSR changed sides and, through the Cubans, helped the Ethiopians kick the Somalis out of the Ogaden. Hardly falling dominoes! This flip-flop, incidentally, provides a good measure of how irrelevant were ideological considerations in the "Marxist" alliances that the USSR made in the Third World. In the probing light of historical analysis, aggressive Soviet foreign policy and the left-inclined Third World, once so seemingly chummy, were merely concomitant phenomena through their inclusion in over-all Cold War patterns. The only potentially "domino country" that really got total, unconditional Soviet support was Cuba and that was because it was next to the USA and Fidel Castro seemed to understand the baffling intricacies of Marxism-Leninism, which was not the case at all because Marxism and economic imperialism are antagonistic doctrines. Latin Americans were taken with Castro and there was a chance among them of a sequence of falling dominoes. But Castro got where he did by feigning and when communists and fellow travelers in Venezuela tried imitating his revolution they put on such a sorry show that even Castro had to dismiss them as bunglers. They acted like burglars telling the beat cop which house they were going to break into that night. Arnaldo Ochoa, the dashing Cuban general who reported to Castro on Venezuelan would-be guerrillas, was later executed on charges of drug-smuggling. They seemed unlikely but since the drugs would end up in America’s streets Ochoa might have thought he was doing his revolutionary "duty". He is supposed to have shouted: either "Long live Castro" or Long live the Revolution" on the day of his execution by firing squad. Angola and Mozambique went "socialist" at the same time, but they were both ex-Portuguese colonies and were physically separated by Zambia and Zimbabwe. In this case it was as if a falling domino did not make its neighbor tumble but a domino two pieces away. The disintegration of the Baghdad Pact, first with the defection of Iraq and then with the overthrow of the Shah, produced nothing like falling dominoes: whereas Iraq became secular and socialist, Iran turned to Muslim fundamentalism. Why didn't domino theory work in general? Ruling and middle classes all over the world identified with America, which offers an adaptable economic pattern or paradigm. Economic liberalism is easily accepted, because it is a conservative doctrine that respects property rights. Aside from this basic appeal, it is more often paid lip service than actually applied. It has always been opposed by bureaucracies. On the whole bureaucracies are not loved. Bureaucracies, behind which privilege usually lurks, are inefficient. But despite deficient governance, what the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called the "soft state"-brutal when making lahti charges but lenient at collecting taxes from the rich-it was perfectly capable of disarming internal communist subversion.
(2) The American informal empire in Latin America
American informal imperialism was at its most efficient in Latin America. During the Cold War the world over outside of Latin America, the USA lost three countries to communism in the former Indochina in part because of the flawed Domino theory and its mishandling of South Vietnam. Communist China cannot be considered an American failure, for the USA had no control over the forces that were at odds in that country. China was simply too big for American imperialism to keep in line. Latin America was, in general, less backward than the rest of the underdeveloped world and more politically sophisticated. That the American informal world empire lost only Cuba to communism in Latin America can be considered a remarkable achievement. So how did America maintain its Western Hemisphere empire with only a minimum of military intervention? The Monroe Doctrine (1823) was a display of cheeky bravado. The USA did not have the means to prevent European intervention over such a vast territory. At the time of its enunciation, South America had not been fully emancipated from Spain and America had not done anything significant to make it happen, so president Monroe was attributing to his country an international authority and prevalence it did not merit or have. Bolivar’s convocation of a Pan-American congress in Panamá, which did take place (1826) but made few waves, was in a way his feeble answer to Monroe’s bluff. As America developed and Latin America stagnated, with the exceptions of Argentina and Uruguay, at least in per capita income, it became habitual for America to intervene in Central America and the Caribbean. The greatest American military operation in the Caribbean had been directed not at a Caribbean country but at Spain, although this resulted in the formal independence of Cuba from Spain and its informal dependence on America through the Platt Amendment (right of intervention). This was probably welcomed by white Cubans themselves who were afraid of what Afro-Cubans might be capable of, and in effect, Americans, who were witnessing from nearby the collapse of order in Haiti, shared that concern. The USA intervened in Cuba from 1906 to 1909 practically at the instigation of rival Cuban politicians. In 1912, there was an uprising of blacks in eastern Cuba that the government repressed with rigor before the USA, which had already landed troops in Cuba, could proceed to a full occupation of the island. Some of the American interventions in the Caribbean, such as the occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and of the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, were humanitarian or political, but the separation of Panamá from Colombia in 1903 and the occupation of Nicaragua (1912-1933) were strategic or economic. The Monroe doctrine had nothing to do with these interventions, except maybe obliquely in the case of Nicaragua, whose sovereignty was curtailed to prevent negotiations for a possible British alternative to the Panamá canal. The USA never had to invoke it, except diplomatically during the brief French occupation of México, and it was a Latin American country, Venezuela, who appealed to it on two occasions: when Britain despoiled it of a large part of the Guayana territory and when it was blockaded by creditor nations, at which point America said that the Monroe doctrine did not apply to debts. American intervention in the Dominican Republic was a public order operation. Four years after the American evacuation (1930), Rafael Trujillo, a megalomaniacal general who had risen in the ranks under American auspices, usurped power and ruled until he was assassinated in 1961. Although himself of part-African descent, in 1937 he ordered the killing of over 15,000 Haitians who had settled on border areas of the Dominican Republic. His son, Ramfis, who was probably half-insane, came back from a Paris playboy holiday and killed dozens of suspects in his father’s murder, after which he left the country and died in Spain at 40 in a car crash.
The Good Neighbor policy of president Franklin Roosevelt was an American commitment to refrain from intervening in the Caribbean. It had been Roosevelt, as under-secretary of the navy (1913-1917) under president Wilson, who instigated the occupation of Haiti and tried to improve living conditions there and establish the basis for political stability. Of more propaganda value was the abrogation of the Platt amendment even if this did not diminish American economic influence on Cuba. The USA had also obtained rights to Guantánamo bay and surrounding lands, in eastern Cuba, but those were not renounced. When Fidel Castro many years later demanded the return of Guantánamo, the USA practically claimed that it was inalienable American territory. But when president George H. Bush used Guantánamo as a concentration camp for suspected terrorists, he did so because it was not legally American territory. Before World War II, Latin America was not likely to go Bolshevik or to challenge American economic imperialism, which was real enough for the USA invested in Latin America not to develop its economies but to feed its own with cheap and essential raw materials. But after World War II, with the emergence of the USSR as a world rival of the USA, things in Latin America might have changed from business-as-usual. In the Atlantic Charter and later in the charter of the United Nations (UN), there were proclamations about a new world of political freedom and economic progress. They were not entirely insincere, but certainly not for the short term, and in Latin America the short-term view was bleak: impoverished masses, peasantry exploited to the bone, racial and cultural discriminations, in brief, a huge hacienda ready for sowing by revolutionary seeds. These were not inexistent before the war, thought they were hard to plant, but there had been a war in which Nazism, Fascism, and militarism were defeated and these exploits echoed globally. In Latin America too, containment had to work for the American informal world empire. The USA had a ready-made alliance, which was the Rio Treaty (1947). But the Rio Treaty was about external military aggression and it didn't do an informal empire much good, so the Organization of American States (OAS) was founded to deal with states that would have strayed from the straight and narrow path of American supremacy (1948). Leftists were so aware of the ultimate purpose of the OAS that when it was constituted at the Pan American Conference in Bogotá, Colombia, they staged some of the most savage riots ever seen in a Latin American capital (1949). The occasion for them was provided by the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, a popular politician though not a communist. Fidel Castro was among the rabble rousers in Bogotá. But in general deviations from the historical norm in Latin America were exceptional.
In dealing with Latin America it is useful and valid to distinguish between primary and secondary exploiters. No Marxist in his right mind would accept such a distinction. For communists, who naturally looked to the USSR, USA economic imperialism was the primary exploiter of Latin America and the main cause of its economic backwardness. But Latin American republics had their own local exploiters, its economic elites with its subordinate middle-class minions, though it was from the middle classes also that revolutionary leaders emerged, notably Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara. With their heads full of Cominterm myths, Marxists were inclined to distinguish between local capitalists and foreign imperialists, but there was no such distinction. On the "quality" of the exploitation there is no denying that the local exploiters were harsher on the exploited than the imperialist exploiters, mainly because foreigners did not have the social attitudes that centuries of history had instilled in the ruling elites. On the "quantitative" side, an anti-imperialist such as the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, author of perhaps the biggest political best-seller in Latin American history, The open veins of Latin America (first published in 1971), had no doubts that it was economic imperialism that made the most profits. But wasn’t this just a case of the chicken and the egg? In colonial times, while the silver mines of Potosí lasted, Spain certainly was squeezing more out of Latin America than what the Creole elites were making from their encomiendas and latifundia. But once that source was exhausted, the primary exploiters were the local elites. Brazil never produced precious metals in large quantities and there the exploitation of slaves benefited mainly the local ruling class. That this pattern was also valid for the rest of Latin America, can be shown simply by weight of numbers and the "rate of exploitation". There were many more local capitalists-call them "feudal barons" or what you will-than foreign companies in Latin America. American corporations became interested in the exploitation of Latin America when copper was found in Chile and Perú and oil in Venezuela. The United Fruit company resulted from a merger in 1899 between the banana plantations in Costa Rica of the American entrepreneur Minor C. Keith and the Boston Fruit Company. Keith’s holdings were inherited from his uncle, Henry Meiggs, who obtained land rights in exchange for the construction of a railroad from the Caribbean coast to the capital San José. Both landowners had decades of experience in the business. United Fruit fed mass demand in America fueled by the company itself, called the "Bananera" in Latin America. The uplands of Costa Rica, which constitute more than half the size of the country, were always in the hands of locals, who profited from the cultivation and sale of coffee beans. The same on a larger scale was true of Colombia. Here was a clear convergence of interests between local and foreign exploiters, which was of the essence in Post-War containment policy. Who made more profits as between the Bananera and the coffee growers? In Colombia, coffee-growing certainly weighed much more than banana-cultivation in the national product. In Costa Rica, the scale was more evenly weighed, yet this country has never suffered from the social strife, racism, and rural subversion that characterizes contemporary Colombian history. In Chile, the foreign exploitation of copper mines certainly did not disadvantage local capitalism, although, as we shall, Chile was the first country in the world that challenged informal American imperialism in a fully democratic manner. Whatever foreign exploiters derived from Perú, could not match, even in purely Marxist calculations about the source of value (human labor), what local exploiters obtained from the vast mass of the downtrodden, un-enfranchised Amerindian population. In Bolivia, there was even the case of an economy where mineral resources, usually coveted by American imperialism, were in the hands of the local Patiño family. Say what you will, the Marxist political distinction between the big foreign and the collaborative and minor local exploiters is untenable. They were essentially the same and the primary exploiters were locals. It was the complicity of local capitalism with international capitalism that made containment successful in Latin America, whose backwardness is more the making of inept and corrupt local governance than of economic imperialism, though the subject is complex and cannot be fully encompassed in a general history of the world.
In the Post-War, it was highly developed Argentina which tried to assert itself within the informal American world empire, but we stress "within" because it did not do it by espousing anything remotely resembling communism. In 1946, despite opposition from sectors of the armed forces, Ex-colonel Juan Domingo Perón was elected president on a populist and ultra-nationalist platform. Eva Duarte, his wife, better known as Evita, a former cabaret singer, was, like her husband, a fiery orator, and became the darling of the working masses (the "descamisados" or shirtless). Perón's rule grew increasingly dictatorial and Post-War economic progress was short-lived as investments from Britain dried up and American capital preferred either more stable (Australia) or more politically sensitive (Japan and Korea) environments. Evita died in 1952. Perón got into a scrap with the Catholic Church and antagonized the conservative layers of Argentine society. His mobs ransacked the opposition newspaper La Prensa. In 1955, he was overthrown by the military, which was not a popular move. Gen. Pedro Eugenio Aramburu (1955-1958) adopted a hard stance against "Peronism"-he was later assassinated by Peronists-mitigated by successive governments, especially that of Arturo Frondizi (1958-1962), but there did not seem to be a possibility of Perón's return until in 1969 there was a popular uprising, known as the Cordobazo (because of Córdoba, the central Argentine city where it began), which spawned a group of violent subversive movements, some to the extreme left, others Peronist, including extreme rightists. The military had undercut Frondizi and named two successive placemen until they formed a junta in 1966 from which in the following years emerged various weak military "strongmen". In 1973 they allowed a series of elections which eventually resulted in Perón's return to power (1974) on the law-and-order platform adopted by his Justicialist Party. Perón died the following year and was succeeded by his beautiful but politically inept widow, Isabel Perón, who ruled with an astrologer by her side. In the balance, what Perón had originally done was to espouse a kind of syndicalism, which is an ambiguously leftist trend, and he was hit by international financial flows. Argentina never really mounted much of a challenge to American imperialism.
And neither did Colombian guerrillas even though armed social conflict in that country has being going on longer than anywhere else in the world. By 1950, Colombia had fallen into a ferocious social war which degenerated into banditry, especially under the rule of the autocratic Conservative Laureano Gómez, who was overthrown in 1953 by Gen. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. The military regime at first pacified the country but when Rojas Pinilla, who did not emerge from the European-descended Colombian elite, tightened the screws, Liberals and Conservatives, whose leaders were definitely elitesque, allied to oust him in 1957. A system by which Liberals and Conservatives alternated in power was designed in 1958. This in practice meant not doing anything to upset the already inequitable social order. When the "alternability" agreement ceased, Colombia was facing a serious guerrilla problem on the left and it was turning into a prime manufacturer and exporter of cocaine. During the presidency of Belisario Betancur Cuartas (1982-1986), the power of the guerrillas to disrupt was sensationally demonstrated when they sequestered the Colombian supreme court (1985), half of whose members died in a rescue operation. Negotiations resulted in the legalization of guerrilla groups and their participation in national elections, but this process was undermined when in 1987 rightists assassinated the leading leftist politician, Jaime Pardo Leal, resulting in an exacerbation of guerrilla activity, especially the FARC, with roots in the period of violence back in the 1950s. Under Virgilio Barco Vargas (1986-1990), the two so-called drug cartels, those of the cities of Medellín and Cali, became extremely aggressive. Violence reached a pinnacle during 1989 and in the following year three presidential candidates were assassinated. The fight against the drug lords was carried on by Cesar Gaviria Trujillo (1990-1994) resulting in the death of Pedro Escobar, the most notorious of them all, boss of the Medellín cartel. Ernesto Samper Pisano (1994-1998), a Liberal, won his term despite accusations by his conservative rival, Andres Pastrana, that he had received drug money in his campaign. Pastrana was elected in 1998. Pastrana's government broke the power of the Cali cartel, but he chose a conciliatory policy with the guerrillas which backfired when these interpreted the government's gesture as weakness. The drug trade is still alive in Colombia. And particularly, the successive governments, Liberal and Conservative alike, have been unable to defeat the leftist guerrillas, who do not bother to dissimulate resemblances to Maoism and the Khmer Rouge. On the other hand, the extreme right organized a secret terrorist organization connived at by the army and given to periodic massacres in areas of the country where leftist radicalism is prevalent. Violence in Colombia has become part of everyday life although the cities are to some extent insulated from it and the national economy carries on, though not brilliantly. It is difficult to estimate the number of victims that political violence and associated banditry in Colombia have produced over the decades since they began, but the figure must be in the hundreds of thousands. Under president Alvaro Uribe (first elected in 2002), ardently pro-USA, the rightist death squads accepted a government armistice, but the main leftist guerrilla, FARC, have become the target of the military and the possibility of a negotiated truce has been discarded.
Even Guatemala, which is often said to have defied American imperialism, did no such thing. Guatemalan history has been characterized by long periods of one-man rule and by the blatant neglect and even persecution of the Amerindian population, which, after Bolivia and Perú (in that order), represents the highest proportion (44%) of the total population among all Latin American countries. Following a period of political uncertainty, Manuel Estrada Cabrera assumed the presidency in 1898 and stayed in power until 1920. It was Estrada who first granted concessions to United Fruit. After Estrada and another longish round of brief, unstable presidencies, Gen. Jorge Ubico emerged as dictator (1931-1944) and took a patronizing attitude towards Amerindians, whose grievances were beginning to be heard. Ubico would personally visit villages (sometimes on a motorcycle), listen to Amerindian complaints, and later affirm that he had taken measures to correct them; but Guatemala remained divided in three parts: an infinitesimal class of large landowners; city-dwellers who often thought of themselves as "middle class" simply because they were not peasants; and the sea of non-Spanish speaking Amerindian peasants. This tri-partite division started having political repercussions when upheavals in Guatemala City brought the leftist Juan Jose Arévalo to power (1944-1951). He inaugurated a period of frantic official activity involving agrarian reform. Arévalo was very anti-American as he had made plain in a Latin American best-seller called the The Sardine and the Shark, the latter being of course "American imperialism". Through free elections, Arévalo was succeeded by Gen. Jacobo Árbenz (1951-1954), who had the support of communists within and outside Guatemala and who carried on vigorously the reformist program of Arévalo. Landowners, particularly United Fruit, were alarmed and much of the army was disaffected or bribed.
It was in Guatemala that American informal imperialism in Latin America, in this case CIA intervention sanctioned by president Eisenhower less than baring its teeth showed one fang and had the rest of Latin America show another. (When Cuba really got out of line by accepting Soviet missiles, American informal imperialism did bare all its teeth, as it did when the Dominican Republic was drifting leftwards in 1965. ) In 1954, military dictatorial governments were on the rise in Latin America-Manuel Odría in Perú and Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in Colombia-and none was as pro-USA as that of Marcos Perez Jimenez (1950-1958) in Venezuela, although there is no evidence that his rise to power was specifically sponsored by Washington. Prodded by the Eisenhower administration, Venezuela hosted an extraordinary OAS assembly in Caracas, which was practically rehearsed to condemn the Árbenz government. This was the "legal" façade that the USA, flush with its recent overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1953), used to mount a coup against Árbenz. Gen. Carlos Castillo Armas, who had failed in a previous coup attempt against Arévalo, was provided with some planes which flew over Guatemala city, dropped some bombs, and provoked the resignation of Árbenz. Obviously, Árbenz could not have been overthrown by Castillo Armas if there had not been the internal pro-American-imperialism opposition in Guatemala. Castillo Armas reversed all previous reforms and ruled highhandedly with the full blessing of Washington until he was assassinated by a soldier in still unclear circumstances (1957). After his coup, it was evident that USA was not going to tolerate disaffection in Central America and that it would do so with the backing of the ruling classes. The only exception to this norm was to be Nicaragua in 1979. Since the peasantry in Central America, particularly in Guatemala itself and in El Salvador, were not being showered with political concessions, rural unrest resulted in that in the 1960s these countries became engaged in civil wars, which lasted until the 1990s and in all left around 300,000 dead, mostly killed by the military armed and advised by the USA. This was the legacy of the CIA’s "successful" operation in Guatemala. But containment worked in the sense that "elections" always tilted towards the right, another demonstration that informal imperialism was possible because it converged with local economic interests. There has been a troublesome consequence for America’s support for reactionary regimes in Central America and it is the flood of illegal immigrants from that area that today is a political problem with no easy solution. President George W. Bush proposed an amnesty so extensive and generous that he had to know his own party would reject it. Dealing with illegals has devolved on a patchwork of state and municipal laws, many of them draconian, more often unworkable because American business is addicted to cheap Latino labor.
The American informal empire was also abetted by British colonialism in the Americas, which lasted until the independence of Belize in 1982. Some islands in the Caribbean remain British, but that is because either they’re too small or they don’t want independence. Guyana, a British dependency whose population was half Indian-descended and half of African origin, certainly wanted independence. Great Britain allowed elections which were won by the leftist Indo-Guyanese leader Cheddi Jagan. Guyana was ostensibly granted self-rule in 1961. On the grounds of ethnic incompatibilities, the British annulled the election and, after various unsuccessful tries, proportional representation gave an electoral majority to the black leader Forbes Burnham (1964). At that point, Great Britain negotiated and independence was granted in 1966. Burnham turned out to be not only more leftist than Jagan, but dictatorial and incompetent as well. When he died in 1985, the economy was a shambles. Burnham was succeeded by Desmond Hoyt, another black politician. In 1992, after winning freely once again, Cheddi Jagan became president. Not long after his death in 1997, his wife, Janet Jagan, originally American and a dentist by profession, was elected president, but resigned in 1999 because of the infirmities of age. She was succeeded by Bharrat Jagdeo. Probably to foil Venezuelan territorial claims on former British Guiana (see footnote 4), the Guyanese government allowed the establishment of a colony of California cultists, followers of a millennialist preacher named Jim Jones, near the Venezuelan border. In 1978, when an American congressional delegation went to investigate Jonestown, after a brief shooting spree over 900 persons committed suicide, or were forced to, with cyanide-laced Flavorade.
Poverty-stricken Bolivia tried to have a go at a revolution of sorts, but Bolivia, a large but lightly populated land-bound country, could not constitute a credible challenge to American imperialism. A National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) mobilized all popular forces and in a short civil war in which the army was practically annihilated it came to power in 1952 under the leadership of Víctor Paz Estenssoro. The revolutionary government nationalized the tin mines and enfranchised the mass of the population (today still 70% Amerindian), but it was ostracized for its radicalism by the rest of Latin America (not to mention the USA) and soon the revolution was having inflationary and other economic problems. Under the more moderate Hernan Siles Suazo, the economic situation improved, but the MNR was still distrusted by Bolivian conservatives and when Paz Estenssoro, who succeeded Siles, attempted to be elected a third time he was overthrown by the reconstituted military (1964). "Che" Guevara was not made for desk jobs and he and Castro were so comradely that they did not want even to think of a breakdown in their revolutionary friendship. After being president of the National Bank of Cuba, where Guevara signed new issue with the nickname "Che"-roughly, "hey, brother"-he decided to go on a self-assigned world revolutionary mission. Congo was in its birth pangs. There Guevara met a young Patrice Kabyla, but he did find not find in him any revolutionary ardor. Africa was definitely not ripe. Guevara went clandestinely to Bolivia (1967) where he hoped to form a revolutionary base like the one Castro made in the Cuban mountains but this time over the entire Andes. He was deluded and Bolivian peasants, who by then were having an impact on local politics, turned him in.
Huge Brazil had a brief swerve to the left. When civilian strongman Getulio Vargas, who had been president since 1951, was told by the military to step down he went and shot himself and left a suicide note that said: "Serenely, I take my first step on the road to eternity and I leave life to enter history." A more dramatic suicide "note" was that of the Cuban politician Raul Chibás who killed himself when he was denouncing over the radio government corruption (1951). He wanted his listeners to hear the shot but he was cut off by the program coordinator who thought he had finished his speech. In Brazil, the decade until 1964 was of democracy during which president Juscelino Kubitschek (1955-1961) invested in infrastructure but specially built in record time a new capital for Brazil, Brasilia, in the interior of Minas Geraes state. Although Brazil's economic indexes grew, it was under Kubitschek that hyperinflation raised its hydra head as a matter of course in Latin America. Janio Quadros, an honest but eccentric politician from Sao Paulo, was elected president in 1961 and resigned in less than a year to general consternation-no one is sure why exactly he resigned-with the consequence that his successor Joao Goulart, a Vargas protegé and a real leftist, took power. The larger part of the Brazilian army became insubordinate. Goulart had to the support of the army in southern Brazil, but after due consideration he desisted and moved to Uruguay. To date, the last crucial military intervention in Brazilian history was Goulart's overthrow in 1964, which inaugurated a period of military rule until 1985.
In very retrograde Perú, there arose an extremely nationalist government that did not like America and America did not like it. Perú’s contemporary politics are very complicated. Arguably, the most important anti-imperialist movement in Latin America was APRA (Spanish initials of Popular American Revolutionary Alliance), founded in 1924 by Raúl Haya de la Torre, who was hearing the perceptible groaning of the Amerindian masses. APRA is the only Latin American-bred party of which it can be said to have had some international political impact, especially on Bolivian and Caribbean political leaders. Popular restiveness was also perceived by some Peruvian military who, under Col. Luis Sanchez Cerro, took over the government (1930). His assassination by an APRA militant (1933) was to give grounds for further military interventions in Peruvian politics. In 1945, José Luis Bustamante Rivero was elected president with APRA support. This riled the military, or so they claimed when Gen. Manuel Odría, an expert on military plots, took power in 1948. Odría was the mentor of Venezuelan officers who overthrew a constitutional government in 1945. Ironically, the Venezuelan military plotters were allied to an APRA-like Venezuelan party. In 1956, Odría let Manuel Prado, a very old-school conservative, ascend to the presidency. In 1962, when again it seemed as if APRA would have a go at power, Prado did a self-coup by practically inviting the military to knock down the ornate fence in front of the presidential palace at which point Prado raised his arms. Fernando Belaúnde Terry won a run-off election in 1963. In the wake of an oil deal that was denounced as anti-nationalist, Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado instituted military rule once again (1968), but this time it was so socially radical that leftists in Latin America thought they had a Nasser on their side. The military experiment in socialistic nationalism was a failure and in 1975 more conservative military took control. In 1980, Belaúnde Terry was elected anew. Hyper-inflation made the sol worthless and in 1985, finally, an APRA candidate, Alan Garcia Pérez, reached the presidency, much to the regret of most Peruvians, for not only did economic mismanagement continue, but the country was plagued by a Maoist guerrilla called Sendero Luminoso (shining path), led by a fanatical former university professor, Abimael Guzmán, who encouraged indiscriminate killings and was captured in 1992 hiding in a house in a higher-middle-class neighborhood of Lima. A Peruvian of Japanese descent, Alberto Fujimori, pipped the well-liked writer but feckless politician Mario Vargas Llosa (1990). Fujimori controlled the insurgency and introduced economic liberalism but in 1992 he assumed dictatorial powers. After he rigged his re-election in 2000, he was driven from the presidency under accusations of corruption and highhanded police methods. Fujimori was replaced by the caretaker president Valentín Paniagua followed by the Amerindian technocrat Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006). Alan Garcia was re-elected after Toledo.
(3) The coup in Chile
Apart from Cuba, which is a special case, and of the recent instance of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Chile is the country where American imperialism received its most powerful democratic dusting off. In 1938, the Radical Party candidate, Pedro Aguirre Cerda, won the presidency with leftist support. (As in France, "radical" in Chile means at most left of center.) Aguirre was succeeded by another radical with ties to socialists and communists. Juan Antonio Rios (1942-1946) began his term by declaring war on the Axis, although, unlike Brazil, which declared war at the same time and contributed troops to the Italian campaign, Chilean support for the Allies was basically moral. The ascendancy of the Radicals continued with Gabriel Gonzalez Videla (1946-1952), with communist but not socialist support. Despite or because of greater American investments and a growing urban population, the conservatives came to power with the election of former dictator Carlos Ibañez del Campo (1952-1958). They retained the presidency with Jorge Alessandri Rodriguez (1958-1964). Economic prosperity was very inequitably shared. Thus, the stage was set for a confrontation between the Christian Democrats (founded in 1957) and the re-invigorated socialists and communists. The Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei (1964-1970) won a landslide majority. He tried to better social conditions by fractioning landed estates and partial nationalization of the copper mines, although it was not clear exactly how these measures were going to help the poor. Land reform might have, but it required costly investments in infrastructure, which were undertaken only very slowly. What did happen was that a very leftist coalition called Unidad Popular won a plurality and in 1970 carried the socialist Salvador Allende Goosens to the presidency. This was the first time in history that a genuinely revolutionary government, in the sense of openly Marxist, gained power through the ballot box, and without external interference as in Czechoslovakia in 1948. The performance of the economy under the Popular Unity government is a matter of debate, but nationalizations did not increase productivity and external investments ceased. American president Richard Nixon allowed the CIA to conspire practically in the open against Allende. The middle classes in Santiago, the capital, turned against the government and the usually reactionary military staged a textbook coup d'état led by the minister of war, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, about whom Allende had no suspicions. Allende killed himself in the presidential palace (1973). There is no evidence that Pinochet was "inspired" or directly financed by the CIA. Chilean military were fully up to the task of choking communism or, perhaps more properly, socialism, for the Allende presidency was not characterized by the communization of the economy.
Here again, American imperialism and its internal capitalist allies had won the day. Pinochet promptly restored full capitalism and began a national manhunt against any one even suspected of active leftist sympathies. Tens of thousands of Chileans (and many foreign nationals) went to prison; thousands were tortured, assassinated, and disposed of secretly. These crimes have been thoroughly documented and investigated although they have not been punished. As in Spain under Franco, the Pinochet regime brought Chile complete social and political stability. Chileans had nothing better to do than to enrich themselves, which they went about quite nicely, in the rural areas on the basis of some previous social reforms. Under internal and external pressures, Pinochet allowed a plebiscite in which Chileans voted against him (1988). Through fiscal discipline and economic enterprise, which attracted foreign investment, the economy was flourishing when Pinochet in 1989 allowed free elections with the proviso that he remain head of the armed forces for eight more years. The official candidate lost to the Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin Azocar. With Chile a fully functioning democracy, Pinochet travelled to London and got the surprise of his life when he was arrested for an extradition trial on charges of violating the human rights of some Spanish citizens in Chile during the military regime, brought before an English tribunal by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón. Pinochet was detained and held under house arrest while the case moved through British courts (1998-2000). He was released for health reasons, which was a cover for Britain to extricate itself from a difficult situation, although the precedent of arresting former heads of state for crimes committed under their rule was securely established and was applied later in the arrest and trial of the ultra-nationalist Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic accused of genocide. Pinochet was interrogated by prosecutors in his own country, but the supreme court said he was suffering from "mild senility" and so could not be put on trial. When he died in 2006, he was still being interrogated by prosecutors in Chile. In late November of 2004, a government report made clear that the Chilean government had regularly applied terror and torture from 1973 to 1989.
Further evidence that informal American imperialism worked without the need of American intervention is what happened during the 1970s in the rest of the South American Southern Cone countries (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay). Paraguay is also part of the Southern Cone, but this small country was under the rule of strongman Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, who looked like a storm trooper, from 1954 to 1989 and in the agitated democracy that followed communists have played no role whatever. Perhaps because it was in politically volatile Latin America or because its government, as others in that region, had statized the economy and was top-heavy, Uruguay was not receiving foreign investments to compensate for dropping exports, a negative balance of payments, and the bane of inflation. In 1951 it adopted a collegiate presidency. This was not the best method for coping with the crisis that was brewing and exploded in the 1960s, during which a much disliked middle-class subversive movement known as Tupamaros (from Tupac Amaru, the Peruvian Inca rebel) created some social turbulence. In 1967, the plural presidency was abolished and a sequence of presidents culminated with the authoritarian Jose M. Bordabery. In 1976, the generals placed Aparicio Mendez as a façade for hard, repressive rule. But, as in neighboring giants Brazil and Argentina, the military were not very competent administrators and their authority waning they handed power over to Julio Maria Sanguinetti (1985-1990). Uruguay has been democratic and stable since.
In Argentina after Perón’s widow, Isabel, the social situation was deteriorating and the military returned to power in 1976 naming Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla as president. Argentine generals had noticed the efficiently murderous way with which Pinochet had dealt with leftists. They liked the idea and under Videla the guerra sucia (dirty war) to eliminate leftist opposition by torture and killing got under way. Some 14,000 to 30,000 persons are believed to have been its victims. Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a sculptor, became the most outspoken enemy of the dirty war for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980. As the dirty war wound down, then president Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri ordered the invasion of the Falklands (Malvinas) and South Georgia (1982), which was defeated by a large British task force. The Falklands war lasted from April to June 1982. Losses were not high on either side, but the UK, then under prime minister Margaret Thatcher, managed to achieve over-all military superiority, in part with American support. Galtieri resigned and was succeeded by two military interim presidents. Raul Alfonsín, elected president in 1983, initiated legal actions against the military who carried out the dirty war, including former presidents, but mostly they concluded with amnesties and pardons. Alfonsín's economic program was a failure and in 1989, Carlos Saúl Menem, a Justicialist or Peronist (by then mainly a tag), was elected.
In Brazil, military dictatorship (1964-1985) was harsh though not quite as deadly as in the other Southern Cone countries, and it is generally considered as a period during which Brazil industrialized and developed into one of the largest economies in the world. But no matter how hard the military tried, and they prided in their technocratic approach (much admired in other Latin American countries), every new economic program ended up in three-digit inflation until tired of trying they acceded to a return to democracy. After various stumbles-a new currency (the cruzado) and an almost shamelessly corrupt president, Fernando Collor da Mello-Brazil finally found in Fernando Henrique Cardoso, first elected in 1995, the president who could beat inflation and give Brazil a steadying economic hand. Before becoming president, Cardoso had been a leftist intellectual who wrote, with the Chilean Ernesto Faletto, an influential work titled Dependency and Development in Latin America (1979), whose central lesson was that to go up in politics in Latin America ballots were better than bullets. In 2002, Brazil elected president the hugely popular, left-leaning former unionist Luiz Inacio da Silva, known as Lula. One of his appointments was a black gay composer and singer, Gilberto Gil, as minister of culture.
Another country that chose the revolutionary way was Nicaragua, but it did not do it by voting but through a civil war. The dictatorship of Jose Santos Zelaya (1894-1909) was undermined by American economic interests. According to at least one view of things, Santos Zelaya was overthrown because he was actively promoting a waterway from the Caribbean sea, along the San Juan river to lake Nicaragua, and a short canal-cut to the Pacific ocean. This waterway awakened some British interest, but it would have competed with the Panamá canal, on which Americans were already spending a lot of money and efforts. With puppet president Diego Manuel Chamorro (1921-1923), the USA signed a treaty giving it rights to any canal building in Nicaragua. During the American occupation of Nicaragua, Augusto Cesar Sandino fought a guerrilla war of resistance until he was lured into a trap and assassinated by the American-backed strongman Anastasio Somoza (1934), who ruled until his own assassination in 1956. Nicaragua was virtually inherited by the Somoza family-Anastasio's sons, Luis and Anastasio jr.-but in the 1970s rebellion and violence spread until in 1979 the revolutionary Sandinist movement came to power, openly favorable to Castro and communism. Anastasio jr. was assassinated in Paraguay in 1980. The administrations of president Ronald Reagan organized covert and complex operations to arm the Contras, Nicaraguan anti-Sandinists who could not be suppressed. The US refused to recognize the election of the Sandinist Daniel Ortega Saavedra. In 1990, under harsh economic conditions and continued fighting, Nicaragua held elections which were won by the opposition candidate, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, widow of an anti-Somoza leader. Despite some stumbles, Nicaragua's democracy has stabilized and the Sandinists so far have proved to be a loyal opposition. Daniel Ortega won the presidential election, unimpeachably democratic, in 2007.
Panamá came into existence as an informal American dependency (1903). By the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty the US was ceded forever the use of the land needed for the cutting of the canal, although the land was paid for in 1904. The canal was a pet project of president Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909). Construction was completed in 1914. Sanitation and health conditions improved in Panamá but the politics were unstable and the US intervened on various occasions. Nothing could be allowed to happen in Panamá if it constituted a threat to the canal. The Arias brothers, Arnulfo and Harmodio, and the de la Guardias, Ricardo Adolfo and Ernesto, dominated the Panamanian political scene from the 1930s and into the 1960s. It was Arnulfo who achieved some modifications of the existing canal treaty favoring Panamá. Ricardo Adolfo de la Guardia was imposed by the USA during World War II because of Arnulfo's anti-Allied stance. Arnulfo Arias was making a comeback when the elections were rigged in favor of Marco A. Roble (1964), former chief of the National Guard. There were anti-American riots and a tentative agreement on new negotiations. Arias won the election in 1968 but the National Guard commander, Col. Omar Torrijos Herrera, usurped power. In 1970, he asked for a total re-negotiation of the Panamá Canal treaties. The USA at first refused but in 1974 accepted the principle that the Panamá Canal Zone should be a concession of limited duration. To show how far he was willing to go to obtain the canal, Torrijos visited Cuba in 1976 with pomp and circumstance. But it was basically the conciliatory foreign policy of president Jimmy Carter that led to an agreement in 1977 (ratified by the Senate in 1978) by which the US agreed to hand over the canal in 1999 with the Panamanian engagement to keep it open to all nations under all circumstances. Torrijos was killed in an airplane accident in 1981. After a transitional government, Col. Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno took charge of the country (1983). He ruled dictatorially, canceling elections and persecuting opposition. What was all the more worrying as there were plausible accusations that he was drug-trafficking. Whether Noriega was guilty or not, the US, then under president George Bush, could hardly allow a state to which it was going to transfer so important a possession as the Panamá Canal do whatever it felt like doing and get away with it. An object lesson was necessary and in 1989 25,000 American troops invaded Panamá. The stealth-bomber F-117 Nighthawk was first used in this conflict, but missed its targets. It was later perfected and participated in the Gulf War and the Second Iraqi War. As the casualties on the American side were in the hundreds, Panamá must have put up a struggle, but in a matter of days Noriega sought asylum in the Papal Nuncio's residence. He surrendered in January 1990, was tried in Miami, convicted on the testimony of drug-traffickers, and is due to be released soon though his ultimate status is still undetermined. Guillermo Endara had won an election in 1989, which Noriega had permitted and then ignored. He was sworn in as president as soon as the Americans landed. The National Guard was reconstituted as the Public Force. In 1994, the candidate of Noriega's party, the Partido Revolucionario Democrático (PRD), Ernesto Pérez Balladares, was elected to the presidency, although he swore off any connection with the deposed dictator. Mireya Moscoso Rodriguez, widow of Arnulfo Arias, was elected in 1999. The handover of the canal to Panamá was completed on 31 December of the same year. In 2004, Martin Torrijos, son of the strongman who negotiated the canal-reversion treaty, was elected president of Panamá.
Because of its history, the Latin American country that had more cause not to fall in step with America was México. It did not do so with respect to Cuba. México is the only Latin American country that has not at one point or another broken with the Castro regime. For the rest, it never gave the USA bad dreams, except now with its large illegal diaspora. In early 2008, it was reported that the rate of emigration from México to the USA was larger than its mortality rate. Mexican and other illegals today are under threat of expulsion by immigration authorities in America, but as they are profitable cogs of the American economy enforcement is local and intermittent. Under Miguel Alemán (1946-1952), the official party was renamed the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI). The worst social trauma in Mexican post-war history was the massacre of protesting students by police in 1968 prior to the efficiently hosted Summer Olympics. The "tapado system", which allowed the incumbent president to name his successor, operated smoothly, but the Mexican economy had its ups and downs and the benefits of prosperity, especially in oil-Pemex is the huge state-owned oil company-did not trickle down significantly to the poor, who looked to migration to the USA as the road to a better life. In 1982, the Mexican diplomat Alfonso Garcia Robles was awarded the Nobel Prize (shared with Alva Myrdal of Sweden) for the Treaty of Tlatelolco, banning nuclear weapons from Latin America. By the time of president Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994), an uptight technocrat, the PRI was mired in corruption. The president’s brother, Raúl, was accused and jailed for a political assassination. The rot uncovered deeply discredited the system of PRI-rule. México joined the North American Foreign Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada in 1994. President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (1994-2000) made one-party rule less compelling and the opposition, especially the conservative Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), which had always had some legal room to move in, began to gain ground. At the end of the 20th century the country was beset by various forces: pressure for political change, the threat of drug-lordism allied to police corruption, and peasant rebellion in the south reminiscent of Zapata's movement In 2000, PAN's Vicente Fox was the first non-official candidate to win the presidency of México since the foundation of the PRI. He offered to transform México's political culture top to bottom, but in a review of the Mexican situation in September 2003 Fox had to admit that his efforts at reform were not up to expectations, and indeed in previous legislative elections voters gave a majority to the PRI indicating that this party was hardly a spent force. In 2006, the leftist Andrés López Obrador, who had the public support of president Chávez of Venezuela, was narrowly defeated by Felipe Calderón. Chávez’s tendency to get involved in the internal affairs of other Latin American states has on various occasions had detrimental effects on his favorites.
European-descended Latin Americans are a minority over all. The majority of Latin Americans are pardos or mestizos, people of mixed European, Amerindian, and African ascendancy or roots. If we count pure Afro-Latin Americans, the majority is larger. Amerindians are also a minority. But whites have been historically the vast majority of Latin American rulers. Pardo presidents in Latin America have been very few, which does not make for a good proportion in countries in which pardos are a large majority, such as Nicaragua and Venezuela; or in which Amerindians are the majority, such as Bolivia and Perú. This racial imbalance is usually tuttuted in Latin America itself. But it shouldn’t be because it is as real as American racial discrimination. Brazil’s population of somewhere around 185,000,000 is 47% white. African-Brazilians are 20% of the remaining. Together pardos and blacks constitute 52% of the population. The rest are Japanese and Amerindians. Yet no Brazilian president has been anything but white, and only one black has been head of a ministry. But all this is not as significant as that Brazil has the 10th largest economy in the world but its per capita income is that of a medium-development country ($10,000), not far from the average for better off Third World countries. This racial imbalance is even worse for Colombia, a country with around 44,000,000 inhabitants of which only 20% are white and zero percentage of presidents have been non-white. Like Brazil, Colombia named a black woman, Paula Marcela Moreno Zapata, as minister of Culture. Another country with a noticeably small white minority is Perú-15% of some 29,000,000 inhabitants-and it has only had one Amerindian president. The Dominican Republic, which is an almost totally pardo and black nation, had a pardo dictator from 1930 to 1961, and after that a white man, Joaquín Balaguer, served different terms for a total of 23 years, and they weren’t more because he retired totally blind at the age of 90. In a country with weak ethnic links to Spain, Balaguer built a disproportionate and heavily ugly monument to Columbus and the discovery of America.
The tendency in Latin America to have white presidents appears now to be in reverse. The predominance of white Latin American presidents obviously denotes a better education and in the majority of cases, but with numerous exceptions, an elitist background. The trend started changing with the election in 1998 of Hugo Chávez Frías in Venezuela, a man who couldn’t look more Venezuelan if he had plastic surgery. Then the Inca-descended Toledo was elected in Perú and in Bolivia, astoundingly, a pure-blooded Amerindian, Evo Morales, was elected president in 2006. There has been some mockery by Bolivians themselves of Morales’ ancestral traditions, which he has made very explicit. In the province and city of Santa Cruz, on the natural gas-rich forested Bolivian lowlands, there have been heard secessionist mutterings. Another pardo, Rafael Correa, was elected in Ecuador. The American informal empire in Latin America was not necessarily racist. As long as the ruling politicians kept their countries on this side of the Cold War fence, they were fine, no matter their color and regardless of their ruling methods. With the end of the "first" Cold War, the American informal empire did not cease to matter, but containment and Domino theory were off the agenda. With China fast becoming the largest capitalist economy in the world, communism is certainly not a threat, but the USA has not entirely shed its imperial pretensions and the arrogance that goes with them. The destruction of Iraq was not part of any war on terror. It was to show the world that America was still at the head of the food chain. But it isn’t. The old convergence between American imperialism and local elites does not mean much nowadays. Local elites could prefer doing business with China or Russia. America is now blaming China for being un-squeamish about its friends abroad, in Africa for example, but America never castigated itself much for the unsavory friendships it made all over the world during the Cold War. Venezuelan Chavez has irked Americans, not just president Bush, to the point where objectivity is thrown to the winds. It’s like: "This colored man from a banana republic does not show due respect". Yet it was America who began to plot against him. Old Cold-War scenarios were put on again to no purpose. The informal American world empire had a purpose, but bullying American political imperialism makes no sense. It remains to be seen whether this new generation of "authoctonous" Latin American leaders delivers as much as it says it can, or if, in well-worn Third World tradition, its members start tripping over themselves. Even if they do, it will probably not be direct descendants of Europeans relaying them.
(4) Decolonization and non-alignment
De-colonization was an inevitability. Under the aegis of the informal American world empire, it was carried out smoothly, except in Vietnam, with three other major hurdles and some relatively minor hiccups. In 1947, British India had been partitioned along roughly religious lines, Hindus in India and Muslims in Pakistan. Lord Mountbatten accepted the task of partition. He asked and got permission to make his own decisions and he was not committed to an united India. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, was set on creating an Islamic state. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Indian prime minister (1947-1964), would have preferred an intact India, but he faced the pressure of his Hinduist supporters, who wanted the end to cow slaughtering, which the British tolerated. (India still tolerates cow slaughtering on a restricted basis deferring to the choice of the individual states.) To make him come around to partition, the British floated a plan to have the larger Indian princely states vote for independence or India. Between the "sacred" cows and British pressure, Nehru came around to Jinnah’s view. But the partition was not achieved peacefully. There were countless Muslims in India-with Indonesia and Pakistan, India still is among the three largest Muslim countries in the world-and there were many Hindus in Pakistan. In the messy Partition process, most if not all Hindus fled to India and many Muslims to Pakistan. To get to their respective destinations, Muslims and Hindus were crossing each others’ paths and when they did mayhem often ensued. Partition involved the greatest movement of populations in history: 10,500,000 in Punjab, half going to India and half to Pakistan. Another million went through the same ordeal in Bengal. The estimates of fatalities in the clashes between the migrating masses (mostly in Punjab), as well as in rioting in cities, are between 200,000 and half a million. The most devastated city was Lahore (ceded to Pakistan), where a population of half a million Hindus and Sikhs was butchered or forced to emigrate. There were reciprocal killings at a basic community level. Calcutta and New Delhi were hard struck by the violence. Calcutta, where Muslims lived in large numbers under British rule, was so badly torn by religious riots that Gandhi went there to fast, the most powerful weapon in his moral arsenal, and exert pressure on the warring communities. He managed to temper the carnage. Upon his return to Delhi, he fasted again for India to allot to Pakistan the agreed part of their previously common treasury and he was shot dead by a Hindu fanatic from Maharashtra, Nathuram Godse, who felt Gandhi was giving in to Muslim demands.
Among the complications of Partition one derived from the time of the first British invasion of Afghanistan (1839). The British had an alliance with the puny-looking but strong-willed Ranjit Singh (1801-1839), the ruler of Punjab, against Dost Muhammad, the Afghan emir. Many Sikhs were part of the invasion force. After Ranjit Singh died, his successors were no match for the British, who annexed the Punjab. The British never lacked for either Hindu or Muslim accomplices to aid them in their gradual subjection of India. In the Punjab it was the Hindu general Gulab Singh who helped them and was rewarded with the dependent throne of Muslim Kashmir. During Partition, his descendant, Hari Singh, had to face an originally disorganized Pakistani attempt at annexation. He fled to the Hindu part of "his" kingdom (Jammu), where he ceded all of it to India. Indian troops were airlifted and they contained a Pakistani invasion force in the valley of Srinagar, but with the heavy engagement of the armies of both countries the higher Himalayan territory of Kashmir was contested and Pakistan retained a very lightly populate one third of the disputed territory. That was hardly the end of it. India allowed elections in Kashmir, which Muslims as often as not boycotted, but it refused to permit a plebiscite on Kashmiri preferences. Pakistan charged that Kashmir was being held hostage by Indian politicians. Kashmir includes Jammu, which is majority Hindu, so the Indians could claim that they were not intruders in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan was not about to fall for that line of argumentation. Kashmir could be partitioned as all of British India had been, but the Indians were not disposed to concede any Pakistani points. India has become a multi-confessional society, constitutionally lay, with the occasional burst of religious fanaticism; but Pakistan is nearly totally Islamic and seethes with religious violence between Shia and Sunni Muslims.
