Tuesday, June 29, 2004
This pair of articles bring to mind some of the difficulties of the balancing act involved in maintaining values while pursuing foreign-policy objectives (sometimes through enlightened self-interest, i.e. encouraging the spread of democracy) while still having to deal with illiberal, dictatorial regimes in a realpolitik world. How much pressure is too much? Where can you draw the lines? How much concession on their part is enough to keep the "hard line" at bay?
Following a wide range of events, as the decision-makers have to, tends to grant a more measured understanding, both of the actions and the actors, than obsessive examination of any one issue may result in. A decade or so hence, the reasons for differences in treatment may become obscure after the milieu's gone cold, leaving judgmental campus kingpins to judge harshly. We should know better.
First, the continuing difficulties in knowing how to handle Libya:
President Bush has expressed his enthusiasm for the process. Speaking in the East Room of the White House on March 12, Bush noted the release Libyan dissident Fathi El-Jahmi, and said, "You probably have heard, Libya is beginning to change her attitude about a lot of things."
Well, maybe Libya has changed her rhetoric, but not her attitude. Speaking in Cairo on March 24, Saif Islam Qaddafi, the Libyan strongman's son, lectured Arab governments about democracy. "Instead of shouting and criticizing the American initiative, you have to bring democracy to your countries," Saif said. But, as Saif spoke, Libyan security forces surrounded the home of El-Jahmi, shortly thereafter arresting him, his wife, and his son. Libyans interpret the move as a signal from Qaddafi that Bush is insincere and weak.
As Burns legitimized Qaddafi with a new State Department office in Tripoli, I sat down with Husayn Shafei in a conference room at the American Enterprise Institute. Just as Burns has not met with El-Jahmi or made his arrest a stumbling block in Foggy Bottom's drive to reestablish ties with Tripoli, State Department officials have not sat down with Shafei. His story might be inconvenient, but he will repeat it today at 10 A.M. at the Washington office of Freedom House...
Of course, one draws the lines differently, among other reasons, depending on the level of perceived threat, the level of realistic expectation for future change for the positive and the efficacy of the application of the hard or soft hand.
Iran likely calls for a different set of responses:
But the pictures of the incident are not those of a truck out of control. It all took place at a border crossing, at a customs inspection station. At the time of the explosion there were eleven trucks parked there, and several of them were carrying explosives for the construction of bombs. They were headed for Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they would be delivered to the forces of Gulbadin Hekhmatyar, the terrorist chieftain who has long killed on behalf of the mullahs.
The explosion engulfed the entire column, which is why — as some of the pictures show — the columns of the customs building were shattered. Friends of mine in Iran insist that the trucks were deliberately blown up by Iranians hostile to the regime. In any event, the next day — the 25th — Pakistani border police arrested some 18 men trying to sneak into Pakistan. Fifteen of them were traveling on false Bangladeshi passports; the other three were Iranian agents. All are currently being interrogated by Pakistani authorities.
Meanwhile, Iraqi authorities have rounded up eight Iranian intelligence officers in Najaf, and one other — a high-ranking officer in the Revolutionary Guards — was caught while attempting to sabotage an oil pipeline.
As you see, the Iranians are frantically increasing their efforts to drive Coalition forces out of Iraq, to wreck the Iraqi economy — and especially to inflate oil prices, which the mullahs hope will bring down the Bush presidency — and to destabilize the fragile Karzai government in Afghanistan. They, and their Syrian and Saudi allies, are doing this because the liberation of Iraq is indeed threatening the authority of the remaining terror masters in Tehran, Damascus, and Riadh. The entire region is bubbling from the heat of democratic revolution, and you can see the fears of the terror masters as they steadily increase the repression of their own people. Syrians can now listen to accurate news broadcasts and calls for freedom from the new radio station launched by the Syrian Reform Party, which has prompted new crackdowns from the Assad regime. And in Iran, despite the unfortunate claim of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage that the mullahs preside over a democracy, one international organization after another has exposed the monstrosities carried out daily by the murders who govern the Islamic Republic. Hands of Cain, an organization fighting capital punishment everywhere, awarded the People's Republic of China its award as top executioner for 2003, with Iran solidly in second position. Hands of Cain noted that 98.7 percent of all executions in the world last year were carried out by dictatorial, illiberal, or authoritarian states.
Just as in the case of terrorism, if you want to win the war against the world's leading executioners, you must fight for the spread of freedom...
