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May 18, 2005
Uzbekistan
To state the obvious: Uzbekistan has an awful government.
And it looks like they're trying the old tried-and-true way of hoodwinking us Yanks into believing what they want us to: "No, no, those dead people weren't protesters. They were terrorists."
Thirty years ago Pinochet would have called them communists instead of terrorists, but, absent the name change, it's the same game.
Our government has lots os suspected terrorists locked up in Gitmo. Why locked up? Because if they really are terrorists, we want to interrogate them. And for that you need them alive.
When's the last time you heard of "terrorists" staging mass protests by the hundreds? Terrorists work in small cells or alone, not in large groups. And 100 terrorists in the same country don't all come out of the woodwork on the same day. That risks exposing too many of their personnel at once. When hundreds of unarmed people are gunned down at once, it's just a massacre.
As I mentioned, I'm stating the obvious.
But it looks like we may have to live with the obvious, despite how awful it is. The military base we have on Uzbek soil is crucial to our efforts in Afghanistan, and the administration is not willing to object to the Uzbek government's conduct in gunning down civilian protestors if that might jeapordize the continued U.S. military presence there.
This gives the lie to the 'winger propaganda machine that's been telling us that every democratic uprising around the world is credible to President Bush.
They said he was responsible for the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. But really, the Ukranians were.
Georgia? Kyrgyzstan? Yeah, he did those too.
But Uzbekistan? That was terrorists.
The Democratic Party is for a democratic foreign policy: We encourage and defend democracies, not dictatorships.
This doesn't mean we have to go out and foment unrest in every authoritarian state in the world. But it does mean that we use our leverage in places like Uzbekistan to encourage them to democratize, rather than letting our base become a means to blackmail us into accepting their dictatorship.
Condoleeza Rice should not be less noisy than Jack Straw in objecting to the crackdown in Uzbekistan.
Posted by James Fichter at May 18, 2005 11:16 AM