Jawaharlal Nehru was a socialist in the sense that he believed in rigid economic controls, although he also encouraged huge private consortia to aid the government in industrializing India. He did not get very far with those policies and India is still wrestling with bureaucratic and other vices acquired during its infancy. At Bandung, Indonesia, Nehru linked with fellow neutralists-neither pro-capitalists nor communists-among emerging nations in Asia and Africa (1955), including hardly neutralist China. Tito of Yugoslavia invited everyone to a summit in Belgrade where non-alignment, a term coined by Nehru, was defined as being anti-capitalist and mistrustful of if not openly hostile to the West (1961). India was a democracy and it had a Western cultural veneer. During and after British colonialism, Indian middle classes have spoken English as a second and sometimes even as a first language. India's non-alignment consisted in an informal alliance with the USSR, which was India's principal arms supplier. Indians and Pakistanis were at war in 1965 and in 1971. Both times Pakistan lost. In 1965, India had to contain a Pakistani tank offensive in the Rann of Cutch, a desert in Gujarat (northwestern India). In a second round Pakistan tried to choke the land corridor to Kashmir, but an Indian move towards Lahore put the Pakistanis on the defensive. Pakistan underestimated India's pluck and saw its forces whittled down to size. In 1971, East Pakistan rebelled against west Pakistani rule. East Pakistan was really eastern Bengal. West Pakistan was composed of various provinces, Punjab being the largest in terms of population, and the name Pakistan was an invention: either an acronym of Punjab-Afghan province-Kashmir-Sindh or a composite word meaning "land of the pure". The first etymology, which would give a handle to Afghan claims on northwestern Pakistan, doesn't sound quite right. The east Pakistanis spoke Bengali and the west Pakistanis different tongues, mainly Punjabi, Urdu, and Pashto. East Pakistan was the principal foreign-exchange earner for the nation through its jute exports, but central political power was concentrated in West Pakistan and East Pakistan believed it was not being given the consideration it deserved. Unable to govern constitutionally, Gen. Iskander Mizra handed military power to Gen. Muhammad Ayub Khan, who ruled by decree (1958). In 1962, the capital was moved from Rawalpindi (the original capital until 1959 was Karachi) to Islamabad. Dhaka, in East Pakistan, was made legislative capital, a dubious concession since the country was ruled dictatorially. The political and economic situation tended to get worse and after a year of endemic rioting, Gen. Ayub Khan handed power over to Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan. Elections were allowed, which were won by the independence-bent Awami League of East Pakistan. The assembly was dissolved and the Awami League banned but this only made matters worse. During 1971, Pakistan used a heavy, repressive hand in the east, millions took refuge in India and toward the end of the year India intervened, defeated Pakistan in a brief war, and East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh. In 1972, Yahya Khan turned power over to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, his deputy prime minister.
During the Cold War, Third World rhetoric was just that. State capitalism, economic planning, development economics, or whatever it was that would make the prosperity of poor countries, didn't work. The problem was that most poor countries did not have the capital and the knowledge to develop of themselves and the economic policies they adopted were almost deliberately designed to make sure that they never obtained those resources or that knowledge. A few of these countries weren't even poor in the fiscal sense and it was their cultural and educational poverty that trapped them in the vicious circles of underdevelopment. They had money but did not know how to use it well. Internationally, third-worldism or non-alignment was also a failure and even Nehru became very disillusioned when China attacked India in 1962 over some barren Himalayan territory it needed for a highway (Aksai Shin salt flats). The Chinese attack consisted in a deep penetration into Assam, which was a distraction from its main objective, and was quickly withdrawn. Perhaps too hastily, Nehru sought the help of Britain and the USA, both countries which had been constantly denigrating his non-alignment policy. Deeply disappointed, Nehru died shortly after that (1964) but his legacy of well-intentioned mis-government went on for a long time. The Congress Party was dominant and Nehru was succeeded by Lal Bahadur Shastri (1964-1966). Upon the latter's death, Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, became prime minister. She basically followed the policies of her father except for a period in the 1970s when her rule became authoritarian and many Indians grew disaffected, significantly because of enforced birth-control measures. In 1977, Indira was turned out of office, but the opposition, led by Morarji Desai, could not organize a coherent government-no one then dared even think of challenging state economic interventionism-and Indira was re-elected in 1980. Sikhs resented her repression of rebelliousness in the Punjab and Indira was assassinated by Sikh bodyguards in 1984. The greatest terrorist action on an airplane ever was perpetrated in 1985 by Sikhs in an Air India flight which exploded off Britain killing the 329 persons onboard. In judging Nehru and his daughter, and the Congress party which they led, in the light of India’s history, it is absolutely necessary to consider that they, and especially Jawaharlal, were building a non-sectarian democracy in a huge multi-lingual and multi-cultural country that had no existence before 1947; and in this they succeeded. What did not succeed at all were their economic policies. Both Jawaharlal and Indira went for economic autarky through five-year plans modeled on those of the USSR. They discouraged foreign investment, micro-managed the economy, nationalized banks, protected inefficiency, enthroned bureaucracy, and so on. Some historians claim that the plans worked. B. Chandran, M. Mukherjee, and A. Mukherjee argue that India’s year-on-year growth at the best of times was 4%, which "compared favorably with the rates achieved by the advanced countries at a comparable stage"-they cite Japan-but this is surely wrong. England grew at a much higher rate during the Industrial Revolution. And while India was waddling along with its burdensome plans, Malaysia was growing at 7% pa during the 1980s, South Korea grew at 12.5% between 1986 and 1988, and the rates for Singapore and Hong Kong were even higher. On what these authors are spot on is the development of "India’s scientific and technical manpower", which was the foundation for the "economic miracle" of the first decade of the 2000 millennium. And "miracle" is not hyperbolic, for any one who visited Howrah, in Calcutta, in 1987, would have to blink twice before believing in the Howrah of Kolkata in 2007.
After Indira’s death, despite the problems it was facing, the Congress Party still seemed an unbeatable political machine. A son Indira had been grooming to succeed her, Sanjay, died in the crash of an aerobatic plane and the next son, Rajiv, an Indian Airlines pilot, stepped into her place, won a national election in 1985, but lost the election in 1989. To try to quell guerrilla warfare and terrorism by Tamil separatists, Indian forces intervened unsuccessfully in northern Sri Lanka (1987-1990), with initially at least the acquiescence of Colombo. The Hinduist Janata Dal party led by Vishnawath Prataph Singh came to power after Rajiv Gandhi (1989-1990), but once again it did not prove to be a viable administrative alternative to the Congress Party. It was torn by factions, one of which was opposed to concessions to so-called untouchables and briefly held office under Chandra Shekhar (1990-1991). While campaigning in 1991, Rajiv was assassinated by a Tamil woman suicide-bomber. The Congress Party won the election and P.V. Narasimha Rao became prime minister. Reform of the heavy official economic apparatus, which had begun with Rajiv, was furthered. Then finance minister, today prime minister Manmohan Singh, lightened the cumbersome licensing of industries, cut import tariffs, and opened previously taboo areas to foreign investors. But central authority did not respond well to charges of corruption, rising Indian nationalism, and regional breakdown of law and order. Elections in 1996 were not decisive and there was further political instability during which Congress failed to gain firm ground. There was a period of political drift-Atal Behari Vajpayee, of the Bahratiya Janata party (Hinduist-nationalist), was prime minister for a few days, followed by H.D. Deve Godwa (1996-1997) and I.K. Gujral (1997-1998)-until Vajpajee (1998) managed to put together a solid government. The heir to the Nehru dynasty charisma was the widow of Rajiv Ghandi, Sonia, an Italian by birth who, despite her unfeigned Indian patriotism, did not seem up to the task of getting such a disparate and complex nation behind her. In 1999, the Bahratiya Janata party won a national victory and Vajpayee was ratified as prime minister. By then India was thoroughly committed to economic reforms, though they were carried out gradually and, as in China, some areas, like Bombay and Bangalore, benefited from quick economic growth while most of the country-India is still predominantly rural-remained mired in old realities. Despite the progress, the primitive infrastructure remains unaffected by a technology boom. In addition, economic gains were offset by laxness in upholding the secularist state that Nehru and Indira had defended passionately.
Gen. Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto (1977), assumed dictatorial powers, and had the former primer minister hung on his conviction for the murder of political opponents (1979). After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1978), Pakistan became the funnel for military aid to the rebellious mujahidin in the neighboring country. In 1988, Zia-ul-Haq died in a plane explosion. The elections were won by the daughter of Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto, who ruled divisively. As with her father, her political base was Sind. Punjab was the locus of strong opposition. Dismissed in 1990 by the president (formerly a ceremonial post, but stronger under the current constitution), Benazir was substituted by her arch-enemy, the Saudi-backed Nawaz Sharif, under whom Islamic Sharia law was declared the superior legal system and laicism was thrown to the winds. By then the military secret services (SIS) were pervaded by fundamentalism. Opposition to India in Kashmir had become openly militant and the Pakistani military were not opposing extremism. In 1993, Benazir returned to power and to even more clamorous opposition, this time including accusations of corruption involving her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. She was dismissed again and Sharif was elected for another premiership (1997) which was internationally considered extremely incompetent and economically damaging.
The Indian-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir was kept alive by Muslim terrorism inside Kashmir. The main Kashmiri resistance organization, based in Pakistan, is the Hizbul Mujahidin. Starting in 1989, there was a constant interchange of artillery, mortar, and other fire across the line of de facto demarcation, usually referred to as the Line of Control or LOC. The constant rumble of conflict extended as far north as the Himalayan glacier of Siachen. In 1998, India, which probably had the bomb since 1974, and Pakistan, which probably had it by 1985, both detonated atomic bombs. In the Kargil war (1999), the two countries engaged in a bloody, localized conflict provoked by Pakistani incursions in Kashmir. Pakistan at first tried to wash its hands by saying it was the doing of Kashmiri guerrillas, but the lie was so patent no one believed it. The Pakistanis occupied heights from which they could bomb India’s highway to and from Kargil, a Muslim city in mostly Buddhist Ladakh (northern Kashmir). Kargil itself is elevated and the peaks surrounding it were on average above 5,000 meters high. It took India concerted artillery and air attacks and infantry slowly and bloodily climbing up steep mountain sides to dislodge the Pakistanis. After India recaptured the posts that threatened land communications, it still had to reduce the Pakistani positions in the mountains behind Kargil. The Indians could have attacked the Pakistani rear and leave the invaders isolated and besieged, but to do so they would have to cross the LOC which had separated the province since 1949, although Pakistan had done just that to attack Kargil. India chose to fight its way from mountain top to mountain top until it had wiped out all the Pakistani posts, or they had been withdrawn by the Pakistanis themselves, but even in this case it was the formidable Indian counter-offensive that forced their hand. India’s was a courageous if costly decision that gained it international applause. The Kargil war was the doing of Pakistani Gen. Pervez Musharraf, then chief of staff under Sharif, who was not given the details of the impending conflict. When Sharif tried to prevent Musharraf from landing in Pakistan on the return from an official trip, the army backed the general and Sharif was rescued from imprisonment through Saudi intervention. A peace process begun by Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Valpajee (1999-2004) and Musharraf (1999), was carried on by Manmohan Sing, the prime minister that succeeded Valpajee in the election of 2004, in which the Congress party won an upset victory over Valpajee’s Bharatiya Janata party. The India economic surge, which was cautiously initiated under P.V. Narasimha Rao (1991-1996), was furthered by Valpajee and by Manmohan, who, as secretary of economy under Rao, was the man who in the first place started dismantling in earnest India’s economic bureaucratic labyrinth.
Ceylon (later Sri Lanka) and Burma (later Myanmar) achieved independence in 1948. The British began decolonization in Africa with their cession of rights over Sudan in 1951, which devolved to Egypt. Under the revolutionary colonels' regime in Egypt, Sudan in 1953 was granted autonomy pending a plebiscite in three years to determine its final status. Egypt tried to sway the Sudanese and minister of state Anwar al Sadat on one occasion shed his clothes to do public relations by participating in some native dancing. This was probably in the non-Muslim southern Sudan because the Egyptians probably thought they had Muslim northern Sudan in the bag. Pro-Egyptian politicians won the election but they decided any way to declare the independence of the Sudan (1956), ethnically divided between an Islamic north and a non-Islamic south. Outright British decolonization came first with Ghana (1957) followed by Nigeria (1960) and Tanganyka (1961), which became Tanzania with the fusion with Zanzibar in 1964.
In the Mediterranean Cyprus was independent in 1960, but the country’s population was majority Greek and minority Turkish and the concept of a Cypriot nationality was not something that could be decreed or established constitutionally. The arrangements for Cypriot independence gave the Turks special rights but neither side was comfortable with the other. Archbishop Makarios III, head of the Cypriot Orthodox Church, was president of Cyprus. In 1963, he attempted to make further constitutional changes, which did not convince the Turks, but in essence Cyprus had not come apart because Makarios had the support of the Greek Cypriots. In 1967, a Greek military regime stoked agitation in Cyprus for enosis (union with Greece). From agitation, the Greek militarists went to action and overthrew Makarios and even attempted to assassinate him. They put their placemen as heads of government and of the church (July 1974). The Turkish government immediately invaded northeastern Cyprus, where the population was nearly but not quite evenly divided between Greeks and Turks. The dictatorial pro-Greece government in Cyprus was overthrown by the Greek Cypriots themselves, but subsequent negotiations over a Turkish-sponsored confederation failed. The Turkish army advanced to occupy 37% of the area of the island, although Turks were only 18% of the population. The move was condemned in the UN. Greeks and Turks moved to their respective areas of control. Greek Cyprus, which did not abrogate the country’s original constitution, became Cyprus and Turkish Cyprus in 1983 became the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognized only by Turkey.
Malaya was independent in 1957, but the departure of British troops was delayed because Malays themselves wanted them to take care of a communist insurgency, which the British did with dexterity. The insurgents were mostly disaffected Chinese peasants in the interior of the Malay peninsula. The Japanese occupation was particularly hard on the Chinese in Malaya. But communists had little internal support and no external sources of weapons. The British isolated them and in the process invented the "strategic hamlet", a fenced in, self-defensive unit that kept guerrillas at bay at night. This strategy, so successful in Malaya, was a failure when the Americans tried to apply it in Vietnam. The Emergency, as the insurgency was called, was officially over in 1960. With the addition of Singapore, Sabah, and Sarawak, Malaya became Malaysia in 1963. Singapore was expelled from Malaysia in 1965, because its founder, Lee Kuan Yew, wanted for his mostly Chinese party the same rights as the totally Malay UNMO.
Other independent states in Africa were: Uganda in 1962, Zambia and Malawi in 1964, and The Gambia in 1965. Uganda's first president was Milton Obote. He was overthrown in 1971 by Gen. Idi Amin, a former non-com in the British colonial army. Some of the atrocities attributed to Amin's dictatorship seem beyond belief, yet it is public knowledge that in 1972 he expelled Uganda's entire Indian community, which was a mainstay of the economy. This ferocious ruler's troops however were utterly incapable of preventing an Israeli battalion-size mission from seizing the airport at Entebbe and freeing the Jewish hostages being held by the hijackers of an airliner (1976). From 1978 to 1981, Tanzanian troops occupied Uganda after overthrowing Amin. Obote was restored to power but his presidency was nearly as ruthless and as incompetent as Amin's and he was deposed by a military coup in 1985. Partially democratic conditions returned with the actual president, Yoweri Museweni. In the late 1990s northern Uganda was plagued by a Messianic insurrection called the Lord's Resistance Army (supposedly formed in 1986) led by a self-proclaimed prophet called Joseph Kony, whose aim is to "impose the Ten Commandments" but whose followers sometimes are plainly terrorizing. In 2004, they killed over 190 civilians for no apparent reason. The Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya, which the British repressed ferociously, delayed independence for that country until 1963. White-dominated Rhodesia seceded in 1964. It became Zimbabwe in 1980, when the previous regime caved in. Aden was independent South Yemen in 1967. In 1970, it became the only "Marxist" Muslim country in history, named the People’s Democratic Republic of South Yemen. But in 1990, it became a province of Yemen without much fuss. Independent Aden was a British idea.
(5) Algeria and the French Fifth Republic
Gen. de Gaulle transferred the provisional government of France from Algiers to Paris upon this city’s liberation (August 1944) and remained its president, but this position was the same as that of prime minister during the Third Republic, which meant that parliament could overrule the executive power. Feeling pinioned by France’s multi-party politics, de Gaulle resigned in January 1946. He did not abandon politics, but sought to outmaneuver parliamentary politics through a party, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF; in English, Rally of the French People), that aspired to obtain an absolute majority. This he failed to do and in May 1953 he retired from politics. With the exceptions of Léon Blum and Vincent Auriol, the politicians that rose to the top after the war were different from those in the Third Republic and all had credentials as opponents of the Vichy Regime in one form or another. De Gaulle was succeeded by the relatively unknown Félix Gouin, who lasted five months and was followed by Georges Bidault, the most prominent in political French Résistance to Nazi occupation. All the provisional governments depended on communist support in the National Assembly, for a large segment of public opinion considered that communists had been more active in the Résistance than those who represented other political tendencies, although the most famous resistance leader, Jean Moulin, was not a communist but a Gaullist. The constitution of the Fourth Republic, approved by referendum on October 1946, made the presidency totally ceremonial. As provisional president Auriol was confronted by ominous waves of strikes fomented by the communists during late November and early December 1947, against which he ordered the intervention of the army. After these events the communists, then led by Maurice Thorez, did not again participate in any French government. From then until the Fifth Republic, executive power was in the hands of weak, sometimes time-serving prime ministers. Auriol was elected as the first president of the Fourth Republic (January 1947-January 1954). The French electorate as usual was very fragmented and cabinets went in and out at such a pace that when Auriol ended his term he said he was tired of having to get "out of bed at all hours of the night to receive resignations of prime ministers". The first prime minister of the Fourth Republic was Paul Ramadier. It was under Ramadier that François Mitterand, who had collaborated with Vichy but then joined the Résistance, first came to prominence in Post-War French politics. During the Fourth Republic, there were 24 premierships filled by 17 politicians, including, in the extraordinary circumstances we shall see, de Gaulle himself. The longest lasting prime minister was Bidault (October 1949-July 1950). From a long-term perspective, the most distinguished French politician was Robert Schuman, who served as premier twice, from November 1947 to July 1948 and for six days in September 1948. Schuman was not even French but from Luxembourg and his native tongues were Luxembourgish and German. He learned French in school and chose French citizenship when Lorraine was returned to France in 1919. It was probably because of this background that, as foreign minister of premier Henri Queuille (September 1948-October 1949), he signed France into the Council of Europe, built on the idea Schuman had been promoting of European reconciliation and unity. France was a founding member of NATO. On 9 May 1950, as foreign minister under Bidault, and with the advice and support of the economist Jean Monnet, Schuman called for the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, the future core of the European Economic Community (EEC), which he welcomed into existence as foreign minister during another premiership of Queuille (March-August 1951). Schuman also served as foreign minister under André Marie (July-September 1948) and twice under René Pleven (July 1950-March 1951 and August 1951-January 1952).
If the Fourth Republic had an inspired European foreign policy, on colonialism it was mostly inertial, in part because, after the trauma of World War II, it did not want to seem like a weakling power. Ramadier, for instance, ordered the bloody quashing of an insurrection in Madagascar. De Gaulle himself, who later proved to be daringly anti-colonialist, ordered that French forces reclaim Indochina. The most pro-colonialist of all French premiers was Bidault and this became his undoing when his views later clashed with those of de Gaulle. It took the iconoclastic Pierre Mendès-France to get France out of Indochina. But Mendès-France was an out-and-out anti-colonialist and Algeria posed a problem he could not resolve, because Algeria had a population of one million Algeria-born Europeans, all French citizens and voters. After the war, nationalist hopes ran high in Algeria. An uprising in Sétif causing nearly 100 European deaths provoked a ferocious French reprisal with casualties in the thousands. The Algerian war of independence began in 1954 led by the National Liberation Front (FNL). It was characterized by terrorism and guerrilla warfare on the side of Algerians and by unscrupulous French military repression (including torture) and reprisals by European settlers against the Arab-speaking population. The cause of the pieds noirs (black feet), as the Algerian-born Europeans called themselves, was strongly if controversially publicized by the leftist intellectual Albert Camus, who was Algerian by birth and refused to endorse the nationalist terrorist campaign against French rule. Camus' main argument was that his mother still lived in Algiers. By 1956, the French armed forces had eliminated the local FNL leadership. Algeria was literally fenced in by barbed wire along the border with Tunisia, where the nationalists were taking refuge. Mendès-France was followed by Edgar Faure (February 1955-January 1956), who was prototypical of the French politicians who, with a small quota of votes in the assembly, could do and undo cabinets; and Faure by Guy Mollet (January 1956-June 1957), who claimed to be a socialist but had a wavering if not two-faced foreign policy. He signed the Treaty of Rome (1957), which was the start of the EEC, and he approved independence for Morocco and Tunisia (1956), but he planned with David Ben Gurion of Israel and Antony Eden of Britain the invasion of the Suez Canal, nationalized by Egypt, although it was not Mollet himself but his successor, Maurice Bourgès-Manoury (June-November 1957), who actually carried out this aggression. Mollet had people believing he would negotiate with the FLN, but when it came down to the wire he reneged and increased military pressure. For the military, independence for Algeria was not an option. But there were nine Arab-speaking for one French-speaking Algerians. Internationally, the FLN had more accreditation as representative of Algeria than France, which considered that Algeria constituted three departments of France (Constantine, Algiers, Oran). And within France itself, the pieds noirs did not count with unanimous support. For the French military and the pieds noirs the government in Paris seemed unreliable. Felix Gaillard (November 1957-May 1958) fell from the premiership because of an incident in the French military’s efforts to isolate physically Algerians from their fellow Arab-speakers in Tunisia; but when the assembly elected Pierre Pflimlin, the military command in Algeria, who by then no longer trusted the Paris leadership, assumed power under Gens. Raoul Salan and Jacques Massu. Salan, the most decorated officer in France, then appealed to de Gaulle, not the best decision he made in his life, taken under the influence of Massu, a great de Gaulle admirer.
From his retirement in the village of Colombey-les-deux-Églises, in the Champagne region of France, de Gaulle declared that he was once more ready to save his country. At the time, many people saw this as complicity and a personal bid for power. The Algerian military invaded Corsica and were planning an assault on Paris. De Gaulle wanted everything done by the rules, so then president Renè Coty appointed him premier against an indignant opposition led by Mendès-France and Mitterand (1 June 1958). De Gaulle had asked for emergency powers to redact a new constitution and these were granted by the assembly. The new constitution, the foundation of the Fifth Republic, was approved by a referendum on 28 September 1958. In the election in November, de Gaulle, who had founded a new party, UDR (Union des Democrates pour la République), won and carried along with him a parliamentary majority. The new constitution was definitely presidential. The prime minister governed at the behest of the president, whose term was for seven years with the possibility of re-election. Since elections for president and for the national assembly took place separately, it could happen that a president would have to rule with a prime minister chosen by a majority in parliament opposed to the president, but this, called cohabitation, was later shown to be quite workable. De Gaulle had not been ambiguous about his republicanism, but he was definitely equivocating with the pieds noirs, to whom he once said in a speech from the government palace in Algiers: "Je vous ai compris" (I have understood you), which of course didn’t mean a thing. But there was no ambiguity at all about the referendum on 8 January 1961 in which the French people approved self-determination for Algeria, which meant independence. De Gaulle’s prime minister Michel Debré was already in secret talks with the FLN when four retired generals, Salan the most prominent among them, incited the military to carry out a coup d’état against de Gaulle (21 April 1961). The plotters had little support in the armed forces, but de Gaulle decreed a state of emergency anyway and the coup fizzled. Algeria obtained independence through the Evian Accords (March 1962). The pieds noirs emigrated massively from Algeria to France.
From the 1961 referendum, fanatical military and civilians, including again Salan, and the civilian Jacques Soustelle, a specialist in Aztec civilization, organized the clandestine OAS (Organization of the Secret Army), which carried out assassinations and indiscriminate massacres of Algerians. Bidault was involved with the OAS. Salan was captured in April 1962. In August, de Gaulle was the object of an assassination attempt because of his Algerian policy. The head of the plot was the military engineer Jean Bastien-Thierry. He stood watch while accomplices used machine guns from a building in a Paris suburb at the car in which de Gaulle was riding with his wife. The car, a Citröen DS, was hit fourteen times, but it ran at full speed with flat tires and no one was hurt. In all more than 200 shots were fired. Bastien-Thierry was executed by firing squad on 11 March 1963. De Gaulle thought at first to grant clemency-Bastien-Thierry’s father had belonged to the RPF-but then he considered that his role in the affair had been cowardly. The actual gunmen were not sentenced to death. Salan and all those involved in the Algerian plots and revolts were amnestied in 1968. De Gaulle was re-elected in 1965, although, as per his constitution, he had to go through a second-round vote because he did not get an absolute majority in the first round. His opponent was Mitterand. Even though it was De Gaulle who practically provoked the long Vietnamese war of independence, as president of France he condemned the American intervention in that country. He vetoed two times the entry of Britain into the EEC. Under him, France had a force de frappe (atomic retaliatory power) and French forces in NATO were under direct French command. The French left had always had an irrational detestation of de Gaulle and Gaullism. Some weirdly considered it fascistic. Student agitators joined forces with strikers in May 1968 and promoted widespread riots in Paris. Some of the slogans were to the effect that the young were right because they were young. De Gaulle called the entire thing a "chienlit" (dog manger or worse: bed shitting). In the elections of June 1968, de Gaulle and his party garnered a big victory. De Gaulle lost a referendum on a minor constitutional point and resigned on 28 April 1969. When Churchill visited devastated Berlin after the war, he commented that with the Allied victory he was drained of hatred and felt some sympathy for the bedraggled Germans he saw. In the case of De Gaulle, German defeat not only put an end to animosity but made him an ardent seeker of Franco-German friendship, even saying once that the "de" in his surname, which means "from" in French, indicated that his ancestors had probably lived in Germany. He considered the core of the European Community to be France and Germany, insisted on the right of veto on new applicants, and twice blocked the entry the UK into the organization. De Gaulle, who in retirement received a colonel’s pension, died on 9 November 1970.
The French Community was created in 1958 as the framework for decolonization. Both French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa were dissolved in 1959. The full dismantling of the French colonial system happened in 1960, although the French presence remained, which suggested that some of the new states were really "virtual" nations. The only country which chose to go it alone was Guinea and the French let it but took with them even the desks in public offices.
(6) The longest and the briefest colonial empires
Decolonization was a largely voluntary process on the part of the formal imperialist nations. Most colonies were not profit-makers and to keep them in subjection, in a world where anti-colonialism was a catchphrase, would have made them big financial burdens. In Britain a lot had to give for India to gain its independence, but the process had no effect on Britain itself. The independence of Algeria had no major repercussions in France. In the 1960s you could still find in the National Geographic Magazine articles on the Portuguese African colonies of Angola and Mozambique in which Africans were either decorative or concealed and it seemed as if the Portuguese or Africa-born Portuguese would be there forever. But if the rest of Africa was going independent it was hardly to be expected that non-Portuguese Angolans and Mozambicans would want to go that way too. Portugal was the first overseas European colonialist power. It pioneered what Spain, England, Netherlands, and France did in its wake. Given Portugal’s size, Portuguese achievements as a colonialist power are nothing short of amazing. Goa was possibly the oldest colony in history (1510-1961). The closest to this record might be Iceland, which was a semi-autonomous dependency of Norway and Denmark for 680 years (1264-1944). Portugal gave Goa up not because it wanted but because India annexed it. If at independence, India had ten times the population of Britain, Brazil is, and was for a long time before, twenty times larger than Portugal. Wisely Portugal did nothing to prevent Brazil from becoming independent (1822). This wise attitude was forgotten in the Post-War. In 1926, Gen. Antonio Carmona headed a military government but by 1928, with Carmona’s backing, power was in the hands of a politically savvy, very pro-Catholic professor of economics, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who became dictator, promulgated a fascistic constitution in 1933, and ruled through a series of pliant presidents endorsed by sham elections, starting with Carmona himself. Portugal stayed out of World War II, but in 1949 readily joined NATO. Salazar was an excellent book-keeper and Portugal never suffered from inflation, but the economy stagnated through sheer un-budging conservatism. The country was getting embroiled in colonial wars in Africa. Salazar was fell by a stroke in 1968. He vegetated until 1970. His last store-minder, Marcelo Caetano, was too slow in introducing reforms and in 1974 he was overthrown in the radical Captains' Revolution-also and perhaps between known as the Carnation Revolution, because soldiers allowed crowds to place the flower in their rifle barrels-which used Gen. Antonio Spínola as a front and the rest of the armed forces did not oppose. The next year, the leftist Portuguese government in Lisbon gave independence to all Portuguese colonies in Africa. East Timor was abandoned in 1976 and was invaded by Indonesia. In Portugal itself, there was a reaction against the radical military and elections in 1975 and 1976 approved a new constitution and the stabilization of democracy under the socialist Mario Soares. In 2002, East Timor became independent after years of resistance thanks to a political crisis in Indonesia. If Portugal was a reluctant de-colonizer, after it deposed this attitude it became the most reluctant colonizer that ever was. It tried to give Macau back to China, but the Chinese wouldn't hear of it. In the 1990s, the Portuguese, who were not disposed to throw money away, made a bare semblance of governing and the city of Macau, which at 400,000 inhabitants inside 5-6 square kilometers is probably the most densely packed territory in the world, fell to predatory land speculators from Hong Kong and to outright gangsterism involved in the gambling business. Macau, with its dependent islands of Taipa and Coloanne, reverted to China in 1999.
The Japanese colonial empire was the briefest of all in history. It began with the annexations of Korea and Taiwan. Korea had been a Chinese dependency. But Taiwan was definitely Chinese territory that Japan colonialized, but that still only makes fifty years (1895-1945). The bulk of the Japanese empire was bracketed from the occupation of North Vietnam in September 1940 to the surrender of Japan in August 1945. The Japanese claimed that the Asian countries they conquered, including China, which it never did, were part of the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. There can be no cooperation between a conquering nation and the conquered, so the ideas covering the Japanese scheme were like a geisha’s elaborate make-up. Even so, Japan made a pretense at breaking its fellow Asians’ ties with Western colonialism. There was an "independent Philippines" under Jose Laurel, who agreed to serve in that capacity by order of Manuel Quezon, recognized by the American administration as president of the semi-independent Commonwealth of the Philippines. Laurel was arrested after the war but he was never tried and benefited from an amnesty. The real Japanese collaborator was Emilio Aguinaldo. He had led the independence movement against the American occupation (1899-1901) and he had no reason to love the USA. He too was amnestied and today is considered the father of the Philippine nation. Thailand was already a pro-Axis state under Gen. Pibul Songgram when Japan demanded a corridor to Burma. During the high tide of the Axis, Pibul declared war on the Allies and annexed to Thailand border territories on Laos, Cambodia, and Malaya, but his government did not strenuously oppose the construction of Allied air bases in northeastern Thailand. In July 1944, when Japan was reeling from Allied offensives, Pibul resigned and the Thai government relinquished the territories it had previously occupied. When the British arrived in Bangkok at the end of the war, they found that the Thais had already disarmed the Japanese forces in their land. The whole business of Thai collaboration with Japan was swept under the rug and Thailand, a very conservative nation, readily accepted being part of the American informal world empire. Just to make the disassociation with Pibul more pronounced, the name Siam was re-adopted. In 1947, Pibul overthrew Pridi Phanumyang and Thailand took a marked pro-Western stance supporting the USA in Korea (1950) and making Bangkok the headquarters of SEATO (1954), one of America's pet anti-communist alliances. The monarchy was under a regency which in 1950 named Bhumipol Aludyadej king Rama IX, who was still reigning in 2008. In 1957, marshal Sarit Thanarot removed Pibul and named Gen. Thanon Kittikachorn prime minister, but the following year he dismised Thanon, took his place, and declared martial law, in part because the conflicts in Indochina were overflowing into Thailand. In 1963, Sarit died and power went to Thanon, who in 1968 promulgated a new constitution for Thailand (not Siam any longer). Civilian ruler was interrupted by Thanon who suspended the constitution in 1971. Thailand had been used as a military base for the Americans during the war in Vietnam and was now used as an exit door. Despite the arbitrary changes of government, the basic fact was that Thailand remained socially stable under military rule and was making economic strides by encouraging its own entrepreneurs (many Chinese) and obtaining special access to the American market for some of its exports. Nevertheless, public unrest became so pronounced that Thanon resigned in 1973 and handed power to prime minister Sanya Thammasak. A new constitution came into force in 1974. The military intervened again in 1976-led at first by Gen. Kriangsak Chomanan (until 1980)-and remained in power until 1988 when primer minister Chatichai Choonhaven was elected only to be toppled by the military in 1991. Vietnamese violations of the Thai border in the 1980s in hot pursuit of Khmer Rouge guerrillas were checked. In 1992, there were anti-government demonstrations, but what made the military give up power voluntarily was the beginning of the Asian economic crisis in 1997. Still another constitution was approved and Chuan Leekpai became prime minister. In the following election Thaksin Shinawatra, a populiat multi-billionaire, ws elected but the military found him too overbearing. He was overthrown but he is back in Thailan.
There was no Japanese pretence of nation-building in Malaya, because it wasn’t even a nation but a collection of sultanates under British rule with a large Chinese population. Eventually, the British consolidated Malaya and other territories into influential, pro-western Malaysia. In the 14th century the Thais occupied Terengganu (northeastern Malaya). The native kingdom of Melaka was founded in former Majapahit territories and soon became a Muslim sultanate (early 15th century). Around 1450, Melaka repulsed a Thai invasion of Pahang, in central Malaya. In 1511, the Portuguese occupied Melaka, whose ruler, Muzaffar, moved to Johor in southern Malaya. Johor retained political influence as far as Perak in the north, on the frontier of Thai penetration. Melaka's discomfiture was gain for the sultanate of Atjeh, at the extreme north of Sumatra, which became part of a triangular commercial rivalry with Johor and Portuguese Melaka. An alliance between the Dutch, masters of Java and hegemonic in the East Indies, and Johor resulted in the expulsion of the Portuguese from Melaka (1641), which became a Dutch dependency. Johor was the main independent state in Malaya. In 1716, the Bugis or Buginese, an aggressive and closely-knit people from Sulawesi (Celebes), began taking an active military and political role in Malaya, but it was the Sumatran kingdom of Malayu, where the Bugis also became influential, that in 1719 occupied Johor. Terengganu had become independent of Siamese suzerainty and gave refuge to the sultan of Johor. Together they mounted a counter-offensive against the Bugis. The oldest surviving mosque in Malaya, reflecting obvious Chinese influence (pagoda-like minaret), is found in Melaka and dates from 1728. Around 1750, a weak native sultanate was founded in Selangor, the south Malayan territory that became the political center of Malaya and Malaysia with the foundation in the 19th century of Kuala Lumpur. The Bugis were not overthrown in Johor until the Dutch inflicted a defeat on them in 1784. Dutch hegemony in Malaya began to be contested with the foundation of Penang in 1786 by the British East India Company. When France occupied the Low Countries (1795), the British, under the command of Stamford Raffles, a brilliant East India Company hierarch, occupied the main Dutch possessions in the Far East (Melaka and Java). Besides being an excellent administrator, Raffles was the author of a multi-volume history of Java in which he called attention to Borobudur and the ancient Malay states of the island, although he was not impressed by their descendants. The Dutch dependencies were returned in 1815. Since the late-17th century, the British possessed the port of Benkulu (Bencooleen), on the western coast of Sumatra. Raffles was named to superintend it. In exchange for the support he gave to the sultan of Johor against attacks from Terengganu, Raffles obtained the cession of the island of Temasik (1819) where there already existed a settlement called Sangapura, which Raffles chose as the site for Singapore. In 1824, the British traded Benkulu for Melaka, which was caught between the British presence in Penang and in Singapore. With Penang, Melaka, and Singapore, the East India Company created the Straits Settlements. In 1821, Siam had annexed Perlis and Kedah, the northernmost parts of Malaya. Allied to Perak chieftains, the British frustrated further Siamese invasion. But Siam forced Terengganu into vassalage ca1850. The island of Labuan, off the Brunei coast, was ceded to the British in 1842. In 1858, Pahang broke away from the sultanate of Johor, but it was politically unstable and the British made it a protectorate under a local sultan. That same year, after the Great Indian rebellion (Sepoy mutiny) in India (1857), the East India Comapany was dissolved. Malaya was administered by British India until 1867, when the Straits Settlements became a colony as opposed to what were formally separate commercial outposts.
Tin mines in Selangor and Negeri Sembilan (south of Selangor) were the motivations which after the mid-19th century impelled the British colonialization of the rest of Malaya. Perak was having succession disputes in 1874 and the British intervened the following year and annexed it. In 1896, the British Colonial Office created the Federated Malay States with Pahang, Penang, Perak, Selangor, and Negeri Sembilan. Penang was the capital. Melaka and Singapore were officialy the Unfederated Malay States (basically they were direct British possessions). The British exerted pressure on Siam and in 1909, by the Treaty of Bangkok, the Thais ceded their Malay dependencies (Perlis, Kedah and Terengganu). In 1914, Johor, the only remaining independent Malay sultanate, became a British protectorate after staving off for decades this virtual inevitability. Simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 1941), the Japanese invaded Malaya from Kota Bharu in Terengganu and soon overran the British forces, which had been primed for an attack on Singapore from the sea. Singapore surrendered after hardly a siege in early 1942. The rural Chinese were particularly mistreated by the Japanese occupation and, organized by communists, they were the only ethnic group to offer some resistance. In 1948, as a prior step to independence, all of British Malaya-except Singapore which had been made a separate crown colony in 1946-was formed as the Federation of Malaya. By then the population of Malaya, which was originally overwhelmingly Malay, had been diversified with substantial influxes of Chinese and Indian laborers, many of whom went up in the world of business, especially among the Chinese. Less privileged rural Chinese were sympathetic to communist China and they resented British accessibility to Malay political demands. Inter-ethnic rivalries-the Malay population feared Chinese economic domination-forced the British to consider new constitutional arrangements. In 1948, there began a mainly Chinese, communist-type rural insurrection. Its spread forced British authorities to declare what is called the Emergency (1950), which had been put down by 1957 (officially ended in 1960), in part with the formation of self-defending armed villages, a strategy the Americans tried unsuccessfully to copy in Vietnam ("strategic hamlets"), mainly because the Vietnamese did not want to be fenced in away from the communist guerrillas. Merdeka or the independence of Malaya came about in 1957. It did not include mostly Chinese Singapore, nor Brunei, North Borneo, or Sarawak. Sarawak, also known then as Kuching, ruled by a British family since 1839, was ceded to Great Britain in 1946. North Borneo (Sabah) was a land grant to the British North Borneo Company (1881), which was turned over to British administration the following year. In 1962, talks began for the incorporation of these territories into Malaya. A political revolt in already oil-rich Brunei was put down and the British accepted its separation from the federation talks as requested by its sultan. In 1963 the Federation of Malaysia was formed under the leadership of Tunku Abdul Rahman. Ruled by the independence leader and strongman Sukarno, Indonesia started invading and attacking along the borders of Sarawak and Sabah with Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). These hostilities, known as confrontasi, lasted until 1966, after the communists attempted to decapitate the Indonesian armed forces through assassinations (1965) and general Suharto deposed Sukarno, who was cozy with China. Under president Diosdado Macapagal, the Philippines claimed Sabah on the basis of its ethnic affinities with the inhabitants of the Philippine Sulu archipelago, but, although Philippine recognition of Malaysia was withheld until 1978, there were no armed encounters.
But Indonesia did pose problems for the incipient American world empire. The Japanese occupied the Dutch East Indies shortly after Pearl Harbor. The configuration of the Dutch East Indies was not finally determined until 1920, with the extension of Dutch administration to primitive western New Guinea. But the rest of the Dutch East Indies were islands with their own rich cultural backgrounds. Java particularly was densely populated. In July 1942, Sukarno and Mohammed Hatta, the leaders of the movement for Indonesian independence, achieved a modus vivendi with the Japanese which roughly allowed Java autonomy while the Japanese exploited the natural resources of Sumatra, especially its oil fields. In March 1945, an Indonesian Committee on Independence, followed by a constitution, was sponsored by the Japanese, but Sukarno and Hatta kept well in the background. On 9 August 1945, when Japanese defeat was imminent, Sukarno and Hatta were flown to Saigon and told by Gen. Hishaichi Terauki that Japan would be granting Indonesia independence, which is what the two Indonesian leaders declared on their own on 17 August, a few days after Japan surrendered. Independent Indonesia included Java, Sumatra, southern Celebes (Sulawesi), and Bali, and it had militias called Pemuda, but already the British had landed troops in Sumatra. In October, British Indian troops fought fiercely to dislodge Pemuda from the port city of Surabaya. The Japanese were surrendering to the British and even dislodged Pemuda from Bandung, an important city in west central Java. By November 1945, the republic had set up its administration in Yogyakarta, one of Indonesia’s traditional capitals in south central Java. The capital of the Dutch East Indies, Jakarta, known as Batavia by the Dutch, was also in British hands. Contrary to their avowed anti-colonialism, the Americans did not trust Sukarno and were for a restoration of Dutch rule. British forces under orders by Lord Mountbatten, head of the Allied South East Asia Command, also landed in Borneo (Kalimantan) and Dutch New Guinea. From Yogyakarta, Sukarno called for a ceasefire, during which the British handed the Dutch control of the northern coast of Java, but most of the interior was under the fledgling Indonesian army. During 1946, the Dutch floated the idea of dividing Indonesia into autonomous states, which doomed negotiations with the republic. By July 1947, the Dutch had 100,000 troops in Indonesia and were able to mount an offensive in Java, but did not capture Yogyakarta. In August, an UN-mandated ceasefire was accepted by the opposite sides. In January 1948, the Dutch offered the formation of an United States of Indonesia by the end of the year, but independence was hedged in ways unacceptable to the Indonesians. In December, another Dutch offensive captured Yogyakarta, where Sukarno and Hatta were arrested. Before that the Indonesian army, led by Gen. Nusation, had suppressed a communist anti-colonialist movement in east Java. Since the Indonesians had also shown willingness to abide by negotiations, the USA turned against the Dutch and supported an UN call for Indonesian independence (January 1949), militarily still alive through the resistance of an officer named Suharto, who surprised the Dutch with a counter-offensive in March 1949. The Americans protested to the Dutch that half of the Marshall Plan aid to their country had been diverted to the effort to re-colonialize Indonesia (although they did not complain to the French about Indochina). Finally, negotiations from August to November in The Hague led to Dutch withdrawal and the creation of the United States of Indonesia with Sukarno as president. The Indonesians agreed to assume Dutch indebtedness during the war for independence, which included the Marshall Plan loans to the Netherlands. On August 1950, Sukarno declared Indonesia an unitary republic. Once his own man, Sukarno committed his country to non-alignment, but this was not necessarily subversive of the American informal world empire. The Dutch lightly retained western New Guinea, which Indonesia annexed peacefully in 1957. When Sukarno was becoming too friendly with the communists, Suharto overthrew him in 1967 and ruled until 1998, when nepotism and the proliferation of corruption brought him down, although under him Indonesia made notable economic strides. The Dutch had some colonies in the Western Hemisphere, among them Suriname, which became independent in 1975, but other Dutch colonies or dependencies in the Caribbean have not wanted independence.
(7) The travails of Africa
One of the most shameful and unscrupulous incorporations into the informal American world empire was the transition of the Belgian Congo to an independent state. The consequences of this process, whose manipulations can be traced unambiguously to economic imperialism and to the CIA, are still being felt and have caused millions of deaths. The Belgians had done next to nothing to educate the Congolese people during 88 years of colonial rule, which, in its first decades, was considered so exploitative and so inhumane it was internationally considered uncivilized, at a time when few paid much heed to colonialist excesses. For Belgian colonialism, the Congo was a source of mineral wealth. There existed nicely designed provincial capitals and some summer stations. But there was no road system and few public schools, none higher level. Education was mostly in the hands of Catholic missions. The rest was jungle and subsistence agriculture. The greatest cultural achievement of Belgian colonialism, and it wasn’t bad, just singular, was an adaptation of the Catholic mass to Congolese drumming and chanting called the Missa Luba, used by the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini in his movie The Gospel according to Saint Matthew (1964). In 1956, the Belgians were contemplating a thirty-year transition period for Congolese independence. The Congo could have bred all sorts of mayhem especially after the British and the French let go of their colonies. It is a huge country, the 12th most extensive in the world, and Belgium could not have coped with that. It was decided, therefore, on a faster peaceful transition for June 1960. There already existed two important political movements: ABAKO, led by Joseph Kasavubu, based on ethnicity around the lower Congo river; and the National Congolese Movement (MNC), founded in 1958 by Patrice Lumumba, who was not a communist and was the closest the Belgian Congo produced to a nationally known Congolese patriot. Elections in June 1960, gave a large majority to the MNC and its allied African Solidarity Party of Antoine Gizenga. Kasavubu came far behind, but was chosen president by parliament with Lumumba as prime minister. On 30 June, the 30-year old Belgian king Baudoin went to Leopoldville to address the Congolese assembly and inaugurate Congo’s independence. His speech was in praise of his great-grand-uncle Leopold II, the man most responsible for the atrocities committed during the formation and exploitation of the Belgian Congo when it was his personal property. In July, the new and untrained Congolese army mutinied against its Belgian officers and Lumumba put Joseph Mobutu to set the situation aright, which he did competently. The unrest this crisis created was taken as a pretext by Moise Tshombe, governor of Katanga province, and Albert Kalongi, governor of South Kasai province, to secede from the Congo. The latter produced diamonds but Kalonji was only a minor player in the series of events that followed. Katanga was run by the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), which produced copper and cobalt and, most importantly, had a monopoly on uranium before World War II. UMHK contributed 1,500 tons of natural uranium 238 for the American atomic bombs.
Lumumba appealed to the UN, which responded with some military aid, but its then secretary general, Dag Hammarksjold, refused Lumumba’s request to quell the Katanga secession. In August 1960, abandoned by the West and the UN, Lumumba turned to the USSR for help. By September, the USA was actively prodding Kasavubu to get rid of Lumumba, but Lumumba had the parliament with him and it was Kasavuba who fled to neighboring Brazzaville, the capital of the ex-French Congo. Failing that, the CIA suborned Mobutu, who illegally imprisoned Lumumba. Kasavubu returned and formed a political alliance with Mobutu. Loyal to Lumumba, Gizenga formed a government in then Stanleyville (Kisangani now), in today’s Tshopo province. Lumumba escaped house arrest but, in trying to reach Stanleyville, he was arrested by Mobutu’s men in Kasai. In January 1961, Mobutu turned Lumumba over to Tshombe in then Elizabethville (today’s Lubumbashi), the capital of Katanga. Tshombe received him saying: "Tu es méchant" (you’re a bad boy), but it wasn’t just clowning. Lumumba was tortured and murdered in the presence of Belgian ex-officers, part of the mercenary force paid by the UMHK which was staying secessionist Katanga. In the USSR, the Peoples’ Friendship University was renamed the Patrice Lumumba University. (In 1992, the university reverted to its original name.) With Lumumba out of the way, Hammarksjold activated the UN to try to put together the shattered Congo republic, but nothing was done to force Tshombe to give up his Katanga base. After many useless negotiations, UN forces were ordered into Katanga in September 1961. Tshombe fled to Ndola, in Northern Rhodesia, but the Belgian mercenaries resisted the UN invasion. Hammarksjold, who, head of the UN, Swede, and all, was unscrupulously defending Western economic interests in Congo, died in an air crash on his way to a meeting with Tshombe. The UN forces reached Elizabethville in December 1961, but this operation was really a stalemate which allowed Tshombe to return to Katanga. Gizenga held out in Stanleyville until January 1962, when he was captured by Mobutu’s forces. The final subjection of Katanga by UN forces occurred in December 1962-January 1963. But that wasn’t the last of Tshombe. Cyrille Adoula had been named compromise prime minister in August 1961. In 1964, in a sign of terrible things to come, a terrorist and terrorizing movement in eastern Congo, named Simba (lion in Swahili), was led by Pierre Mulele, a former Lumumbist, and was committing atrocities about which Adoula could do little. In July, Tshombe, the expert on hiring mercenaries, was named prime minister. He recruited his former supporters who went and captured Stanleyville, where the Simba were holding European hostages. Katanga was again becoming restless and Tshombe sent the mercenaries there. In minor operations, like squashing the South Kasai secession, Mobutu and his Congolese army had not done badly, so the CIA played all its stake on him. In November 1964, Tshombe and Kasavubu were ousted and Mobutu became dictator until 1997. He renamed his country Zaire (great river). According to Michela Wrong, in the book In the footsteps of Mr Kurtz (2000), Mobutu lured Mulele back to Congo (then re-named Zaire) in 1968 and he had him literally ripped to pieces in public.
In the Third World at large, Africa was the best (or the worst) example of how things could go terribly wrong. The first wrong was colonialism itself, for which most African colonies were an economic burden that did not merit either social or developmental expenses. In colonies with valuable mostly extractive natural resources there were large investments, but these benefited the colonialist states and their societies but produced little for the native populations. Of the twenty lowest ranking nations in the UN Human Development Index in 2002 , nineteen had been long-term former colonies and only Ethiopia was an independent state except for a brief Italian colonialist interlude. Of those colonies, the French had nine, the Belgians, British, and Portuguese three each, and the Italians one (Eritrea). In justice, of the former French colonies, five are either totally or mostly desert. Of the total of 36 countries in the lowest development category, 31 became independent after 1945. But not all the blame can be placed at the feet of colonialism. Haiti, independent since 1804, is the 28th most underdeveloped country, and Liberia, independent since 1847, was in such a chaotic state in 2001-2002 that it could provide no meaningful statistics. The dismal record of colonialism is too long to write down, but certain aspects of it require addressing. Europeans created states in Africa by drawing arbitrary boundaries in which were included different ethnic groups, sometimes strongly antagonistic to each other. Northern Nigeria had very little in common with southern Nigeria, which was the case also of the Sudan and of Chad. As the decades of independence went by, the spectacle of entire nations disintegrating because they had been formed as colonies without regard to the cultures of their populations became a familiar but always discouraging spectacle (Somalia in 1991, Congo-Brazzaville in 1997, Côte d’Ivoire in 2002). Before colonialism, if barely structured, the states that did exist (Asante, Yoruba, Dahomey, and others) at least had a semblance of nationhood. Imperialist powers did the barest minimum to prepare technicians and professionals in their colonies. Combined with extreme ethnic fragmentation, this absence of a large educated elite inevitably led to one-party state politics and, as the few who were educated felt entitled to greater social standing, it also led to extreme corruption and incompetence. Colonialism did so little to create infrastructures for the new states that the time from 1960 to 1980, during which the decolonization process was at its most rapid, were considered decades of progress despite dreadful premonitory signs.
During the so-called decades of progress, ethnic conflict in Nigeria became so acute that the oil-producing southeastern part of the country, called Biafra, seceded and it took three years of combat to re-integrate it into the country. In Burundi, a Belgian colony that became independent at the same as the Congo, there occurred a Hutu genocide by the minority ruling Tutsi which produced 200,000 dead and the emigration of the same number of Hutus to Rwanda, the sister Belgian ex-colony in the heart of Africa. This in turn produced an exodus of Tutsis from Rwanda to Burundi. These killings, which might have seemed to be purely African in nature, had colonialist antecedents. John Reader traces the hatred between these "two peoples" to colonial times. Tutsis were given preference over Hutus in all walks of life. "And how could you tell them apart? Those at either end of the physical continuum-the stereotypically tall slender Tutsi and the short stocky Hutu-were easily identified, but between these extremes there were thousands, if not the majority of the population, whose physical appearance was no clue at all. Generations of intermarriage, migration, and changes in occupation and economic standing had blurred the tribal distinction. But no matter. In 1926 the Belgian authorities introduced an identity card to clarify the issue. By law, the card had to specify the tribe to which the holder belonged. Where appearance was indecisive and proof of ancestry was lacking, a simple formula was applied: those with ten cows or more were classified as Tutsi, those with less as Hutus." Worse, although not really that much worse, was to come in that ethnic confrontation.
Foreign intervention in Africa was rife. Angola, which became independent during the political upheavals in Portugal, was soon engaged in a civil war promoted by racialist South Africa. The same thing occurred in the other large Portuguese colony of Mozambique, where white-dominated Rhodesia financed a murderous gang called RENAMO whose atrocities-most infamously hacking off limbs of apparently random victims-set a pattern that was later followed in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. Neighboring Sudan and Chad were "artificial" states in the sense of having been constituted on colonialist whims. Sudan is the larger of the two but otherwise they look much like but for the southern tips of each, which in Sudan twists to the right and in Chad to the left. The French had a military base in Chad, called Fort Lamy (later N’Djamena, Chad’s capital), from where they ruled a northern arid land peopled by Muslims and a lush southern non-Muslim area. But for its rivers Sudan is a desert but these rivers include the mighty mid-Nile and its upper reaches. No ethnic considerations entered into the formation of either country. In Chad southerners ruled tyrannically the northern Muslims. Conversely, in Sudan it was the Muslims who had the upper hand. Periodic political breakdowns in Chad brought in a French regiment, which left after patching up affairs. Just as these countries were colonialist contraptions, so there were no reasons for animosities between them. But in the 1980s, the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi "declared" clandestine terrorist war on America, which he lost after a big bombing raid on his country and about a dozen Hollywood movies about said raid. The Sudanese Muslims in Khartoum had power through the army and were steering Sudan straight to fundamentalist application of Sharia law, bane to non-Muslims. Sudan and Libya did not get along, but also in Ethiopia, south of Sudan, there was a pro-Soviet military dictatorship. For the USA Sudan became of strategic importance and it gave it generous aid. As it was in Sudan that Osama bin Laden sought asylum when his own country disowned him, looking back it would seem as if America were paving the way ahead of him, for the American anti-Soviet strategy in Afghanistan had eventuated in the Taliban regime, which then became the next obvious host for Al Qaida. Within itself, Sudan had its own civil war between Muslims and southern non-Muslims. As oil was discovered exactly on the north-south divide, it became a question of survive and let survive, which is when brains whirr faster. Darfur is western Sudan. It is Muslim but beset by multiple internal social fissures: in sum, it had grievances. In 2003, Darfur rebels attacked Sudanese troops but here there was no resource of great value to bring the two sides together. Also, Khartoum did not want to be wasting military resources, so it "sub-contracted" to the Janjaweed, nomadic herders and grazers who lost no love on farmers. Very quickly the small rebellion became a major calamity. Estimates on victims are guesses, but the figures are usually large. One of the consequences of the Darfur civil war was that it spilled into Chad with the "millions" of refugees. Mutatis mutandi, Darfur and bordering eastern Chad became like the Pakistani Northwestern Province, a lawless frontier incubator of all kinds of political conspiracies. Chad does not want the refugees and Sudan would rather like to colonize Chad with them. There exists a state of war or hostilities between the two countries. Sudan rounded up a liberation of army of discontented Chadians who tried and failed to capture N’Djamena. Not long afterwards Darfur militants attacked Omdurman, Khartoum’s large neighbor city. They too were repelled but a raid this daring would not have been possible without the mass of refugees in the "lawless borderlands" and the logistic support of Chad. It was in Chad also that Muammar Qaddaffi’s dreams of an African empire came a cropper. Libyans invaded Chad on various occasions for no other purpose that annexing the Ouzoo strip, a worthless piece of desert the French had offered the Italians but never actually turned over to them. Libyan fighting skills were so poor that, even with the best weapons available, they were beaten and scattered by northern Chadian tribesmen, themselves only partially integrated to the rest of the country. So you could say that Chad taught Libya a lesson. We have to make clear now what "Chad" we are talking about.
Famines struck regularly in the Sahel, the semi-arid belt separating the Sahara from tropical-forest Africa. But perhaps the worse was in Ethiopia where in 1984-1985 there were a million victims of hunger. Obviously, then, not all African disasters were of strictly colonialist origin, although, again, imperialist neglect of education in its colonies was a contributory factor all the more nefarious as it went with the absurd theory that Africans were incapable of learning. One thing that African leaders learned were concepts such as "socialism" and "revolution". These ideas had only the remotest relevance to post-colonial African conditions, yet with few exceptions most of the new states adopted them as vague political doctrines with regrettable practical results. How could "revolution" and "socialism" be applied to societies which were tribal, barely urbanized, and nowhere near even a pre-industrial stage of development? Developmental nostrums such as import-substitution, grandiose development plans, and state interference in economic activities and international commerce were implemented without any regard to their efficacy or even viability. These policies were often a reaction against the backwardness that colonialism had left behind, but the results were counter-productive and by the late 1980s most of Sahelian and Sub-Saharan Africa, including Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, entered a seemingly irreversible economic slide. With a few exceptions, African economies were shrinking or stagnating, incomes were falling, and social conditions were deteriorating, all of which contributed to the accentuation of ethnic rivalries and conflicts, often overlapping from some states to others.
The political skein in southern Africa was extremely complicated because of all the conflicting interests involved and in particular because of the obstinacy of white-dominated states, Rhodesia and especially South Africa, in endeavoring to cripple the process of state formation in the independent black countries around them. Whites in general in South Africa, but particularly the Dutch-descended Afrikaaners, had straitjacketed the country with the Apartheid system which denied blacks all civil rights and tried to isolate them from whites through Bantustans and slummy suburban townships. When Africans protested in Sharpeville (1960), white supremacists, to show they meant business, had police shoot at them killing 69, no regrets shown and no inquiries opened. When Soweto, the largest black township, staged a large-scale revolt against Apartheid (1976), police repression produced 600 dead. South African Apartheid, put in place after World War II by the Nationalist party under the fascistic politicians Daniel Malan, Hendrik Verwoerd, and Johannes Vorster, was interpreted by South African Marxists, mostly Jewish, as a form of economic exploitation. But "American Apartheid" in the southeastern states (especially) did not require the South African "legal" apparatus to achieve the same results, so the more stringent South African version did reveal the racial aversion that was spontaneously evident in the USA. In Angola, the leftist MPLA was entrenched in the capital, Lunda, but its control of the interior and of other cities was precarious because of the South African-backed UNITA guerrillas. To counter these, Cuban help was solicited from Lunda and provided with few logistic limitations due to Soviet supplies. Cuban human resources could not extend to Mozambique where also a leftist government held the capital, Maputo, but could do little to stem rebel depredations, even after the white government of Rhodesia was forced to relinquish power. But Cuban intervention in Angola was quite efficacious and in 1976 an open South African incursion was defeated at Cuito Cuanavale (1987). South Africa did not again invade Angola, in part because Apartheid was being subjected to an internal process of reconsideration, which was accelerated by the imminent end of the Cold War. Even before this, negotiations had been going on by which Cuba agreed to evacuate Angola on condition of the independence of Namibia.
The South African statesman who ended Apartheid was F.W. de Klerk. In 1990 he legalized the African National Congress (ANC), which had led clandestine black resistance (and existed since 1912), and released Nelson Mandela after 27 years incarceration mostly in Robben island, across the bay from Cape Town. Mandela was one of the early leaders of the ANC. He was a successful lawyer by cultivating a large black clientele even in the nearly wholly white Johannesburg milieu in which he moved. He did all he could legally to oppose Apartheid, unsuccessfully, and concluded that it was inevitable to recur to armed struggle, which he sanctioned as leader of the ANC. He was caught in a safe-house, called Rivonia, disguised as a gardener. During his trial in October 1962, Mandela said: "I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities." The South African government gradually recognized that it could not oppress 40 million or more discontented blacks forever and it turned to Mandela as the person with most stature within the ANC. After his gradual release, Mandela, by then 72, was a world sensation because of his indomitable spirit, his magnanimity, his undiminished eloquence, and a charisma that left few untouched. In free and universal elections, Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994. In Angola, the MPLA and UNITA tried to form a unity government, which Jonas Savimbi, the UNITA chieftain, sabotaged, but propless he was eventually cornered and killed. The Angolan civil war left 350,000 dead. In Mozambique the rebels were left adrift and had to accept their incorporation into the national army. The Mozambican war left one million dead. The one big stain in southern Africa’s post-Apartheid political progress was the devastating AIDS pandemia which affected from 20% to 40% of the entire populations of the regional states, even those, such as Botswana, which had not been subjected to the ravages of war. Thabo Mbeki was elected after Mandela. He has been a mediocre president, even giving the sanction of his office to bush medicine against AIDS. His successor as head of the ANC has a criminal record. But the gravest problem facing southern Africa seems to be the dilapidation and decadence that is afflicting Zimbabwe, the former white Rhodesia, after decades of the authoritarian incompetence of Robert Mugabe.
The next great cycle of violence in Africa was purely internecine and cannot in justice be attributed to European colonialism. Liberia was founded by freed American slaves in 1847. In time the descendants of these freedmen became a ruling aristocracy living mostly in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, for whom the tribes of the interior were approximately what they had been to American whites. A native reaction led to the downfall of the Liberian elite (1980), but the new rulers, led by a former sergeant, Samuel Doe, were in every respect worse than the previous ruling class. Liberia was torn by tribalism. In 1997, an educated but amazingly unprincipled politician, Charles Taylor, set Liberia on fire in a deadly civil war that divided the country into his so-called "Greater Liberia", a faction led by a savage called Prince Johnson, and Monrovia itself, which was occupied by Nigerian troops sent in on a pacification mission. During the first siege of Monrovia, the city was devastated. Doe was captured and his death by torture was videotaped. Not content with the havoc in his own country, Taylor went and gave his support to a band of brigands in Sierra Leone which recruited boy killers and habitually applied mutilations. Taylor’s interloping in the neighboring country was to plunder its diamond fields. Like Liberia, Sierra Leone disintegrated. Taylor finally managed to capture Monrovia, but he had so disarticulated his country that violence was endemic. The British had to occupy and pacify Sierra Leone (2000). The Nigerians and the opposition to Taylor besieged Monrovia a second time, causing more destruction, but Taylor was finally cornered (2003). Though reduced to shambles, both countries are in a process of recuperation that will take years if not a decade. Between the two countries, the toll of deaths was around 200,000. In 2006, Taylor was brought before an international tribunal in The Hague.
The shocking climax to ethnic strife in Africa occurred in Rwanda, where, as we saw, the effects of genocidal killings in Burundi had consequences. In these two countries, there seemed to be a continuous murderous charade. Hutus would be elected or named to the presidency only to be killed or deposed by Tutsi soldiers. In 1994, the presidents of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, and of Rwanda, Juvenal Habryamina, both Hutus, were approaching Kigali, in Rwanda, when the Falcon executive jet they were flying on (a gift from France to Rwanda) was shot down and crashed in the grounds of the presidential palace. This set off genocide in Rwanda. The Hutus turned against their Tutsi neighbors and in a matter of weeks did all they could to exterminate them, in the absence of firearms, with clubs, knives, machetes, or their bare hands. This too has been called genocide-even though the two peoples spoke the same language and had mixed over time-but it was not as centrally organized as Khmer Rouge terror. Ultimately, the carnage in Rwanda, where even priests and nuns collaborated in the slaughter, resulted from backward or abysmal cultural and educational levels. A Tutsi force led by Paul Kagame, who has been accused of being responsible for the downing of the Rwandan president’s plane, invaded Rwanda from Uganda and sent Hutus fleeing to the Congo, among them the shadowy organization, Interhawame, to which the methodical killing of Tutsis was attributed. Events in Rwanda had major repercussions in Congo. The same Kabila who had made such a dismaying impression on Guevara, now hairless and fat, received full support from Kagame to invade Congo from the same region where the Simba once terrorized Europeans and overthrow Mobutu on condition that Rwanda would be allowed to cull Hutu murderers in the refugee camps. Mobutu fell like a rotten mango (1997). But even though Kabila did not have the means to exert authority in eastern Congo from Kinshasa (as Leopoldville had been renamed), he turned against Kagame, who of course did as he wanted. Uganda, which had previously backed Kagame, got into the act and also invaded eastern Congo, where it came into conflict with the Rwandese. The masses of refugees now trekked back to Rwanda. Kabila was assassinated and his son Joseph succeeded him as president (2001). Uganda and Rwanda finally evacuated the eastern Congo but left behind proxy armed gangs which went by different acronyms and more often just groups of bandits who took advantage of the chaos to pillage and kill. By 2002, there were signs of the end to the Congolese multi-faceted civil war, which had caused two to three million dead as much from disease and starvation as from fighting. The Kinshasa government still does not have the Congo in hand and eastern Congo is in a state of unstable ceasefire with warlords holding to their respective territories. The UN had been cutting back on funding of international operations so that the killings in Rwanda and the subsequent chaos in the Congo have occurred without any external restraints. In Rwanda today ethnic differences have been rigidly outlawed, but Burundi still seems in the grip of Tutsi-Hutu hatred. In Congo, a very old Antoine Gizenga was named prime minister in 2007.
(8) Israel, Palestine and the empire under Eisenhower
Even after a few Jewish brigades had sufficed to make Israel independent, the Arabs still believed that they had the upper hand, still because of their far greater number than that of Jews, and also because with the inception of the Cold War they felt confident that they could redress the logistical disadvantages they had in comparison to Israeli resources. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was another process that ran conjointly with the Cold War and the Third World processes. It was through Third World support that the General Assembly of the UN declared Zionism to be a form of racism. Because of innumerable prejudices, from those with long cultural antecedents to those which surfaced in the day-to-day coverage of issues by the media, America might have perceived Israel as a democratic underdog surrounded by hungry wolves, but that was hardly the case as could be observed, if one wanted to observe objectively, during the attack on Egypt mounted by France and Great Britain in connivance with Israel. We last saw Gamal Abdel Nasser nurturing his grudges in Gaza at the deplorable Egyptian logistical situation. In 1952, Col. Nasser deposed king Farouk and in two years had consolidated his power with which he put his country in the first line against Israel and made himself into an Arab military and cultural icon. Nasser was under no illusions about America and Israel and he forthrightly sought friendship with the USSR. In 1954, he nationalized the Suez Canal, whose management required only mid-level administrative skills. In an unwarranted imperialist start, Britain went into war mode persuading the French, resentful because of the hard time they were having with Arab-backed Algerian nationalists, to accompany them. In the UK, the Laborites had lost to the Conservatives in 1951. Churchill became prime minister once again, but age and the pleasures of good living he had never denied himself had taken their toll. Domestically the Conservatives retained the reforms introduced by the Attlee government. Churchill was still imperialistic and he let Antony Eden, with whom he saw eye to eye, do foreign policy. Britain fought successfully the Emergency in Malaya and the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya. Churchill retired in 1955 and Eden immediately won an electoral ratification. This empowerment might have been what led to him to plunge his country into the reckless and unnecessary Suez adventure. Harassed in its territory by fedayin-the Arab name for commando meaning literally one who dies for one's country-and uncomfortable with the constant threats emanating from Egypt, Israel went along with the invasion plan of Suez. The disingenuous ploy was that Israel would invade the Sinai and British and French paratroops would land to separate the contenders. The UN condemned the aggression, but it was American president Dwight D. Eisenhower who brandished the stick that made America's allies back off (1956). British prime minister Anthony Eden was discredited, but basically he was maneuvered out of office by his successor Harold MacMillan, who spoke of de-colonization as "winds of change". The French 4th Republic was itself already so discredited by its inherent political instability that another crisis more or less didn't really matter much. But in Israel, where David Ben Gurion was prime minister, there were no internal counter-effects and instead Israeli anti-Arab resolve was strengthened.
Despite Egypt's vulnerability, Nasser claimed victory, which made Arabs unrealistically delirious. Egypt assumed an exaggeratedly bellicose stance. Some argue that Nasser had no choice, but he certainly did nothing to calm superfluous passions. Nasser increased his harassment of Israel, including interdicting access to the Israeli port of Eilat via the gulf of Aqaba. Moshe Dayan planned a pre-emptive war against Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. America was not in on the secret. It was so brilliantly executed that Israel occupied the Sinai and the Golan Heights and it annexed the rest of Jerusalem and the West Bank, all in six days (5 June-10 June 1967). Among other conquests, Hurgada was a pocket of land on the Egyptian Red Sea coast where Israel developed a first-class tourist resort. Israel demonstrated in one daring stroke how to deal with Third World high-fliers. Despite the conclusive Israeli triumph, Nasser, who died in 1970, obtained another "victory" when an Arab summit in Khartoum once again re-affirmed the policy of non-recognition of Israel. It was these consequences of the American interdiction of the Suez invasion that have led some observers to argue that Eden was right after all, but this counterfactual reasoning is based on some very unlikely suppositions: that the humiliation or overthrow of Nasser might have made Arab animosity to Israel less provocative or that Israel might not have not found or manufactured the opportunity to obtain what it did in 1967. Eisenhower’s Augustan no-war stance didn’t gain it any Arab favoritism. Nasser knew where America stood. He did not need Soviet enticement, and besides the USSR was offering to build the Aswan dam without any pre-conditions.
Dwight David Eisenhower is as high in a genius scale as an average American has ever climbed. Born and bred in wheat-and-cattle country America, he was an undistinguished West Point graduate (1915). His life-long wife, Mamie, was also an average American. During World War I he was commandant of a training camp for the tank corps. During most of his career Eisenhower held administrative or staff postings. In 1933, he was aide to Gen. Douglas McArthur, the army chief of staff, and went with him to the Philippines from 1935 to 1939. When McArthur was named field marshal by Filipino president Manuel Quezon, Eisenhower told him that he would be demeaning himself and his country by accepting that rank. Field Marshal is the equivalent in America of five-star general, the rank Eisenhower attained. Like Stalin, Eisenhower had the utmost respect for military power, and for little else. He had few scruples about violating sovereignties if he could get away with it. In this, like the average American, he shielded behind common decency and the fundamental purity of American values. Eisenhower was instrumental in having Congress adopt "In God we trust" as the American motto in lieu of the unofficial but grander "E pluribus unum". Eisenhower might, or might not, have looked down on the lowly but he certainly knew how to court the mighty. His military genius is summarized in his career from the rank of colonel, which he attained in March 1941 at the age of 51, and six months later that of brigadier general. By way of comparison with other distinguished American generals of his time, MacArthur was general at 38 and George Patton at 45. Omar Bradley became a general at the same time as Eisenhower, but always served under him. It is truly an amazing accomplishment. In an nutshell from the Columbia Encyclopedia: "Eisenhower’s impressive performance in the 1941 army maneuvers led to his assignment in Washington, D.C. as chief of operations (1942) and preceded his meteoric rise to the top as Allied military commander of World War II. In June, 1942, General Eisenhower was named U.S. commander of the European theater of operations. He commanded U.S. forces in the North African landings (Nov., 1942) and in Feb., 1943, became chief of all Allied forces in North Africa. After successfully directing the invasions of Sicily (July, 1943) and Italy (Sept.), he was called (Dec.) to England to be supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. He was largely responsible for the cooperation between the British, American, and other forces and for the integration of land, sea, and air forces in the great battle for the European continent." He was chief of staff until he was chosen president, of the University of Columbia no less (1948). He resigned from that post to be Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, head of NATO.
A man with these credentials as Republican candidate for president would have been expected to steamroller the Democratic Adlai Stevenson, who had a reputation as a witty intellectual, and of course he did, not once but twice. The second time Stevenson accepted the role of sacrificial lamb. President Eisenhower did not invent the American informal world empire. The ideology behind that was formulated by men like John Kennan, who called it "containment", and secretary of state Dean Acheson, and the groundwork was laid by president Truman. since all the alliances made by Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles were failures what can be said of Eisenhower is that he tried to give informality some kind of military form. American historians tend to credit Eisenhower with ending the Korean War and it is true that it was in his first term that the war ended, but that was probably the doing of the Indian ambassador to the UN, the truculently anti-American Krishna Menon, but a good friend of the People’s Republic of China, who facilitated the Korean armistice at Panmunjon. It was the CIA under Eisenhower which promoted the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala, as it was that, following his instructions, it planned the overthrow of Castro in Cuba. These hill-of-beans republics were as nothing to people like Eisenhower and Dulles. Iran, where the government of Mohammed Mossadeq had nationalized the oil industry, was a more ambitious undertaking, but there too the CIA, with British support, orchestrated the overthrow of Mossadeq and installed Mohammed Rehza Pallavi as dictator-king (1953). The latter’s total disregard for the most elementary constitutional principles resulted in the Ayatollah’s revolution in 1979. Eisenhower exceeded himself a heck of a lot when he kept personally authorizing 70,000-feet overflights of the USSR by the U2 spy plane. This aircraft was a master design that could only maintain its altitude by flying at barely 12 miles above stall speed. No fighter could even come close to that altitude. But any turbulence could send it into a spin. CPSU secretary general Nikita Khrushchev knew that these flights were going on and he went bats every time he was informed of one. He made it high priority for the Soviet military to down an U2, which they finally did on May 1960. The excellent pilot Maj. Gary Powers was at the controls. (He later died when his helicopter ran out of fuel after covering forest fires near Los Angeles.) Eisenhower looked disingenuous, or looked the part, when Khrushchev loudly demanded apologies at a Paris peace summit (1960). It was under Eisenhower that the USA first got involved in a one-way, no-turn-back track in Vietnam.
Eisenhower did not oppose McCarthyism but let it self-destruct. McCarthy was elected as senator from Wisconsin in 1947. Before that he had been a well-liked circuit judge. A considerable part of his constituency was of German descent. He first gained notoriety by actually opposing the death penalty for the German soldiers who had perpetrated the Malmédy massacre of American soldiers during the battle of the Bulge. Under Truman, the State Department had largely rid itself of employees that were considered security risks, but there were 205 of the suspects about whom it was not known precisely whether they too had been fired or were in the process of investigation. In early 1950, in what was supposed to be part of a routine campaigning tour for the Republican party in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy claimed that he knew for a fact that those persons, most of whose names he ignored, were communists. As the Red Scare of the previous years had become stronger because of the Korean war, McCarthy became an instant media celebrity. But his numbers kept changing. In 1948, a congressional investigator, Robert E. Lee, got hold of the list of remaining 57 left-leaning suspects in the State Department. It was passed on to McCarthy, who used it, but soon, not wanting to seem that his accusations dated from an investigation carried on two years before, he augmented it to 81 cases, although he still could give them names. The State Department did name 40 cases that were still under scrutiny. The Tydings Committee, from the name of its Democratic chairman, was formed to investigate McCarthy’s charges. Although only one person among them was tried and acquitted, its fabricator was given in 1953 the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which he used to enhance his reputation as the nation’s number one anti-communist and to attack those who crossed his path by any means fair or foul. The only mitigation for McCarthy’s bullying is that he acted as he did because Eisenhower, a fellow Republican, never openly stood up to him. On the advice of J. Edgar Hoover, the almighty head of the FBI, McCarthy hired Roy Cohn, who had been the prosecutor behind the sentencing and executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, as his principal counsel, and Cohn, who was homosexual, in turn appointed G. David Schine as his assistant. At the height of his power and influence, McCarthy had truculently attacked the universally admired Gen. George Marshall on the issue of who had "lost China". When Schine was inducted into the army, Cohn, with McCarthy’s support, did all he could to get him preferential treatment. McCarthy then began a transparently personal quarrel with the Pentagon and a subcommittee of his own subcommittee was formed to investigate McCarthy’s so-called investigation of the army. Republicans and Eisenhower were fed up with McCarthy and all pending debits against him were collected when, as a result of the sub-investigation, which was televised nationally, the Senate passed a resolution condemning McCarthy, who was an alcoholic and died before completing his second term, very much ignored even by his colleagues. It was commonly thought that Cohn and Schine were lovers, but this has not been proven. Cohn went on to a successfully law practice but died young of AIDS. Schine became a successful film of producer and died with his family piloting his private light aircraft.
Eisenhower is not normally credited with his greatest accomplishment. Earle Warren, three times governor of California and a district attorney with an exemplary record, was an Eisenhower supporter. When it came to fill the vacancy because of the death of chief justice of the Supreme Court Fred Vinson, Eisenhower chose Warren (1953), but he did not know that he was appointing not just a liberal but a radical. He might have overlooked that on one of his runs for the governorship of California, Warren, a Republican, was also endorsed by the Democrats and the Progressive party. On 17 May 1954, by unanimous decision, the Supreme Court declared school segregation on the basis of race unconstitutional. That case (Brown v. Board of Education), in which the plaintiff’s lawyer was Thurgood Marshall, future Supreme Court justice, was the electrifying start of the Civil Rights movement in America. Much though he might have disliked it, Eisenhower had to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, where Gov. Orval Faubus was doing his best to obstruct the Supreme Court’s decision to integrate schools. Eisenhower did his duty there and he set the precedent of civil rights enforcement that his successors would have to follow, although they did it with much more alacrity than Eisenhower did. The answer in the South to Federal interference was a general shut down of public education. But the original school desegregation decision set off a series of initiatives that resulted in the legal prohibition of the de facto subjugation under which American Blacks lived. The Swede Gunnar Myrdal described it in terms that rang true and appalling: "Except for a small minority enjoying upper and middle class status, the masses of American Negroes, in the rural south and in the segregated slum quarters in southern cities, are destitute. They own little property; even their household goods are mostly inadequate and dilapidated. Their incomes are not only low but irregular. They thus live day to day and have scant security for the future." Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff elaborate on Myrdal’s social vivisection: "As the economic conditions were, Myrdal found that the treatment of Negroes in the courts was worse. Whites tended to respect the justice system. Negroes were terrified of it. Neither a Negro’s person nor his property was safe in the courts, Myrdal concluded." Myrdal reported: "Most of the time the Negro is not allowed to register or to vote, and he might risk up to his life in attempting to do it."
Schools and voting were the two most important areas of discrimination, but there were countless everyday instances of it. In Montgomery, the black community sustained a boycott of over a year to force the desegregation of the bus system (1955-1956). When protests against racialism became more aggressive, as in the 1960 Freedom Rides in which blacks and white sympathizers traveled cross country, the danger factor increased and the KKK committed various murders. In 1962, it took a complement of federal marshals to permit James Meredith to register in the University of Mississippi, who otherwise would possibly have been lynched such was white fury. The 1963 March on Washington, led by Martin Luther King, was massive enough for politicians to start paying more attention to the resistance to anti-segregation laws. Even so, the aptly nicknamed "Bull", Theophilus Eugene Connor, head of public security in Alabama, used attack dogs and turned powerful hoses on passive protesters trying to integrate central Birmingham. But it was a spate of killings in 1964 that finally persuaded Congress to approve the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965. This legislation was sponsored by president Lyndon Johnson. The voting rights law was particularly influential in giving blacks a voice in politics at all government levels. All of this produced a backlash among whites all over America, which was a collective aberration considering that blacks had been dehumanized for centuries in America and the civil rights movement barely got started in 1955 and was at its most politically effective only a decade later. With legal assertion of blacks came illegal riots in Harlem (1964), Watts in Los Angeles (1965), and most significantly in Newark (1967). The latter was a watershed. Whites moved to suburbs and many urban centers, especially in the east coast became like ghost cities on week-ends and noticeably deteriorated. Newark, a small but pretentious city where a white elite ruled a majority black city, changed hands and lost some of its previous monumental luster (neglected statues of dead white males in uniform on horses, for example). The legal backlash was that the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, with the predictable higher application to blacks than to whites, and three-strikes laws, by which a person can be sent for life imprisonment if caught three times with crack, became widespread starting in the 1990s. The expected consequence of these crypto-racist measures is that America has the highest population of prison inmates of any country. The figure is 2.3 million, higher than in China, and it means that one in every 100 Americans is in calaboose. Since for a certain age group one in every nine Blacks are incarcerated, roughly in a prison population of 100 just under 50 are Blacks. Since Blacks are arrested disproportionately with respect to whites for illegal-drug possession, around 25 of those 50 maybe are in jail, perhaps for life, for smoking marijuana. Before the get-tough laws came into effect, the proportion of jailees stood steadily at a much lower level, even through the decades of Prohibition and the crimes waves of the 1930s. Although the beginning of a long lineage of civil rights legislation, the mandate for school integration itself has had a very rough going in America and has probably not been a success. To give the tale a final tweak, the Supreme Court in 2007 practically argued for the legality of de facto school segregation on the same argument used in 1954: that color should not be used in school districting. Two contemporary distinguished personalities that were bred by the civil rights movement are Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, whose legal philosophy would have outlawed anti-discrimination legislation, and Barack Obama.
(9) Vietnam and the Domino theory
For the American informal world empire, there was one area which Domino Theory seemed to fit to a T and that was Indochina. It is often said that the Vietminh was a purely nationalist movement but that is inaccurate: Ho Chi Minh and his military commander, Vo Nguyen Giap, led a nationalist and communist movement. There is no validity in the charge that it was American opposition that made communists out of Vietnamese nationalists. Even if the French had told them to keep Vietnam, Ho and Giap still would have established a communist regime. There is no reason to believe that they would have become capitalists over night if the French first or the Americans later had sat down and reasoned with them and even offered them economic aid. Nationalists in the rest of South East Asia were not communists. But Ho Chi Minh was present at the founding of the French communist party (1920); he became a member of the Comintern in Moscow; he did duty as a Comintern agent in China (1925-1927); so you could say that he was the flesh and bones of the Vietnamese communist party, even if officially he was founder of the independence movement of Vietnam (Viet Minh) and of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (known in the American press as Viet Cong). The French were intent on retaining Indochina. Despite France's Post-War economic travails, they were not counting their francs. They knew that Vietnamese nationalists were communists, so they had no difficulties in convincing America that it should help them in their fight to re-establish colonialist rule for the sake of anti-communism. This proposition was more complex than it might seem on the surface. Indochina was not one but three different countries: Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. The name Indochina itself was a somewhat pedantic French invention. In the remote past Indian influence had pervaded the region. The Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia is its most splendid, though not an early, manifestation. Northern Vietnam had always had Chinese cultural influence. India and China thus formed Indochina. But the Vietnamese never accepted Chinese political hegemony and their linguistic roots were Austro-Asiatic, which made them remote relatives of the Cambodians (although no self-respecting Cambodian will admit this). The Laotians were Tai-speakers. The Cambodians, who in the past were the most Hinduized of the three peoples, had long ago forgotten Sanskrit and adopted Buddhism. In simple terms, there was no Indochina. But communist military victory in Vietnam, which was by far the most important of the three countries, the one that had suffered most under Japanese occupation, would have had repercussions in Laos and in Cambodia. Vietnam has a large border with China. It has a very extensive border with Laos, which also borders on China. These borders were quite porous because they were mostly mountainous and covered by thick tropical forests. If ever there were odds stacked against colonialism, it was in Indochina against the French. It wasn't too hard for the French to retake Vietnamese cities, which they did brutally, but they could not extend their rule to rural areas, especially deep in the back country, close to China. Outside of Vietnam, France thought it had things more or less under control by granting a kind of supervised independence to Laos and Cambodia (1953). The situation in these two countries was extremely fragile. In Vietnam, the tide of war began to turn against the French after the communists came to power in China. The decisive defeat on the French was self-inflicted. The high command in Vietnam planned to lure the communist guerrillas into a pitched battle in a makeshift military base in the valley of Dien Bien Phu. The theory was that parachuted artillery and an airport to keep the base supplied would suffice to rout the enemy. The Vietnamese communists were not only nationalists but also well-armed and disciplined (precisely because they were communists). Giap stealthily surrounded the Dien Bien Phu garrison with more men and guns than the French had and then started closing in. The end came in June 1954.
At the time there were two related processes in full operation: one military in Asia and the other political in France. The French were tired of the Vietnamese war and the socialist economist Pierre Mendès-France, a former Free French aviator, became prime minister (June 1954-February 1955) with the solemn undertaking that he would end it in one month. Mendès-France was like a nova in the international firmament, but he had certain handicaps in France. He was a milk-drinker-or said he was, and ostentatiously drank it during parliamentary debates-and he wanted other Frenchmen to do likewise, which was overdoing it. France's contemporary history demonstrates that high national indexes of alcoholic consumption are not incompatible with economic progress and technological prowess. Finland is another example. But Mendès-France's really crippling political handicap at the time was his sincere anti-colonialism and France was not then ready to give up Algeria. As we saw, it would take a de Gaulle to make Frenchman swallow that bitter pill, with wine. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu, Mendès-France convoked a conference in Geneva and by agreeing to divide Vietnam along the 17th parallel he got all the parties to agree to a truce in July, almost to the month he gave himself. In the south there was a pro-Western government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic in a country overwhelmingly Buddhist. In the north, Ho Chi Minh and his atheistic nationalists-communists assumed power. It was agreed that elections to reunify the country were to be held in 1956. Cambodia was under the multi-talented, saxophone-playing king Norodom Sihanouk. In Laos things were not so clear. The Vietnamese communists supported the Pathet Lao. But this guerrilla movement was led by prince Suphanouvong, who was a cousin of the neutralist prime minister prince Souvanna Phouma. There was an unsteady balancing act between the capital Vientiane and the peasant-based Pathet Lao, but for the West it was not necessarily as lost a cause as Hanoi. The most disappointed party by the Geneva settlement was Eisenhower’s USA. By the time the French left Vietnam, Americans were already involved with Diem. The French might have induced them to look towards Vietnam, but it was containment, or rather a misconception of containment, that eventually did them in. Devised against communist imperialism, containment turned America from informal imperialism to active imperialism through the imprint of Domino theory. The start of America's long and painful trek in the heart of the Vietnamese darkness was a deceptively simple reasoning. When the time came for national elections in Vietnam, president Diem refused to celebrate them with the historically impeccable argument that communists always rigged them. This was a no-win situation. If you held elections, the communists would make sure that every northern Vietnamese voted for them. But if you did not hold them, as indeed happened, then a war was on that the communists had a good chance of winning. American intervention ideally was meant to contain tyranny and promote democracy. In reality, containment could be misconstrued as American imperialist arrogance. Once the USA became actively involved in Vietnam, what the Vietnamese in general saw was meddling. Poor to start with, South Vietnamese did not observe any difference in their economic situation through the American presence, but what they did notice were soldiers of another skin color from another land virtually taking over their country. And as to freedom and democracy, apart from meaning very little to Vietnamese peasants, they were scarce commodities even in the cities. Ultimately, the culprit was the fateful and unsubtle idea of the falling dominoes.
Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Officially he died from a stroke. It is possible that his death was induced. There can be little doubt that medical assistance to the Soviet despot was delayed. As Stalin lay dying, Beria was like a speeded-up manic-depressive going from exultation to crawling when Stalin still gave signs of life. It took Stalin five days to die. When the Georgian cinema director Mikhail Chiaureli, who made films glorifying Stalin with look-alike actor Mikhail Gelovani, started blubbering in public, Beria told him: "Control yourself, you idiot!" After a funeral procession characterized by mass hysteria and deaths by suffocation and trampling in crowds, Stalin's heirs opted for what seemed like an inevitable but sensible solution: collective leadership. Georgi Malenkov became prime minister, technically chairman of the council of ministers, and Vyacheslav Molotov and Beria deputy prime ministers. Nikolai Bulganin occupied the important post of minister of defense. Stalin had been secretary general of the politburo of the central committee (CC) of the CPSU. The politburo was the standing committee of the CC. After a party congress in 1952, Stalin enlarged it and renamed it presidium, but he did not otherwise modify it. Despite their republican and egalitarian posturing, communists have been the most intense devotees of political hierarchy in our times, perhaps in history, which in effect has made them inaccessible and pretentious as rulers. When some one once mentioned the Vatican to Stalin, he asked: "How many divisions does the pope have?" In keeping with his parody of proletarian simplicity, Stalin, who, like Hitler, eschewed medals, gave up the post of secretary general of the party around the time, before World War II, when he had become not just the party leader but the absolute autocrat of the USSR. He put himself at the top of the list of party secretaries, hence inferentially the first secretary, but in principle the equal of the others or at most a primus inter pares. That was of course pure stagecraft and every one from Stalin down, in and out of the USSR, knew who was the vozhd, as the Chinese knew unmistakably that Deng Xiaoping, a mere chairman of a military committee, was at the top of the pecking order in his country during the time he held that post. With Stalin dead, Malenkov occupied the place of first secretary. The perspectives for collective leadership in a country where the cult of personality had been deliberately made a religion-substitute were not very good. The collective leaders turned on Beria, either because they felt relegated by him or had real evidence that he was conspiring to make himself dictator. Beria was acting as if he was the boss and, surprisingly, he initiated the process of de-Stalinization by opening some gulag doors. His hatred of Stalin was perhaps greater than that of the other members of the party presidium, possibly because he had to bear more than the others with Stalin's despotic whims, including in 1946 his removal as head of the NKVD. During Beria’s brief stint as the most powerful Soviet hierarch, there were some initial moves towards economic liberalization and he even proposed releasing East Germany from its satellite status. Beria was arrested and executed, and so were his closest associates in the following three years, which suggests that there was more to his dispatch that mere moral scruples about Beria's role as Stalin's hangman. These purges were the last publicly acknowledged political executions in the USSR. But about a country so given to secrecy and arbitrary methods, it would be unpardonably disingenuous to believe that extreme abuse of authority ceased when Beria was eliminated.
Even with this upper-echelon purge, collective leadership did not survive for long. The person who emerged as the main wielder of power, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, was at first not even in the forefront of Stalin's successors, even though he was part of Stalin's inner circle. He frog-leaped over all the other CPSU secretaries and, displacing Malenkov, was officially ranked first secretary, formally the same as Stalin had been. Khrushchev was the son of peasants, but his father also worked as a miner and Khrushchev preferred to think of himself as of proletarian origin. He and his wife, Nina Petrovna, could have been, as they say, chosen by central casting for the part of Russian mujiks. But Nina Petrovna, Babushka face and all, was a party activist who originally had an educational edge on her husband. As communist boss of Ukraine, Khrushchev showed a keen interest in agriculture. He was as communist as they came and he sincerely believed that planning could beat a free market any day. He had big projects for the USSR and he did not want interlopers. He overhauled the NKVD, Beria's former vipers’ nest, which was renamed KGB (committee for state security), the designation under which it became most notorious in the West despite having been much less homicidal than in its previous avatars. Khrushchev launched the policy known as "virgin lands", or the plowing of steppe lands in Kazakhstan and western Siberia to expand cultivated acreage in lieu of increasing the productivity of existing farmland, a policy which he adopted in part based on Lysenko’s bogus genetic theories. Collective leadership was formally maintained, but Stalinism as a political system of one-man despotism was defunct. Khrushchev was an accomplice to some of Stalin’s political crimes. He had to be because Stalin trusted him and was instrumental in his ascent within the Soviet hierarchy. But it is more realistic to view him as caught up in the Soviet system of terror, which he deplored but about which he could do nothing, except perhaps to flee without professional credentials, no other language but Russian, and the pudgy, gap-toothed looks of an angry nobody. He chose to go the course and when his time came he gave Stalinism its funeral oration. At the 20th Party Congress in February 1956. Khrushchev did not hold anything back in his denunciation and even went further than he should have when he depicted Stalin as prostrate with fear when Germany invaded the USSR, which was not true. Stalin never lost his cool in his life. What is known is that, after the fall of Minsk (30 June 1941), Stalin absented himself from his place of work in the Kremlin and it was the politburo that had to seek him out in his dacha. Simon Sebag Montefiore speculates that it might have crossed the hierarchs’ minds to remove Stalin, but in the same version, what they did was beg Stalin to return and lead the country, which Stalin did. All this happened in less than two days, and after Stalin had given Zhukov a lesson in self-discipline.
Even the Khrushchev critic Howard Taubman admitted that Khrushchev’s performance at the 20th Congress was "brave and reckless", which sounds supererogatory, for just by being brave Khrushchev was being reckless. Khrushchev’s defiantly anti-Stalinist stance was later toned down by his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, but Mikhail Gorbachev, who finished the work Khrushchev began, said of himself and his allies in the Soviet pyramid of power that they were "children of the 20th Congress". Khrushchev's intervention in the 20th Congress also came out in favor of peaceful co-existence with capitalism, which had been Malenkov's line and one of the reasons for his demotion. As in empires throughout history, Soviet policies were never without significant consequences. Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin was especially influential on events that followed, although the ultimate causes of those events were rooted in previous Soviet imperialism, about which there was nothing informal. There were no social convergence of interests as in America’s informal empire, except between the CPSU and the communist rulers of Soviet satellites. That this was the state of affairs became clear when the East Germans rose up against Soviet tanks in 1953. After Khrushchev unmasked Stalinism, Hungarian communists tried to chew off the Soviet lead around their necks. For a few days they got away with hustling out and bashing political police, but Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and the restored communist regime inveigled and later executed Imre Nagy, the leader of the Hungarian insurrection and a former communist prime minister. Not for nothing Stalin had given the Ukraine a border on Hungary. This strategic advantage became unmistakable when Polish communists also became so recalcitrant that they would probably have opposed a Soviet invasion. Over Moscow's discontent, the reasonably nationalistic, but still communist, Wladislaw Gomulka became Poland's leader.
Khrushchev consolidated his hold on power by dismissing Molotov, Malenkov, and Lazar Kaganovich at one go from the party presidium with the unlikely excuse that these men, life-long Bolsheviks and apparatchiks, constituted an "anti-party group". Malenkov had survived his first defeat but this time he was completely ousted from power and ended up managing a hydroelectric dam in Ust-Kamenogorsk, somewhere in Kazakhstan. Molotov was posted to Mongolia as ambassador, later named Soviet representative to an UN agency in Vienna. Kaganovich was given the lowly task of managing a cement plant. But Khrushchev was no despot, perhaps mainly because he did not have Stalin's absolute hold on the party. Bulganin was kept on as prime minister and even accompanied Khrushchev on junkets, until he too was retired. Anastas Mikoyan, a genial Armenian and loyal Stalinist, also palled around with Khrushchev and made friends for the USSR abroad. He was adaptable and survived Khrushchev's downfall. Khrushchev on the whole was well-intentioned but he was not one to weaken party control. After his denunciation of Stalin there was a period, known as the thaw, when free expression was given some leeway. Ilya Ehrenburg, usually conventionally Stalinist in his writing, was the one who first used the image, explicitly represented in a Russian period film, of winter ice melting into a clear spring brook. But Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, which was crude about the infancy of communism, did not find a publisher in Russia and the novel was first printed in Italy by a communist editor (1957). Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature the following year. Given a choice by Soviet authorities between rejecting it or traveling to Stockholm and not being allowed to return, he chose to remain in Russia. Pasternak's experience was the model upon which the samizdat "industry" was created and flourished: officially unprintable works were chain-copied, circulated within the USSR, and smuggled out of the country, where some were published, others not. Soviet censorship had a devastating effect on a gentle patriot such as Pasternak, who did not long survive his disgrace as a bona fide Soviet author. In the case of the bilious Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the recoil was horrendous. Solzhenitsyn's novelette "One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich", about living conditions in a Kazakh labor camp, was published through Khrushchev's personal intervention. Solzhenitsyn, a one-time officer in the Red army who saw action and was twice decorated, was sent to labor camps because of indiscreet references he made to Stalin. Fed up with the political persecution of freedom of expression, he began to write furiously denouncing the Soviet system. With his galloping boldness and Khrushchev's forcible retirement, his lengthy, over-written works went unpublished. Khrushchev had probably supported him in the first place because Solzhenitsyn is not entertaining, hence did not seem likely to get a wide and durable following, but his testimony on the Stalinist prison system was the ideal literary pendant to Khrushchev's secret speech. "Denisovich" sold in the millions. Via samizdat and foreign publication, Solzhenitsyn gained a big following abroad and he too won the Nobel Prize (1970). Placed in the same disjuncture as Pasternak, he too declined emigrating. His voluminous Gulag Archipelago, a denunciation of the vast and complex Soviet system for detaining, mistreating, and degrading political dissidents, appeared in the West and the Soviet authorities raised a hue and cry. Solzhenitsyn was arrested, his citizenship was annulled, and he and his family were exiled. Reading Solzhenitsyn had become almost dutiful in the West, and the writer, who also now could collect his Nobel prize money, was a wealthy man and could afford to live in splendid, almost obsessive, isolation in Vermont. His property was surrounded by a chain link fence and he once explained to his neighbors why he lived like that, which he did until after the dissolution of the USSR.
Khrushchev's supremacy was beset by problems, some of them of his own creation, but by no means all. Mao Zedong had established communism in China mainly with indigenous resources. The USSR welcomed him, but it had not always been unconditionally supportive of Chinese communists. The original Chinese communists were city-bred, but Mao himself had rural roots although he had a good urban education. The Chinese communists' obedience to Comintern instructions resulted in their slaughter in Shanghai and Canton. (See chapter.) Despite previous slights, Mao Zedong was willing to defer to Stalin as the leading figure in international communism, but not to an upstart like Khrushchev, who in turn believed that Mao's pretensions were barmy. Communist leaders were punctilious about ceremonials and Khrushchev and Mao were looking at different claims for precedence. Given that it was the USSR that had the bomb, and that it was Mao who had written that power comes out of the barrel of a rifle, Khrushchev had the better arguments, but China had the biggest population in the world and numbers had made a difference in Korea. Relations between the USSR and China went from bad to worse until the break was consummated with the Soviets packing up their blueprints and engineers from eastern Europe abandoning their jobs in construction and industrial projects. China was then in the middle of a mind-boggling economic crisis because of Mao's absurd "Great Leap Forward" (1958-1960), during which agriculture was regimented and villages were ordered to build primitive iron refineries. The results were widespread food scarcities and useless lumps of pig iron. The Soviet withdrawal came like an earthquake after a typhoon. Mao's leadership was so patently incompetent that he effaced himself, but only long enough to get military support and to plan the Great Cultural Revolution, a pandemonium during which young people were incited to attack and destroy anything that smacked of order, intellect, or tradition, sometimes even to torture and kill, with the pretext of a revolutionary renovation. Among those persecuted and vilified were Deng Xiaoping and Peng Dehuai, an intimate of Mao who had led the Chinese forces during the Korean War. It begun in 1966 and lasted with varying degrees of intensity until Mao’s death in September 1976. That youth took to such directives with so much gusto is an indication that William Golding might not have been far from the truth in his depiction of children in the novel The Lord of the Flies as naturally cruel and barbarous. Even in these circumstances, as in Stalin’s great purges, the Chinese dictator was selective and China exploded its first atomic bomb in October 1964 and tested its first fusion bomb in the middle of the Cultural Revolution (1967). Self-evidently, Chinese scientists were not made to wear dunces’ caps, as Deng Xiaoping and other politicians who had crossed Mao were. Another significant comparison is that ridicule is much less lethal than a Lubyanka cell or a Gulag camp. Also, the Cultural Revolution has been defended in that it achieved a truly Gargantuan expansion in education at the primary and secondary levels. Even so, the idea behind Mao's Cultural Revolution was the model the Khmer Rouge imitated in Cambodia, except that they cut to the chase and just tortured and killed in the millions. Nobody initiated a crusade to save Cambodia and it was only when the Cambodians began a piecemeal penetration of Vietnamese territory that the Vietnamese invaded and overthrew the Khmer Rouge (1979), a purely strategic move that was much denounced by the USA and China.
(10) Nuclear escalation
The first two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan by American planes in 1945. The USSR had the bomb four years later. It is a general belief in America that the Soviet espionage made the Soviet bomb possible, but this is not accurate for the Soviet atomic program began in 1942 or earlier led by Soviet scientists and the only specific input to Soviet research that might have come from Los Alamos was the design of the implosion plutonium type bomb with which the Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs, who was part of the Manhattan project, knew in detail, because he had been instrumental in designing it. Although Fuchs was only sussed out in 1950 in Britain, it is questionable whether he was a traitor to the USA. He was not for nothing in Los Alamos and he felt strongly that the main enemy of the Nazis, who had killed most of his family, was the USSR. But he did betray Britain when after the war he maintained his liaison with the Soviets. He spent nine years in prison after which he emigrated to Dresden, in communist East Germany. The Soviet bomb was of the implosion type. The USA developed the hydrogen bomb in 1952 and the USSR tested one in 1953. The hydrogen bomb idea would probably have arisen in many ways, but it was Fermi who suggested it to Edward Teller. The basics here are, very crudely, a fission bomb around or near a fusion device which released its own energy and the two combined and interacting had many more times the explosive power of an atomic bomb alone. This was going way beyond Little Boy and Fat Man. Oppenheimer dragged his feet on this and Teller pushed so hard that the coordinator of the atomic bomb project, who in his youth had some marginal contacts with communists, had his security clearance revoked. Lots of hydrogen bombs could wipe out a big country and not long after the United States (November 1952), the USSR started actively producing its own (August 1953).
During the Cold War, words provoked interpretations, hence more words, but the escalation of nuclear terror was an all-too-palpable menace. It was not re-assuring either that there was an inescapable rationale to it. The Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs still could be said to be within conventional-weapons dimensions in that each one was the approximate equivalent, in destructive energy released, to the full load of 200 B-29 Super-fortresses, a large but not huge four-engine plane. Operation Gomorrah destroyed Hamburg from 27 July to 3 August 1943. It involved 3,000 American and British planes which dropped 9,000 tons of bombs. Tokyo was leveled by B-29 raids from February to August 1945. The death toll was higher than from either the Hiroshima or the Nagasaki bombings. Both the USA and the USSR were obsessed by what was known as "first-strike capability", or victory in one nuclear onslaught, so they went into massive bomb-building programs. Since bombs needed means to transport and drop them, they also started producing "strategic bombers"-very long-range with a capacious belly-and more menacingly, because bombers were fast but still sub-sonic, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) which could fly at over nine times the speed of sound. Nuclear strategy got, literally, a boost when the Soviets lifted a satellite (Sputnik) onto an earth orbit while America had not yet gotten around to lobbing a softball-sized object beyond the atmosphere and back. Americans believed the Russians were ahead of them in boosting capacity and thus began talk of a "missile gap" that had to be filled. Sputnik was actually the result of a window of opportunity that rocket scientist Sergei Korolyov saw and jumped into. The Soviet ballistic missile R-7 was over-powered because the weight of a nuclear warhead was not known exactly. As there were delays in the nuclear weapons program, Korolyov got a reluctant military to let him lift the a spherical aluminum-alloy satellite with barely two transmitters. Even the Soviets at first did not play up Korolyov’s sensational achievement and Pravda reported it in an inside page. American technology was given a powerful fillip and the arms race, and nuclear terror along with it, grew in intensity. American strategists, who tended to think of communism as an international "monolith", were not relieved-some became even more suspicious-when the USSR and China had a noisome and bitter falling out because the Russians were not willing to provide the Chinese with nuclear capability. The Berlin Wall, a certain sign (in retrospect of course) that communism was hopeless, made the United States more apprehensive about Soviet intentions. If a satellite communist regime was willing to go to the length of sealing its own citizens inside what seemed like a nation-size though relatively comfortable concentration camp, what would the USSR not be capable of in its lunge at world domination? The truth was that the USSR did not have the wherewithal for world conquest and communism anyway was fast approaching its high tide. Even though America not only spanned the "missile gap" but for starters in July 1969 landed two astronauts on the moon-more than a scientific expedition, it was to tell the Russians: "Better that if you can!"-strategy and technology in unison kept searching for means through which one side could get the better of the other.
In principle, you can have too many of a certain weapon, but the United States and the USSR could not know exactly what were "enough" nuclear bombs and missiles, because they had to be prepared to withstand a first strike by one on the other and be able to retaliate wreaking the same or more destruction than a first strike occasioned. The nuclear arms race was not without costs and every bomb test spewed into the atmosphere clouds of radioactivity that, every one agreed, could eventually result in dangerous contamination. Since nuclear tests were carried out by the USA and the USSR in their own territories, a cardinal consideration was that these countries would be the first to suffer the consequences of radioactive fallout. For these very valid reasons a treaty was signed in Moscow for a partial test ban (1963), which later was voluntarily converted to a total ban. The UK had suspended testing in Australia before then, but the French went on making tests in the South Pacific provoking official protests-New Zealand was especially critical-and the active opposition of the environmental organization Greenpeace. French secret services tried to sabotage Greenpeace by sinking the ship Rainbow Warrior docked in Auckland, for which they had to apologize and pay compensation.
The ban on testing was not accompanied by a ban on manufacturing, so basically being on the earth was beginning to feel like living next to an unlicensed fireworks factory, where an explosion could occur some time. Nuclear strategy went on looking for the mythical advantage that would give one side the edge over the other. There were many kinds of missiles-ICBMs, mid-range missiles, even "tactical" atomic weapons-but they all went from surface to surface. Massive retaliation, or the counter to first-strike capability, depended on having missile-launching extra-thick concrete silos in such numbers that many would survive a first strike. But suppose you could make it so that the enemy could not know where your missiles were? This would certainly put out of anybody's mind the remotest possibility of success for a first strike. To make the strategist's task virtually unsolvable, ICBMs, could also be launched from submarines (SLBMs), or moving platforms, which, if nuclear powered, could remain undersea for long periods of time and go anywhere undetected. Sub-launched missiles made targeting missile sites impossible. There was an ethical tittle here. Silo-encased missiles theoretically could be guided to strike at enemy silos, but SLBMs could not be targeted with the accuracy of stationary ballistic missiles, so deterrence now was necessarily also based on the destruction of cities. Since the Russians also had SLBM capability, self-preservation beat any ethical qualms there might be about collateral damage. But suppose a barrier could be built of missiles that could destroy in-coming missiles? There already existed a technology by which one ICBM could divide into many separate nuclear warheads and these could be aimed at different targets. These were the MIRVs or Multiple Independently-targeted Re-entry Vehicles. This did not invalidate the concept of anti-missile missiles, because you could in theory knock out an MIRV before it spawned, but at the time the technical problems of coping with MIRVs and SLBMs were daunting. To dissuade copycats, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty was subscribed by a large majority of states (1968). By that time, the USA and the USSR had such an overabundance of nuclear weapons and ICBMs that no matter what defense strategies either country adopted, nuclear war would eventually result in reciprocal annihilation. When this reasoning became the subject of public debate, it was also realized that it was better to be in such a situation than in one in which one country had the advantage over the other, which anyway was not likely to happen. This approach to nuclear strategy was called Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD. In America it is associated with the name of Robert McNamara, a former auto industry chief executive and Kennedy's secretary of defense, but in the USSR no one in particular hogged the credit, so it is more likely that MAD was just another name for common sense. MAD became official with the signing, on 26 May 1972, of the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), a strictly two super-powers or bipolar affair. After that, the next logical step was to implement arms limitations, perhaps arms reduction. These negotiations were called Strategic Arms Limitations talks or treaties (depending on the results). There was a SALT I during Nixon's second administration. There were the SALT talks during Carter's administration which ceased the moment the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The MAD equilibrium was not affected.
Joseph Kennedy was a Boston-Irish wheeler-dealer who amassed one of the greatest fortunes in America (for his time). In doing so, he became friendly with Franklin Roosevelt, whose 1932 successful campaign for the presidency he actively supported. Roosevelt named him chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, all in all a good choice as Kennedy knew every Wall Street flimflam. His appointment as ambassador to Great Britain, though, was a very bad choice. As descendant of immigrants fleeing the Irish famine, he harbored no great love for Britain, although he enjoyed hobnobbing with the aristocracy. He and his wife had nine children and one of his daughters, Kathleen, married the Marquess of Hartington. But Kennedy was an isolationist and when war came to Britain, he publicly showed a yellow streak about Germany. He declared that Britain was finished as a fortress of democracy. He was forced to resign. It is unlikely that Kennedy himself had personal aspirations to be president-apart for his sorry show as diplomat, he was hobbled in other ways-but he definitely wanted one of his male children to make it to the White House, and they, especially John Fitzgerald Kennedy, knew it and agreed. One thing about which no one can accuse Joseph Kennedy is of pulling strings to keep his sons from the frontlines during the war. The eldest of the brood, Joseph Jr., was killed in a little known screw-loose operation called Aphrodite. It was approved by Gen. Doolittle, of "Tokyo-raid" fame, but no one has claimed its invention. It consisted in using run-down B-17s and B-24s as remote-controlled, explosive-laden semi-drones against difficult German targets, such as reinforced concrete submarine pens. Without canopies, the bombers would be manned to a low altitude followed by a primitive remote controller airplane. At a designated distance over England, the two-man crew of the bomber would activate the fuse, set the controls on auto, and bail out. The guidance plane would then direct the drone to the target. Of the thirteen missions undertaken, each one involving various bombers, not one hit the target. Two bombers crashed in England itself, one near Ipswich. Most of the drones were downed by flak. And one bomber detonated before the droning maneuver. This is the one that killed Joseph Jr. John Fitzgerald served in the Pacific as commander of a torpedo boat that was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Before war service, John’s graduation thesis at Harvard argued that had Hitler been confronted by Britain before he attacked Britain, Germany would have won the war. Later, Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for a book, Profiles in courage, that many have said was ghost-written for him, although the truth is probably that he had the idea and wrote it but that the research was done by others. He was Hollywood-handsome and married a tall, cute, elegant woman, Jacqueline Bouvier, with a distinguished social background, though not as rich as her husband. It is impossible to prove with hard facts that Joseph Sr. made John Fitzgerald the political meteor that he was, for the son had the father’s talent but totally dedicated to politics. In 1960, he won the presidency by a small margin against Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice-president. In "image-conscious" America it was thought by many that in the television debates between the contestants, the first in history, Nixon’s five-o-clock shadow was too noticeable. Eisenhower left John F. Kennedy two deadly legacies: the CIA plan to invade Cuba and the Vietnam entanglement. The Cuban project bloodied the CIA’s nose and led to a nuclear confrontation. But the Vietnam containment policy was disastrous.
Diem's refusal to hold elections was the signal for North Vietnam to put into effect plans it had been contemplating from long before: a nationalist front, guerrilla-formation in the south, and military supplies and infiltration from the north along the Ho Chi Minh trail which threaded the jungles that straddle Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Since North Vietnam was communist, it seemed as if South Vietnam could also be made communist; and if Vietnam was united as one communist country, the rest of Indochina was as good as gone. Thailand would then be the next domino to fall. Domino theory was distilled for the American public in a 1963 film adaptation of the best-selling novel The Ugly American, by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer (1958). The film was set in a hypothetical neighbor of Vietnam. At the time, the USA was not yet irretrievably committed to fighting directly in the Vietnamese civil war. The real country used for the filming was Thailand. Hollywood was trying to make a real-life political statement. Films as a rule do not make fashions but follow and reinforce them. The Birth of a Nation (1915), one of the most politically horrendous movies ever made, was part of the same racialist trend that made the Ku Klux Klan briefly the main political force in Indiana. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) extolled the closing of psychiatric wards. All movies are inherently unlikely, but this one was particularly far-fetched, with the aggravating circumstance that it was also socially irresponsible. The Ugly American tried to make the point that the USA had to take a less self-righteous approach towards manifestations of social protest or inconformity in Third World countries, which was alright as far as that went. The film was also spot on about the seriousness of the communist strategy in Vietnam. But it got its signals crossed in its overarching arguments. It conceded that the "Thais" knew their country better than "ugly", fanatically anti-communist American ambassadors who confused reformers with troublemakers. Then it portrayed communist subversion as nearly unstoppable. And it made the from-the-blue-beyond suggestion that only an enlightened American public, a concept it presented as an oxymoron, could actually prevent the spread of communism! This entailed that the domino theory was self-perpetuating-from its premises it couldn't be stopped from coming true in reality-and that the USA had an unlimited number of Vietnams in its future. But it was conceivable, even back then, that capitalist, autocratic, incompetent South Vietnam could have staved off the communists if adequately supplied and left to fend for itself.
Kennedy was advised to let good, or for that matter less bad, alone, but instead he chose to send 10,000 "military advisors" to Vietnam. Like president Roosevelt with Joseph Kennedy, president Kennedy chose Henry Cabot Lodge, the wrong ambassador for South Vietnam. In the starkest of terms, Americans in general could not believe that "chinks" and "gooks" no matter how many of them could defeat a determined American offensive. (When the Vietnamese began eroding the American effort, they were called the more respectful "charlie".) The Korean experience was dismissed with a chart of casualties: 37,000 American dead to 350,000 commies killed (estimated). And that without recourse to the massive bombing of China. Even without atomic bombs. Losses by the South Korean army were discounted because it was generally believed that it was incompetent and cowardly, part of course of American arrogance towards Orientals. Vietnam had to be a cinch: an anti-insurgency operation that would be over in a matter of months. But that wasn’t happening even with American advice, so Lodge led a campaign of denigration against the USA-assisted Diem regime, which was very repressive because it knew it had to be. Before and after the Korean War, the South Korean government was extremely repressive. Chiang Kai-shek had been bloodily repressive in Taiwan in February 1947 and, when he finally retreated to that island, he and his regime kept it under strict martial law from 1949 to 1987. Thailand never tolerated communists at any time. In the Philippines, Ramon Magsaysay had not been repressive enough, perhaps because his was a country of islands. Officially, the American government was effusive about Diem. Vice-president Lyndon Johnson called him the "Winston Churchill of Asia", which should have led to a diplomatic break with London, but which Americans explained as that Diem, whatever his flaws, was "their son of a bitch". The pressure to dump Diem went on mounting. It was as if Americans were looking at a beautiful tropical beach in the distance but not at the swamp beneath their eyes.
(11) Ngo Dinh Diem and John F. Kennedy
Diem was totally nationalistic. This no one doubted. He did not like Buddhists, but he did not mess with them if they did not obstruct him. Buddhism was to become one of the biggest sink holes in the Vietnamese morass that Americans got into. Throughout history, all Asian dynasties that could would eventually suppress the sangha (the community of Buddhist monks). Buddhism served to structure states, such as Thailand, as well as to undermine them, such as Sri Lanka. Myanmar was occupied by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945. Assassinated in July 1947, Aung San had negotiated the independence of Burma, which became effective in January 1948. The military under Gen. Ne Win, a former ally of the Japanese, seized power in 1962 from a weak civilian government headed by U Nu. They have held on to it since then. Ne Win's rule was capricious-socialist: a believer in numerology he emitted bills for 45 and 90 kyat, because these figures could be divided by nine, which Ne Win considered lucky. Arguably, the fact that Myanmar is the most ethnically diverse state in South East Asia might have contributed to draconian military rule, which to this day restricts foreign access to large areas of the country, and has shown that it will not give in to Buddhist social disruption. Diem had the levers of rule in his hands: the police and the army, but there were generals ready to betray him and it was with these turncoats that Lodge and the American government began to scheme. On 2 November 1963, a cabal of South Vietnamese generals went violently into the presidential palace in Saigon and shortly afterwards captured and assassinated Ngo Dinh Diem. Later, Lodge had the treasonous generals for dinner and congratulations. He was "celebrating" the complete loss of political legitimacy in South Vietnam. It has been credibly reported that, when Ho Chi Minh was given the news, he exclaimed that he could not believe how stupid Americans could be. Kennedy himself was shocked by the murder of his erstwhile ally and co-religionist.
Kennedy had appointed his brother Robert as attorney general, although he was more of a general advisor. Joseph Kennedy Sr. was always on friendly terms with Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin communist-hunting senator. Robert Kennedy cut his legal teeth in the Justice Department and in the committee headed by McCarthy. He did other public legal work, but his real career was politics at the side of his brother. As attorney general, Kennedy pushed hard on civil rights with the legislation available-the Senate then still had many racist, southern Democrats-and against organized crime and labor union racketeering. Twenty days after the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, president Kennedy was in a motorcade in Dallas when a sniper killed him from a nearly empty building nearby. Later that day, a patrolman stopped a man called Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot him dead. Oswald was cornered in a cinema, resisted arrest, and had to be subdued. Oswald was an intelligent oddball who had once lived in the USSR and was married to a Russian woman. In the [Earl] Warren commission report on Kennedy’s murder, the weapon that killed Kennedy, an old Italian model called Mannlicher-Carcano, was linked to Oswald. It is not exactly known why Oswald would want to kill Kennedy. Unfortunately for historians (or fortunately for a certain type of historians), Oswald was killed by a man with underworld connections called Jack Ruby (Rubenstein), but he died in jail four years later and never gave any reason other than indignation for having shot Oswald. An imaginative historian could argue that Ruby tried to do a Herostratos, a Greek lunatic who in Antiquity set fire to the temple of Artemis in Ephesus to gain immortality. If that’s the case, he, like his possible role model, succeeded. Robert Kennedy, who was much more progressive than his brother, was assassinated June 1968 by a Palestinian fanatic, which is really the most senseless of all these crimes. Robert would almost surely have put an end to the American involvement in Vietnam. The two Kennedys could have exerted a more even-handed influence in the Middle East, for they were not as beholden as all recent American presidents have been to Jewish support. Although who knows? Jacqueline Kennedy died young. She named her husband’s unfinished presidency after the musical Camelot, which is good myth-making, if we ignore Marilyn Monroe’s suicide-it is rumored that the Kennedys and their brother-in-law Peter Lawford fungoed with her-and the clear evidence in the Zapruder amateur film of Kennedy’s assassination that Jackie was scrambling for dear life after her husband was shot.
Aside from the bitter Vietnam entanglement, the American informal world empire was generally in good health, which is not to say that peoples under capitalism the world over were doing square dances. USA foreign policy was usually successful in furthering American interests with a minimum of military exertions, which makes the Vietnam intervention all the more anomalous. America responded when Lebanon asked for help in 1958, but left as soon as the political crisis passed. Lebanon had Israel to the south and Syria on its other borders. Syria might have been unpredictable at the time, but there was little fear that it might go beyond "socialism", which in the Third World can mean totally anything except out-and-out communism. Syrian policies, which are thoroughly Western if undemocratic, is another reason against the controversial thesis of insurmountable cultural incompatibilities between Islamic countries and the West. The author of the thesis is Samuel Huntington, whose perceptiveness can be gauged by another one of his ideas: that Hispanics can only become truly "American" if they dream in English. Syria is strongly anti-American to the extent that it is anti-Israel. In Vietnam there was fear for the Cambodian and Laotian dominoes. Insofar as Cambodia and Laos were a priori considered "dominoes" that had to be propped up, the theory seemed indeed to be self-validating, for it was American actions that were making worst-case scenarios possible. Sihanouk and Souvanna Phouma might not have seemed trustworthy-the first was too Frenchified, the other too complaisant-but they were better than the solutions that the USA chose: military coups and massive bombings.
The man who really went in a big way for Domino theory was the most socially progressive president that America ever had: Kennedy’s vice-president and successor Lyndon Baines Johnson. The conservative photo-magazine Life once accused Johnson of being out-and-out corrupt. But the only really indictable action that can be attributed to him is that he won the 1948 Democratic primary for senator in his state of Texas by 24 votes, and there were suspicions of ballot-stuffing. Johnson called on his Jewish lawyer friend Abe Fortas, who saved his man, though not in a manner as spectacular as James Baker got the Supreme Court to hand the presidency on a dish to George W. Bush. As president, Johnson asked Arthur Goldberg, who had been named by Kennedy to the Supreme Court, to step down and become USA ambassador to the UN, which Goldberg did. Johnson then named Fortas to the Supreme Court. When later Johnson tried to make Fortas chief justice there was intense opposition in the Senate. Muckrakers came up with improprieties by Fortas-as Justice, he accepted a retainer from a friend-and he was pressured into resigning by chief justice Warren (1969), who had already decided to resign himself but stayed on for another term. President Nixon named a conservative chief justice, Warren Burger, and the Supreme Court has never since had a liberal majority, although compared with some of the specimens that have come afterwards Burger was a mad-dog liberal. It was Johnson who made the civil rights revolution in America, the cornerstones of which are the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights act of 1968. President Johnson was responding to the clamor for enfranchising legislation that was raised by blacks themselves under the outstanding leadership of Martin Luther King, perhaps America’s greatest orator, but Johnson went the limit he could go in trying to safeguard African-Americans from discrimination. He might have been a firm believer in Domino Theory, but down to brass tacks, he was being badly assessed by the military in Saigon, who were undermining themselves by publicizing body counts and, as these also included American casualties, this propaganda tool was counter-productive. After a fabrication in which North Vietnamese torpedo boats were supposed to have attacked American destroyers twice in the Gulf of Tonkin (1964), Congress authorized Johnson to take whatever war measures he considered necessary in Vietnam, which is the only possible historical parallel that one can find to president George W. Bush’s war on Iraq.
(12) The Cuban missiles crisis
American military intervention in Vietnam escalated to a peak of 550,000 service personnel (1969), even though in 1968, when the American command in Vietnam were claiming imminent victory, the Vietnamese had captured and held the city of Hué for nearly a month. In retrospect, some historians have argued that after the battle of Hué, the former royal capital of Vietnam, which was part of the general Tet offensive in South Vietnam, the communists were exhausted, but since American casualties went on increasing, the thesis is hardly defensible. Despite the numbers, the most advanced counter-insurgency technology, and continuous aerial pounding of North Vietnam, communists resisted and it was in 1973, and a total of 212,000 casualties, that the United States finally disengaged from South Vietnam. Historians tend to divide on whether president Kennedy would or would not have gone to the lengths that president Johnson went in Vietnam. Those who argue that Kennedy would have withdrawn are on shaky counterfactual ground. The growing American military presence in Vietnam came in large dollops. But the diplomatic, political, and intelligence infrastructure for the successive increases in contingents was in place when the first 10,000 "advisors" went in; and from this figure to one hundred thousand there is but a quantitative leap whereas between zero fighting men and 10,000 there was a qualitative difference. Opposition to the war in Vietnam mobilized countless protests and huge rallies, but Americans by and large stood by their government, and they proved it when in 1968 they elected Richard Nixon, who did not promise to end the war, for the presidency. What he and his advisor Henry Kissinger did was to escalate the bombing of North Vietnam and extend the air raids to Cambodia, which strengthened the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. Kissinger was a Harvard academic who joined any American foreign relations association that he could. He entered big-stakes politics through the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and his friendship and advisory role to Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York state and Republican presidential aspirant. When Rockefeller lost to Nixon in 1968, the latter recruited Kissinger.
There was one time when the capitalist-communist proxy struggle in the Third World came close to upsetting carefully built strategic plans. Cuba was a close ally of the United States and a recipient of heavy American investments as well as sugar subsidies. It was an on-and-off, corrupt democracy. A mulatto sergeant, Fulgencio Batista, took power in Cuba after the overthrow of the dictator Gerardo Machado (1925-1933). Although Machado is considered something of a political monster in communist Cuba, there is evidence that he maintained good relations with pre-Castro Cuban communists. Among the founders of the original Cuban Communist party in 1925, was Fabio Grobart, a Polish Jew and an agent of the Comintern. Batista went on to become the dominant figure in Cuban politics. After losing an election in 1944, Batista retired from politics but returned in 1952 and did another military coup. His second regime was characterized by repressive brutality and the tolerance of US gangsters in the gambling and tourist trades. How Batista fell and the Cuban revolution won is a story that still defies belief. In 1953, Fidel Castro, his younger brother Raúl, and a few others attempted to take over the Moncada barracks in Santiago, the largest city in eastern Cuba. Fidel and Raúl were captured and tried. In 1955, Batista amnestied them. In Mexican exile, Fidel joined with Ernesto "Che" Guevara, an Argentine itinerant revolutionary who had collaborated with the Arbenz government in Guatemala after a motorcycle trip from Córdoba with Alberto Granado, a friend of his elder brother Roberto. According to Granado, he planned the trip with Roberto in mind, but when he declined because of his studies he suggested that he take Ernesto along. With an old motorboat named Granma (after the original American owner’s grandmother), Castro landed with a handful of recruits and Guevara in Oriente province in December 1956. Santiago is the capital of Oriente. The war party nearly succumbed.
According to Tad Szulc, a good researcher but no friend of Castro, Fidel and a companion had to conceal themselves in cane field furrows at night while soldiers were looking for them. Fidel put the nuzzle of his carbine to his jaw and kept muttering: "They’ll never take me alive!" The western part of Oriente is mostly a jungle-covered cordillera named the Sierra Maestra. It was in those wilds that Castro regrouped the survivors of the expedition and set up a guerrilla base. Gradually, the insurgents increased with local peasant recruits and volunteers from the cities, but their force, except towards the end, never numbered more than hundreds, which however was sufficient to win tactical victories against isolated army units. During 1958, Batista, who had an army of 40,000 men, ordered an offensive in the Sierra Maestra, which failed. Around August 1958, the rebels started offensive operations in Oriente province. Columns led by Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos advanced along the countryside towards central Cuba. The rebels had never controlled any Cuba city until Santa Clara fell to Guevara. By then, Castro’s army numbered in the thousands, but it is obvious that the demoralized Cuban army was not resisting anywhere On 1 January 1959, the rebels entered Havana, where there was a large underground movement working for them. Fidel Castro arrived in the capital on 8 January. Castro broke with the Latin American norm by ordering hundreds of executions against Batista's soldiery and police. In some documented cases, Castro's men practiced mock executions either as a means to obtain information or as chastisement for crimes that fell short of requiring a full execution. The legality behind all these measures was not at all clear. At first hailed as a democratic reformer with spotless hands, a misperception that he encouraged, Castro soon turned to the extreme left and even said publicly that he had always been a Marxist-Leninist, a claim with no documentary backing. It was self-evident that Castro was different-he acted very much like a Bolshevik-but, as he was not overtly contradicting the impression that he was democratic and reformist, no one suspected the hatred he bore America, which was obsessive. The origins of such an attitude are not hard to find in Latin America where leftism has always entailed basic Leninist anti-imperialism. In the case of Castro, the detestation of the USA could be traced also to his Galician father who emigrated to Cuba precisely at the time when the Americans were gratuitously and systematically demolishing the shreds of empire that remained to Spain, and with that a great deal of Spanish pride, which can never be underestimated.
The Cuban revolution's nationalizations without compensation and its coziness with the USSR led to a break with the United States towards the end of the Eisenhower administration. The CIA had overthrown the moderately leftist regime of Árbenz in Guatemala without breaking a sweat. Guevara had his first experience of revolutionary politics there. By the time of Castro's open profession of communism, there had been an USA-encouraged mass exodus to Florida of Cuba's upper and middle classes, the only ones who could have put up an effective opposition to Castro within Cuba. Eisenhower left to his successor, John F. Kennedy, a CIA-organized plan to invade Cuba with a brigade of Cuban exiles, trained in Guatemala, plus some World War II-vintage bombers based in Nicaragua. The idea was that the Cuban masses would arise in anger and kick the scoundrels out. Kennedy approved it but not direct military American intervention. Such coyness is explicable by the essence itself of the informal American world empire. It would made the satellite condition of states such as Cuba or Venezuela too obvious, and especially it wasn’t necessary because Cuba wasn’t going anywhere. The invasion, known in the USA as the Bay of Pigs, landed in Girón beach, south east of Havana. The place couldn't have been chosen better if Castro had done it himself. The invaders could only advance along one road. Castro's combat-hardened troops contained them and his tiny air force repulsed air attacks, harassed the invaders’ rear, and sunk its supply ships. Most of the brigade was captured and the USA was left with egg on its face. The head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster Dulles and the architect of the coup against Mossadegh in Iran, resigned. Latin American hearts beat in unison over what seemed like a well deserved vengeance for the overthrow of Árbenz.
Just as his speeches, which could last ten hours or more, transcended anything in the history of declamation, so Castro wanted to transcend Latin America, and for that he made a firm alliance with the USSR, which under Khrushchev was actively recruiting allies in the Third World. Khrushchev's greatest blunder in foreign affairs happened when he tried to install medium-range missiles in Cuba that would open a nuclear flank next door to the USA (1962). Howard Taubman contends the whole scheme was Khrushchev's invention to get even with the USA for perceived humiliations inflicted on the USSR, but it is likely that Castro, who had the USA breathing down his back, had as much a say on the matter as Khrushchev did. The myriad Castro-sympathizers in Latin America, not to speak of Cubans themselves, might have asked why Cuba could not do what it wanted to defend its sovereignty from American aggression, which was the excuse for the installation of the missiles; but from an American perspective having a nuclear threat in Cuba was tantamount to letting yourself get slapped around without lifting a finger in self-defense. Some missile sites were ready. The missiles were still in their crates, more were on the way in freighters, so before things went any further, president Kennedy took the nerve-jangling decision of telling the Soviets that their ships would be intercepted and the missiles impounded on the high seas, with the implication that further retaliations could follow. The Soviet ships turned back and the missiles already in Cuba were all taken back to the USSR. The missiles crisis was on the whole constructive for both sides. The Kennedys, the president and his brother Robert, had negotiated with the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin the removal, after a decent face-saving lapse, of American Jupiter missiles, of the same medium range as those destined for Cuba, from their base in Izmir, Turkey, which is what soon occurred. The USSR obtained American guarantees that Cuba would not be invaded, which, as the USSR had invaded Hungary and was still to invade Czechoslovakia, is not as cursory or offhand as might sound. And the missiles crisis was so hair-raising that the two superpowers signed the nuclear test ban treaty, a certain sign that both sides knew that they had been playing with matches in a gasoline depot. During the late-1970s and 1980s, Cuba, which was receiving more subsidies from the USSR than it ever received from the USA, was using its soldiers to prop up "socialist" regimes in Africa. A general agreement for the evacuation of Cuban troops was instrumental in the independence of Namibia (1990). Castro's Cuba prides itself on its production-line schools of medicine and, despite the grinding poverty, the country always turned in rosy social statistics. But the economy remained primitive and sugar-exporting. With the collapse of communism in Russia, Soviet subsidies dried up. Cuba had been looking for a grandiose economic alternative in biotechnology, but in the 1990s, except for a vaccine for hepatitis-B, nothing much had come of that. By the 21st century, Cuba, who for many years had made a great show of its sugar-harvesting efforts, was shutting down sugar-cane mills and keeping its head above the water thanks to European tourism.
(13) Venezuela and the failure of the Alliance for Progress
In the Third World, economic development and democracy did not travel together. The handful of Asian economies that either had made the breakthrough or were on the breakthrough path to development had done so mostly in undemocratic circumstances. North Korea, heir to the industrial infrastructure left by the Japanese, at first seemed to be the more developed of the two Koreas. Authoritarian South Korean president Syngman Rhee was forced to give up power in 1960. In 1961, general Park Chung Hee, a former Japanese collaborator, took over. Under his strong rule, Korea made sensational economic strides with the state-encouraged Chaebol (native conglomerates) leading the advance. Park's secret police, the KCIA, was terrorizing. Park was assassinated in 1979 by the director of the KCIA, whose predecessor had gone into opposition and had been assassinated by Park's agents. The military retained power and in 1980 students and workers staged massive demonstrations in Kwangju (now Gwangju), in southwestern Korea, which were repressed with hundreds of deaths. Military rule was tarnished and strongly opposed until in 1987 South Korea became a democracy. The first fully democratic presidential election in Taiwan was held in 1996. Thailand had only become democratic in 1997, but that experiment concluded in 2006 without any noticeable effect on the economy. In Singapore, the authoritarian rule of Lee Kuan Yew antedated the country's independence in 1965. It lasted formally until 1990, but what Lee said was always quoted by the press as if it were official policy. Of all the really developing countries of Asia, only India, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka have had elections since their inceptions, yet even in Malaysia authoritarianism was the rule and prime minister Mohammed bin Mahathir was unchallengeable from 1981 to 2004. The fact is that, if international capitalism, what later was designated globalization, was supposed to be the key to economic progress, democracy did not seem to be part of the package. And if one went by the experience of the impeccably democratic South American state of Venezuela, democracy was an utter failure at economic development. To counter the appeal of communism in poor countries the set of prescriptions adopted and propagated as unofficial policy, mainly but not exclusively by the USA, was known as development economics. This was in effect a doctrine with aspirations to theoretical status. It went against the grain of conventional economics, yet it tried to use its jargon and methodologies. Whereas capitalist, free-market economics were always imagining what was called a Pareto equilibrium, a situation in which total information obtained and economic flows, including labor, moved about unimpeded, development economics proposed all sorts of barriers and distortions for the economies of poor countries. Vilfredo Pareto himself was a socialist and the equilibrium he postulated was supposed to be advantageous to labor. But under development-economics guidelines, free trade and the international division of labor were unmentionables. Tariff walls to protect nascent industries were to be built. Subsidies and incentives, where possible, should be applied freely to stimulate investment and job creation. There had to be planning to remember what exactly all these measures were about. But, as development economics was in essence a set of contrivances to create strong market economies, planning was not compulsory but indicative. This resulted in that Third World countries got into the habit of quoting figures in the plans rather than real-world statistics and so they ended up in cloud cuckoo land. But this was not at first clear, in part because development economics had a brilliant genealogy.
One could go seeking for its ancestry very far in time if one wanted, but the soundest precedent was mercantilism, which advocated national self-sufficiency and gold-hoarding through protectionism. Mercantilism was cutting-edge doctrine at the time Europe was practically on the threshold of industrialization and development economics was very derivative. In the 19th century, the case of protectionism was famously made by the German-American economist Friedrick List, who also advocated the Zollverein or the customs union of all the German states before German unification in 1871. It could be argued that basically List was for economic nationalism, not at all unlike what mercantilism was about. All things considered, development economics embodied the sort of spontaneous arrangements and manipulations that governments tended to adopt when they were at an economic disadvantage with respect to other nations. There were some pre-World War II theorists of development economics. They came up with concepts like "economies of scale" and "externalities" and had the backward Balkans in mind. These were meant to justify large-scale industrialization schemes even when the economics didn't click. Just to keep things in perspective, Argentina, which in the Post-War adopted the development-economics model, before the war was considered among the ten richest countries in the world through the export of beef and wheat, hardly requiring special economic nostrums. It could even be argued that Argentina actually "underdeveloped" because of its intense desire for "balanced-growth" industrialization. In general, the policies associated with development economics had not been shown to be very successful in the past. Heavy protectionism was unarguably a powerful cause of the Great World Depression of the 1930s. But in the Post-War there were many economists working on development-economics premises, because the industrialized countries, the USA excepted, were a mostly struggling handful, the rest of the world was generally dirt-poor, and with the end of the colonialist empires, communism could have rich pickings among the myriad states, often really pseudo-states, that were being, or about to be, created.
Venezuela was definitely a notch or two above dire poverty, mainly because it had a lot of oil. The state's coffers were brimming over and there was a trickle-down, bureaucratic effect. It wasn't trickle-down from wealth-formation but from large fiscal income, which means that most of the money was being recycled and not re-invested. Venezuela's first great bureaucratic expansion occurred during a brief democratic phase between 1945 and 1948, after which it continued but under a very pro-USA, intolerant, though hardly brutal, military regime. In January 1958, street riots undermined military discipline and the then dictator, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, fled the country with dollar-stuffed valises. During a demagogic transition to democracy, a subsidy for the poor was pegged at above going wages in rural Venezuela, which meant the cities were inundated by unemployed peasants who built shanties with astonishing rapidity. It was at this time of social ferment that vice-president Richard Nixon visited the country. Security was so lax that mobs in Caracas surrounded Nixon's car, rocked it back and forth, broke the windows, and spat at the vice-president and his wife. The USA was about to intervene when the Venezuelan government got the situation in hand. It is a plus for Nixon that, after going through that hellish experience-in situ, he was especially indignant at the treatment his wife got-he could report in the safety of his own country that American foreign policy towards the Venezuelan dictatorship had been misguided. When Kennedy defeated Nixon, he took his rival's conclusion to heart and created the Peace Corps, aimed at all poor countries in the world, and specifically for Latin America, he announced the Alliance for Progress, which adopted development-economics lock, stock, and barrel. Since Venezuela had been at least partly the stage for America's awakening to the shortcomings of its policy towards Latin America and since also it was a democracy and had government funds to spare, it was only to be expected that it should have become something of a showcase for the Alliance for Progress. It included the betrayal of Pérez Jiménez, the former faithful dictator, who had even received the American Legion of Merit, and Kennedy handed to Venezuela for a corruption trial. Venezuela has remained faithful to the electoral system, but that's about all it has retained from the days when it was the model for state-guided capitalist development and the cornerstone of America's commitment to democracy in Latin America. Venezuela participated in the great OPEC oil-price spirals of the 1970s. As one of the loudest voices for a heralded "new international economic order", Venezuela was led by the hyper-kinetic but not very brilliant Carlos Andres Perez. Its economy was "booming". To fight unemployment, Pérez decreed that there shouldn't be an unattended toilet or elevator in the land. The first high rises in Venezuela were constructed in the 1950s. Before that, the country had not known even hand-activated elevators.
In the early 1980s, despite another boost in oil prices, Venezuela's currency, the bolívar, began an incredible descent from 4.3 to the dollar to the near 6,000 to the dollar at which it is traded today in the black market. Thinking of undoing his previous mistakes, Perez was re-elected in 1983. He decreed the immediate end of price controls and subsidies, starting with public transportation, which in the Third World stirs discontent more than any other issue, except food price increases. There were riots in Caracas and before the first year of his second presidency was out Perez was the most detested man in Venezuela. He ended up in jail briefly and then in house arrest accused of corruption. His main advisor in the botched attempt to reform the Venezuelan economy, Moises Naim, got himself a job as an editor in Washington. After eight consecutive fully open and honest presidential elections, Venezuela in PPP terms and discounting for inflation was nearly as poor as it was at the end of the military dictatorship in 1958. The electoral system itself was used by the current president, the ninth in the previous sequence, to change the constitution the country had for nearly forty years and to get himself re-elected, one year after his first election, for a period of six years, after which he was re-elected once again. The author of these institutional commotions, former paratrooper Hugo Chávez Frías, had tried to overthrow in 1992 the government elected in 1988. He was pardoned by Rafael Caldera, the president legally elected in 1993. At first, Venezuela's per capita GDP had a year-on-year deterioration of something in the order of 5%, but once president Chávez was firmly in charge, after containing massive protests and a botched coup, the Venezuelan economy started coming alive again, not least through another spectacular rise in oil prices. So much, anyway, for oil-wealth, development-economics, and democracy as the sure-fire formula for prosperity in developing countries! However singular the set of circumstances surrounding the dismaying Venezuelan economic crash, the economic failure of democracy is not unique. Despite the period of dictatorial rule by president Ferdinand Marcos, who did not begin as a dictator but won two consecutive elections, the Philippines has a longer record of democratic politics than its South East Asian neighbors, Malaysia excepted, but the Philippines is among the poorer countries in the region, not as bad as Cambodia, Laos, or Myanmar, but lagging in growth even in comparison with Vietnam, which has retained many features from its communist past. The most striking contrast of all is between democratic India and un-democratic China. China might at one time under Mao Zedong have qualified as the world's poorest country, certainly poorer than India. After some 25 years of economic reform, but without free elections as in India, China has surpassed India in economic performance and there's no limit to its growth in sight. After 1991, India started discarding development-economics nostrums and its long-term perspectives at present are nearly as good as China’s.
(14) Khrushchev falls and Nixon rises and falls
The USSR had, any way you looked at it, given in over Cuba and Khrushchev's colleagues in the presidium were keeping a tally against him. There was no pretense at collective leadership although there wasn't a Stalinist-type cult of personality either. Khrushchev’s Virgin lands policy had sensational results in 1956, but after that harvests started declining until in the 1960s the policy was something of a flop. His rivals began to plot. That they had to maneuver with stealth but could actually maneuver without being exposed and disposed of demonstrates how tyrannical the USSR still was but also how far it had left Stalinism behind. Then the plotters struck. In October 1964, they summoned Khrushchev from a vacation in Abkhazia and confronted him with a list of charges in which it is hard to say which was the most damaging. He was accused of being dictatorial and letting a personality cult develop, but as this was to happen again in the 1970s, it is more likely that Khrushchev was the victim of political ambition, the lust for power that activates history, which in the USSR after Stalin was dissimulated with the cheesecloth of collective leadership. The anti-Khrushchev coup was an instance of collective leadership, but only to put itself in reverse, so to speak. The group that deposed Khrushchev and banished him to a dacha outside of Moscow, was headed by Leonid Brezhnev, who assumed the post of first secretary (October 1964). Aleksei Kosygin was the new prime minister and Nikolai Podgorny president. The KGB was in on the move. The present consensual version of the results is that Kosygin became the most influential member of the new collective leadership. But Khrushchev was set aside by the CC of the CPSU, not in the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, or in the council of ministers, and during the 23rd Party Congress, Brezhnev was elected secretary general, which had been Lenin's and Stalin's rank, certainly one or various steps above first secretary. If Kosygin was indeed the top man in foreign affairs, as is often claimed, it was a precarious perch and the fiasco of Czechoslovakia was his undoing. Initially without a veto from Moscow, Alexander Dubcek, the Slovak head of the Czechoslovak party, began to introduce reforms (1968), which soon went far beyond de-Stalinization and Khrushchevism. This was the process variously known as the Prague Spring and as "socialism with a human face". It was like telling Soviet leaders that they were, to say the least, sourpusses frozen in time. The Warsaw Pact was put in motion and Czechoslovakia was invaded by its communist neighbors. Only East Germany and Romania abstained. The Germans did so probably because it would have smacked of a re-enactment of Hitler's destruction of Czech sovereignty. And Romania under Nicolas Ceausescu was taking a "neutralist" stance, much reported in the West, but, as Ceausescu was an unreconstructed Stalinist, only a pantomime. Kosigyn lost his job to Brezhnev, who after that really did promote such a cult of himself that even today when people in the former USSR wax nostalgic about communism they usually have Brezhnev in mind. Brezhnev's consolidation of power took about as long as Khrushchev's, but when it was completed he was more securely in command. Again, Brezhnev was no Stalin and it was he who in 1974 signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) with president Gerald Ford (1974-1977), the first real attempt to reduce nuclear arsenals.
When in 1972, Americans once again had a choice to exit Vietnam their macho, face-saving attitude won out once again when they re-elected Nixon against the Democratic candidate, George McGovern, who really did say he was going to put a peremptory end to the war. By then it was known that Nixon and Kissinger did intend to end of the Vietnamese entanglement. Nixon’s victory was the greatest landslide in American electoral history. In it, Nixon obtained 61% of the popular vote and McGovern only received 15 electoral votes. This is another parallel between the Vietnam war and the Second Iraqi war, in the midst of which Bush was ratified with an ample margin. If anything both elections show that America is hardly the peace-loving, non-aggressor state that its media revel in portraying. Nixon did get the USA out of Vietnam quickly into his second term, but the exit was hardly dignified and its consequences were disastrous, none worse than the Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia (January 1976) and the auto-genocide that followed. The USA began the process of recognizing the People’s Republic of China-Nixon traveled to Beijing and met Mao Zedong in 1972-and negotiated the first SALT, which his successor signed. Nixon’s trip to Beijing, although no doubt ground-breaking, was really mostly stagecraft. The recognition of the People’s Republic of China by the UN was already being implemented-officially in 1971-and the start of normalization of relations with the USA could have been done without all the secretive, and really hoopla, negotiations carried on by Kissinger before Nixon’s trip. Besides, Nixon’s encounter with Mao did not affect much the course of the Cold War and the establishment of diplomatic relations with China came about under president Jimmy Carter. Nixon is one of the most paradoxical politicians in history. His early political career in California went from one smear campaign to another against Democratic opponents whom he accused of unproven communist associations. As a representative, he was a tested and true McCarthyite, but unlike the Wisconsin senator his standing did not suffer but was enhanced. Despite reservations on the part of Eisenhower, he was twice his vice-president. When in 1962 he lost the race for governor of California, he showed that he was a sour loser by telling a gathering of reporters that they wouldn’t have him to kick around any longer. Apparently, they had not kicked hard enough and his victory in the presidential race against Hubert Humphrey in 1968 is inexplicable without media concurrence, for Humphrey was more likely than Nixon proved to be as a peace-in-Vietnam candidate. Nixon’s dirty political tactics and his sensitivity to criticism were probably what made him a secretive and vindictive. Yet inexplicably he had his own presidential office bugged and, when the senseless Watergate break in became public and escalated to controversial proportions, he was forced to hand over the "Presidential tapes", which did not prove that he had actually approved it, but, because of an erased segment, raised reasonable suspicions that he had. The entire Watergate affair was an exercise in futility. Nixon had his re-election locked in and he did not need information on Democratic political strategy. The crucial question is why he had himself unnecessarily taped in situations which were clearly embarrassing.
As there were no precedents of any head of state deliberately spying on himself, what conclusion, other than the esteem that Nixon had for himself as a man who was making history as he breathed, could have prompted his decision? Nixon knew that he was extremely profane, but male persons who use expletives are probably more common than those who do not. Nixon is accused of being vengeful and paranoid, but from an impassive historical perspective, he was more the rule than the exception. There is about the society that reacted against him a strong reek of hypocrisy. Nixon had every reason to believe that he had such a large mandate that he could be allowed certain derelictions. History shows that he was right. Bill Clinton converted the Oval Office into a mini-brothel and that certainly seems more morally repugnant than a minor burglary. In foreign affairs, few American presidents can match the ambitions of Richard Nixon. It was probably as a record of these that he installed the taping devices, much more cumbersome then than now. In brief, Nixon was proud of himself and it did not cross his mind that he would end his presidency under the accusation of covering up and probably instigating a minor felony. So far, then, we have the individual Nixon asserting himself. But there is more. It was Nixon who had ordered the tapes that were bringing prosecutors and Congress on his head. But Nixon refused to admit that he had committed any impeachable offense even though he had to fire his most trusted advisors because of Watergate and his lawyers were not re-assuring about his own legal situation. Nixon could have destroyed the tapes himself. When they became known and were subpoenaed with the consent of the Supreme Court, he had every legal right to retain them by taking the Fifth and his accusers would have been trampling on a basic legal protection if they had judged him merely on the presumption that the tapes were incriminating. But Nixon did nothing about the tapes. It almost seemed as if they were a physical prolongation of himself, which in a way they were. As Nixon was not a madman and he was a lawyer and he had to know that eventually he would have to hand the tapes over to his pursuers, his refusal to do so, which is usually viewed as a tacit admission of guilt, can also be interpreted as a dogged defense of these palpable extensions of himself. If this reading of the events leading to Nixon’s resignation does not have a justification, then how else to explain: first, the existence of the tapes themselves; second, Nixon’s refusal to destroy them; and third, his decision to retain them until it was no longer legally possible. It was his inordinate, but understandable, self-love that did him in. Nixon quit in August 1974. His vice-president Spiro Agnew was an alliterative crook who received pay-offs in his White House office and had been forced to resign in 1973. Nixon named Michigan representative Gerald Ford as his successor for the remaining nearly two and half years of his term. Ford promptly granted him a presidential pardon for any criminal acts he might have committed as president. Ford kept Henry Kissinger, whom Nixon had made secretary of state, and he carried on with Nixon’s international policies.
(15) America turns to a God-fearing humanitarian from Georgia
In the immediate Post-War, the USA had been on a war footing of varying intensity during the Berlin crisis and during the Korean War. There were actually two Berlin crises. One was the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948, which was foiled by an airlift and suspended in 1949. The second Berlin crisis occurred when in 1958 the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced that the administration of East Berlin would be turned over to East Germany. Theoretically, this could be interpreted as an unilateral abrogation of the Post-War agreements over the control of Berlin. William Taubman makes much of this, but it is highly unlikely that East Germany would have been able to do anything about the status of West Berlin or that the USSR would have allowed things to get out of hand. The over-all status of Berlin remained unchanged: a Länd or state of Federal Germany in its western part and the capital of East Germany in its eastern sector. After Korea, America was on the qui vive to counter communist moves anywhere. It was not at war, but it could not elude the knowledge that it could be at any time. For the American media, which usually reflect official USA policy and in turn determine public opinion, the transition from Stalin to Khrushchev was not originally observed as particularly significant. Tired of the intrigues spawned by Nixon’s agitated presidency but confident in its moral righteousness, the American electorate turned to a God-fearing humanitarian from Georgia, Jimmy Carter, who tried to engage America in a world-wide human rights campaign. Carter was to Nixon what an antacid is to bile. But it wasn't a question of renouncing war for conciliation or of backing off from confrontation. The USSR in its own way was becoming conservative. It seemed to have a stake in peace. America still embraced Domino Theory but it wasn't about to get involved in another war in a far away tropical land any time soon. Every sane strategist by then knew that in any given nation the forces for conservatism and continuity were generally stronger than revolutionary drives. After Vietnam, America perceived a more stable world, one in which it could exert its economic and social advantages rather than its military might, and Carter embodied ideally this perfectly reasonable attitude. Apart from Israel, the mainstay of American Middle Eastern policy was still the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), whose two pillars were Turkey and Iran. In the oil-saturated Arabian or Persian gulf region, nearly half of which was Iranian shoreline, the USA had placed all its chips on the stabilizing influence of the modernizing if tyrannical Iranian regime. Even idealistic Carter had in good conscience to praise shah Mohammed Rehza Pahlavi, Iran's dictator-king. The shah and his wives, the ravishing but barren Soraya and her successor, the lovely and impeccably sophisticated Farah Diba, were the main dish in any given edition of the garishly illustrated Spanish weekly Hola, which slobbered over royalty and entertainers and was the almost inevitable recreation for hardworking Spaniards during and after the Franco dictatorship. The shah's despotism was a vice bred by power, for in private the Iranian monarch was such an amiable person that he had practically been forced by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to defy and unseat the Iranian nationalist politician Mohammed Mossadegh. Although he made a great deal of Iran's origins in the ancient Achaemenid Empire, Muhammed Reza Shah was only the second ruler of the Pahlavi "dynasty", which had been founded by his father, Reza Khan, a military man who in 1925 had overthrown Ahmed Shah, the last of the Ghajar dynasty. Whether in a democracy, or in a crumbling state such as Russia in 1996, but especially in a dictatorship, rulers are wont to ignore what is happening among the peoples over which they rule. This happens less in a democracy where there are polls and the media editorialize freely, but the president of the USA, or those exceptional individuals who aspire to power in America, do not have the same perspective on the world around them as does the "common man", which is why now and again you have poll-busting electoral upsets. In the case of Iran, the shah had totally isolated himself from the reality that his subjects detested him and were enthusiastic about a cleric with perhaps the most terrifying frown in history and a look from out of darkened orbits that were the closest humanity has come to a Medusa stare. This cleric was the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a fierce enemy of the shah and his "un-Islamic" modernizing ways who had been exiled to Turkey, from where he subsequently moved to next-door Iraq.
Sunni is the form of Islam most Muslims accept. Khomeini, like most Persians, was a Shia Muslim. Shia-at-Ali, or the party of Ali, one of Muhammad's sons in law, appealed to Persians because, although they converted to Islam, they resented Arabs, and Arabs were, and today still are, mostly Sunni. Khomeini was expelled by Iraq, where Sunni Muslims governed a majority Shia population. In Paris he taped searing, sanctimonious sermons that in Iran became the equivalent of platinum discs. For no particular cause other than the accumulation of resentments, Iran went on a huge collective riot in which the masses lost their fear of the repressive secret police, SAVAK, and the shah was forced to abandon Tehran and his throne. There was some political opposition to Khomeini but the government could not contain the Islamist impetus and the first modern aggressively Islamic fundamentalist state was born (March 1979). The Ottoman Empire, for instance, was Muslim and aggressive, but it had a system called millet through which each religious community had its own head and retained jurisdiction in certain areas of social life, mainly within the scope of what is known in the Western world as civil law. Religious toleration in fundamentalist Iran exists, but Sunni Muslims and other religions, including even Judaism, survive by being very inconspicuous. No sooner had the shah fled his country, officially on vacation, and (after some dithering) Khomeini had been acclaimed as national leader, than Iran withdrew from CENTO and rejected its alliance with the USA. Carter now showed weak knees and in an useless gesture of conciliation with the ayatollahs, who were attacking America and handing down death sentences with the abandon of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, at first refused asylum to the fallen and ailing shah. This was as if Carter had disemboweled his own foreign policy showing the contradictions at its gut. Just as this deeply decent American president could not deny that the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua was reprehensible, so he could hardly blame the Iranians for getting rid of a tyrant and his minions, who had gone far beyond torture in their methods. But this meant that the USA was in the most uncomfortable position of having to ingratiate itself with its enemies. In the case of Nicaragua, the name Sandinist, an anti-American cry of defiance that resounded over Latin America, said it all. In Iran, Khomeini lost little time in calling America "Satan", a very distorting perspective indeed and one which had to be particularly disturbing to Baptists, themselves prone to denunciations of Satan and among whom Carter was a lay preacher. To make things more difficult for the American president, not only was he called the "president of Satan", which Carter most certainly wasn't (precisely the opposite is what he wanted to be), but when the USA finally granted a visa for hospitalization to the dying shah, Khomeini's zealous oratory, which, like Castro's in Cuba, was exercised continuously, incited young Iranian theocratic revolutionaries to seize the American Embassy and sequester its some 60 occupants in contempt of all rules of diplomatic conduct. The American government was forced to cancel its visa to the shah for the sake of the lives of its diplomats. The shah, who had made it a point during his reign of having himself photographed restraining people trying to kiss his hand, was generally shunned in the West and he ended his days in Egypt. His tomb and a memorial plaque can be seen in the Al Rifa’i mosque in the center of old Cairo.
The man responsible for Khomeini's expulsion from Iraq was Saddam Hussein. Iraq's population was divided roughly into 60% Shia and 37% Sunni (the rest being mostly Assyrian Christians). Kurds, the largest ethnic minority in Iraq, are Sunni but not Arabs. The scission between Sunni and Shia occurred in Iraq, at the battle of Karbala, south of Baghdad, where the Umayyads, who established the caliphate or the successorship of Muhammad in Damascus, killed Husein and his partisans in a massacre so thorough that, according to legend, only one person, Ali, Husein's sickly child, survived to tell about it. Husein was caliph Ali's son. The 7th century details are murky, but there were three caliphs (successors) after Muhammad: Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman. Ali either was the fourth caliph or claimed during the period of the first three successors that he was the one and only caliph, in part because he was married to Fatima, daughter of Muhammad. The Prophet had many children and Abu Bakr and Uthman were also in-laws. Sunni Muslims accept the tradition of the first three caliphs but Shia Muslims insist that Ali was the one and only caliph. The important point politically is that Shia has survived to our days not only as a religious tradition but as a political force, crucial in Iran and important in Iraq. Khomeini was deported by Hussein, himself religiously un-zealous but of Sunni origin, because, with his compulsive sermonizing, the Iranian cleric was making Iraq's Sunni rulers nervous. The year that Khomeini and the Shia ayatollahs took power in Iran, Saddam Hussein became president, in reality sole dictator, in Iraq. This fateful event went virtually unnoticed in America and the world because over all in the Middle East, every one was looking at Iran; and America in particular was fretting over the unmerited imprisonment of its diplomats in the embassy compound, where insolent Revolutionary Guards kept them in jitters with their taunts about "Satan" and "the great Satan". Hussein, a conspirational, pistol-packing politician, had climbed to power through his leadership inside Baath. The Baath ruler of Syria was Gen. Hafez el-Assad, who emerged from very lowly social origins through the Syrian air force academy. Ironically, his call for a political union between Iraq and Syria did not make for Baathist solidarity but for quarreling between the two countries and their separate Baath parties.
America's collective mind would soon be concentrating on still another crisis, one that, though less painful to Americans in a heart-felt patriotic sense, was a humiliating strategic slap from the USSR, for Americans the real "great Satan" on the loose in the world. It occurred in a country so remote and backward that it would have crossed no one's mind that it could be the base for a devastating terrorist attack on New York city itself. The contemporary history of Afghanistan is completely incomprehensible if it is narrated only with a view to what went on in Kabul, which is about the farthest that Afghanistan ventured into the 20th century, although in this limited sense it didn't do badly at all and pre-civil war Kabul, even communist Kabul, is remembered as a lively, handsome city with spacious avenues, important cultural institutions, and impressive public buildings. The Afghan capital was inhabited by a sophisticated population avid for modernity, blessed by nature with lovely views and a good year-around climate. Kabul was definitely atypical, yet the tragedy of all of Afghanistan could be seen in the unmistakable grief of the native curators of the Kabul museum when, heads bowed in regret and shame, they told of the depredations of the Taliban authorities. Better, they seemed to express, a century of communism than half a decade of religious obscurantism. The last king of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah (1933-1973), encouraged reformism after World War II and the country tried to strike a balance between communism and capitalism, although commercial relations leaned heavily towards the USSR. Afghanistan has borders on the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. A Loya Jirga or grand assembly sanctioned a constitution and elections were held for a House of the People and a House of Elders. Politics were polarized between modernizers and Islamic traditionalists, but it did not appear from outside of Afghanistan, or even in Kabul itself, as if the country had such an inexhaustible reserve of the fundamentalist energies that later surged. Even the traditionalists (Jamiyyat e Islami or Islamic Brotherhood or Society) had their base in the theological school of Kabul university. The radical modernizers were either in the Khalq (people) or the Parcham (banner) parties, offshoots of a parent Marxist organization, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Mohammad Daud Khan, a general turned politician and a cousin of the king, also the central figure of Afghan politics for decades (when he mostly had a conservative tint), expelled king Zahir Shah and declared a republic with Parcham support (1973). In another Loya Jirga, a new constitution was adopted. Daud ruled with royal relatives and cronies and Khalq and Parcham united in opposition.
Kabul was in the grip of political upheavals and Daud and his family were assassinated (April 1978). The coup organizer was Hafizullah Amin, who obtained military support, but the government that emerged was dominated by Nur Muhammad Taraki as leader of the PDPA. The Khalq and Parcham factions began feuding, thus weakening the government, which was getting heat from the Islamists apparently, and only apparently, absent as political rivals. A certain sign of growing radicalism and creeping anarchism was the assassination of the American ambassador, Adolph Dubs, who was kidnapped by Islamists and killed in a rescue attempt (February 1979). Gradually and without making world headlines, rebellion in the countryside was spreading and the army was giving up positions. The decades old political process in Afghanistan was something of an urban drama with Kabul as stage and backdrop. Rural Afghanistan, which before appeared to have zero weight in the country's affairs, began to emerge as the bull-necked rival of pro-Soviet modernizers and radicals. Hafizullah Amin, who disclaimed subservience to the USSR, outmaneuvered Taraki and had him executed. Another radical, the one closest to the Soviets, Babrak Karmal, head of the Parcham faction, fled to the USSR, which, at his behest, invaded Afghanistan and eliminated Amin. Karmal became nominal head of government (December 1979). While America wallowed in impotent anger over Iranian brutality, the Soviets, led by secretary general Leonid Brezhnev, seemed to have effortlessly added another satellite to their empire. What no one could foresee at the time was that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan did not constitute a strategic victory for the Soviets but the last twist to their own hangman's knot. Carter's reaction was immediate. Given the sequence of events from the Soviet invasion to 9/11, it is possible that, like the British when they thought that the Russians were ensconced in Kabul in 1878, the American president might have over-reacted. Condemnation of the invasion was forceful and unequivocal, disarmament negotiations with the USSR were suspended (although Washington and Moscow announced separately that they would abide by the results achieved), relations fell to the coldest of Cold War temperatures. The USA refused point blank to participate in the Summer Olympics, which in 1980 were celebrated in Moscow. But however vigorously Carter acted, his previous foreign policy record, plagued as it was by vacillation and by inherent contradictions, did not support the platform on which he wanted to stand and challenge the USSR. In the media he was sometimes portrayed as a blubber-lipped, gap-toothed hick. To find a comparable level of contempt, one would have had to go back to some of the dirtiest 19th-century American political campaigns.
The coup de grâce to Carter's re-election hopes occurred when an American task force badly botched a rescue operation inside Iran. The operation was so complicated that it’s a wonder it was even conceived. C-130s and eight large transport helicopters were to land at night in a desert area in central Iran. From there they were to improvise a base closer to Tehran. A commando force would overpower Iranian guards and penetrate the embassy building to the area where the hostages were being held, which was known from a source the CIA had found by happenstance. To accomplish this, it was necessary to create a power blackout in the area while attack helicopters flew overhead to repel Iranian counter-assaults. The rescued hostages would then be taken to a soccer stadium in Tehran and flown out in helicopters to a captured Iranian air base where C-141s would be waiting to take them out of the country with a fighter escort. In practice, of the eight helicopters involved in the first phase, three became accidentally inoperative (one returned to its carrier base), at which point the entire complicated operation became too risky and was aborted. The troubles did not end there because, in the haste to evacuate the first base under limited visual conditions due to the sand raised by the rotors, one of the helicopters crashed on a C-130 and resulted in the death of eight aircrew personnel. All the remaining helicopters were abandoned and the C-130s evacuated the rest of the servicemen engaged in the unfortunate mission. Most damaging for Carter, his exemplary moral stance had been weakened too glaringly for him to start acting like the tough guy in a dangerous neighborhood. The USA was also suffering from inflation due to new spikes in oil prices, although Carter's administration handled the problem better than other developed nations. Carter, who had no problems with being called a liberal, gave liberalism a "bad image" and Americans, who had long before forgotten that it was liberalism that had helped them or their parents through the Great Depression, happily and even tauntingly began to boast of their conservatism. This was so marked that women voters, who had been predictably conservative, began to act like liberals in contrast with their illiberal men. Carter could be called the last successful, as well as the most unsuccessful, representative of traditional American liberalism. Amid the gloomy setbacks, at least one person saw a "ray of sunshine" and that was Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who recognized right away the Soviet blunder in Afghanistan and devised an insurgency plan to repay the USSR for the American humiliation in Vietnam. But he has claimed more. He says he was the architect of the American-Saudi-Pakistani alliance that brought down the Soviets, which would make him the ultimate instigator of 9/11. At least, it was this blueprint that president Ronald Reagan used to the inch.
(16) Sadat’s successful strategy cost him his life
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had been created to coordinate Palestinian international opposition to Israel (June 1964). Yasir Arafat, head of Al Fatah, a guerrilla movement affiliated to the PLO, became its leader (February 1969), in part because of the prestige he and his fighters gained in resisting an Israeli attack on Karameh (1968), a town on the Jordanian side of the Allenby bridge over the river Jordan where the Israelis underestimated potential military opposition and suffered heavy casualties. The Jordanian army probably accounted for the relatively large military hardware losses of the Israelis, including various tanks and one warplane. The PLO operated against Israel mainly from Jordan, where it tried to meddle in that country's internal affairs and was suppressed and expelled by King Hussein (September 1970). The PLO moved its operations to Lebanon, where it participated in that country’s factional quarrels mainly pitting Christians against Muslims. Palestinian terrorist operations were against Israel but they also were carried out internationally. Arab terrorism was at its most horrifying with the kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic games, but there were many instances of equally repugnant actions, such as an incident on a hijacked cruise ship in which terrorists killed and threw overboard a wheel-chair bound Jewish man. Arafat realized that such tactics were counter-productive and sought to orient PLO strategy exclusively against Israel itself. Nasser died in 1970 and was succeeded by Anwar el Sadat, another general. Sadat had one objective in mind: to recover the Sinai. Nasser's successor knew that he could not force the USSR to join him in attacking Israel and therefore he also understood that it was only with the support of America that he could engage Israel in negotiations for the return of the Sinai, where the Israelis were entrenched as if in permanence. Israel had taken big and small chunks of lightly peopled Egyptian territory, which Egypt could lose like the Palestinians their homeland if it did not act decisively and soon. But to attain its goal, which in essence was negotiating peace for land, Egypt had to carry out a radical international re-alignment. Sadat asked the Soviet military advisers to leave Egypt and adopted a neutralist stance, but one that militarily left Egypt out on a limb. To justify this breaking of international political molds, Sadat also had to prove his ultimate commitment to the anti-Israel, pan-Arab cause, and he had to do some vindicating of Egyptian fighting mettle. The events of the 1973 War, often called the Yom Kippur War, appear to indicate that Sadat was not entirely confident in ultimate victory, so in a sense he waged a war he knew or suspected he was going to lose because he wanted to prove that Egypt was not a loser. Strangely, but not that strange in the Middle Eastern context, his politico-military strategy worked very well for Egypt, although not so well for Sadat himself.
Allied to Syria, the Egyptians caught the Israelis with their guard down (6 October 1973). Wheatcroft, who compensates his rather obsequious critique of Zionism by trying to make Arabs seem the ultimate in stupidity, argues that Yom Kippur, a stay at home holiday, was the wrong date for the attack. The Egyptians crossed the canal and advanced well into the Sinai, where Egyptian land forces halted and formed a defensive line. Close observers of these events tend to coincide with the view that Israel's arsenal was significantly depleted and that to mount a large counter-offensive Israel needed American supplies badly. President Nixon provided them whereas Egypt, no longer freely aided by the USSR, had to try to contain Israelis with sharply lower military means. Forces led by Gen. Ariel Sharon drove the Egyptians back and cornered them in the city of Suez, at the southern entrance of the canal, until the late 1980s a visibly war-ravaged city. Israel could have advanced towards the Egyptian capital. Fighting went on in the desert between Suez and Cairo and for many years afterwards the former battlefield was littered with tank carcasses. The Israelis also initiated a feint on Damascus from the Golan Heights. Although the Soviets had been expelled from Egypt, they did not relish virtual American hegemony through Israel in the entire Middle East, where the USA already counted with the support of Iran. The USSR told Israel to halt its offensive. It is often said that the nearest the world came to a nuclear conflagration was during the Cuban missiles crisis. But it could be argued that the danger of nuclear war was greater when Nixon's secretary of state Henry Kissinger, presumably with Nixon's approval, placed American forces on a world-wide nuclear alert in response to the Soviet warning to Israel. In this case, there was no actual physical face off as there had been in the Atlantic ocean in 1962, but war surely would have been an option if Israel had continued to move in on Egypt and Syria. A truce was negotiated by which the Israelis withdrew to the Sinai and far away enough from the canal to permit its re-opening. Sadat was reviled by Syria for not following up on the Sinai offensive. Syria also complained that when Egypt halted its advance it had left the Syrian forces in the lurch and imperiled Damascus, the Syrian capital. The Israeli line of occupation in the Golan heights is not far from Damascus, certainly a much more attainable military target than Cairo. Israel's main objective was the greater menace that Egypt represented. Tthere is little doubt that the Egyptian situation was critical. Sadat had not revealed all his strategic cards to the Syrians, but it is not fair to say that Egypt did not do its best to beat Israel.
For the moment Sadat’s strategy was going roughly according to plan. Sadat knew that the state of Israel was there to stay. But the climate for negotiations was not good and Egyptian peace feelers to Israel did not make much of an impression on primer minister Golda Meir (1969-1974) nor on her successor Yitzhak Rabin (1974-1977). But Sadat persisted. In exchange for the recovery of the Sinai, Egypt was willing to recognize Israel and sign a peace accord. Menachem Begin, of the hardline Likud Party, became prime minister, and this Zionist ex-terrorist could not in good conscience reject Egypt's peace offensive, dramatized by Sadat's what-more-can-you-want trip to Jerusalem and his speech before the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Even then there was no breakthrough, for Israel was not in a conceding mood. To counter the PLO, its forces were raiding deep into Lebanon. The process was at the point where ground was broken but nothing had been planted, let alone anything harvested, when president Jimmy Carter stepped in. Carter was already two years into his administration and his approach to foreign relations, crucial to an understanding of his presidential and post-presidential careers, was not going down well in Congress or among the media and the public. Americans are proud of being tough-nosed about foreigners, unless they perceive them, as they paradigmatically do Israelis, as being very much like themselves. Outside of that, they have little patience with abstract principles, and Carter was proposing principles above calculations on what conforms or does not conform with common perceptions of American interests. Carter wanted to discriminate between democratic and non-democratic practices but some of America's allies in developing countries were not democratic at all. This did not much concern Americans. Democracy was a good in itself, but what mattered was that to each his own. If you missed the democratic boat, then you had no one else to blame but yourself and it wasn't in America's interest, much less was it its duty, to help democracy along anywhere. Presidents were allowed to sound pious about such things, but taking themselves too seriously was a public opinion hazard. Besides, Carter had already caved in to a dictator when the USA signed with Omar Torrijos of Panama the canal-reversion treaty, which was evidence that Carter did not make democracy a pre-condition even for such a monumental give away of American property.
In the negotiations between Egypt and Israel, Carter got himself a winner. His intervention in this issue was decisive and beneficial all around. Speculating about might-have-beens is about as useful as making predictions on the basis that things do not change over the short-run. But it is possible to argue that had Egypt and Israel not made an enduring peace the course of world history could have been much more bumpy than it has been in the last decades. And what Carter achieved was a real peace. He brought Sadat and Begin together in Camp David and he kept them under such constant pressure that the two leaders finally did achieve agreement (September 1978). By way of contrast, and as proof that history is recalcitrant to remakes, president Bill Clinton adopted exactly the same tactic, perhaps with even more persistence, to force Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat to depose their differences, but in the end he had nothing to show for his efforts. The Camp David Accords ratified an exchange of Egyptian recognition of Israel for Israeli-occupied land. As the ultimate promoter of the peace process, Sadat was generally denounced in the Arab world and a frigid no-comment was the best that he could hope for from any Arab state. Sadat was assassinated by fanatical military during a national day parade under the lenses of the world's television cameras (6 October 1981). His killer was an officer, Khalid Islambouli, who, after firing a deadly burst, looked inside the presidential box to see if Sadat was totally dead, and fired another burst. The following year Israel returned the entire Sinai to Egypt. Despite initial high hopes, the relations between Egypt and Israel soon became chilly, but the two nations share a common interest in not breaking the peace negotiated in Camp David, even though on occasions it has been hard for Egypt to countenance what Israel was doing. Arafat tried to make the PLO part of the peace process seeking recognition for a Palestinian state but this was not accepted. The Camp David Accords included an Israeli commitment to promote Palestinian self-rule. But there was no one present in Camp David from the Palestinian side, and before the accords were signed, Israel had already undertaken something that went against the spirit of Camp David. Early into Begin's tenure (1977-1983), Israel had begun a colonization or settlements program in Palestinian territories (Gaza and West Bank) under the supervision of the extremely anti-Palestinian, outspokenly anti-Arab Ariel Sharon, famed in Israel for his raids outside Israel and the same Sharon who encircled Suez during the Yom Kippur war.
(17) The Lebanese civil war
During 1972 and 1973, the Lebanese army was trying to come to grips with the internal security problem created by the Palestinian presence, but it was hampered by the fact that Christian officer had to impart orders to reluctant Muslim non-coms and soldiers. Also, the PLO had been practically re-forming its own army. In 1974, Israel stepped up its attacks on southern Lebanon, where the PLO was practically sovereign. In 1975, the internal fractures in Lebanon resulted in outright civil war between the PLO, backed by the Druze Jumblatt clan, and the Christian core of the Lebanese army. This conflict, in which the participants increased as the fighting went on, lasted on and off until 1991. As a rule, it pitted Muslims and Druzes against Christians, but towards its final years it degenerated into fighting between Christian factions and between Muslim militias. The Druzes and the Palestinians were usually allies in the fighting, perhaps because their territories were not contiguous. Much of this mayhem was orchestrated by Syria, which first joined the civil war in 1976 and very gradually imposed its authority in Lebanon and finally pacified the country, although its methods were often underhand and callous. Throughout the process the Syrian president was Hafez al-Assad.
The Lebanese civil war did not have a clearly demarcated frontline, except in Beirut, and it shifted from one part of the country to another, whenever fighting erupted between the different communities, especially between Muslims and Christians. One of the early theaters of the civil war was the fighting in the north between Muslim Tripoli and Maronite Christian Zgharta. During the early part of 1976, just prior to the Syrian intervention, the Lebanese army dwindled to its Maronite nucleus and the communities started self-segregating from each other. This process of self-segregation also affected the divisions among Muslims between Shia (mostly in southern Lebanon), Sunni, and Druzes. Beirut was divided into Muslim west Beirut and Maronite east Beirut. Allenby street was the no man's land between them, known as the "green line" because no one could venture into it without risk of life and it soon became overgrown with vegetation. At the start of the war the PLO and allies had over 20,000 soldiers against a lesser number on the side of the Maronites. The official army itself was so weak that it was complemented by a Christian militia known as the Lebanese Forces (LF). There existed the very real possibility that all of Lebanon could fall to the PLO. The Syrian intervention has been attributed to an appeal from president Suleyman Franjieh, a Maronite, but it is more likely that the Syrians intervened because if the PLO had triumphed Israel would have invaded putting Syria at further military disadvantage. In a general sense, it can be speculated that a PLO victory would have embattled the Near East further than it already was. The Maronites certainly did not object to the Syrian invasion, which was at first extremely cautious and limited to the Bekaa valley, north of the road between Beirut and Damascus. The PLO stopped its advances and placed a wary eye on Syria. The Syrian invasion grew bolder and by November 1976, it had taken over much of Muslim Lebanon, including especially west Beirut and Tripoli. Israel responded by setting the Litani river as the limit whose crossing by the Syrians could provoke Israeli intervention (depending on various other strategic concerns). The Litani river flows into the Mediterranean sea south of Beirut between Tyre (Arabic Saida) and Sidon (Arabic Sur). Inland it courses down the Bekaa valley. In 1978, when Palestinians landed in Haifa and commandeered a bus killing 37 civilians, Israel invaded southern Lebanon with 25,000 soldiers as far as the Litani river. The Israeli withdrawal left behind (1) the largely Christian Southern Lebanon Army (originally The Free Lebanon Army), sponsored, advised, and weaponed by Israel in the region as far north as Tyre, and (2) just north of the Israeli border, the 6,000-man UN force called Unifil. The SLA and Unifil co-existed side by side. Unifil was supposed to disarm anti-Israeli commandos but it was largely ineffectual.
The ayatollahs came to power in Iran in 1979 and in Lebanon they sponsored Shia militias and especially Hizbollah, a community-based association and a political front which badly dissimulated its militant stance. Not wanting to take casualties, Syria held Lebanon almost gingerly. Overt fighting all over the country was common, reciprocal antagonisms were constant. In 1981, Syria began to flex its muscles by first installing SAMs in the Bekaa valley, which obviously were meant to deter Israel. At the same time, fighting between the PLO and Israel in southern Lebanon, but overlapping into Galilee (northern Israel), was taking on the character of a small war. It was as a result of these circumstances that in June 1982, under the supervision of Sharon, now as Israeli defense minister, Israel launched its full-scale invasion of Lebanon designated Operation Peace for Galilee including the destruction by air of Syrian missile sites in Bekaa. Syria rose to the challenge with its air force which was engaged by the Israelis in a gigantic dogfight covering 2,500 square kilometers and involving hundreds of supersonic fighters on both sides. The Syrians lost 90 aircraft. Their air forces were shattered. The Israeli army advanced to west Beirut which was put to siege. As the Israeli objective was to eliminate the PLO in Lebanon, a multinational force (MNF)-American, French, and Italian troops amounting to two brigades-was allowed to land in Lebanon in August 1982 and evacuate thousands of Palestinians fighters, but not all, to Syria and Cyprus. Bashir Gemayel, the Maronite "official president" of Lebanon, who was blamed for Israel's invasion, was assassinated by Palestinians. He was succeeded by his brother Amin.
Despite the PLO evacuation, there remained in West Beirut the camps of Palestinian refugees, and these were bristling with resentment and arms. The Israelis occupied west Beirut. A powerful Maronite militia, the Falangists went at sunset into the crowded Sabra and Shatilla refugee areas. The Israelis provided flares and observed operations from nearby buildings. At dawn it was found that the Falangists had left behind an indiscriminate massacre of civilians, which is usually estimated at between 800 and 1,000, The Falangist leader Elie Hobeika was blamed for the slaughter. The killings must also be put in the context of innumerable atrocities committed by all sides wherever there was fighting in Lebanon. Sharon was forced to resign the defense ministry although not from the cabinet, then headed by primer minister Menachem Begin. When Belgium approved an universal human rights law, Sharon was accused before a Belgian tribunal. Israel disparaged the proceedings and Belgium later amended the law so as to apply only to Belgian nationals. Hobeika was killed in an explosion in 2002. Israel had taken over 650 fatal casualties, and they kept mounting, so another MNF, composed as the previous one, was sent in to separate Israelis and Lebanese. At first, hopes were pinned on peace for Lebanon through the MNF-unrealistic considering its small size-but soon Muslims began to see Americans again as the enemy because of its key alliance with Israel. In April 1983, a van loaded with explosives was crashed into the American Embassy causing 63 dead including seventeen Americans. The deed was claimed by the Iran-backed Islamic Jihad, which, it is generally believed, was just a telephone-front for Hizbollah. Arafat was feeling pressure from the Syrians for not having ordered the PLO to fight to the death in Beirut and he left his Damascus offices for Tunisia. By July, Syria was stepping up its efforts to get things in hand in Lebanon. This highly devious and violent process would take nine years. It began with the formation of a National Salvation Front (NSF). Lebanese president Gemayel was tacitly accepted, although the parties to the front (Muslims and Druzes) and Syria itself controlled much more of Lebanon than he did. Syria encouraged a scission within the PLO-the Abu Musa faction-and fomented attacks against loyalists of Arafat. By September 1983, the Israelis began phasing down their occupation of southern Lebanon, first out of Beirut and south to Sidon. Fighting between Druzes and Christians was at its most intense from this period until 1984.
On 23 October 1983, a terrorist drove a truck around in circles inside a parking area in front of the USA barracks in southern Beirut. He was gathering impulse for a dash against the American military compound. The heavy vehicle crashed and smashed its way over various obstacles and was detonated next to the barracks. The detonation, which has been called the "single largest non-nuclear explosion" in history (almost certainly an exaggeration), killed 241 USA servicemen (mostly Marines). Shortly afterwards a lesser explosion devastated the French barracks producing 58 deaths. Syria is thought to have a hand in both attacks, in part because of the sophistication of the bomb targeting the American troops. In November, under constant Syrian pressure Arafat's remaining PLO troops were evacuated from Tripoli to North Yemen, Tunisia, and Algeria in Greek ships with a French naval escort. In February 1984, Shiites went on the offensive against Christian east Beirut, and the green line, which was being crossed as a result of the MNF and the NSF, was sprouting again. The MNF threw in the towel that month. As part of its maneuvers to subject Lebanon, Syria also fomented fighting in west Beirut between non-Christian militias which it had itself armed. In September, the USA embassy annex, where the embassy still functioned, was bombed with 24 dead including two soldiers. Maronite factions fell to jockeying and occasionally fighting against each other. In February 1985, the Israeli army fell back from Sidon, quickly occupied by Shia militias, to Tyre. In March, the Israelis created the security zone (ten kilometers north of the border) which it left to be policed by the SLA, led by Maj. Saad Haddad. In April, even as the Maronites were engaged in internal power struggles, they were also fighting off Muslims. In December, it was the warlords turn to try to engineer a truce: Walid Jumblatt of the Druzes, Nabih Berri of Amal (Shiites), and Hobeika of the Maronite LF. The Sunni Muslims of Lebanon never quite managed to put together an effective fighting force. Their militia at the start of the civil war, al-Murabitum-the name of the historical Almoravids-was a Palestinian front. Basically it was Syria throwing its weight-Hobeika was considered pro-Syria-and in July 1986 it started taking over Beirut, where it would meet Christian resistance. In February 1987, the Druzes and the Shiites began fighting their own civil war in Beirut with T-54 tanks previously provided by Syria. It was heavy combat, the crowning blow to Beirut's devastation, and the militias only achieved their own weakening. Syrian troops advanced south to Sidon without Israeli opposition, for it was becoming evident to observers that Syrian hegemony was the only hope for stability in Lebanon. The interests of Syria, Israel's implacable enemy, and those of Israel were converging, although this wasn't the first time this had happened in Lebanon's crazy-quilt civil war. But the Maronites still cherished the obsolete dream of the old French-sponsored Lebanon and were hardening towards Syria. By mid-1987, Unifil had suffered 139 casualties and France withdrew from it. In 1989, the Syrian-backed René Mowad, another Maronite, succeeded Gen. Michel Aoun, provisional president only since the expiration of Amin Gemayel's term the previous year. Mowad was assassinated and Elias Hrawi took his place. In September, Aoun was leading the Christian opposition to Syrian plans. In October, in Saudi Arabia, the Taif Accord gave general though not unanimous backing to Syria's hand in Lebanon. Some Maronites too saw Syria as inevitable and the LF militia partly turned against Aoun. In early 1990, Aoun was fending off his LF enemies. By the end of the year, the USA augmented the chorus for Syria, especially as Syria sent a contingent to participate in the UN-sanctioned, USA-led Gulf War against Iraq for its annexation of Kuwait. In May 1991, Syria disbanded and disarmed the militias, except Amal and Hizbollah in the south engaged in confrontation with Israel and its proxy SLA. Hostage-taking of westerners had become a commonplace activity of the militias since the mid-1980s. Some hostages were held captive for years, moved from one hideout to another in Beirut. Now all remaining hostages were released. In August 1991, Syria sanctioned a parliament in which Christians and Muslims were evenly represented. Gen. Aoun surrendered in October.
(18) Ronald Reagan’s proxy-wars strategy
Ronald Reagan, a competent, real-to-goodness Hollywood professional with dozens of movie credits, had started way back in his life as a liberal but had evolved towards extreme conservatism, especially when he became a much appreciated corporate spokesman and lecturer. This placed him in a position to make a complete switch from acting to politics. He did it so skillfully that he served two terms as governor of California. In office, he was true to the widespread conservative standard that prescribed tax cuts, less social subsidies, more reliance over all on the virtues of economic entrepreneurship and on private, strictly voluntary giving. This ideology was preached in America by the eccentric economist and theoretician Milton Friedman, whom Reagan elevated to the rank of utmost though dubious national and international respectability. As advisor to presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, Friedman proposed abolishing the social security system. His pet historical thesis was that the Great Depression was caused by government interference meaning Roosevelt’s step-by-cautious-step first term and not the previous three extreme laissez faire Republican governments. Friedman was associated with the University of Chicago view that the role of government in the economy is to keep the money flowing, but to cut back on credit with high employment. Monetarism, as this view was often termed (because it really was in part as old as money) had many practical consequences. Faced with the huge difficulty of foreseeing large corporate busts, usually due to uncovered borrowing, the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) cast about for an independent watchdog and found one ready made in the companies that were in the business of rating corporate credit, foremost among them Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch, and selling the results of their research to investors. The government by default ceded supervision of credit-worthiness to a private sector, which now had a captive market in its former willing or unwilling objects of scrutiny, but not quite that captive, because investors were still free to place their money where they wanted regardless of ratings. During the 80s and 90s, government regulations so increased the categories of investors under its purview-for in stance: managers of large trust funds-that ratings became practically indispensable for any significant issue or purchase of bonds. Good or bad, the ratings were made public but payment was entirely dependent on those whose aspirations were met. If the rating was not favorable, debts were considered junk. Thus the rating system was profitable while serving the public and the issuers of certified debt were certain to place their securities in the market. There has so far been discovered no evidence of collusion between the debtors and the rating companies. The policy against direct government interference was carried to a great extreme by the heir to Friedman’s mantle, Alan Greenspan, who apparently believed in all honesty that there was no profit in regulation. But financial transactions had gone from plain-vanilla bonds to what are called derivatives, financial packages for large investors securitized in whatever complex ways corporate assets could be subdivided and marketed. With the huge "sub-prime lending mortgage pools" business, on which the "supervisors" were way below their depth, as house prices went down and there was an immense number of foreclosures, which normally do not produce profits, it was seen that privatized supervising was nearly as bad as no supervision at all. The American bust had an impact on stock markets all over the world. Reagan was twice defeated by professional politicians, Nixon and Ford, when he lunged for the Republic presidential nomination. But he went on talking, softly, with impeccable diction and clarity, about toughness and other American values. He praised success and implicitly contemned losers. He was unashamedly for the happy ending. He did not avoid a show of vanity and claimed the right to ostentation.
When Carter appeared to be stumbling badly, Republicans finally caught on: the majority of the American voting public wanted chin-forward conservatism and was no longer ashamed of being considered illiberal or even anti-liberal. Reagan was so prototypical of the conservative that he was the obvious choice as the opponent to the prototypical liberal Carter. At election time, Reagan trounced Carter and liberals couldn't believe what was happening. Naturally, being liberals it never crossed their mind that an actor could actually be elected president of the USA, the highest public office in the world. Reagan was as loyal to his beliefs as he was consistent in his advocacies. Domestically, he was constrained by the liberal proclivities of the federal government, which hadn't been tampered with even by Richard Nixon, the arch-conservative who wasn't. Reagan's economic creed was that granting the affluent tax breaks was the best incentive to the production increases which would generate the taxable income to compensate for the budget deficits that his tax cuts created in the first place. As investment growth was supposed to generate employment, his argument was not as circular as it sounds, but even his vice-president, George Bush, called Reagan's reasoning "voodoo economics", for every one knew that fiscal measures to stimulate growth took time and deficits are short term. Reagan got his tax cuts markedly skewed towards the wealthy, but deficits increased and later, as president, Bush was forced to reverse some of Reagan's tax cuts in order to make fiscal ends meet. Reagan called the USSR and its dependent states the "evil empire". This came straight out of the 1977 film hit Star Wars, but Americans did not see anything frivolous or shallow about the simplification. They found nothing startling either in Reagan's admiration for the movie character Rambo, a Vietnam war veteran superman and the model for a long list of masturbatory fantasies about American heroes wreaking revenge on sadistic Orientals, although the germ for the genre was the cloyingly patriotic Deer Hunter, the 1978 Michael Cimino movie.
Reagan also initiated the American male's infatuation with the Three Stooges, which was a collective, defiant affirmation, like being a conservative and the hell with liberals, that there were fun things in life that one need not be ashamed of just because the pretentious called them, or used to call them, low-brow. Reagan arrived at the White House but he did not renege on his Hollywood background and instead put it center stage and used it to bolster his popularity, for Americans have always taken movies very seriously and fawning on "stars" and fixating on "celebrities" have always been acceptable collective traits. The harmful extreme in these practices is stalking and attacking the objects of awe and admiration and Reagan did not escape the hazards of being the greatest super-celebrity ever when he was shot at and almost killed by a deranged would-be assassin. Unlike the assassination of Kennedy, there were no politics involved in the attempt on Reagan's life. Reagan had been married to an actress, Jane Wyman, who had a better reputation in their field than he did. Critics and Reagan himself considered that his best acting moment was his secondary role in the film King's Row. Wyman said that one of the reasons for their divorce was that she got tired of watching reruns of King's Row. One of the perks of celebrity-hood is showing off and Reagan and his second wife, Nancy, a former starlet who believed in astrology, put on a lavish round of celebrations after the oath-taking that had few if any precedents in American history. Unlike Kennedy, who had sidelined, and alienated, such showbiz supporters as Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis jr., Reagan went out of his way to demonstrate that he was proud of his affiliation with the movie industry. Thus, "evil empire", which most anywhere would have elicited sniggers, in America, and coming from Reagan, seemed a natural thing to say. The problem with "evil empire" was that it meant nothing whatsoever. Did the "empire" include communist China or just the Soviet Empire? If both, why not "evil empires"? If both also, there was an implicit distortion of historical facts, for the USSR and China were not allies but rivals, and how could you have evil opposing itself? If that was the case, then you had evil schizophrenia, which could be good or bad depending on whether it went berserk and self-destroyed or tried to destroy America. Was "evil" meant in a sense that excluded redemption? Did "evil empire" embrace any one anywhere who adopted a more analytical, less smug view of history, or God forbid, actually found some thing to admire in Soviet history, if only its indispensable role in the destruction of Nazi Germany? And if "evil empire" was accurate, then how could the USA, presumably its angelical foil, have any truck with it? It would have been as if in John Milton’s Paradise Lost Gabriel had been over to Lucifer's for lunch.
Reagan backed up his characterization of communism with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The SDI consisted in the development of a missile system that could knock attacking missiles out in space. This was promptly and inevitably dubbed "star wars". Some conservatives allege that the movie tagging was critical and derisive. It has the ring of the tabloids, which is usually very conservative, and besides Reagan virtually asked for it by using the meaningless but decidedly Hollywoodesque "evil empire". The project immediately flew into a flack field. The most reiterated criticism said it was unfeasible and a waste of money. And some of the tests that were carried out did seem clownishly inept, like the Three Stooges in outer space. As to the real possibility of its achievement, in view of foreseeable technological advances, it seemed more foolish to deny than to accept it. But when Reagan first announced it, the SDI sounded like a reckless, self-righteous, and de-stabilizing policy, a guzzler of money that could have been better spent, say, on NASA. As so far there has been no public announcement of a breakthrough in missile-interception, which is much worse that finding the proverbial needle in a haystack; also, considering that in May 2002 the Pentagon cancelled a spy-satellite project because the Boeing super-corporation could not solve certain technical problems , the misgivings about the technological feasibility of SDI may not have been so short-sighted. There was a string of reasons why SDI made anti-nuclear activists jumpy. There was another area in foreign affairs in which Reagan showed himself unarguably astute and truly the most formidable adversary that the USSR, stagnating under the leaden leadership of secretary general Brezhnev, had ever faced. If the USA learned something from the Vietnam War it was that in the Third World it was better to fight by proxy that to get involved in actual combat. The USSR had been the ultimate victor in Vietnam because it committed not one soldier to that war. Also, the Vietnamese were scrupulous about keeping it a strictly nationalist war and they never accepted, or for that matter needed, non-Vietnamese volunteers, except those with propaganda potential or value, which ironically more often than not were Americans themselves, the actress Jane Fonda being the most notorious case. This incidentally taught Americans another lesson, which was that it didn't pay to be too active against your own country's wars, right or wrong. This lesson was learned so well that activism against the Second Iraqi war, which happened because America either forgot Vietnam or was being true to a previously unobtrusive historical type, was so discreet that jingoist journalists had a hard time finding celebrities to pillory for being against arguably the most blatantly imperialistic war that America has ever fought. The Democratic candidate, John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran who openly opposed the Vietnam war, had a terrible time getting over what could be called a "Jane Fonda complex". Incredibly, what the Soviets apparently drew from Vietnam was not a cautionary lesson but some besotted sense of their invincibility in a backward neighbor like Afghanistan.
The fight-by-proxy strategy was immediately applied by the Reagan administration in Nicaragua. There was no scarcity of Nicaraguan enemies of the Sandinists, and they weren't necessarily only former Somoza supporters or discharged soldiers. The latter-day Sandinists, like their idol, also walked into a trap: because their victory came from the muzzle of a rifle and because Cuba, the only Latin America state to challenge the USA successfully, was being an enthusiastic supporter, they lost sight of the fact that in the Western Hemisphere, as the Guatemalan leftist politician J.J. Arévalo put it, it was the American shark chasing sardines, Nicaragua being among the sardines. In brief, the Sandinists were not being accommodating, domestically or internationally, and the USA was not even disposed to be accommodated. It was eager to conspire. But instead of sending in the Marines, like presidents William H. Taft and Calvin Coolidge had done, Reagan's administration began openly financing the anti-Sandinist Nicaraguan guerrillas that came to be known as Contras. The Sandinists had only a short period of relative internal peace in which to apply their revolutionary program before they became embattled, and not just by the Contras, but by the USA itself, which, to make sure that the Sandinists were really hurting, air-dropped mines in the main Nicaraguan ports. This was pure, unashamed bullying. But it shouldn't have come as a surprise to any one, least of all to Sandinists. The Sandinists like Castro might have won any election, but they were stubbornly opposed to free elections. Reagan did not always approach international issues with the indirection he adopted towards Nicaragua. The tiny Caribbean island state of Grenada came to independent life under a labor leader, Eric Gairy, whose party was named GULP. Gairy knew how to begin strikes but not how to end them. Under British colonial administration, Grenada became a competitor in the spice trade and was given the nickname of the "nutmeg island". It also had some top-class tourism, although its beaches are not spectacular. Maurice Bishop, the leader of the opposition and founder of the New Jewel Movement, which was more leftist than GULP, and not Buddhist despite the name, deposed the junketing Gairy and took power effortlessly. Apparently, Bishop was not being revolutionary enough for his constituency, which included hardened Castroites. Although it wasn't clear exactly what his opponents wanted to revolutionize, Bishop was overthrown and killed. Cubans were in view in the island constructing a big international airport, long enough to land Russian Migs, when American paratroopers in one day or two corralled the communists, expelled the Cubans, and settled in for two more years, when they left Grenada with an elected government.
When terrorism in Lebanon killed 241 USA servicemen, president Reagan, his signature coif unruffled, the tip of an index finger resting on his ultra-thin lips, a look of mild distress in his eyes, prudently ordered withdrawal. American politicians had just learned another lesson: rather than take politically damaging casualties it was better to lose face, even if the baddies went un-chastised. Nine years later in Somalia, Clinton reacted exactly the same way as Reagan had in Lebanon. You couldn't win them all and the bottom-line was that if Americans got the shaft in Beirut they gave it to the Cubans in Grenada. The greatest and most successful proxy-war America backed was in Afghanistan and not against Russian proxies like the Cubans but against the Russians themselves. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, they did so because this country's radical regime, inherently unstable, was under threat by scattershot Muslim traditionalism based in the countryside and its numberless villages. By then the Iranian ayatollahs had made Islamic fundamentalism famous-or infamous depending on your perspective-but certainly forceful enough to have a global impact. The Afghan traditionalists were your Iranian fundamentalists writ large. Basically, they wanted their women in purdahs or burqas (baggy, head-to-toes black dresses with vertical slits to see through); they did not want them in schools or in the professions or in government; they wanted Sharia law at its crudest (stonings and maimings); and they wanted the letter of the Koran respected in all things. In lieu of universities they preferred madrasas (religious schools). Above all, they did not want foreign atheists crossing them, and the Russians in Afghanistan were both foreign and atheists. The majority of Afghans were still living in more or less medieval conditions, save for modern guns, and they couldn't have driven the Soviets out of Kabul any more than they could the British almost exactly a century before. But unlike 1879, when the British did not have to contend with the Russians themselves, Soviet-occupied Afghanistan no longer bordered on British India but on sullen and pugnacious Pakistan. Pakistan was solidly with the west as a member of SEATO and CENTO. But it would have been with the West under any circumstances if only to spite India. Pakistan was so obsessed with the Kashmir issue that it made an alliance with China when Chinese-Soviet relations were strained to the breaking point. When the Chinese attacked India to occupy a barren portion of Ladakh over which they had built a highway between Tibet and Xinjiang, Pakistan stood cheering on the sidelines. Pakistan was drifting towards fundamentalism even before the Iranian revolution. Not surprisingly, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan and the Americans decided on war-by-proxy, Pakistan eagerly became the middleman between the USA and Afghan guerrillas. A more ideal situation could hardly have been imagined for Pakistan, who in one deal strengthened its hand against India through the American connection, undermined India's principal arms provider and long-term ally, and struck a blow for Islam. On the other hand, the USA couldn't have found a better partner to needle the Russians than Pakistan, whose military intelligence service was imbued with Islamic mystique and, because of the continuing low-intensity conflict in Kashmir, was adept at cross-border infiltration. This marriage made in Paradise would turn out to be the cause of America's worst nightmare. By the time all its weirdness was revealed, including such a monumental failure of intelligence as can hardly be imagined, America had made Pakistan a major partner.
The objective of the original American-Pakistani alliance was to bloody the Russians so much that they would admit defeat and evacuate Afghanistan. This was in general terms much like what the Russians and Chinese did to the USA in Vietnam, with a significant difference for the future of Afghanistan and of the world. Even though Americans were the paymasters, it was the Pakistanis who smuggled in and apportioned the weaponry. The Saudis also were heavy financiers of the Afghan mujahidin, again through Pakistan, which wildly unrealistically they considered to be the next strategic objective of Soviet imperialism. After the Iranian gantlet, the Americans had reasons to be suspicious of fundamentalism, but not necessarily of Pakistani fundamentalists. They reasoned correctly that power politics provide stronger motivations, on the whole, than religious fanaticism. This turned out to be true when Pakistan supported America’s proxy war on Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, but, in view of the events leading to 9/11, it could have been considered an ill-conceived strategy. What the Americans chose to ignore was that the Pakistani dictator, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, was fully as fanatical as the Afghans he was being asked to finance generously. For the purpose of striking at the Russians, the Pakistanis did not have to show favoritism, so arms were allotted to all the Afghan resistance factions. Renowned for their marksmanship, the Afghans had become adept at the use of the famously effective Soviet-designed Kalashnikov automatic rifle. This weapon is so uncomplicated that it was replicated in hundreds of workshops in northwestern Pakistan and in Afghanistan. First used in World War II, the Kalashnikov is the weapon of choice in armed conflicts all over Asia and Africa, but nowhere does it have a stronger association with a people than with the Pathans of the Pakistani Northwest Province and the Pashtun-speaking Afghans of eastern Afghanistan. Pathans, who also speak Pashtun, is a Pakistani ethnic designation. Afghan logistic competence did not rise much above the Kalashnikov and when Afghan fighters were given weapons even as lowly as mortars they handled them as they would an angry rattlesnake. After short but intensive field training, they overcame their initial apprehensions and became quite proficient at downing Soviet aircraft with shoulder-held SAMs, perhaps the deadliest infantry weapon ever devised, which, in the American Stinger version, was being supplied to Afghan mujahidin starting in 1986. When the Stingers were first successfully used against Soviet helicopters landing in Jalalabad, the tapes of the dead or dying crewmen were shown to Reagan in the White House and people in the CIA and the Pentagon were going around doing high aces. The Russians were holding their own in the cities, but even approaching Kabul airport Soviet military transports had to do zig-zag patterns to avoid getting hit by SAM snipers that it would have taken battalions to chase down in the surrounding hills, and during the entire Afghan war the Russians never committed on average more than 100,000 troops. Americans were so cocksure about their anti-Soviet strategy in Afghanistan that they even financed the printing of fundamentalist texts for distribution in Afghan-controlled areas as educational aids and morale builders. They were basically catering to prejudices and passions that hardly needed encouragement, perhaps on the advice of their Pakistani allies and bridge-builders.
Of the proxy-wars wars waged by the Reagan administration the one that required the greatest secrecy and bristled with possibilities for cross-purposes and pitfalls, and pratfalls, was the one undertaken on the side of Saddam Hussein against Iran. Iraq and Iran had been at odds for control of Shatt al Arab, the natural channel formed at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. Shatt al Arab flows for most of its length in Iraq, where Basra, one of Iraq's largest cities, lies on its right bank. But for the last 75 kilometers or so before it empties into the Arabian or Persian gulf, the left coast of the waterway had been occupied by Iran, to whom it had been ceded by the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. The Iranian island of Abadan in this section of Shatt al Arab is the site of what once was the largest oil refinery in the world. In theory, Iraq had sovereignty over the channel but in practice Iran shared in this sovereignty. The ambiguity arose because in the 1930s and 1940s American and British oil interests, as they operated equally in Iran and Iraq, were not particularly finicky about the frontiers between the two semi-independent countries. At the time when the shah was standing tall and Iran was considered a crucial American ally, the Iranian government denounced the treaty that gave Iraq formal sovereignty over Shatt al Arab. Because of Abadan, Iran wanted the boundary moved to the thalweg (the middle of the river). The Iraqis were pressured through Iranian military help for rebellious Iraqi Kurds and the dispute was patched up with the recognition of Iran's claim. In the early stage of the Iranian revolution, the ayatollahs, led by their revered Khomeini, dabbled in inflaming the Middle East with their Islamic fervor, as in the case of Hizbollah in Lebanon. Iranian Shia militancy did not inspire confidence in nearby Arab countries, which saw in Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein a shield against Iranian subversion. The Iraqi dictator decided to cut the Gordian knot of Iran-Iraq relations by attacking and invading Iran. Hussein did not know the mess he was getting into. The Iranians were at the acme of their revolutionary fervor. If they had defied the USA out of sheer bravado, no presumptuous Arab despot was going to cow them. Since relations between the USA and USSR had deteriorated to very unfriendly levels because of Afghanistan, this was also a good time for radical regimes of whatever hue in developing countries to ripple their biceps. Thus arose the curious circumstances in which a fundamentalist regime in Iran felt emboldened against the USA at the same time as fundamentalism in Afghanistan was still a real policy option for America. Stranger combinations were shortly to follow.
(19) The Iraq-Iran war and the Oslo accords
If the Soviets miscalculated in Afghanistan, Iraqi aggression against Iran was not a miscalculation but a blackhole of a blunder. Iraq's longest and most irregular border is with Iran. For much of its length it follows foothills or mountainous areas in which Iran commands the heights. Iran had three and a half times the population of Iraq. Much of it was young and passionately devoted to the thundering Khomeini. Iraq was not significantly better armed than Iran. It did have poison gas and its dictator and the male members of his family were not finicky about the means of coercion they used. But all in all, Iraq was at a disadvantage and this soon began to show. Dislike and mistrust of Iran ran high in the American government and these attitudes bred fears. During the Cold War the possibility of "falling dominoes" was never far from American strategic thinking, basically because Americans simply do not trust peoples who are not in their league of economic development or as attached as they are to some form of democracy. The fear was that Iran would turn the tables on Saddam Hussein and instead of Iraq getting full possession of Shatt al Arab, Iran would get possession of Iraq, which was conceivable, and if Shia Iran and Shia Iraq acted jointly, why, it was not unimaginable that the entire Middle East would be subverted and that it would rise like a huge sandstorm against the West. The USSR could not fail to try to take advantage of such a situation. The Soviets would then of course win the Cold War and conquer the world. The line between the "not unimaginable" and a real threat is not wide in these cases. Besides, whether the reasoning was sound or not, America could not stand around with its arms folded while a part of the world went to pot, especially a part whose own pot was already brimming with oil. There was also the matter of not losing face which throughout the Cold War was as important to the two superpowers as any strategic consideration. The usual reason alleged for American interventions in the Third World was that people there, especially in Asia, did not like losing face and so America, who, with the USSR, was a great face-saver, had to act in such a manner that it did not lose face. Since losing face is simply a matter of not giving in and since America has given in only seldom in its history, then the losing-face reflex is more likely American than Asian and still more likely universal than specifically either American or Asian. The upshot was that the USA decided that it was to its advantage to side with Iraq against the detested Khomeini and his revolutionary guards and so Donald Rumsfeld, a trusted Reagan aide, former secretary of defense under Reagan, was dispatched to Iraq various times until he finally met Saddam Hussein directly. Whatever their personal rapport might have been, the two finalized a low-key but very consequential alliance of convenience. Iraq and America established diplomatic relations. More importantly, the USA began to feed Iraq satellite-gathered intelligence on Iranian troop movements, by which means Iraqi numerical inferiority in the war was discounted. If ever an American president followed Theodore Roosevelt's advice to speak softly and carry a big stick, it was Ronald Reagan. Through the incongruous understanding between a ruthless Arab dictator and the "world's greatest democracy", Americans got off the rocks that had been weighing on them since the Iranians had sequestered their diplomats, one of the major disrespects inflicted on a great power in the Post-War. The secrecy involved in these operations was not without perils.
America was then engaged in three proxy-wars: in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, and in Central America. Covert operations by their very nature tend to create situations in which one hand might not know what the other one is doing. Or feet might stumble over each other. Financing for them is not usually above board. And this was what had been happening when the Iran-Contra scandal came into the open. Given its "banana republic" status, Nicaragua did not excite American rancor the way Iran and the USSR did. Grenada had not either, so basically Reagan had acted decently in sparing Grenadians the trials of a tyrannical, Cuban-type regime, although American intervention was undertaken less to spare Grenadians anything than to humiliate Castro. Reagan's White House was not given carte blanche by Congress in Nicaragua. But the Sandinists had to go. The administration had been making profits selling arms to Iran in order to liberate hostages in Lebanon. This already was somewhat dodgy but it was humanitarian, hence not unethical. Not so unimpeachable complications arose with the disposal of the profits. That was when John Poindexter, Reagan's security adviser, and Col. Oliver North, his operations man, came up with the stranger-than-fiction scheme to use them to finance the Contras. The overseer of the affair, according to Steve Coll, was CIA director William Casey. The arms deal with Iran did not square with the rapprochement with Iraq and it favored the unsavory ayatollahs, but the armaments involved were not large enough to offset the aid that America was giving Iraq. Thus America was both undermining and aiding one enemy, Iran, to sabotage another enemy, Nicaragua. From another angle, it was being complicit with a big menace, if strategic fear of Iran was to be taken seriously, in order to get rid of a mere nuisance such as the Sandinists. From the perspective of the Second Iraqi war, American cynicism in the Middle East could be accounted for as evidence that the USA had picked Iraq as the lesser of two evils. Events would show that it was the wrong choice, but also that once it was made the USA stuck to it even when it could have backed off and prevented bad from becoming worse. Whatever the margin for honest error, though, the seeds of the Gulf War, of 9/11, and of the Second Iraqi War, were sown when America consecutively gave its backing to two dictators: the shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The shah's fall led to the end of Iranian friendship with America and this made it possible for the USA to befriend Iraq, Iran's enemy. Assuming American support, Iraq began acting up and America garrisoned Saudi Arabia. Fundamentalists, Osama bin Laden foremost among them, took umbrage at the presence of American troops in Arabia precisely at a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was beginning to boil over in the rock-throwing First Intifada (shaking off), which went on and off between 1987 and 1991 and then Israeli defense minister Yitzhak Rabin repressed unsparingly. It must be said that, as Hussein consumed a lot of Iranian fundamentalist zeal, at first he was probably not seen by the USA, and especially by his Arab neighbors, as a bad investment.
The 1973 War had demonstrated that, whatever the circumstances, the USA would never remain indifferent to Israel's fortunes. The Palestinians' plight after Egypt's defection was worse than it had ever been before, especially as the only limit on Israeli intervention in Lebanon was the number of casualties that Israel was willing to take. There was nothing to prevent Israel from intensifying its policy of dotting Palestinian lands with innumerable Jewish settlements. It was then that Muammar Qadaffi of Libya decided to take on the USA. International terrorism, which was what Libya supported, becomes vulnerable to counter-terrorist measures when it offers a visible target. Libya was that target and it was soon put out of commission (1986), though not entirely because Qadaffi was behind the terrorist downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which resulted in 270 fatalities. Bowing to the unavoidable, which was, as the Lebanon conflict had shown, that Palestinians could not gain political objectives by violent means, the PLO recognized the right of Israel to exist and renounced the use of terrorism (1988), although this did not necessarily mean that terrorist organizations that were recognized by the PLO also accepted Arafat's renunciation. Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister in agreement with Peres, his foreign minister, about the possibility of dealing with Arafat and the PLO for a peaceful solution to the Palestinian problem. After preliminary talks in Madrid, Peres initiated the Oslo negotiations. An interim agreement had been reached by September 1993. It was signed in Washington by Rabin and Arafat with president Bill Clinton present and it was ratified by the same signatories in Egypt. The Washington treaty (usually subsumed under Oslo accords) involved Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and the West Bank over a period of five years. Initially, the Palestinian Authority (PA), as the interim government of the future Palestine was called, would be ceded all of Gaza and Jericho in the West Bank. Palestinian self-rule would be gradually increased in the West Bank and it was left for a final phase to determine the exact extent of Palestinian sovereignty. Arafat arrived in Gaza and set up the PA, which organized its own police force. Another symbol of statehood was the inauguration of an international airport. Arafat, Peres, and Rabin shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. Two years later, somewhat dodgy elections ratified Arafat, who did not lack for political enemies, as president of the PA. In particular, Hamas and Islamic Jihad were violently opposed to the Oslo accords and these clandestine organizations began a sustained campaign of terrorism against Israel. It is widely believed that in Lebanon Islamic Jihad was a cover name for terrorist attacks. Since these were mainly the doing of Hizbollah, then Islamic Jihad was an Iranian signature appellation. But in Palestine, Islamic Jihad appears to be a real though small terrorist organization, possibly dating to the 1970s. Hamas was another thing. Previous to the First Intifada, its predecessor was a benevolent, mutual-help Palestinian association, vaguely related to Muslim Brotherhoods in other countries (not necessarily peaceful everywhere), which Israel thought could be a counterweight to the PLO. During the First Intifada, members of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood created terrorist Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Mukawamah al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement), which after that never looked back to its original purely charitable activities. Hamas became Arafat’s sworn enemy once he signed the Oslo accords and it did all it could to frustrate his authority as president of the PA. Given Hamas’ grass-roots in Gaza, Arafat had to deal with it if not gingerly at least in a manner that did not alienate popular support for the PA.
(20) The rise of Gorbachev
Before Brezhnev died, anyone could tell even from photographs that he was a semi-corpse being carried about or being held up by the people around him. In a very literal sense, "minders" is the word that comes to mind. But when he committed his greatest foreign policy blunder, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Brezhnev was fully aware of what he was doing. As it led to the downfall of communism, Afghanistan was far worse that Khrushchev's adventurism in Cuba. Brezhnev had a reputation for laziness and he tended to delegate, hence he probably encouraged initiatives within conventional Soviet canons. But he was surrounded by mediocrities. Afghanistan was such a predictable error that it is hard to understand how it came about in the first place. The invasion was delusional. The Russians might have been fooled by Afghanistan's lack of jungles. It is almost inconceivable that they did not realize (1) that Afghanistan's dry, rugged mountains were as formidable a barrier as jungles for control of a country and (2) that portable SAMs would be as effective against their aircraft as they had been against American war planes. Afghanistan was a mistake compounding such a vast quantity of previous errors that the Soviet system was literally cracking under the load, but this was not yet apparent even to the most percipient of Kremlinologists. While Brezhnev was dying, Yury Andropov quit his post as head of the KGB to devote himself to the coming scramble for political power. When Brezhnev was finally pronounced officially dead, Andropov was chosen secretary general by his peers. Because of Afghanistan and also because the Soviets had deployed the intermediate range SS-20 missiles, the Cold War was gusting again. Reagan was in the White House lambasting the Soviet "evil empire". More effectively, he bucked the trend towards disarmament and increased America's defense spending. To counter the SS-20s, Pershing and cruise missiles were stationed in Germany. A new arms race seemed about to start. But it wasn't exactly as before. No country could win a nuclear war, no matter how many more missiles and bombs it added to its already existing arsenal, so it was that Reagan sought the advantage of the SDI. Andropov lasted fifteen months as Soviet leader before dying from kidney failure. His successor, the even more infirm Constantine Chernenko, lasted eleven months before succumbing to lung and heart diseases. Both Andropov and Chernenko were not exceedingly old when they died, 70 and 74 respectively, but they were in bad health. Their colleagues knew it, so in promoting first one and then the other they were apparently following a macabre Buggins-turn rule.
This did not hold for the next leader of CPSU. Among the other members of the presidium one stood out over the lot: that was Mikhail Gorbachev, also at 54 the youngest. The world might have started on a brief roll when Michael Gorbachev became general secretary of the CPSU. Already before Chernenko's demise Gorbachev had impressed Margaret Thatcher, the normally dour British prime minister, an anti-communist Boadicea even before Reagan came on the scene. Despite his titles, Brezhnev was probably more figurehead than any previous Soviet leader. He was the representative figure of Soviet society and especially of the CPSU. When Soviet archives are fully opened, it might be found that Brezhnev was a spokesman rather than a leader and that he was given his rank because the other Soviet hierarchs did not begrudge it to such a mediocrity. Towards the end of his life another consideration might have come into play and it was that who would envy or feel inferior to a person who was more dead than alive. During the Brezhnev years, there always loomed, almost above his boss, another figure, one that was abhorrent to any self-respecting Western intellectual. That man was Mikhail Suslov. He looked big, but especially, with his intense, unfriendly look and his eyeglasses, he had the air of some one who thought very seriously about things and was not tolerant of opposition. Suslov was universally acknowledged as the Rottweiler of Soviet orthodoxy. In the USSR, his thinking was of the right sort and whoever did not think the way he did, and came to the attention of others, was sure to get into big trouble. It was under Suslov's guidance that the procedure of branding and treating dissidents as mentally sick came into full operation. In America, by contrast, even the certifiably insane were being released from asylums through the use of tranquilizers, although one of the results of this program was to increase the number of the homeless. Confinement in a psychiatric ward certainly beat Stalinism, to be sure, but at the time it seemed like the height of political impudence, almost as bad as being sent to a labor camp. Suslov made his first impression by being particularly boisterous against maverick Tito. Within the collective-leadership arrangement, he backed Khrushchev but later dumped Khrushchev to promote Brezhnev. Gorbachev ascended within the party with Suslov's good will. In view of what Gorbachev later did, which was to flout everything that Suslov stood for, this could indicate various things. It could be that Gorbachev was hypocritical. Because of the circumstances of Soviet politics, he had to be such a master dissimulator that he managed to do a reverse Castro. After he was firmly in control, the Cuban dictator claimed that he had always been a communist. Since Gorbachev did a comparable but inverse turnabout-from communist to libertarian-it was conceivable that he might have been a crypto-capitalist from the beginning of his career, although, unlike Castro, he has never made such an admission.
Gorbachev enunciated the two ideas that were to be the guiding principles of his tenure as Soviet leader: glasnost and perestroika, the former meaning "openness" and the latter "re-structuring". These concepts derived their impact not from themselves, but from their context. Their essential lack of originality was more than compensated by their novelty and their incongruence in a society that had prematurely old, ailing conformists for leaders. So how could Gorbachev have made it to the top? Glasnost went against the grain of the policies that had victimized Russian intellectuals, notably Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn (but there were many, many more), although these policies were hardly limited in application to men of letters. Perestroika was even more antithetical to Soviet values because it struck at the fundamental economic model that had prevailed in the USSR since the revolution: public ownership of the means of production and state allocation of resources according to "compulsory" economic plans. The plans, during the Stalin period, were elaborated for periods of five-years, and they were coercive but, except in fancy and propaganda, their goals were never fully attained. The surprising thing is not that Gorbachev succeeded Chernenko, but that he could do so with the help of men of whom the least one could suspect would be the remotest sympathy for more social openness and for the re-modeling of the Soviet economy. Gorbachev's political background was impeccable and in hindsight it is possible that Gorbachev himself did not fully comprehend the consequential implications of the ideas he was promoting, so that it is also possible that Gorbachev, one of the most influential men that ever lived, might have achieved his eminence without knowing or wanting what he was getting into. But Gorbachev did not come out of a void: his reforms, which resulted in the destruction of the USSR, had to have some grounding in Soviet history.
It is possible to dissimulate an intense dislike or a profound disagreement, but you can hardly keep up an act like that for years without revealing some inkling of the truth. It could be that in the mare magnum of Soviet political sameness Gorbachev's eloquence was like a beacon of Marxist reformism. This would also explain how after Suslov died, at about the same time as Brezhnev, Gorbachev became the leading light in the presidium under Andropov, who is often cast as his patron. Gorbachev not only retained that position during Chernenko's tenure but improved on it so much that fellow presidium members, and future detractors, Yegor Ligachev and Nikolai Rhyzkov, helped him on the way to the top. But if Gorbachev had so much support from Soviet reactionaries, and then he went and did the opposite of what they believed in, he couldn't have been speaking his true mind during his ascent to power, and what we have is the psychological problem of how it is possible to keep up such a two-faced act for so long. There is yet another possibility. There was an "ideological" counterpart in the USSR to American political democracy and social openness, and that was the humanist side of the Marxist state that could reiterate the old revolutionary mantras even in the shadow of Stalinist sociopathy. However monstrous its aberrations in practice, Soviet communism always made a pretense of legality and especially it always claimed to stand for Marxist humanism. The USSR was supposed to be the "workers' paradise", but even more pointedly it avowed noble principles such as social justice, anti-racism, the equality and brotherhood of mankind, and so on. According to one version, the idea for the Nuremberg trials was contemplated at Tehran. When Churchill proposed the summary execution of
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fifty top Nazis. Stalin countered that it should be 50,000 and Roosevelt jokingly toned that down to 40,000. Churchill got angry and left the informal meeting with Stalin trotting after him to say he was kidding. But as the Soviet armies entered Germany they formed courts to justify the execution of Nazis and the other Allies had to accept the principle of trials rather than outright executions. For Gorbachev, that what the USSR did was pay lip service to humanitarian principles might have mattered less than that the principles themselves were never questioned. Soviet society was committed urbi et orbe to the ideals that were buffeted and trampled on a daily basis within itself. It was this kind of intellectual sophistry that gained for the USSR the on-and-off adhesion of a man like the agonizing French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, one only in a roster of fellow-travelers the world over that rivals in length Leporello's catalogue in Don Giovanni. In other words, Gorbachevism, often simply reduced to glasnost and perestroika, could have been not only a response to failure but also a spontaneous assertion of the much-trampled but still living ideals that made communism so appealing to so many millions all over the world, despite the gulag and despite the ban on travel and despite the overall political despotism.
Even if Gorbachevism had some ground in Soviet society, it was still subversive and Gorbachev still had to dissimulate if he wanted to achieve anything. During the time when he was making the pronouncements which caught the world's attention, he often spoke in a sybilline, sometimes seemingly incoherent and even ungrammatical manner. He wasn't the only one who in his time had to waffle. President Eisenhower was not the most brilliant of elocutionists when he gave press conferences. In his racially conciliatory phase, Malcolm X also seemed to have this problem about making direct, easily graspable statements. It is one thing to be fully committed to the Soviet system and it is another to have to simulate commitment to a system you want to transform top to bottom from within. Eisenhower could not have been supreme commander of allied forces in Europe during World War II, president of Columbia University, and chief executive of the USA if he did not think capably and possessed the eloquence to communicate his thought. His biographers attribute his difficulties with phrasing to the trying circumstances in which he had to govern, the height of the Cold War-Stalin died in the third year of his presidency-and the beginning of the civil rights movement prominent among them. Followers of Malcolm X expected their man, who knew the uselessness of permanent confrontation, to go on bating whites. Like Eisenhower before and Gorbachev afterwards, Malcolm X had to sound radical and send un-radical signals at the same time. Try having to praise a dish you dislike. Intellectuals, who tend to see too many sides to an issue, seldom make good politicians, who always have to sound firm on issues or they equivocate and sound incoherent, although intellectuals are not safe from this trap, which makes them doubly handicapped: they cannot sound firm like politicians and they tend to equivocate like politicians but without the rewards (or discomforts) of politicians. Yet despite the ambiguities and incoherences, Gorbachev held his audience and got important people to give him a leg up, almost, one could say, in open defiance of their own interests. Besides, Gorbachev did not want to undo everything that had gone before him or that was there when he got to the political pinnacle. The Soviet system was capable of spectacular successes. Its war technologies were as good as America's. Before Reagan's SDI, the Soviets had experimented on its feasibility. When the USSR concentrated its resources, it could attain specific, sometimes awesome, goals, but this meant sacrifices in other sectors. In America economic freedom and entrepreneurial initiatives are the means by which the system performs at peak and policy goals do not interfere with over-all economic innovation and growth. If the Soviets had been capable of erecting an anti-missile shield they probably would not have hesitated, which means that they knew how weak they were. This makes Reagan's choice of terrain on which to challenge them a stroke of genius. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and from the start showed not only a willingness to liberalize the Soviet regime but also a desire to put an end to the Cold War. Although Reagan did not officially abandon the SDI, he and Gorbachev got along famously and the resulting Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) became a means for furthering lessening the antagonism between the two super-powers (1991). The elimination of intermediate-range nuclear missiles, which had been proposed by the United States and rejected by Brezhnev, was accepted by Gorbachev.
Gorbachev did not mind forfeiting the Soviet empire. But he did not pursue the dissolution of the USSR. Perestroika meant reform, radical reform, but it did not imply throwing out the window the entire communist economic system. He was not the only one who knew that it needed re-structuring. The post-war history of the USSR can be told in terms of successive efforts to improve its economy, which is not without irony for Marxists claimed that economic realities determine the social "super-structure", such as judges sentencing according to economic interests, and a communist society in principle was beyond such a skewing of legality because it had no particular economic interests to benefit. It is true that in America government has been and often still is partial and supportive of big business, but if the Soviet leadership had constantly to be tampering with underlying Soviet economics, then obviously capitalism was the steadier of the two. Nevertheless, since the Soviet system worked, and sometimes did so extremely well, it did not seem on the surface to justify its total abolition. That it had been decaying for decades could not be denied either, and the leaders of the USSR had to know this first hand. Gorbachev certainly did and he also said that he knew how to reform it, which might be what made him interesting, especially as there was no reason to think that he wanted to go beyond tampering in the usual ways. Khrushchev probably owed his ascendancy over the CPSU to his ideas on how to improve the Soviet economy. The "virgin lands" policy was the first significant measure he took once in power. Long before that, it was evident that economic centralization was burdensome and inefficient. Under Stalin, who ruled the USSR like an anthill, it didn't much matter. But his successors, even Beria but especially Malenkov, were concerned about consumers. Khrushchev replaced the economic ministries with "economic councils", which were more numerous than the ministries and permitted some independent management. It was less complicated to make coherent plans in one region or in one sector of the economy than in bureaucratic offices in Moscow where the signals received were at best over-optimistic and at worst completely unreliable; and in general so voluminous that it was impossible to sort them out. Politics aside, the crucial difference between the Soviet and the American economies lay in that every American businessman was like a Soviet economic bureaucrat but working for his own benefit with the advantage of reliable information to make decisions of restricted scope within the entire economy. These traits of course meant that the American businessman was not like a Soviet bureaucrat at all, but they did imply that a Soviet insider could function like an American businessman, which, when all is said and done, is what eventually has obtained. In a further measure of economic de-centralization, Khrushchev went to the wolf's lair and created within the CPSU itself different sections for agriculture and for industry, which normally would have been anathema to orthodox Marxists. Khrushchev had smooth sailing until the agricultural sector faltered and, as he had already made a raft of other mistakes, he was toppled by an opposition united against his unorthodox ways. There followed economic changes, which are often attributed to Alexei Kosygin, but they consisted in a reversion to the situation before Khrushchev's timid reforms, mainly the absorption by the central ministries of the economic councils.
What Soviet leaders either refused to believe, or believed but were afraid to act upon, was that tinkering with economic institutions alone would not do the trick. Real change if it was to come had to be systemic, but that involved striking at public ownership, and this was of the essence in communism. They also had to concede some measure of economic freedom, but if this was granted, why not just abolish the CPSU and the KGB and all the other means of coercion? Curiously, despite the previous record of economic incompetence-the USSR on its own couldn't even mass produce a decent small automobile-the Brezhnev years, during which experimentation was set aside and orthodox Stalinist economics prevailed, were considered prosperous. The CIA accepted along general lines Soviet statistics on economic growth and even on occasions revised them upwards. This presumed Soviet prosperity seems like a conundrum as impenetrable as how it was that the USSR, burdened by Stalinist terror and limping from a depleted officer corps, with inferior armed forces and a second to third rate economy, could resist the full might of Germany and go on to crush its enemy utterly. In the case of the literally unbelievable Soviet economic growth during the Brezhnev period, it is more likely that what the USSR achieved was an offsetting of population growth, low in Russia itself, to barely sustain a dreary standard of life. With the system it had been saddled with by Lenin and Stalin, the people of the USSR would never be able to opine freely or to travel abroad or to entertain hopes of improving their economic lot. They could if they succeeded at communist party politics, but this was not something within the reach of the average consumer. It was against this background that Gorbachev could get away with making intelligent observations about Soviet society and offering changes that could be expressed in loaded but vague concepts, which is only what glasnost and perestroika at first were. That Gorbachev became party secretary general with the support of people who would later try to overthrow him and eradicate the changes he introduced indicates the host of ambiguities that were at play at the time. These people were attracted to Gorbachev and it cannot have been merely because of his eloquence or his charm. They were willing to accept reforms that did not overstep a certain boundary. What Gorbachev initially attempted were measures of the superficial sort that had come and gone before. He must have known that they were going to fail but he couldn't push the USSR towards radical change from one day to the next.
A catastrophic incident showed that one of the really hopeless problem under the Soviet system was management. In the worst accident in the history of atomic-power generation, a gigantic plant located in Chernobyl, Ukraine, exploded. The cause of the accident, very roughly, lay in that the reactor was designed in such a way that it was stable at full power but became unstable if power went below a certain level unless certain strict procedures were followed. What should have been a routine test in the early hours of 26 April 1986, went askew when power fell and the crew in charge tried to raise it to normal levels by removing control rods. The core overheated and unleashed two steam explosions that blew off the steel ceiling of the plant and carried with them highly radioactive debris. The effects of Chernobyl, whose uncontrolled chain reaction released forty times as much radioactive energy as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs together, are still being felt. Soviet engineers first covered part of the Chernobyl building in a leaky, concrete "sarcophagus". There are now plans for a huge hangar-like arch of steel, twelve meters thick and one hundred meters high, to be slid over the gigantic, radiating pile of twisted steel, concrete, debris, and dust. Chernobyl could and should have been interpreted as a symbol of the difficulties that Gorbachev would have to face during the following years, but he had a tendency to underestimate opposition to his policies, perhaps because he figured that if he had been able to carry with him hidebound communists on an adventure that could only have seemed abhorrent to them he was not likely to encounter greater or more dangerous obstacles.
(21) Gorbachev and Reagan: a convergence of opposites
Gorbachev was bolder on the political and the international fronts than in the economic field. One indirect way to ease the economic burden on the Soviet system was to start mending the old Cold War fences, which had been transgressed badly under Brezhnev provoking strong rebuke from Carter and an aggressively anti-Soviet attitude from the soft-talking but unsubtle Reagan. After becoming top Soviet leader, Gorbachev met Reagan in Geneva (November 1986). Reagan was already committed to the SDI, but he and Gorbachev agreed on the initiation of the START talks. The easy, cordial relationship between Gorbachev and Reagan illustrates a curious tendency in international affairs during the last decades of the 20th century. It is what could be called the convergence of opposites and is probably strictly conjunctural. Some convergences between un-likes were inevitable. When De Gaulle decided that for the good of France it was better to let Algeria go, he had no choice but to accept the FLN, which united all anti-French opposition, as interlocutor. During the Portuguese revolution, the radical officers running it, who wished to be shot of colonial wars, had only to leave the field to existing guerrilla movements. Here likes converged, but Portuguese de-colonization was a rushed affair. When P.W. De Klerk wanted to finalize Apartheid in South Africa there was no better counterpart than Nelson Mandela and the ANC. De Klerk and Mandela grated on each other despite being on the same side. In these cases, a political stalemate was resolved through the unavoidability for parties at opposite ends to meet and, basically, for one of the parties to make a renunciation of power. Peace between Israel and Egypt was made between political contraries, Begin and Sadat, who did not renounce to anything basic and had the alternative of not meeting at all. It was during the administration of Richard Nixon that America reconciled itself to the fact that communist China was not going to go away. Nixon's early political career included a cynical, anti-communist, libelous campaign in a California senatorial contest against the overly polite liberal Helen Gallagher Douglas, whose husband, the actor Melvyn Douglas, had made a great hit with the film Ninotchka, a very funny satire on Bolshevism. Although it was hardly the prelude to a great friendship, Nixon even visited Mao in Beijing. It was also Nixon who signed SALT. But it was during the liberal Carter administration that Brezhnev provoked America most inconsiderately by invading Afghanistan. After this Soviet blunder, it was only to be expected that Gorbachev had to be the seeker and the very conservative Reagan the courted. What these convergences of contraries probably demonstrate is the primacy of impersonal processes over the individual actors on the historical stage.
Besides Geneva, there were three other meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan: October 1986 in Reykjavik (Iceland), December 1987 in Washington, and May 1988 in Moscow. In Reykjavik, Gorbachev tried to dissuade Reagan from pursuing the SDI, still more evidence of Soviet weakness, but he did not get anywhere, although the SDI was downplayed in the remaining Reagan years and during Bush's administration. By then, the Cold War was becoming less chilly. The relations between the two superpowers were much less abrasive. Nuclear terror was circumscribed by the MAD equilibrium with now the substantial difference that America and the USSR were no longer on an adversarial footing. In other respects there was progress on disarmament. Gorbachev accepted the INF (inter-mediate range nuclear forces) treaty spurned by Brezhnev, eliminating the Soviet SS-20s and the American Pershing missiles. It provided for mutual inspection. In all, over 2,500 missiles were destroyed by both sides. In perhaps the most significant move to ease the Soviet economic situation, and to improve relations with America, Gorbachev put an end to the invasion of Afghanistan after the mostly Russian troops engaged there had taken some 15,000 casualties. Above all, that Reagan and Gorbachev were able to click on a personal level showed that America was not a vindictive empire gleefully kicking a falling adversary, or at least, at that point, an adversary that, cuts and all, was proffering a friendly hand. It must be said that what went for Reagan and Bush did not necessarily go for American media. As in Fermi’s Pile that the louder the clicking the closer it got to a chain reaction, so in America the closer the USSR came to a meltdown the louder the crowing and cackling grew in television and radio, the press, and the publishing industry. It didn’t matter that Russia was changing from within, for no one ever accused Gorbachev of being a secret CIA saboteur; what counted was that America had "won" the Cold War. And as usual as the media went, so did American’s "collective brain". One especially egregious example of this reaction was the book Lenin’s Tomb (1993), by David Remnick, which was an unoriginal indictment of Soviet failures and a transparent and unjustified hatchet job on Gorbachev. It really wasn’t even a book but a magazine piece padded with anecdotal "evidence" and rambling interviews mostly with Remnick’s Jewish friends in Moscow. It boiled down to that America was greater than the USSR in every respect. It pandered to every American Cold-War prejudice and did nothing to examine the forces within the USSR that had made change possible. It was not constructive, but its depiction of Russia’s prostration, which was historically unwise, did reflect the bullying that began when president Clinton fostered NATO’s provocative expansion into eastern Europe.
Gorbachev's mending-fences policy was as successful as his efforts to repair the Soviet economy were unavailing. Perestroika at first took the form of measures to lubricate bureaucratic stiffness and to stimulate productivity, but in the Soviet system there were just so many things that could be done in that respect and by the time that Gorbachev arrived there were hardly any left that had not already been tried. Gorbachev must have seen this and his idea of perestroika surely went further than just reform within the conventional communist mold. That he knew exactly how far he was disposed to go is another matter, which eventually was taken out of his hands anyway. What perestroika basically achieved was a loosening of central control over the huge Soviet industrial empire. This had been tried with the economic councils introduced by Khrushchev. But these councils were still responsive to central planning and perestroika did not compensate the losses of central authority with alternative mechanisms. Since perestroika wasn't capitalism either, its immediate impact was a dramatic fall in the state's revenues. It is also possible that the wild capitalist seeds that eventually sprouted in Russia were already sown during the perestroika period when in situ management realized in essence that it could get away with murder and began considering profitable options either immediately available or in the near horizon. By way of contrast, at the time when the USSR was experiencing all sorts of crises, America was entering the greatest economic boom in its history, one that continued into the 1990s and that ended only at the beginning of the 21st century. Gorbachev and those, and they must have been thousands, who helped him up the greasy pole, had to understand that America was so far ahead of the USSR in economic performance that their own country was slipping fast into underdevelopment by comparison. Gorbachev did not introduce perestroika as a personal whim. He did not meet a solid wall of opposition, because others beside him knew that central planning and much of the communist paraphernalia had to be chucked in one way or another. Economic liberalism was gaining ground globally. The idea that state bureaucracies were the most appropriate means for economic development was rapidly becoming passé.
If his economics were hazy, Gorbachev knew slightly better the political ground he was treading and where he wanted to go, although in the end for him it turned out that it was precisely in the area of politics where he most erred. Gorbachev placed himself in various dilemmatic situations. His program for reforming the USSR in a radical manner was made possible through his ascent within a party that was by nature anti-radical-reform. On his way to the top Gorbachev had allies who were of his bent of mind, notably Aleksandr Yakovlev, who was his media advisor and a cornerstone of glasnost. But he also initially had on his side tepid reformers such as Ligachev, and in the same central committee session from which he emerged as secretary general, the party also chose Andrei Gromyko to be president of the USSR. Gromyko in his prime was a scowling Cold-War warrior whose face American newspapers loved to print as a living symbol of countless Soviet vetoes at the UN. Gorbachev came up the party hierarchy from his base in Stavropol, an industrial city in southern Russia, with the tacit support of counterparts such as Boris Yeltsin, the communist boss of Yekaterinburg (then Sverdlovsk), the Urals region city where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were assassinated. It was Yeltsin who, on superior orders, razed the Ipatev House, where the killings took place. Yeltsin in some manner must have contributed to the rise of Gorbachev, who had Yeltsin in mind when his main concern was to consolidate his position within the party. Yeltsin was brought by Ligachev from Sverdlovsk to head the party apparatus in Moscow. He was made a non-voting member of the presidium. Yeltsin's re-assignment in the party organization was another of Gorbachev's dilemmatic situations, for when push came to shove the newcomer to Moscow turned out to be more radical than the secretary general. Even before this became notorious, Gorbachev already knew that he had a rival in Yeltsin. Ligachev, who later claimed he was being deceived by Gorbachev, orchestrated the removal of Yeltsin from his Moscow post and his expulsion from the presidium, which, as Yeltsin was practically an arriviste, was not hard to achieve. Gorbachev did not oppose this ostracism. Yeltsin, already known as an offence-taker, was resentful but powerless. Despite his pre-eminence in the most tyrannical political party in history, Gorbachev was honestly committed to glasnost. His closest advisers, which, besides Yakovlev, included his foreign secretary, the Georgian Eduard Sheverdnaze, were openly favorable to political reforms. But an observer of the USSR at the time could not have said that there was a communist groundswell for perestroika. At the 19th party conference-a different type of venue from the party congresses-Gorbachev relaxed the party's grip on the Soviets, or the parliaments of the constituent parts of the USSR, which previously could not have had a grain of sand lifted without getting communist-party authorization. All soviet delegates were still communists, so it was only a minimal degree of democratization. Even so it was resisted by party stalwarts.
In October 1988, Gorbachev was elected chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Presidium was a collective presidency. Its chairman, theoretically, was on a par with the post of prime minister or chairman of the council of ministers, which was selected by the presidium of the Supreme Soviet. The post of president was created in 1990. The position that counted for most was still secretary general of the CC of the CPSU, from among whose members those of the presidium were chosen. The secretary general was ipso facto the chairman or president of the presidium. These posts and institutions were all, more or less, reduplicated in each of the Soviet republics, Russia being of course by far the largest, the most populous, and the most politically important of all. In no state in history have countervailing executive powers been more numerous and more intricately organized than in the USSR. Even an expert can be baffled by the profusion of secretaries, chairmen, and presidents over bureaus, secretariats, committees, presidiums, and soviets. Yet in no state have such institutions been more hollow. Under Stalin it was the man who made the post. After him, the rule of thumb to identify the person with the most clout was who held the post of first secretary or secretary general of the CC. The CC itself was nothing next to the politburo-what Stalin had renamed presidium-which was the real power-wielder. Ultimately, should doubts linger, the two great communist dailies, Pravda and Izvestia, would reveal over and over who was the real boss, just as reading North Korean propaganda rags you could hardly mistake the "sun who rises in the east", Kim Il Sung, with anything other than the absolute, indisputable Alpha male, whose destiny could be nothing less than embalming or mummification. A Latin American communist working as copy editor in North Korea once had the temerity to call Kim "fatty" in a letter to a fellow communist. He must have been either gullible or dull to think that letters were private in North Korea. For his irreverence he was sentenced to an indeterminate term of imprisonment, from which he was rescued by a compatriot who had connections in the Kremlin. Even with these antecedents, his correspondent later accepted an invitation to visit North Korea and defended his tour by mumbling something about General Motors and its publicity department. And so it went with communists. In post-Stalinist Russia there had been two occasions when government power seemed to be in competition with party power. On both-when Khrushchev crushed his rivals in the presidium and when Brezhnev dismissed Kosygin-the party was victorious. It was standard Soviet practice to denounce losers as "anti-party", communism being the ultimate legitimizer. But in 1988, Gorbachev was pulling off the amazing trick of actually having the party relinquish voluntarily its monopoly on power. His campaign culminated when he obtained changes to the constitution of the USSR adopted under Brezhnev ten years before. Elections were held for the Congress of People's Deputies in some of which there was more than the usual official communist candidate. Gorbachev was elected president of the USSR. Yeltsin sneaked in as a lowly deputy from Moscow.
Things were moving at centrifugal speed, yet they might have appeared not to be changing that much. The grand sounding Congress of People's Deputies was not the ultimate legislative body in the USSR. It was more in the nature of a huge electoral college from which emanated the grander sounding Supreme Soviet, and this was more in keeping with traditional communist mystifications. Gorbachev chose a communist party hack, Gennady Yanayev, as his vice-president. The presidium of the Supreme Soviet was still in the hands of party-men. The situation that obtained was extremely curious and lent itself to diverse hypotheses all of which appeared to be unlikely. Either Gorbachev was leading the despotic CPSU party to its doom with its acquiescence, or the party actually believed that Gorbachev was not serious about glasnost and perestroika, or Gorbachev was the only remarkable man in a maremma of such mediocrity that he could do whatever he wished without serious opposition. This last hypothesis raised the question of whether Gorbachev himself might not have been just another mediocrity, the least mediocre of all. Well, Yeltsin was not a mediocrity, and as events showed, if Gorbachev thought that he was leading the blind, he was more than half blind himself. One thing that can be said for certain is that he did not have a blind spot for the Soviet Empire. It had been unsustainable before. If backward Afghanistan had given Russia a bloody nose, a revolt of the satellites could lead to a situation comparable to a political cataclysm. Even before perestroika, it already cost a mint the USSR could not afford to maintain a bloated military. With economic de-centralization and public revenues dropping sharply, Gorbachev not only was willing to let the satellites go: he sought the opportunity to do so, even though he knew, as every one else also did, that if they went it would be as far as they could from the USSR.
(22) Putting an end to the Cold War was the easiest of Gorbachev’s jobs
At the beginning of 1989 the world was still bi-polar and the USSR was still not an open, democratic society. With glasnost Gorbachev had started changing Soviet society and political events that affected communism began happening at a rate so vertiginous that Sovietologists and Marxists were left in a state of bafflement. The Soviet empire started to disintegrate when a non-communist prime minister was chosen by the Sejm, the Polish parliament. East German tourists, who were usually prevented from crossing the border between Hungary and Austria, were let through and allowed passage in their wheezy Brabants as refugees into western Germany. Without Gorbachev's backing, the durable communist leader of East Germany, Erich Honecker, was toppled and the Berlin Wall was knocked down. The Hungarian communist party had previously dissolved itself. Bulgaria entered a period of unrest which resulted in its de-communization. Riots in Czechoslovakia were put down and for a time it seemed as if the most audaciously liberalizing of the communist satellites would resist the anti-communist surge, but then, literally from one day to the next, the country simply abandoned communism altogether. The last hold-outs were Nicholas Ceausescu and his wife, who jointly ruled Romania like a family property. Other communists assassinated the terrified couple. Romania began moving very obliquely towards democracy. In other post-communist states, communist leaders were jettisoned but the electorates have brought them back to power as moderates. Even in East Germany, once the furnace of anti-communist hatred, there is drift towards the loyalists of the fallen ideology. Part of this paradoxical movement is due to disillusionment with capitalism, but part can also be explained with the equation that for talent and ambition capitalism and communism are circumstantial: a capitalist multi-millionaire would have made a successful apparatchik and the secretary general of any communist party would probably have had a good chance of becoming president or prime minister in a democracy.
There was a nimbus of ambiguity surrounding Gorbachev and his reforms, for it was hard to believe that the CPSU would allow itself to be led willingly to the block. Yet the party, though still in power, was suffering back to back reverses. It lost local elections with some regularity, which was unheard of before Gorbachevism. The most galling blow was purely doctrinaire. Part of Stalin's charade about power in the USSR was that the article in the constitution that established the party's legal supremacy was shelved deep into its text. In the 1978 constitution it was made the sixth in order of appearance, a whiff of political legitimization that would have been superfluous under Stalin. In 1990, the entire article was excised from the constitution. In the agitated times that Russia was entering, the Soviet constitution had the merit of providing quick means for its own amendment. This gave legislative sanction to the multi-party politics that were already in the offing, although Russia has yet to develop a functional multi-party system both in the sense of some programmatic clarity and of sufficient public membership or support, as if Russians after the experience of many decades of one-party rule were inherently incapable of believing in parties of any kind. Putin has tried to remedy this by introducing propositional representation, in which it is the party, and not individual politicians, who has the final say on policies and on who gets or does not get to go to the Duma. But Putin’s reforms have been accompanied by discriminatory practices which have obstructed the creation of a real political opposition. Notwithstanding the actively tolerant attitude of the changing Soviet state, it also occasionally bared its fangs as if saying "don't taunt or provoke me beyond endurance". Soviet troops had intervened in Georgia to crush separatism. Gorbachev wanted above all else to safeguard the Soviet federation. Any threat to it would have been the political straw to break his own tolerance. Next, it was Azerbaijan that started acting up and Soviet intervention was again forthcoming. But the biggest challenge to the integrity of the USSR came from Lithuania, one of the small Baltic republics, which also included Latvia, linguistically related to Lithuania, and Estonia, whose linguistic affinities are with Finland. All these nations had kept their traditions alive. In the case of Lithuania, this was so marked that it attracted the special attention of linguists, ethnologists, and even of Prosper Merimée, the French writer enamored of the "European exotic". Merimée set one of his better known novelettes, Carmen being of course his most popular work, in Lithuania. Called Lokis, it is a variant on the werewolf theme involving bears. The descendant of the ancient duchy of Lithuania, founder of the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania, Lithuania declared its independence from the USSR in March 1990, the first Soviet republic to do so. It was also where KGB troops most reverted to Stalinist type during the taking by force of a television station in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. There were fourteen civilian casualties. This incident is the one big stain in Gorbachev's otherwise impeccably libertarian credentials.
Gorbachev was indecisive about economic liberalization. When it was too late to change tack, he probably realized that too rapid a conversion from communism to any type of non-communist order would be chaotic. This was already happening in a spontaneous way. As he was also intent on preserving the USSR, which he saw as coming under threat from various directions, Gorbachev began to shy away from the implications of his own reforms. This meant backtracking towards reliance on the CPSU and its dinosaurs. This in itself was already impracticable. There were three different processes going on at the time in the USSR and they were not heading in the same direction. One process was what Gorbachev and his group wanted to see happen. The other process was what went on in the CPSU. And the third process consisted in what was happening in the country. Gorbachev undoubtedly wanted to democratize the USSR. He also wanted its economy to be more efficient. But he never doubted that, whatever happened, the USSR, or some reasonably democratic, de-centralized facsimile, should subsist. One thing that Gorbachev did not envision or desire was the sort of economic and institutional free-for-all that later came about under Yeltsin. Although he was out of the political running by then, Gorbachev represented everything that the economic "shock treatment" that Russia was made to undergo wasn't. He was a gradualist. He believed in the efficacy and the need for institutions and regulatory laws. He wanted what anti-Stalinist Soviet sympathizers desired: an USSR endowed with freedom of expression, courts that upheld due process, liberty to travel. Gorbachev's commitment was not to frantic, uncontrolled change but to orderly, constitutional evolution. Gorbachev wanted to emasculate the tyranny of the CPSU, but within the system in which he had ascended and over which he for a time presided, the party was practically the only federal institution that did not in itself involve direct legal coercion. The party was ultimately coercive through its domination of the state, but people were not forced to join the party: they simply realized that if they wanted to improve their condition in Soviet society they had to join the party. What Gorbachev probably wanted was a docile but not monopolistic CPSU that would help to keep the USSR together as a close federation of democratic states. There were various ironies and vicious circles at the heart of Gorbachevism. He wanted to use the Communist Party as an instrument even as he himself was blunting it, thus very quickly rendering it useless. The instrument itself, which still had influential people in all spheres of government, was reluctant to be used. When Gorbachev saw that things were getting out of hand and sought party support, the party was too weak and too suspicious of him, so in desperation it tried to eliminate Gorbachev and only succeeded in putting itself out of commission. Gorbachev was pro-democracy, but democracy meant self-determination, which meant separatism, and that was what Gorbachev most feared and made him consent to the use of undemocratic means such as the military suppression of separatisms. He wanted gradual economic reform but he was provoking economic spontaneous combustion and whittling away at the fiscal resources necessary to achieve his goals. After Vilnius, where Gorbachev demonstrated that the USSR had not entirely lost its grip, he realized that in order to keep separatism at bay he had to use persuasion based on Soviet legitimacy. Gorbachev was hubristic in his confidence in his own powers of persuasion. In the spring of 1991, he sponsored federation talks among the Soviet republics certain that they must have believed, as he did, that in unity lay strength. But the other republics were not keen on an union in which Russia remained the super-republic. Under CPSU rule at least each republic had its own relatively autonomous dictatorship. Under a democratic federal state, there were no guarantees that the power of local bosses would be upheld and respected. Free elections and the other appurtenances of democracy could erode regionalism and, horror of horrors!, the Russians, who were everywhere, could actually become rulers of the non-Russian republics by democratic means.
What was happening in the CPSU when Gorbachev, still the party's leader, was going about promoting his visions? During Gorbachev's rise in the presidium and at the time he was named secretary general, the party cannot have but known that there were going to be reforms. Gorbachev and his fellow presidium members had access to the same information about the USSR. It was the fear of stagnation and decay that had lifted Khrushchev to the top and that had made Kosygin the activist pole during the first period of Brezhnev's stewardship. Even as separatism strengthened, Gorbachev went on with his talk of making the USSR a better place while still being the good old USSR. Perhaps up to a point Gorbachev thought that this was possible, but in the end the Soviet system was so constructed that removing a few bricks could make the building start collapsing. Gorbachev removed more than a few bricks. In fact he was dismantling the system's communist-party foundations. The real communists, and not the wolf in sheep's clothing that Gorbachev must have seemed to them, were obviously not happy over this turn of events. The party was the overseer of the Bolshevik legacy and it could flirt with superficial reforms but not with anything even remotely resembling capitalism. And what partymen observed was the return of undisguised capitalist greed. Collectivist greed was well and good and communist bosses had not gotten to where they did without greed. But capitalist greed meant the end of the world as they knew it. Confident in his eloquence and in his firm commitment to the USSR, and also surrounded by men who did not openly challenge him, Gorbachev had no idea what the real communists were about. Yeltsin for his part had risen within the Russian Supreme Soviet to the head of the presidium, which he couldn't have done without the support of the Communist Party, then still the only party in Russia. Even so, like Gorbachev, he too must have felt that the support he was getting had no major strings attached. Unlike Gorbachev, he quit the party altogether, which might indicate that he believed that his communists were more committed to him than they were to their Marxist beliefs or to the values that the party stood for. Thus it was that when Yeltsin selected a vice-president his choice fell on Aleksandr Rutskoi, who had not been a communist hierarch but who was still a communist with an un-capacious stomach for reform. Later, what Rutskoi had to take from Yeltsin was more than enough to give him indigestion. Yeltsin's constraints in choosing the Russian vice-president indicated how much things had changed over the previous years. Gorbachev had chosen Soviet vice-president Yanayev from within the CPSU. Rutskoi had been a general during the Afghan war. Yeltsin selected a communist but one with a background outside traditional CPSU echelons. Despite the changing circumstances, both Gorbachev and Yeltsin misjudged in their choices of vice-presidents.
So if both major leaders of the Russian historical counter-revolution were committing big errors of judgement, what was the real situation? For one thing, the foundations for grab-as-grab-can capitalism had already been laid. The process of granting greater autonomy to state enterprises in all sectors of the economy had probably been upping the level of self-interest of the managerial class where plans were now made independently of central control and the least any one was considering was a return to Soviet economic authoritarianism. As there did not exist laws or guidelines for such a transition, the improvisations that appeared spontaneously were determined strictly by profit-making calculations. The USSR, and vast Russia in particular, had already de facto adopted capitalism, not simultaneously with capitalist legality and institutionalism, but at its most rudimentary, even savage, level, where, say, England had been during the Industrial Revolution or America in the last decades of the 19th century. And even then the comparisons are misleading, for private ownership was the real ultimate basis of capitalism and in Russia control of assets was what counted, for no one really knew who owned the productive enterprises or the banks or the agencies that provided services like export and import. As enterprises became less accountable to central ministries in Moscow, a crucial second point was that the resources to pay for policing society were becoming scarcer. Under the Soviet system, the means for coercive social control, as distinct from the instilling of socialist beliefs, were generously financed. There were hierarchies among law-and-order bodies. Informing was a duty under Stalinism. Above all, coercion and propaganda created certainties about society and the state that both the police and the population shared. This made the work of policing easier, because it was generally recognized as legitimate and useful. Legal coercion was applied in a state which regularly denied all basic liberties, or doffed its hat to them and used convoluted arguments to show that the denial of liberties was really the greatest form of liberty. The paradox of arguing for the contraries of self-evident principles was not unknown to Plato in his The Republic, where even too much philosophy was suspect, or to religious figures who denied the self-evident delights of life for the sake of bliss in another life. Every set of ethical beliefs is ultimately based on the argument that liberty lies in deliberately limiting your options. Epicurus, the philosophical proto-type of the hedonist, was a dainty moderate. The crudely hedonistic Marquis de Sade attributed to his villainous characters such "pleasures", like coprophagy, as normally you would have only in low and dirty nightmares.
In the USSR, self-sacrifice and devotion to socialism did not seem to bring a more abundant society any closer, a society, for instance, that did not have to pen its members in because it knew that comparisons would be disadvantageous to it. The leaders of the USSR knew better than its ordinary citizens how unpromising the prospects were. From the widest social perspective you could attain, which was the view from the presidium, the economic results of Soviet certainties were not as satisfactory as expected. The deterioration of policing favored another emerging social trend. Even under Brezhnevian conformism, perhaps especially because of it, there was a Russian criminal class that went unreported because the Soviet system did not allow such things to be known. The USSR, where everything-goods, services, displacements-was rigorously controlled, and consequently doled out or permitted in restricted doses, was made to order for bribery and for illegal activities of all conceivable sorts. There were probably embryonic mafias everywhere, some very likely quite respectable-seeming, the equivalent of white-collar crime under capitalism. Some have compared the Communist Party itself to a gigantic mafia, although this is carrying things too far, for individuals such as Gorbachev or Yeltsin had ideas about the good of society. They were not mafiosi or even the shrewd criminal types morphed into legitimate businessmen in books and films in America (though usually not to the extent of being made to seem sincerely philanthropic or of having serious social concerns). Gorbachevism was not only reformist: it was also questioning, and when social values are questioned, the police lose moorings. If tyrannical Soviet legality was not rock-solid, as the whirlwind of changes in the USSR was showing, and there was no peremptory, short-term substitute for it, then laws were floutable. And after all, wasn't the Soviet system itself quite unscrupulous about applying or not applying its own laws depending on its conveniences? This day-to-day, variable, unstable situation was plowed and fertilized ground for criminal activities and for police corruption. As police services declined, there arose the need for parallel security services not for society at large but to defend the profit-making turfs that were being staked out. Under Gorbachev there was not so much a breakdown of law and order as the strengthening of the forces that existed in Soviet society which could lead to or encourage such a breakdown.
Another alarming aspect of the new reality was that the USSR was visibly coming apart. Russia was inheriting much of what the USSR still had. It was "acquiring" the USSR but trying to be different from it. Gorbachev was attempting to contain separatism with negotiations and high hopes about a voluntary, democratic federation. The Baltic states were recalcitrant even to such an arrangement. But most of the inertia was coming from what Gorbachev thought would be the pillar of this Phoenix-like federation of autonomous, democratic, and willing member republics. This was Russia itself and on this Yeltsin knew far more than Gorbachev. Yeltsin was the realist foil to Gorbachev's idealist. When he climbed to the top of the presidium of the Russian Supreme Soviet, he had a law passed giving Russian laws priority over Soviet laws. This gave precedence to the Russian constitution over the Soviet constitution. They were probably then not that different so the gesture might not have seemed a big menace to the federation process that Gorbachev was promoting. But from a strictly legal point of view, Yeltsin's move implicitly contested Gorbachev's authority. That Gorbachev retained his membership in the CPSU while Yeltsin had renounced his, broke another disciplinary bond between the president of the theoretically superior USSR and subordinate Russia. The latter was still officially the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the USSR, but, paraphrasing Voltaire on the Holy Roman Empire ("neither holy nor Roman nor an empire"), the USSR was no longer an union, and it was damned near neither Soviet nor socialist. Despite the exemplary punishment of Lithuanian independentism, Latvia, its Baltic neighbor to the north, went independent in March 1991. In June Yeltsin was elected president of Russia, which, since the Russian constitution already superseded in Russia the Soviet constitution, made him at least the legal equal of Gorbachev, and in Russia his superior in point of real power. Things were not that desperate for Gorbachevism as they might have seemed from perspectives such as that of the Russian government. The USSR still existed. It was legal and it had the steadfastness that comes from a long history and the respect that this commands. Furthermore, the federation talks for a constitutional, orderly transition from the USSR to its democratic re-incarnation were going on and by July 1991 a federation treaty was ready. It was discounted that the Baltic republics would want to remain within the new federation, but compared to the Ukraine, the second most populous Soviet republic, they were expendable; and it did not seem likely that the other republics, which were economically dependent on Russia, would recklessly choose to break away and go their uncertain independent ways. As to Russia itself, despite his resentment of Gorbachev, Yeltsin did not openly challenge his authority. He probably would have become very unpopular in Russia if he had taken up the cause of the dissolution of the USSR, and in the USSR at large Gorbachev was still the highest constitutional authority. Even with the problems that were rising and growing like thunderclouds on a hot day that Russian summer, Gorbachevism was a promising alternative for the USSR. On paper it was the ideal solution, the means for the USSR to become capitalistic very gradually, to foment democracy in a climate of open and unhurried debate, to bolster democratic law and order, in sum, to spare the USSR the rigors and the aberrations of another revolution, one in which pure greed and social disgregation went rampant. The project was more dreamy than feasible and it depended on the vision and the abilities of one man, Gorbachev, who had a tendency to overestimate the control he had over social and political processes, probably a reflex from the time, which had been most of his life, when what the CPSU wanted went.
(23) Why Saddam Hussein thought he could get away with Kuwait
If the 1980s were trying for the USSR, for America it hadn't all been beer and skittles. President George Bush had succeeded president Reagan. Bush's relations with Gorbachev were good and the meetings of the two leaders in Washington and in Moscow were ratifications of the understanding achieved in the previous Reagan years. But Iraq was becoming something of a liability. Despite American support for Iraq in its war with Iran, the Iranians captured the Kurdish Iraqi town of Halabja and were on the road to Kirkuk, also in the Kurdistan region. The Iraqis counter-attacked and Hussein dealt with the Kurds in Halabja in summary fashion through the use of gas which left 5,000 civilians dead. In the end, after huge casualties on both sides, no one gained an inch and a UN-sponsored ceasefire was agreed (1988). The entire campaign against Kurdish separatism during the Iraq-Iran began in 1986, was called Anfal, and reportedly produced 100,000 Kurds dead. Because the USA still could not overlook aggressive Iranian fundamentalism, still "anti-Satan" and also very anti-Israel, relations between the USA and Iraq remained friendly, which might have had to do with what later happened. In 1990, Hussein set his sight on Kuwait. Did Hussein really believe that he could maintain his credit with Americans if he invaded and annexed big oil-producer Kuwait? Or did he proceed to do so even in the knowledge that the USA would be opposed? Hussein cannot or should not have been surprised by the condemnation of his attack on Kuwait. No amount of diplomatic equivocation could have induced the belief that Iraq's move would not receive the American-led international reprobation it got. It is possible that Hussein might have thought that international opposition to his annexation of Kuwait would not go beyond words and resolutions and, in the very worst of all scenarios, that Iraq would be subjected to embargos such as those decreed against Rhodesia and South Africa. These for him would have been like rain drops on a slicker. Hussein was a dictator but his rule did not make odious distinctions such as those between whites and kaffirs. He had the Kurds to deal with but Kurds were not anything like an organized opposition, nor did they, like blacks in South Africa, have entire neighboring countries as bases for refuge or arms supplies. If Kurds rebelled in Iraq they would not get a helping hand in Iran (under normal circumstances), in Syria, and least of all in Turkey, where they were carrying on guerrilla and terrorist warfare.
Before 9/11 made the USA the greatest foe of social or anti-state terrorism in history, Hussein himself could have been considered an inclement persecutor of terrorism, even if only in Iraq. What most bolstered Hussein's expectations about literally getting away with Kuwait was that he did count with considerable Arab popular support. Most Arabs are inured to dictatorships. A distinction between the Iraqi and the Kuwaiti autocracies would have seemed pointless in the Arab world. Unlike non-Arab Islamic countries, where the tendency to democracy is noticeable if erratic (Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan), Arab democracies are virtually non-existent. Yemen celebrates elections and some Arabic Gulf states have been making cautious moves towards democracy. This is not to exclude "democratic practices"-as different from electoral democracy-which are gaining ground in formerly autocratic countries, such as Morocco and Jordan. Tunisia and Algeria are still basically one-party states. Egypt has an institutional dictatorship. Syria is outright dictatorial. Saudi Arabia is still an absolute monarchy. Sudan, which is only predominantly Arabic and Muslim in the north, celebrates suspect elections under precarious conditions. Hussein believed not entirely without foundation that by acting aggressively he could become the Arabs' paladin. He wasn't a fundamentalist, but fundamentalism and Arabism are not the same thing. The Iranian Shiites tried to make fundamentalism quintessentially Muslim. But Iranians and Arabs are linguistically and culturally dissimilar. Hussein was Arabic and Iraq has both Sunni and Shia populations, with Shias in the majority but not quite as disproportionately as in Iran. Hussein belonged to the inter-Arabic, non-religious Baath party. It was as a Baathist that he had become dictator. He had the makings of a new Nasser, the first and the greatest of the Post-War charismatic Arab leaders. Pan-Arabism, for which the Palestinian cause is paramount, was much closer to Baath than it ever was to Nasser's Egyptian nationalism. Little wonder then that Hussein could have thought that his Kuwait grab could succeed. In addition, there existed in all this another important political influence: half of Kuwait's population was Palestinian and like Palestinians all over the Middle East the Palestinian community in Kuwait had no political rights. The Palestinian diaspora was not as mobile as the Jewish diaspora. When Jews were ejected from Judaea by Roman emperor Hadrian, they dispersed in the multi-ethnic Roman Empire. After that, Jews moved about in a world in which political frontiers were changeable-except in the core of China, where not many Jews settled-and would remain relatively fluid for centuries and only gradually become powerful barriers to the movements of peoples. The Jewish Pale of settlement was made possible because of the permeability of national frontiers. The much shorter Palestinian diaspora had nowhere to go but to the Arab states surrounding Israel. One of Israel's arguments against Arabs is that they did not assimilate their fellow Palestinian Arabs into their societies, which is as if you despoiled some one of a house and blamed the neighbors for not taking him in. The argument has so many holes it is totally worthless and now seldom invoked. Not all Palestinians stayed in refugee camps. Those who could emigrate, perhaps as many as remained in the camps, usually did so to the oil-rich countries of the Arabian peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain). Many Palestinians had good educational backgrounds. For most, it was the ticket out of the misery of the refugee camps. The nations that accepted them could put them to good use but only under very stringent rules of residence. Thus, for Palestinians in general anything or any one who would break down national barriers in the Middle East was good. Hussein was about the best thing that had come along for them in a long time.
The USA had not been the only supporter of Iraq in its confrontation with Iran. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had extended to Iraq large loans, which Iraq wanted written off. The creditors were pressing their claims when oil prices were sliding. Alleging a flooding of the oil market, Iraq invaded Kuwait, abolished the local regime (itself not notably democratic), and proclaimed Kuwait's annexation as Iraq's 19th province. The basis of these actions, which at first sight seem arbitrary, was that Kuwait had been a dependency of the Ottoman governorship in Baghdad. By secret treaty, the British extended their protection to Kuwait later. The situation was anomalous. If Kuwait was Bedouin or nomadic territory that British colonialism converted into an artificial state, well, so was much of Iraq. The border between Syria and Iraq was mostly the handiwork of British and French imperialisms after World War I. Turkey only very grudgingly renounced its claim on Mosul and northern Iraq. And its renunciation extended to all Arab lands including Kuwait, so that Iraq's argument that its claim to sovereignty over Kuwait stemmed from the Ottomans could also mean that Turkey still had a claim on Iraq. Iraq did not see it that way. The grave international crisis the Iraqis provoked gave president Bush the opportunity to lead America in its first exercise of leadership in the emerging unipolar world. Hussein was served notice by neighboring Arab states and by the USA and other Western powers to evacuate Kuwait. Of Iraq's Arab neighbors, only Jordan, for commercial reasons and out of political prudence, maintained relations with Iraq. When there was no compliance, Iraq was bombarded heavily and its forces were easily vanquished, but not before Soviet-designed Scud rockets in the hundreds were flung at Israel and at Saudi Arabia. Resistance collapsed when a high-tech American bomb was aimed so perfectly that it penetrated the air vent of a bomb shelter for Iraqi functionaries and their families killing all its occupants. President Bush restrained the invasion short of Baghdad and Hussein remained in power as repressive as ever. Unlike his son twelve years later, Bush didn't want to entangle his country in a situation from which he did not know how to extricate it and would inevitably provoke high Iraqi collateral losses. The Gulf War was international, swift, and decisive. It was not an aggression but a merited retaliation on an aggressor. It accomplished what it had to and the winners themselves decided that it was not theirs to meddle in the internal affairs of Iraq beyond restraining its ability to wage war. Interdiction zones, where Iraq was enjoined not to fly or engage in aggressive military activities, were established in northern Iraq and south of Baghdad. Iraq was also forced to comply with an UN inspection program to deter the development of WMD. Oil sales were curtailed, permitted only for humanitarian and reparation-payments purposes, which encouraged an international black market for Iraqi oil to arise. Hussein was also able to put down Shiite rebellions in the south of the country.
Because of incessant media bombardment, Americans tended to damn Arafat for supporting Hussein and the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait. Most Israelis, it goes without saying, just considered that one more reason to despise him. But under objective historical scrutiny, Arafat had little choice but to do so if he wanted to retain his credibility with Palestinians. When Iraq invaded Kuwait and later resisted instead of retreating in the face of impossibly superior forces it was partly acting in the name of Palestinians, which might mean that if Iraq had gotten away with its annexation of Kuwait, sooner or later there would have been another confrontation between Arabs and Israel. President George Bush's determination to stop Hussein was not only for deterring aggression but also to spare Israel from a military threat such as Egypt constituted in the past. Iraq's assault on Kuwait can be interpreted as yet another phase in the Arabs' long war against Israel. Seen in this light, it was also the first time that America had physically and massively intervened in defense of Israel, which could mean that Iraq was seen as the greatest threat that Israel had ever faced. Hussein's stint as pan-Arabic and specifically Palestinian vindicator was as brief as the actual fighting in the Gulf War. His aggression was rolled back by a large coalition led by the USA, integrated mainly by American troops, but sanctioned by the UN and including significant Arab contributions and contingents. Saudi Arabia was an essential base of operations, but even Syria pitched in with a combat unit. So fascinating for Palestinians, Hussein's charisma definitely did not seduce other Arab leaders. It did not endear him to anyone that his bid for power failed so catastrophically. Nasser at least did not surrender Egyptian sovereignty with the loss of Egyptian territory. Hussein not only had to accept the mutilation of Iraq but he also had to give up some basic prerogatives of statehood, such as arming itself and carrying on trade without external fetters. Even if after the Gulf War Hussein still retained some prestige among Arabs, at the very least as the man who tried, every one could see that he no longer had the power to threaten, and that is the minimum that is required of an international leader. At that point in time, the Arab world did not have any outstanding international personality that could speak authoritatively in its name. Besides, even Arabs could wonder whether there was the need for one. By abstaining from destroying Iraq altogether, Bush showed that he respected Arab sensibilities.
In the midst of Israel's invasion of Lebanon, Begin resigned and gave way to a fellow former independence fighter and also Likud party member, Yitzhak Shamir (1983-1984). By then Israel was fully committed to the settlements policy, mainly in the West Bank. Labor came back to power with Shimon Peres (1984-1986). After the inconclusive Israeli invasion of Lebanon was terminated, Shamir became prime minister again (1986-1992). Jewish settlements by then involved a population movement of over 150,000. Settlers were enticed by comfortable, low-price homes, and tax breaks. In the West Bank, fabulous hill-top vistas were common. Gaza, flat and dry, was not the sort of real estate Israeli militants preferred and consequently the settlements were much fewer there, preferably near the sea. Arabs in the occupied territories were smoldering over Israeli intrusions and they staged the stone-throwing First Intifada. Israel was bent on obtaining the financial underwriting, which amounted to the political sanction, of its settlements policy. The American Congress, whose members are very appreciative of campaign contributions and of the large Jewish vote, was all for it. President George Bush was not of that opinion, which he resisted and finally defeated, and even bragged of having done so. His opposition to Israeli encroachment on the occupied territories was another positive sign. That Bush was a Republican, in many respects the prototype of a conservative, and that he was coinciding with the aspirations of Palestinians, whom most Americans consider troublemakers, was another one of those convergences of opposites that characterize some signal moments in contemporary history. Unfortunately, the Bush approach did not prosper. To say that he was not the favorite of pro-Israel lobbyists would not be exaggerated, but that a Republican incumbent, such as Bush was in 1992, lost the election because of lack of financing would be going too far out on a limb, as far out as making the usual claim that he was defeated mainly because he had to cover Reagan's legacy of deficits with tax increases. But Clinton certainly did have a lot of Jewish support and that counted for a great deal in an election in which the conservative Ross Perot siphoned Republican votes.
(24) China goes on at its stately pace while Yeltsin pulls the rug from under Gorbachev
The biggest country in the world, China, still had a communist political system. But there too change was in the works. Mao Zedong was succeeded by Hua Guofeng (1976-1981), a supporter of the Cultural Revolution. Yet it was Hua Guofeng who arrested the so-called Gang Four accused of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution one month after Mao’s death. Mao's widow, Jiang Qing, part of the "four", scotched any illusions about her husband by claiming in high-pitch at her trial that nothing moved in China without Mao's willing it. At the head of a military committee through which he had supreme though not absolute power, Deng Xiaoping went on the offensive. When Hua Guofeng was removed, China embarked on a rectification campaign in which party secretary general Hu Yaobang (1981-1987) represented the most liberal tendency. Economically, agriculture was privatized and in general private ownership was legalized. The Chinese economic transformation required that China abandon the Maoist neo-dynastic dream of autarchy. Already in 1978, foreign direct investments were being accepted. To bypass the monstrous Chinese bureaucratic apparatus, special economic zones were created in which red tape was dispensed with. Southern China, especially the province of Quangdong and its capital Quangzhou (Canton), experienced extraordinary development through these investment havens. Economic growth was so vertiginous that between Hong Kong and Quangzhou there mushroomed practically overnight a one-million-plus metropolis called Shenzheng. Statistics show that this once tiny hamlet has the highest disposable income per capita of any other Chinese metropolis. By 1993, there were over 2,000 special economic zones, which is not without its hint of irony in that, under communist patronage, China was promoting something somewhat like the old concessionary ports, but with the crucial difference that this time it was China and no one else setting the rules, even if these had to be very accommodating to foreigners. In China, unlike what obdurate Castro decreed in Cuba, the intention was not to create two separate economies, one to earn hard currency to survive, the other to live under rigid non-competitive communist norms; but to form a general "socialist market economy" in which productivity, capitalist management, and limitless profits were national norms and not the privilege of foreign investors. The much less repressive post-Mao climate engendered democratic hopes which, upon Hu Yaobang's natural death, were expressed in popular manifestations led by students in Tiananmen Square, the center of Beijing. When troops and tanks intervened causing a massacre-then prime minister Li Peng took the blame for this, but Deng Xiaoping concurred-illusions about instant democracy were rudely shattered (1989). China would go the way of market reforms but at its own communist-party deliberate pace and for the foreseeable future there was to be no democracy outside the party. Instead of that there was a eye-popping average growth in agriculture and industry during the 1980s of 10%. Towards the end of the decade, inflation was threatening, but communists have always been good conventional monetarists and the problem never got out of hand, although growth during the 1990s was not as vertiginous as during the previous decades. Part of the problem was the state-owned industrial sector, which was ordered to show profits or else. By 2000, Chinese GDP was four times what it had been in 1978. In 2004, constitutional changes consecrated private property rights. In 2006,. total Chinese trade was $1.76 trillion, the third highest after the USA and Germany. There were still 300 million Chinese living in subsistence (mainly rural) conditions, but this was not considered a drag but growth potential.
Gorbachev might have had in mind something along the Chinese pattern of very gradual economic reform in a semi-democratic context. But his communist comrades sabotaged his plans when they arrested him on a trip he made to the Crimea and on Soviet television announced they were restoring communism (August 1991). According to a common theory, the conspiracy was organized by Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB, but the spokesman for the conspirators was Dmitri Yazov. Gorbachev's vice-president, Yanayev, was with the coup, as was a majority of the presidium of the CC. It was a conspiracy to restore things as they had been before Gorbachev began re-arranging them, but communism was then beyond salvation. It had taken less than the six years that Gorbachev had been in power for Soviet society to acquire a stake in the order (or more accurately disorder) of things that was replacing a system installed nearly three quarters of a century before. Also, and crucially, another exceptional product of the Soviet system, Yeltsin, was around. Almost everything about the USSR, and specifically Russia, during the Gorbachev years sounds as if it had been taken from a ciphered text that had been garbled and written like a boustrophedon, somewhat like Churchill's riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It was as inexplicable as how the most stifling social system in history had turned itself into a superpower. How had Gorbachev been possible? Why did the Communist Party accept being trussed up like a pig and taken to the slaughter? And how did communists have the unerring flair to discover in Yeltsin the man who would finally stick it to them? In a normal world, Yeltsin would have seemed the least likely candidate for the role of democrat and founder of capitalist Russia. His personal authoritarianism was more compatible with communism than with anything resembling democratic constitutionality. Yet, over all, his actions from the moment he was summoned from Sverdlovsk to Moscow leave no doubt that he had sincerely changed, either by degrees or suddenly-like St. Paul, another authoritarian-from apparatchik to unyielding enemy of communism. When he learned of the coup against Gorbachev, Yeltsin gathered military support, which the plotters assumed would be completely on their side, and stood on a tank in front of the modernistic Moscow high-rise called the White House, where the Russian Supreme Soviet sat, and defied the communist conspiracy in the name of constitutional legitimacy. Despite his personal grudges, he also demanded that Gorbachev be released and restored to the presidency of the USSR. Yeltsin by then very likely had few illusions about the viability of the USSR but the absolute priority at the moment was to restore the process that Gorbachev had initiated, even if Yeltsin's ultimate intention was to derail it.
The plotters had multiple links to instruments of power. They counted on the support of the Soviet bureaucracy and possibly every Soviet diplomat abroad knew about the coming coup. They certainly were aware of it in Havana, where high diplomatic functionaries assumed an unmistakably smug, conspiratorial air when Gorbachev and Soviet reformism were mentioned, as if they knew something no one else did. The Americans, who warned Gorbachev, very likely learned of the plot from diplomatic sources. What the plotters lacked was leadership and especially self-confidence. When he announced at a press conference that Gorbachev had been overthrown, Yanaev’s hands were shaking so badly that it was hard to take the conspirators seriously. Outside of the USSR, people were much more apprehensive. With Soviet precedents in mind, it was feared that Gorbachev might have been liquidated. Yeltsin rallied opposition to the coup and had the plotters arrested to general cheering, in Moscow at least. The CPSU was legally dissolved, although the plotters were released not long afterwards and the party was re-founded. Gorbachev was re-instated as president of the USSR. On the surface, it was like recovering a guideline that had been momentarily lost in a squall. But this superficial impression was wrong. Gorbachev had been winged. He had undermined his own communist legitimacy and his former communist buddies had undermined his legitimacy period. Gorbachev himself was not unaware that he had been made to look bad. When Yanaev came back to him as if nothing had happened, Gorbachev asked him if he was trying "to hang noodles from my ears", the earthy Russian expression for taking a person for a fool. Aside from the mailed fist, the CPSU was what kept the USSR together, so Gorbachev was now reduced to his powers of persuasion alone, and with these it was impossible to block the trends that were in what seemed like the pull of centrifuges. He might as well have tried to stop a bulldozer on auto with speeches. The trends could only have been braked from within and, aside from Gorbachev and the people who betrayed him, no one important or influential seemed to want to save the USSR. Perhaps a majority of Russians would have preferred to keep the USSR alive, but at the time what mattered above all was eliminating communist dictatorship. First things came first. But without communism there was a real second possibility: the fall of communist power and the disbandment of the USSR were all one. To save the USSR there was also the alternative of Russian military might. But even to achieve his goal of saving the USSR in another form, Gorbachev would probably not have unleashed Soviet armed forces on its neighbors, even if it still had been in his power to command them. The Lithuanian experience had been bitter-as well as a less publicized but deadlier attack on protesters in Georgia-and Gorbachev himself was conscious of the damage it had done to his prestige. Besides, the effective president of Russia was Yeltsin, and, as he had already accomplished the task of saving the Russian Supreme Soviet, the source of his power, he was not keen on civil war for the sake of Gorbachev's political ambitions. It could also be said that, after some amputations, and a leak here and there, the USSR was basically Russia and the armed forces of the USSR were mainly Russian. Yeltsin and other leaders of Soviet republics concurred publicly with Gorbachev when he argued that to sacrifice the Soviet federation was unthinkable, but, as they say, actions speak louder than words; and in retrospect, for these men it was not only quite feasible to do without the USSR but it was what they wanted to do. After the August putsch, the rest of the USSR, in the wake of the separatist Baltic republics, started to disgregate. Uzbekistan opted for independence just eight days after Gorbachev was released. The secession process became irreversible when Yeltsin's Russia recognized the independence of the Baltic republics. Despite these discouraging signs, Gorbachev persisted in his talk of a reformed and reborn USSR. Though not alienated, Gorbachev was not entirely in touch with reality either. Unlike the imperturbable Yeltsin, whom crises transformed into a giant, Gorbachev was a hands-on man increasingly now pre-occupied by theoretical and constitutional issues, and these had but a slender connection to events.
If the dissolution of the USSR was what Gorbachev most dreaded, what he probably could not even consider seriously was that the Ukraine would separate from Russia. The Ukraine was part of the Russian heartland. Christian Russia was founded in Kiev, in the Ukraine. After Mongol power in Russia waned, Ukrainian history was mostly about its gradual absorption by Russia against the pretensions of Poles and Turks, both of whom the Ukrainians detested. Much of the Soviet central bureaucracy and of its diplomatic service was Ukrainian. And the eastern Ukraine, the industrialized Donets basin, and the Crimea were mostly peopled by Russians. Yeltsin had seen polls that showed Ukrainians inclining by a large majority to independence, so large that it had to include even ethnic Russians. Gorbachev, who later for a long time refused to accept his own unpopularity in Russia, wouldn't have believed them. Yeltsin did not have Gorbachev's obsession with federation. He would later pay a steep price for his habitual nonchalance, so steep indeed that it almost cost him the presidency of Russia. The terms "union", "federation", and "federated" have specific meanings in the context of the USSR. "Union" is the least specific and it is the same as "united" as in "United States": constituted by partially sovereign but not independent states. A Soviet "federation", unlike the "Confederate States of America", was an union divided into political entities or parts each inhabited by "nationalities", people of the same ethnic stock who usually spoke the same non-Russian language. The Confederacy was just a replica of the United States but with an economy based on black slavery. "Federation" and "federated" were inalienable Soviet inheritances from Tsarist Russian imperialism. Stalin had incorporated the Ukraine into the USSR by force, which was when Lenin tsk-tsked in disapproval. Since the memory of nations is long, this incident was possibly one of the reasons why now Ukrainians wanted to separate from Russia. Stalin did it again in Georgia, where he himself was born, assisted by another communist Georgian "federalizer", Sergo Ordzhonikidze. The "federated" parts of Soviet Russia were themselves "autonomous" but far from sovereign, not even in the limited sense in which American states are sovereign. The USSR was a super-federation of "Soviet republics", which in theory were the equal in sovereignty to Russia. In practice, "republics" were only privileged in having their own communist parties, which were entirely subservient to the PCSU. Russia itself was officially the Federated Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, because it contained many nationalities. Peoples usually do not occupy lands according to agreed settlement schemes or deliberate, commonsensical partitions of territory, which is the reason why the autonomous republics of the USSR and of the Russian Federation today have very irregular shapes whereas in the USA state borders were often defined by surveyors and there is not one American state (except Hawaii) that does not have a part of its limits looking as if it had been drawn with a straight-edge. Try searching for a straight line in the political map of Europe and see what you come up with. During the frequent Soviet political re-organizations of the Russian Empire, mostly before World War II, there were federations, analogously like federated Russia, such as the the Turkistan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, including the present territories of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. It was from this federation that the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, including Tajikistan, was formed. Finally, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were made separate Soviet socialist republics. These different republics, and Kyrgyzstan, had in common that they were Muslim. Tajiks were Indo-Iranians and the others were Turks. On the other side of the Caspian sea, the Soviets created the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic with Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. This federation was also dissolved into separate Soviet socialist republics. "Soviet" and "socialist" denoted a higher political status without the "autonomous" qualifier, which always implied belonging to a federation, hence not very autonomous. Roughly, these jurisdictional subtleties were respected after the USSR was dissolved: Russia became a federated republic and the former Soviet socialist republics became just republics.
On Georgia's northeastern frontier, lies tiny Chechnya, known in the USSR as the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (now it is the Checheno-Ingush Republic). Though in principle a nationality like those which were constituted as independent republics, the Chechens, who are Muslims and speak a Caucasian language of the same family as Georgian, had the spirit but not the historical past and the tradition of sovereignty that would have justified the full rank of Soviet socialist republic. By contrast with Chechnya, Armenia and Georgia had long national histories of their own. Azerbaijan had not usually been an independent kingdom but it was from Tabriz, the Azeri capital, that the Mongols ruled Persia and the Middle East. Chechens had a reputation as fighters the equal of the Cossacks, but the Cossacks spoke Ukrainian and were good Orthodox Christians. Given their head, Chechens could have spelt trouble. When the Soviet republics were going for independence one after another in the wake of the foiled August coup, the Chechens threw Soviet jurisdictional niceties to the wind and went and declared the independence of Chechnya (November 1991). However tyrannical the USSR, it had its moments of political lucidity. One of them was not unduly empowering Chechens. On the other hand, the opposite, that Chechen ferocity was Soviet-bred, can also be argued, for Chechen independence was the work of the freakish Dzhokhar Dudayev, a Soviet general serving in Estonia who was made dictator of Chechnya by thugs and promptly converted the country into a court of miracles, a place where the illegal was legal and the arbitrary consensual. One of the ironies about the Chechnya wars to come was that Western journalists knew the kind of smugglers' and thieves' dens that Chechnya became and yet they persisted in characterizing Chechens as unbeatable warriors and heroic patriots. Another important point is that if Yeltsin later suffered recurrent Chechnya nightmares, it was because he did everything he could to deserve them.
Yeltsin and the leaders of the other Soviet republics, especially Ukraine and Belarus, were growing weary of Gorbachev's virtual soliloquies about a new democratic USSR-like federation. After his rescue from the clutches of the KGB through Yeltsin's intervention, it was obvious that Gorbachev was a lame duck, just as the USSR itself was pure formalism, a shadow that Russia still cast. For one reason or another, Yeltsin did not challenge Gorbachev and ask him to step down. Perhaps it was that, as he had opposed an illegal communist power-grab, unseating Gorbachev against his will would have seemed like a reversion to communist political practice. It could also have been judged unconstitutional and no one then knew the depth of Gorbachev's lack off popular support. Whatever the case, there was another way to achieve exactly the same thing and that was to make Gorbachev irrelevant, like having an eloquent atheist address a Baptist convention, or simply by leaving him without an audience altogether. In the first week of December 1991, absent Gorbachev, who astonishingly appeared to have suspected nothing, Yeltsin met with Leonid Kravchuk of the Ukraine and with Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. On the 7th, the three presidents agreed to dissolve the USSR. During post-prandial celebrations, Yeltsin got so drunk he had to be carried to his bed. It wasn't his best moment, but Yeltsin had the gift of bounciness and during his period as president of Russia he showed that, at critical times, he didn't give a damn for anything but the central issue and that to achieve legitimate political ends he was capable of controlling his tendency to drink excessively and even of facing up to illnesses that, in the circumstances, would have done in a lesser man. The following day the presidential trio unveiled the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), their version of the new voluntary "federation" that was to take the place of the defunct USSR. Ukraine voted by over 90% for independence. On 21 December, to close the cycle of the downfall of the USSR and the birth of the CIS, all the former Soviet republics except those on the Baltic and Georgia signed on to the CIS in Alma Ata (Almaty), the former capital of Kazakhstan. Georgia did not do so because its principal politician and future president, Eduard Sheverdnaze, had been until recently the foreign minister of the USSR and one of the protagonists of Gorbachevism. As successor state to the mighty USSR, the CIS did not quite fit the bill, but the armed forces of Russia are still officially those of the CIS. Technically, CIS and not Russian forces defended the border of Tajikistan against infiltration from Afghanistan, in effect a shield for Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. CIS forces were also in view when they manned the borders of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan with Afghanistan during the American-led and Russian-supported War on Afghanistan.
On 25 December 1991, without a state to govern, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned to the presidency of the USSR. He was a man of only sixty years. Arguably, he did more than any man in the 20th century to change the world. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had done splendidly what was expected of them. The "splendid" qualifier here is what counts, for, with or without Churchill or Roosevelt, Britain and America would have opposed the Axis, and with America's resources, the Allies, under any military command, would have defeated the Axis. This is admittedly counterfactual, which is dubious historical reasoning, but it is only used as a stay for the historical thesis that history is made up of processes and that it is determined neither by the lack-of-a-nail nor by the heroes of the moment. In the space of a few days, the United States had won the Cold War and the world had ceased being bi-polar and had become unipolar. The travails of Russia and the former members of the USSR in the years that followed ratified the failure of communism including the sudden descent of Russia from the equal of America to a nation struggling against the accumulated disasters of decades of Soviet misrule. In view of the crises that succeeded each other in post-communist Russia, the USSR might have seemed a model of social welfare and economic discipline, but Gorbachev did not introduce perestroika because he wanted to destroy a system that worked but because he wanted to reform one that was collapsing.
(25) As Clinton crosses his arms about Israel/Palestine, Osama bin Laden makes a silent entry
Known for his womanizing, Arkansas long-time but young governor Bill Clinton (1978-1980; 1982-1992), had already built a national reputation when he decided to run for the White House in 1992. He suffered a few reverses during the Democratic primaries but in the end prevailed. He called himself "the comeback kid". He probably defeated incumbent George Bush because the maverick, rabidly anti-immigration Ross Perot sipped off Republican votes. Again, television-watching American pundits speculated that president Bush lost points when, during the television debate with Clinton, he looked at his watch as if he was impatient talking to the mass of the American public. Another theory was that Bush increased taxes after he had promised not do so, even saying slowly "read my lips", but this was to balance the budget, a Republican mantra. There is also the "it’s the economy, stupid" myth propagated by Clinton’s campaign advisor James Carville, but in America recessions had become so mild that they hardly mattered in presidential elections. Clinton was re-elected four years later. His approval ratings by the public throughout his two administrations were always high, even when he was impeached by the House of Representatives because he evaded questions about having been given oral sex by a young White House internee. Clinton expressed his remorse and did a lot of lip-biting. Domestically, Clinton had always advertised himself as a moderate Democrat, which, before and after his election, essentially meant watching opinion polls. His presidency was mildly progressive and its only radical initiative was a plan for universal health-coverage, which was the doing of his wife, Hillary, a lawyer like Clinton with very much her own political agenda. The project was torpedoed by the medical establishment and insurance companies. Though it did not seem so at the time, Clinton’s international policies were disastrous, particularly in that they paved the way for the excesses of his successor George W. Bush. Clinton’s administrations coincided with the post-Cold War chaos in Russia. The former American informal world empire was no longer necessary. Without the adversarial relation between the USA and the USSR, it was generally agreed that international politics were largely overshadowed by unipolarity. It was America unilaterally calling the shots. Unipolarity had started with the elder Bush, who handled it in a statesman-like way. Clinton had to face some crises, various of his own making. Through NATO, America ended the savage ethnic conflict in Bosnia. The air war against Serbia over Kosovo (1999), where Serbs were accused, somewhat exaggeratedly, of applying genocide (1996-1999), was also a NATO operation. Bosnia had been steadied but with the promotion of autonomous Kosovo, the southern Balkan situation was de-stabilized. Totally uncalled for, and only feasible because of Russia’s relative prostration, was that Clinton put his weight behind the expansion of NATO to formerly Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Since NATO was created to contain communism, this implied that either Russia was still communist, which it wasn’t, or that it could challenge America’s unipolar status. The idiocy of this policy was converted by Bush the younger into an aggressive stance that Russia, now no longer in crisis, is confronting vehemently. American humanitarian intervention in Somalia got bogged down in that country’s tribal warlords’ violence and was ended. Clinton had a debt to Jewish political support-his wife now as Democratic pre-candidate for the presidency has a bigger one-and he watched impassively as Israel tore up the Oslo accords. But he went further still when, like Bush the younger later, he gratuitously demonized Saddam Hussein. When, as a lame-duck president, Clinton tried to build a bridge between Israel and Palestine, which he might have wanted to do earlier but did not dare to, it was a predictable failure because Israel was standing pat, and anyway what could a president nearing the end of his term, with a new one impatiently waiting in the wings, do? Although even now it does not seem so, because Clinton’s presidencies were comparatively halcyon times for the USA, the international basics from Clinton to Bush did not change much, though again and counterfactually, it is possible to credit Clinton with more common sense and moderation than his successor.
Enter now Osama bin Laden, not with the daredevil leaps and bounds with which Saddam Hussein had made his presence known on the world stage, as at the start of a Red Army Chorus Cossack skit, but in a sidewise, wily manner, almost, one could think, as if he, like Ronald Reagan before, believed in the soft-talk-big-stick shtick. Arab strategy against Israel had started with overt military confrontation, which had veered to terrorism, and then reverted to war. In all phases of this epochal conflict, the Palestinian cause had been rebuffed and Israel, with unconditional American support, had emerged each time not only the winner but stronger than before. Al Qaida might have been founded shortly after the conclusion of the Iraq-Iran war. Its deadly activation with bin Laden's large financial purse followed the defeat of Iraq after its Kuwait adventure. Open warfare against Israel had failed. International terrorism against Israel had not worked. Through its excesses, it recoiled on the perpetrators. State-sponsored terrorism of the Libyan sort was vulnerable to effective countermeasures. With all roads blocked, the PLO had chosen the path of conciliation. Al Qaida thought it had found the effective alternative strategy, which was more terrorism, not mainly against Israel, but against America. Now, this would seem to be counterintuitive, for if terrorism could not cow Israel, what chance did it have against the most powerful state in the world? The seemingly impossible contrary is what bin Laden set out to prove. He also believed that his chances improved if he broadened the scope of terrorism. Instead of Palestinians against Israelis, he would make it Muslims against America. But could Muslims be goaded into such a dangerous confrontation? The average Muslim was not a potential recruit. Islamic fundamentalists who still revered the memory of Khomeini would have been ideal volunteers but they were Iranian Shiites and they could rub Sunni the wrong way. There was also an incipient Muslims versus Christians struggle but it fed on the discontents of Muslims in European countries and it was, first, specific to each nation, and, second, one that could be dealt with on a case by case basis. Hardly the stuff for an apocalyptic international terrorist campaign! But there were Sunni fundamentalists a-plenty in Arab countries and especially in non-Arab Pakistan.
Al Qaida was, from the start, a Pan-Arabic organization. Bin Laden's second in command within al Qaida is still the Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri, an Egyptian Muslim radical Muslim for whom Palestine as the main Arab and Muslim cause. Both were disiciples of the Egyptian Islamist scholar theologian Sayyib Qutub, who wad spent a time in the American Midwest and was shocked by cheerleaders. When Osama bin Laden and al Qaida were attacking opportunistic American targets-notably, the attempt to blow up the World Trade Center’s foundations (1993) and the bombing of the USA embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania-the Palestinians were inclined to negotiations. Not all Palestinians were disposed to negotiate with Israel and there exists the Israeli argument that Arafat and the PLO were giving surreptitious, and not so surreptitious, support to Palestinian terrorism. The most damning piece of evidence, if some Israeli figures are accurate, is that Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis increased significantly between the signing of the Oslo accords in September 1993 and 1999. In 1994, 1995, and 1996, 73, 52, and 87 attacks, respectively, are reported, which compares with an average of 17 yearly attacks from 1967 to 1992. The West Bank was annexed by Israel in 1967 and the policy of Israeli settlements began to be applied systematically during the 1970s. The First Intifada is conventionally bracketed between 1987 and 1993. Most of the attacks reported in 1993 occurred before the Oslo interim agreement. The escalation of Palestinian attacks began not in 1993 but in 1988. It cannot be said that Oslo marked the onset of intense hostilities, but at most that it did not put an end to Palestinian terrorism. The rise in attacks after the Oslo accords-in point fact really noticeable after the assassination of Rabin (1995)-is part of a pattern of growing Palestinian hostility to Israel and, if the increase in the number of attacks is to be related to the existence of the PA, then a significant drop in attacks in 1997 should in principle also be attributed to the PA. The year that Benyamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister of Israel (1996) can be said to mark the preliminary breakdown of realistic negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. In effect, Israel had voted against the Oslo Accords. It was the closest to a plebiscite on whether Israelis wanted peace or even to make some concessions to Palestinians. Arafat or the PLO had not given grounds for an Israeli rejection of their aspirations to a Palestinian state. The mainstream PLO was not then engaged in terrorism. Its willingness to negotiate was as pronounced as the Israeli rejection of negotiations. When Palestinians thought that they were within sight of a political arrangement they could live which did not imply doubts on the legitimacy of Israel, Israelis jerked away from Oslo, from committing themselves to a Palestinian state and even from negotiations that could result in anything resembling one. That Palestinian leadership had transformed itself politically was not of course gratuitous but the result of Israel's dogged resistance to Palestinian and pro-Palestinian pressures. But there was in this no reason to doubt the sincerity of the Palestinian offer of peace. It would be difficult to imagine a situation more conducive to open-dealing than one in which survival is at stake, and the survival of Arafat, of the PLO, and of the possibility of a Palestinian state were then indeed at stake. After decades during which it was claimed by Israelis and Americans that Israel stood for negotiation and the Palestinians for conflict, it was now going the other way: Palestinians wanted negotiations and Israelis were adamantly and democratically, opposed to negotiations.
Palestinians, or at least the Palestinians that Arafat represented, were willing to negotiate because they had no alternative. This says nothing particularly good of Arafat’s sincerity, but one thing is what you intend or wish and another is what you can achieve, and in history the latter is usually what you have to accept. Whatever Arafat really wanted, whether he was an unrepentant terrorist still aiming at wiping out Israel, a common Israeli view, or whether he was really intent on negotiating a peace, what he was getting was what Israel decided to give and Israeli offers during the Oslo process were risibly small and every one was counterpoised by their almost immediate negation. Before shutting down the Oslo process, Netanyahu offered 9% of the West Bank. The PA asked for 13%. Israel’s rejection of this modest demand angered Palestinians. This is when Arafat started talking of unilateral independence. Israel then offered to redeploy its troops in the West Bank and hand over 195 square miles of territory, an offer which was cancelled virtually the following day. Even Ehud Barak, who was elected Israeli prime minister in 1999 and was the last Palestinian hope for a negotiated peace, only offered the PA 7% of the West Bank. He consented to the free flow of traffic between Gaza and the West Bank along controlled roads. But he also authorized more settlements than Netanyahu had and when the PA asked for another 5% of the West Bank it was turned down flat. By then the Oslo process in a strict sense, which should have culminated with Palestinian statehood in 1999, had run out and what Israel finally offered the PA were two thirds of the West Bank in which instead of Israeli pockets there were Palestinian areas almost entirely surrounded by Israeli settlements. Negotiations had broken down. Arafat had Hamas breathing down his neck and he couldn’t go back to Palestinians with that. In October 2000, al Qaida organized the attack on the American warship USS Cole in the harbor of Aden. The Second Intifada began around the same time. Early in 2001 Israel was going to vote again and the issue, aside from political subtleties, was again war or peace. The Second Intifada was a sort of war, but what sort of war could it be that pits mobs against an army? Sharon crushed Barak in the Israeli elections. Barak had not modified his antagonistic attitude to Arafat and the PLO. Netanyahu was a loudmouth intransigent with the earnest manner and looks of an American college debater. On American television Larry King called him "Bibi" and treated him as if he could have been your friendly next door neighbor. But Sharon was another proposition altogether. This man was tough in a way that Bibi could never be. He was a veteran of the Israeli war of independence. He had been responsible for reprisal attacks on Arabs. He was as good a politician as he was a brave soldier. Sharon was the greatest promoter of the invasive Israeli policy of settlements in land that sensibly should have been left to the Palestinians. Considered by many the greatest modern Israeli soldier, one of the most successful strategists and tacticians of our times, Moshe Dayan, had been willing to let Palestinians alone. Like Sharon later, he had been minister of agriculture and it did not occur to him take land from the Palestinians and give it to Jews, which all it did was make worse an already bad relationship. Sharon had been the author of Israel's strategy to strike at the PLO in their Lebanese bases. He had looked the other way when Christian gunmen killed Palestinians in the refugee camps. Sharon's election was like opening the gates of Janus. In ancient Roman tradition, the temple to the two-faced god Janus was closed in times of peace. As far as is known, they were only closed once, by Augustus, in the fall of 25 CE. Once in power in Israel, Sharon let loose the Israeli armed forces on the Palestinian police and on all manifestations of open Palestinian defiance. Among other things, Israeli army tractors tore up the runway which had been such a seductive symbol of statehood when the PA was constituted.
Palestinian police were involved in the fighting during the Second Intifada. But a police that existed at the sufferance of Israel, which essentially expected it to function as an anti-terrorist arm of Israeli authority, was as powerless as ululating Palestinian crowds. Thus, between September 2000 and March 2001 it was possible to have a ratio of five Palestinians killed to one Israeli, which was less lopsided than the counts at the end of the First Intifada when there were nearly seven Palestinians dead for each Israeli life lost. Suicide bombers were almost an inevitable tactical choice for Palestinian terrorists. The origins of this sort of terrorism have been debated. As in the more conventional forms of terrorism, in which the perpetrators do not intend to immolate themselves, suicide tactics can historically be attributed equally to states or to rebels or outlaws. The most famous 20th century wave of suicide attacks were the Japanese Kamikaze during the final year of the Pacific ocean war. These were not social terrorists but soldiers sworn to fly under religious oath to kill themselves by wreaking as much destruction as they could on the enemy. The Kamikaze could not prevent the momentum of the American advance, but they inflicted losses on ships and men. In over 3,800 missions, Kamikazes sank anywhere between 34 and 81 ships (mostly small) and killed some 4,900 American sailors. The heaviest ships damaged were escort-carriers and destroyers. There were suicide fighters long before the Japanese formed their self-immolating squadrons. Leonidas at the Thermopylae resisted the Persians to death. The Spartan hoplites, which numbered only 300, could not have contained the huge Persian host. The Spartans had allies beside them but they were the vanguard and suffered the brunt of the Persian attack. They in effect committed suicide to delay the invasion of the Greek heartland. Leonidas is the heroic western prototype of the suicide fighter. Jews had their own suicide fighters: the Zealots at Masada who killed themselves rather than be crucified by the Romans. In Muslim lands, resistance to conquerors almost certainly had fatal consequences. Mongol persistence and destructiveness were legendary. The defenders of cities against Mongols were sure to be slaughtered. If they survived in the ruins, Mongol detachments were left behind lurking to finish them off. There existed suicidal war rituals in India and in Indonesia. In Rajasthan when a Rajput fortress was doomed, its defenders often opted for gaujar, in which fighting men went out for a final stand as their women immolated themselves and their children. In Bali, when the nobility of Denpasar was being besieged by Dutch cannon and rifles, they chose to mount a puputan or charge with swords and krises. The cases of certain death in modern European wars are legion. In our times, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka made their suicide attacks notorious. Women volunteers were especially fearsome. It was a Tamil woman who blew up Rajiv Gandhi during an Indian electoral campaign. But the Tamils, however great their devotion to suicide tactics, cannot claim contemporary primacy over Arabs. The great terrorist attacks in Beirut that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of marines and dozens of French soldiers was the work of suicide bombers and it anteceded the Tamil use of human self-detonating bombs. Terrorism, and suicide bombers in particular, have been described as the weapons of last resort of the downtrodden everywhere. Israelis and Americans may dislike the idea that suicidal terrorism can be a weapon of self-defense or of self-assertion but the evidence that such is the case is too voluminous to ignore.
Osama bin Laden himself has said that his hatred of America began when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Obviously, his hatred of the USSR was greater because not long after that he and some fellow Arabs were volunteering their services to the Pakistan-backed Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who told them they weren’t need; but bin Laden persisted and his group found trenches in the frontlines and fought on until 1989 when the Soviets pulled their forces out, although they continued to back the government of Najibullah. It is possible that Osama had already founded or had planned in his head the organization that was to be called Al Qaida. When bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia and settled in Jeddah, as the usual story goes, he was horrified to see USA armed forces were being concentrated in his country for the Gulf war. He complained to the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki bin Faisad Al Saud, who concluded that Osama was a well-intentioned dolt. He had only agreed to receive him because of he was the son of Saudi Arabia’s greatest construction magnate, close to the royal household. Bin Laden argued that the Prophet had forbidden that foreign fighters set foot on Arabia and Turki explained that what the Prophet had enjoined was that no other faith than Islam prevail in the peninsula. Both were arguing not from the text of the Koran but from a hadith (singular and plural are the same in English) about Muhammad’s death. Hadith are traditions generally accepted by ulema as credible, practically an extension, or extensions, of the holy book. Abstention from alcohol, for example, is in the hadith and not in the Koran. Afer that futile dialogue, the headstrong Osama bin Laden, who did not seem so from his gentle manner, began to criticize the royal family outspokenly. He had already met Zayman al-Zawahiri. The Saudis tolerated bin Laden until 1991 when he was expelled to Sudan and the warm embrace of Hassan al-Turabi, the ideologue of Muslim fundamentalism in that country. Osama never returned to his native land but he might have traveled to Pakistan during his stay in Sudan, where he made large investments in construction and agriculture. In 1993, Ramzi Yousef, a Kuwaiti national of Palestinian extraction, placed a large bomb in the basement of one of the WTC towers, but, though the explosion was impressive, it was not strong enough. Yousef might have trained in an Al Qaida-sponsored camp, but the operation was too crude to be fully Al Qaida-financed. The plotters who were in with Yousef tried to collect the deposit on a rented vehicle, which eventually led to Yousef’s capture in Pakistan. Before this happened, Youzef spent some time in Manila plotting to bomb various American passenger flights over the Pacific. He himself experimented on how to do it. He boarded a Philippines Airlines flight in Manila to Tokyo via Cebu. On the Manila-Cebu leg he built a small timer bomb with wires concealed in the heels of his shoes and some chemicals and he placed it under his seat. He got off in Cebu and his seat was taken by a young Japanese traveler. When the bomb exploded, the hapless victim was severed in half with the top in the passenger cabin the lower half in the plane’s luggage compartment. The plane’s flight controls were disabled, but Eduardo Reyes, the Filipino captain of the 747, used engine thrusts to steady the plane and head it to a safe landing in Naha, Okinawa. In 1995, there was a terrorist attack on an American installation in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, although Osama bin Laden’s complicity is only suspected. What in retrospect seems almost certain is that Al Qaida was already operating as a shadowy financier of terrorism. Under strong American and Saudi pressure, the Sudanese let Osama bin Laden know he was no longer welcome. This was in 1996 and the Afghanistan civil war had taken an unexpected turn.
Since 1988, the Soviet-backed government of Najibullah in Kabul was holding its own against Hekmatyar and the other major warlord, the Tajik Ahmad Shah Massoud, but by 1992, the USSR had dissolved and aid dried up. Not so in the case of the warlords, who were still being financed by Pakistan with power attorney from the USA, so to speak. In America, Afghanistan had been downgraded as a strategic terrain by the CIA and president Bill Clinton. Massoud captured Kabul and Hekmatyar besieged the city with rocket and artillery fire. In 1994, a one-eyed messianic figure, Mullah Omar, created a fighting militia with madrasa students called Taliban and was allowed to impound a large Pakistani arsenal with which in short order he captured Kandahar and drove out the local warlord, an ally of Massoud. The Pakistanis, who were disappointed at Hekmatyar’s incompetence, decided to back the Taliban. When these were forcing Massoud and his men out of Kabul, Osama bin Laden was in Jalalabad (east of Kabul). Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden did not know each other, but affinity of ideas made then natural allies and bin Laden built a large, austere compound in land near Kandahar’s airport for himself, his large polygamous family, and his praetorians. It was in the crucial year of 1996 that Osama bin Laden emitted his declaration of a Jihad against America and Israel. The CIA had already taken note of bin Laden in Sudan, but he did not figure as a significant threat to America. Bin Laden and Zawahiri were like hand in glove, although at first Zawahiri was skeptical of the ambitious Saudi’s "target America". The 1997 Luxor massacre, in which six assassins slaughtered sixty tourists at the monumental temple of queen Hashepsut and then committed suicide in a cave in the surrounding desert, was an Al Qaida-financed operation, which did not gain any adherents for Islamists and probably made Zawahiri defer to Osama bin Laden’s plans, These were like the challenge: "Sixty innocent tourists, that’s all you can do!". Even al Qaida’s alarm level was not raised in the USA. This changed in 1998, when terrorists partially destroyed the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania, with large loss of lives, mostly Africans but some Americans in Nairobi. At this point, the Clinton administration made killing Osama bin Laden a priority. A wave of cruise missiles struck a site in eastern Afghanistan, south of the city of Khost, where reportedly bin Laden was attending a meeting of international fundamentalist terrorist leaders. He was not there or had left. A drug factory, erroneously reported to belong to bin Laden, was destroyed in Khartoum. Clinton urged more action on the CIA, but in 1999 its director, George Tenet, still did not have his mind concentrated on the super-terrorist. When Clinton handed over to Bush, the terrorist threat to America was not in the list of urgent business. Like Clinton before, but more obsessively, Bush came in whooping for Saddam Hussein’s scalp.
Kabul fell in 1996 but the north was not entirely reduced and furious resistance continued in the Panjshir valley of the Hindu Kush, in the heart of Afghanistan, headed by Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Tajik or Persian-speaking Afghan. The Taliban instituted a regime of fanatical religious terror, beginning with the evisceration of Najibullah, whose corpse was put on display. According to some cynical veteran observers of Afghanistan, Najibullah was a torturer who just might have deserved his end. But the Taliban regime was easily one of the most benighted and, as it turned out, dangerous and self-immolating destructive that the world has seen. It ransacked the country’s premier museum to ransack its contents for purblind fanaticism. By way of contrast, in 2004 it was announced that the Najibullah government had stored and protected many of the treasures of the Kabul museum from Taliban fury. In an act denounced the world over as cultural barbarism, the Taliban destroyed with dynamite and cannons two huge Buddhas, one 53 meters high, carved and plastered on a rock side in Bamian (2001). These Buddhas, possibly as old as the 3rd century, were invaluable testimonies to the cultural links between India, Central Asia, and China forged by the Kushan Empire, itself an intriguing blend of Greek, Indo-Iranian, and Indian cultural traditions, the likely source of the branches of Buddhism that sprouted in China and Japan. The Taliban were trying to reverse or even obliterate not only what went against their primitive and futile version of Islam, but even the historical process as it had happened before the rise of Islam. It was in a country so gripped by intellectual darkness that was forged the plot that struck devastatingly at what was then generally reputed as the most enlightened, the most tolerant, and the most advanced country in the world.
(26) Gorbachev is made redundant
In an oblique way, Gorbachev was a result of Hitlerism. Stalinism in practice was little better than Nazism. In theory, the USSR stood for everything that was execrated in Nazi Germany. Unlike the rest of the great political figures of the 20th century, Gorbachev did not face an external enemy easy to recognize and circumscribe. He believed in some of the ideas that his political adversaries also held and for those practices that he wanted to change in Soviet society, as we saw, he had to feign that he believed in the system in its entirety. Gorbachev's situation did resemble Nixon's, whose certified anti-communism permitted him to break down official anti-communist barriers in the American government. But Gorbachev's task was far more difficult for it involved going against the grain of a heavy, intolerant, and suspicious system. For his pains, Gorbachev obtained neither personal gain nor gratitude in his country, and in the West, a sort of grudging recognition mixed with scorn, such as the journalist David Remnick evinced reporting that when the USSR was dissolved Gorbachev asked: "And what about me?" Gorbachev did not dissolve the USSR. His rival Yeltsin did. Gorbachev democratized Russia and he liquidated the Cold War. He did not complete the process of democratization because he was not given the opportunity to do so and his plans were for a much more equitable and orderly process than the one that got underway after him. Under Gorbachev, the USSR weakened militarily, but this process was going on before, and the USSR did not lose the Cold War completely under Gorbachev but only after Gorbachev was sabotaged by the communists. With all its faults, the USSR had a steadying influence in the world. If the downfall of the USSR enters the picture of the world as it is today, it is not because of what Gorbachev did but because of what he could not do. So basically the worst criticism that can be levelled at him is that he was not up to the Gargantuan task of successfully transforming the crumbling USSR. Another of the Russian riddles is why Gorbachev is so despised by his own countrymen. During the early Yeltsin years he was made a figure of derision and satire. For some reason, rock bands were particularly vicious in their mockery, which, if one believes Remnick, went beyond words to the cruel prank of bilking Gorbachev's mother of her house in the Stavropol region. They also associated him with Stalinist economics. Apparently, Gorbachev was blamed for all the ills of Russia without getting the recognition for his accomplishments, mainly that without Gorbachev Russians would not now have the right to vote freely, to travel, and to enrich themselves. When presidential elections later came up in Russia, despite the surveys that showed he hadn't a ghost of a chance, Gorbachev ran anyway and got less than one percent of the total vote. Such a massive rejection, incomprehensible to an external observer, must have been unthinkable for Gorbachev himself. The reasons usually attributed to Russians for Gorbachev's electoral defeat do not stand up to scrutiny. In general, they have to do with the decay of Soviet might, as if it hadn't been decaying before Gorbachev came to power or as if he had deliberately set about reducing the USSR to the status of a second-rate power or even down to a condition of economic underdevelopment. Yet Russian voters ratified Yeltsin, who was more responsible for Russian economic and political chaos than Gorbachev ever was. In sum, Russians yearned for the good old communist-imperial days even as they enjoyed their liberties and they blamed Gorbachev for liquidating the past without crediting him with having inaugurated a new Russia and having tried to manage change so that Russians would not have to be nostalgic about the USSR’s standing in the world. In the end, it could just be a matter of personal appeal: Gorbachev was charismatic under the Soviet regime, especially among his communist colleagues, but in a democracy he gives people the blahs. Yeltsin instead, who had all the vices of a Russian autocrat, but also enough patriotism to know when he was doing more harm than good, and to act accordingly, had the charisma that Gorbachev lacked. Gorbachev's detainment in the Crimea by communists that until then he had trusted probably convinced the vast majority of Russians that he was not the man to steer their country on the roaring seas of the new politics. It may be that Russians are still not comfortable unless they feel they have a strong man at the helm. But it is also not likely that they will give up their flawed democracy without a fight.
The downfall of Soviet communism was on the whole a good thing. It was politically beneficial for Russians and for the world. It made the end of the Cold War and the triumph of America, the land of the free, the paradigm of economic prosperity, definitive. But there is the other side of the coin. Even before it had ended, the Cold War was in a steady state because the USA and the USSR knew enough not to get reckless with their nuclear arsenals. Still, the rivalry was there with the possibility of de-stabilization. Reagan's antagonistic attitude and his threat of undermining the MAD equilibrium with the SDI were evidence either that the balance of world forces was very delicate or that the world had attained such a degree of stability that nuclear war was out of the question. Reagan's America used its power with swagger and seemed willing to go the distance against the USSR. This was alright because the USSR, by then, was fooling no one about being the Marxist paradise, the paladin of peace, or a real economic rival of America. But it was not alright if Reagan's "evil empire" was a valid representation of the USSR, for evil knows no bounds and if America really had come up with a workable SDI there was no reason to believe that the USSR would not have struck. Two things are more likely: one, Reagan did not really mean what he said and what he and his advisors wanted was to put the USSR under the greatest possible strains; two, the USSR far from being an evil empire was conscious of its responsibilities as a nuclear super-power that would not let the worse come to worst in the confrontation with America. Gorbachev cannot be explained except as a product of a form however attenuated of responsible government. It is conceivable that no Soviet leader would have let himself be provoked into a nuclear misstep by Reagan's taunting. With considerable hindsight, the existence of the USSR was not a menace to peace but a force for peace. With Gorbachev it became even more so, because Gorbachevism stood, not only for glasnost and perestroika, but also for relations with America not on the basis of reciprocal fear but of cooperation. Admitting that Gorbachev himself was probably never altogether clear about his precise goals, if anything like Gorbachev's agenda had been allowed to follow its course, the USA and a democratic USSR could have cooperated in managing the crises that beset the world after Gorbachev was set aside and the USSR was dismantled. Yugoslavia might just possibly not have come apart without the Soviet example. America certainly could have benefited by having a Soviet counterpoise to Pakistan in Afghanistan. Conceivably, an arrangement like this could have prevented 9/11 from happening. This is not to say that Gorbachev the individual could have saved the world a lot of grief, but it is to make the admittedly risky claim that the absence of the USSR from the world in general and from crisis-prone regions in particular has contributed to the instabilities that are the traits of the world situation today.
With Gorbachev's fall, there began one of the most traumatic periods in the history of Russia. Yeltsin was the outstanding and indisputable leader of the country. In the light of the economic policies he adopted, it is undeniable that he had extirpated from his belief-system any residue of communism. He still had a political strain from his communist past which emerged in the run up to the presidential election in 1996, but, as we shall see, he did not allow it to flourish. At any rate, the crucial events during Yeltsin's tenure after Gorbachev's resignation were economic in nature. Fading to background, politics let the "economic revolution"-in an NYT article it was called the "Russian devolution"-take its course. By profession, Yeltsin was a construction foreman. Like peasant Khrushchev, he looked the part. Unlike Khrushchev, he had only a rudimentary knowledge of economics. Gorbachev might not have been an economic expert either, but he knew that, starting from a communist base, economic change is better slow than swift. China is proving Gorbachev at least partially right and if it ever truly democratizes it will wholly vindicate Gorbachev's approach. The contemporary history of Russia is still barely known, much less understood. Russia is so huge and diverse and skewed in so many different ways that it is impossible to generalize about it. It is even impossible to generalize by denying all generalizations about Russia. Many patterns emerged as the country was transformed economically: from the huge capitalist wave (like Hokusai's woodblock print) that swept Moscow; to the many variations on the privatization program as it applied to the different cities, provinces, and regions; to the autonomous nooks and crannies where communist habits skulked like immunized bacteria. Either tipped by Russian insiders or by foreigners who had some access backstage, Western observers took fixes on facets of the economic process: how banks were still granting unsecured loans to industries; how inefficient producers, in the absence of liquidity, bartered inventories among each other; how corruption had become a normal part of doing business; how rivalries or debt-collections or turf-competitions were settled by violent means; how, in general, the communist economy was dis-assembled without the adoption of saving capitalist graces, including, in the understanding of many of those observers, letting foreign managers run the Russian show the way it should be. Russia was supposed to become a model of a smoothly functioning capitalist economy overnight and since it couldn't achieve this water-into-wine miracle any journalist could write as if he knew exactly what it was that was wrong with such a backward, corrupt, violent, and incompetent country.
There seems to be consensus that Russia had an option between a gradual and a speedy way of going about change. The gradual way, presumably Gorbachev's, although he isn't usually credited, consisted in legislating capitalism into existence with solid time-tested capitalist institutions brought in and put in place, thus subjecting the new system to oversights and reasonable restraints. The speedy or fast-track way, called "shock treatment", was to privatize massively, to let market forces determine who survived and who succumbed, and along the way to improvise the legal and institutional framework for Russian capitalism. This presumed option is speculative. There is only one possible way in history. Background or antecedent conditions determine what that way is. The background conditions in Russia were certainly not for gradualism. Before it became official, privatization was already under way, and privatization, according to the probably accurate general view, consisted in stripping and selling assets to make quick millions, just as quickly stashed away outside of Russia. This is what junk bonds were all about in America in the 1980s: raising capital to buy large diversified corporations and break them up to sell its profitable parts at huge profits letting the rest rust or sink. In other words, Russians were quite good at what Americans had discovered only a decade earlier. That in Russia such opportunities to get rich quick would be ignored or rejected was not in the nature of human affairs. Those profiting from these operations were not rich foreigners, and not ordinary Russians either, but Russians who under the Soviet system were inscribed in the nomenklatura. They were the insiders who managed Soviet enterprises, to do which they had to belong to the CPSU. Their condition as insiders did not come about after the USSR dissolved but had been attained long before, so it can be said that under communism, even of the extremely conservative Brezhnevian sort, capitalism was already in a healthy, fetal stage. When privatization became official, its practical mechanisms were already known down to the subtlest details. Also, the process showed how under any system, capitalist, communist, mixed, or whatever, whether in a village or an empire, talent in one way or another always outs. Yeltsin's economic inner circle was partial to fast-track privatization and its members were always putting under the president's nose specialists who favored that approach. The more prominent figures in the circle were Gennady Burbulis, Yegor Gaidar, and Anatoly Chubais. Burbulis was an all-purpose advisor. Gaidar was acting prime minister. A ministry for privatization was headed by Chubais.
(27) A short course on privatization
It doesn't take a profound knowledge of economics to know what privatization consists in. If I have in my possession on trust a family heirloom, I can privatize it by paying my relatives something or I can simply keep it if nobody asks about it or if they all die. Alternatively, I can sell the family silver to a third party and either give my relatives their share or keep the money. I can take the silver and melt it into ingots and put them in a bank or I can pay myself a tour of the world with them. In all cases, I have privatized. In the case of the Russian economy, it helped, for legitimacy and for the adoption of standard capitalist practices, to have the sanction of foreign experts and institutions. Some professorial economists had made a career of privatization schemes. It was these who invented the phrase "shock treatment" and who told Russians how to privatize above aboard instead of just grabbing what you could lay your hands on. One of these foreign advisers, the one who got the most publicity, was Jeffrey Sachs, who before going to Russia had privatized for the non-communist Polish government. Organized privatization rather than the grab-as-grab-can variety took the form of auctions in which in theory ordinary citizens bade with scrip for installed capital. This was like giving the inheritors shares in the heirloom. From the results of important auctions, it was observed that, before the bidding commenced, deals had been struck by which those who had already made their bundle through similar or more likely less orderly means ended up with the ownership of the industrial plants or whatever it was that was being put on the block. This was like paying the heirs for the heirloom. The Agency for International Development (AID), an American organization for channeling economic assistance to under-developed countries, pitched into the Russian privatization process with $300 million, some of which reputedly ended up in the pockets of economists charged with administering it. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were also involved. The biggest plum in the privatization process was the immense monopolistic Gazprom, the company which owns most of Russia's natural gas industry. With a payroll that ran to over 350,000 persons, it was Russia's biggest company. In Gorbachev's time it was run by Viktor Chernomyrdin. Gazprom was undersold so scandalously that even Sachs declared that it should be re-nationalized. It is conceivably the biggest scam in history, but it has remained private and has made millionaires of many Russians that were in on the quickie de-statization of Russia's economy. In all, it is estimated that from 1993 to 1999 capital flight from Russia lies somewhere between 200 and 500 billion dollars, a vague but appalling estimate, even at its lower end, for much of that money was made by individuals and groups of individuals despoiling the Russian economy practically under the eyes of the government which should have prevented it and of a public who could do nothing about it but stare. Admittedly, too, given the dates for the estimate above, part of those transferences, perhaps most of them, were made by what had become legitimate businessmen and not just by communists after a fast buck and a quick get away.
In 1993, Gaidar, by then himself a millionaire, as was Chubais, handed executive power to Chernomyrdin. Russia had spawned a congeries of multi-billionaires, two of whom, Boris Berezovsky, automobile magnate, and André Gusinsky, a former theater director who made enough money to nurture aspirations of becoming the number one media baron in Russia, were the most visible. But there were many others making a rich display of their wealth, such as the Russian drugs-firm owner seen in a NYT photograph in the process of purchasing in his Moscow office a bottle of claret with a $40,000 price tag. There has never been in history such a fantastic proliferation of nouveaux riches in such a short term and of such a magnitude of opulence. During the 1980s, America had made wealth-flaunting not only respectable but even a sign of good taste, a development which would have floored Molière, or even the rich themselves before the vulgar but undeniably prestigious celebrations for Reagan's first inaugural. Thus, exhibitionist rich Russians, even those in the Mafia, were well within internationally admired social norms. As the process for the re-arrangement of the social order, with a consequent rise in criminality, had gone on unabated from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, some of the new Croesuses, notoriously Gusinsky, had their own platoons of armed-to-the-teeth bodyguards. Russia had become the sort of place in which money was unflinchingly and unashamedly power, a living society that in America existed only in the caricatural form of a film such as Coppola's Godfather II. All of this obviously had to trouble ordinary Russians profoundly. It wasn't that some Russians were getting very rich and most weren't. After all, Russians, especially in the larger cities, were now free to do many things that before were forbidden, among which was making a better living for themselves without having the secret police on their backs. Since Russians knew the basics of privatization as well any one else, what shock therapy introduced were such things as a price spiral through the removal of controls and subsidies and the reduction of spending in the "social net" because of the need to balance budgets. Free convertibility was implicit in privatization itself, for what would be the point of stripping and selling if what you had left were heaps of rubles which had to be made productive in more strip-and-sell schemes? Privatized firms handed less money to the government than state-run enterprises, so fiscal receipts went on falling making budgetary discipline even more painful. The most troubling consequence of this was that while a few benefited hugely from privatization and shock therapy, many Russians were having a hard time adjusting to the new order of things. Some, particularly the elderly and others that depended on government transfers, were hurting acutely. In the countryside people were more affected than city-dwellers, who had more water in which to swim.
As Russia had become a democracy even before it became a showcase of capitalist inequality, politics might have offered a way to get at the rascals. There were a few stumbling blocks here also. No major elections were scheduled for the immediate future. A non-binding referendum, which means Yeltsin could have ignored it if it went against him, gave him a majority. Another stumbling block to effective political action was that Russia had no stable political parties! The history of western Europe and its American offshoots is almost unimaginable without the existence of political parties. In the 18th century, England had Tories and Whigs, whose roots went back to 17th century dynastic changes. The names were reciprocal insults. They originated in pro-Stuart (Tories, or Irish bandits) and pro-Hanoverian (Whigs, or Scottish raiders) sympathies, but there existed between the two bands sufficient substantive social differences to make them the cores of the great 19th century Conservative and Liberal political parties. Because of where representatives sat in the National Convention, the French Revolution was the source of the right-left political classification of parties, which of course also made possible centrism. The Supreme Soviet had emanated from elections held in December 1988 and at that time, although there had been some multiple-candidate elections for people's deputies, there existed only the CPSU. After the CPSU was disenfranchised, many parties had been founded, various mainly as purely personal political instruments. The most important were: Russia's Choice and Democratic Russia, created for the specific purpose of supporting Yeltsin; the Liberal Democratic Party, an empty formula that the eccentric and once much-feared Vladimir Zhirinovsky used to give some kind of respectability to his public antics; the re-founded Communist Party of Russia, headed by Genady Zyuganov; and smaller groups such as Civic Union, Yabloko, the National Salvation Front, and the Movement for Democratic Political Reform. Except for the communists, these parties, even those for Yeltsin, did not have national organizations. Most of the members of Russia's parliament followed the dictates either of their conscience or their convenience. The sense of accountability to a constituency wasn't there. But you would have had to be deaf and blind not to sense Russian discontents and the Supreme Soviet during 1993 became vociferous in its opposition to Yeltsin and to everything that emerging capitalist Russia stood for. There arose a confrontation between the executive and the legislative branches in which the latter demanded a return to the past and Yeltsin not only was not prepared to budge but also assumed the role of defender of the new Russia whatever its shortcomings. The ringleaders in the Supreme Soviet were Ruslan Khasbulatov, a choleric Chechen, and Aleksandr Rutskoi, Yeltsin's hand-picked vicepresident and former general.
As the conflict spiraled, enlightened public opinion in Moscow realized that the parliament really did intend to legislate Russia into a communist-fascist dark age and that only the bulky, boozy Yeltsin could prevent that from happening. Through a patently unconstitutional decree, the Russian president dissolved parliament. Rutskoi and Khasbulatov defied Yeltsin's ban and organized a resistance movement in the White House. The conflict could have been solved quickly through the use of military force, but neither side had at first the power to command its intervention. Parliament was legally in the right in refusing to disband, as a constitutional court confirmed, but Yeltsin was the lawfully elected Russian president and if he was deposed the armed forces would be assuming a heavy responsibility that could degenerate into social chaos with divisions ranged against one another. However constitutional, the Supreme Soviet was not seen as a viable political option, not anyway at the stage at which Russian society had arrived in the process of shedding communism. The defiant deputies were not even wholly communistic but had a heavy admixture of social aberrations such as fascism, ultra nationalism, and anti-Semitism. Neither as communists nor as fascists nor as whatever else they stood for could they be considered a fair reflection of Russian public opinion. Physically, the Supreme Soviet, or the quorum of deputies that sustained its constitutionality, was in the disadvantageous position of being contained within the White House. The deputies were the besieged and Yeltsin was the besieger. But the siege was not entirely constricting. The deputies chose to be inside the parliament building because if they left it, they had no place to go but home. After ordering that all possible pressure be put on them short of an attack by the police, Yeltsin took a detached, nonchalant attitude to the situation until some deputies left their redoubt and tried to occupy a television center known as Ostankino that transmitted nation-wide. Things were beginning to get out of hand when Yeltsin came out like a furious bear, as he had done during the coup against Gorbachev. He swung the minister of defense, Gen. Pavel Grachev, to his side and tanks arrived and surrounded the White House. After firing some rounds at the central floors of the building, where flames and smoke poured out of windows charring the walls around them, there followed an attack that left fourteen dead. Soldiers occupied the White House and the last defenders of parliament dispersed. As had happened to the conspirators in the August 1991 coup, the parliamentary ringleaders were arrested, held prisoner for a time, and then released. There was a difference in that Gorbachev had been illegally detained and this time it was Yeltsin who acted outside of the law. Grachev's support was to be at the origin of Yeltsin's greatest mistake, a worse blunder than Gorbachev's consent for KGB intervention in Vilnius. Things would get much worse for Yeltsin before they got better.
(28) Yeltsin tries to put his house in order
One thing emerged clearly from the taking of the White House. It was obvious that Russians did not relish the thought of bringing back communist despotism. Many who were struggling to keep afloat probably reasoned that their chances of improving were better under a system which permitted individual enterprise than under one that illegalized it. Wasn't the history of Russia before and during communism that of the state encroaching without restraint on the private lives of its citizens? The modernizing Peter the Great had converted the Russian Orthodox Church into an instrument of the monarchy through the Holy Synod, which enjoined priests to break the secret of the confessional if the security of the state was at risk. Lenin had wiped out the few gains for due process that were made under the last Romanovs. Under Stalin of course there was no real legality, at least in the political sphere. Collective leadership was an improvement, but it was potentially Stalinist. And under Yeltsin Russians, whatever hardships they might be undergoing, were not willing to risk a reversion to Stalinism. After Yeltsin's coup, Russia was endowed with a new constitution in which the power of the president was considerably enhanced. Before, any minister who served as spokesman for the president, such as Gaidar or Chernomyrdin, was considered the equivalent of a prime minister. Now, the post of prime minister was officially created, although it continued to be entirely responsive to the president, who could dissolve the Duma (the re-adopted traditional Russian name for legislature) and call for new elections if it failed to ratify the president's choice after three tries. Moscow had come too close to a legal reversion to communism for Russian voters' tastes, but capitalist Russia and its flagrant abuses were still so distasteful that in December the electorate gave a plurality to Zhirinovsky, as repulsive a politician as a democracy could throw up. Zhirinovsky was what in America would be called a "plain speaker", but he was also extremely politically incorrect-among other things, he was an anti-Semite with a Jewish father-so he raised many hackles by assuming fascist stances, using ethnic slurs, and turning violent when challenged. Just as Gorbachev was more admired outside Russia than in his country, so Zhirinovsky was taken more seriously by American journalists than by Russian politicians. Yeltsin's economic policies went on unchanged and social conditions in Russia tended to deteriorate rather than improve. Gusinsky was building up his conglomerate of media, in which facts were crudely reported, though not in a manner that would discredit the free and easy ways through which he himself had made his huge fortune. Yeltsin unwittingly provided him with the opportunity to become the Russian champion of freedom of information.
Russia had been too preoccupied with one thing and another, especially the crises stepping on the heels of each other-August 1991 and its sequels, shock therapy all through 1992, and Yeltsin's own coup in 1993-for the central government to do much more than to try to keep the Russian Federation in line with its policies, or for that matter, its lack of policies, which is often what laissez faire is about; and Russia was also, among the other singular things it became in that time, the greatest historical exemplar of the abuses to which laissez faire lends itself. The first communist state in history, the greatest historical refutation of all the basics of capitalism, had become in only a couple of years the embodiment of the worst excesses of capitalism. In the midst of these concerns, the unacceptable situation in Chechnya had been neglected, although not entirely forgotten. Chechnya was like a stomach ulcer, tiny but constantly painful. Since in Chechnya itself everything went, Chechens became visible members of Russian mafias. So here was a situation in which a province of a country had declared its independence unilaterally and still had the gall to encourage its own citizens to engage in unlawful activities within the country it officially wanted to have nothing to do with. From reports about Dudayev, the former general and self-proclaimed president of Chechnya, he was probably partly insane-not a good reference for the Soviet higher-officers class-so any possibility of a negotiated settlement was out of the question. Yeltsin was already under pressure from Grachev and people in his entourage to do something about Chechnya. Separatism was in vogue and much of the information about Russia that the Western press printed was about this or that local de facto dictator, or about cities that were still living in a twilight zone between communism and capitalism, or of entire provinces and regions trying to ignore the changes that Russia had undergone. In October 1994, the ruble took a big dive, which was not really that significant in Russia itself, most of whose citizens were not making currency transactions on a daily basis, but which showed that the Russian economy was doing badly. Not only had social conditions been deteriorating, but the chances that they would improve through economic growth were being visibly squashed. It was at that juncture that Yeltsin authorized Grachev to take Chechnya by force. Russian military capability, already discredited in Afghanistan, had been declining as the entire country went downhill. Even so, the Russian high command believed that it would subdue Chechnya practically by marching in. Chechnya is about the size of New Jersey with some 1.4 million inhabitants, more than half of whom lived in the capital Grozny. The Russians sent in 40,000 soldiers, but the Chechens had spent the previous years setting a gigantic ambuscade and the fighting was hard, much more so than the Russians expected. Instead of sticking to the facts, American reporters went on about how one Chechen was worth ten Russians. Gusinsky's television network, which by then covered all of Russia, made a name for itself with reporting that was as unsparing as that of the American media in Vietnam. In exasperation, the Russians did a blitz in Grozny and caused the greatest destruction and loss of life that any city had experienced after World War II, to no useful purpose for the Chechens went on resisting without let up and the two sides got bogged down in a small but awful war that had no end in sight, even after Dudayev's cell phone was tracked down by the Russians and he was killed by a well-aimed missile.
Even as the war in Chechnya ground on, the insatiable Russian billionaires were engaged in bigger and better deals, most of them at the expense of the complaisant state that Yeltsin headed. One of the magnates, Vladimir Potanin, a typical commie insider who turned the Soviet Vneshtorbank into the privately owned (and better sounding) Uneximbank, invented the ultimate scam, which was to lend the state money that probably came from underpaying taxes in exchange for shares in lucrative state companies. This was the equivalent of the rich using money stolen from the poor to make themselves richer at the further expense of the poor. It was the most nightmarish Marxist prediction coming true in the country that had first espoused and then repudiated Marxism. Communism had been terrible but not quite that economically inequitable. This was in 1995 and parliamentary elections were set for December. On polling day, the voters ignored lingering scruples about the Soviet past and gave a strong plurality to Zyuganov and the Communist Party. This was not aberrant voting to needle the powerful, as in the case of the vote for Zhirinovsky, but a real protest vote. Since there were to be presidential elections in 1996, it might have been construed as the ram with which the communists were going to break down the huge Kremlin portals and recover what had been theirs. One of the winners in the parliamentary elections was another plain speaker, Gen. Aleksandr Lebed, but not a violent clown like Zhirinovsky nor a mad dog like Dudayev. He had become famous in a situation which would not have induced much trust in his ability to achieve what he later did. The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, peopled historically by speakers of Romanian, declared its independence during the time when most of the other Soviet republics were doing the same, but the circumstances were somewhat special. Moldova, the country that emerged from the Soviet womb, was very small and it was half Russian. Moldova is divided by the Dniester river and most Russians live on its left or eastern bank. Lebed commanded the regional Soviet land forces, but he was ordered to butt out of Moldova. Instead he occupied eastern Moldova and set up a Russian administration for the region that has become known as "Transdniestra". After retiring from the army, Lebed participated in the 1995 parliamentary elections with his own personal party, the Congress of Russian Communities. Yeltsin, whose sense of opportunity no modern politician can match, co-opted Lebed and, of all people, gave him a free hand to end the interminable conflict in Chechnya. Lebed accomplished his task with a truce extricating the battered Russian forces. Having achieved this, Lebed, who had his own presidential ambitions, left the Kremlin to campaign for himself.
In opinion polls before the presidential election, Zyuganov was leading Yeltsin by large margins. The American financier George Soros, who took a great interest in the Russian process, was prognosticating a communist victory. This had already happened