Wash.Post: Present and Past

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Washington Post, Present and Past


[A strongly critical piece ran in the Post of the 15th discussing the
reality of the garbage the Bushies were spewing during the coup.  I
guess now that the shit's going to hit the fan (unless Chavez has
already cut a deal where he keeps it out of the fan in exchange for a
hands-off policy, which might explain his new loving feeling toward
the US) the press feels comfortable discussing the Emperor's wardrobe
choices.  It will be frustrating but defensible from the long view if
Chavez does keep a lid on the investigation: opponents of US
interventionism have rarely had an opportunity like this to get the
assistance of a sitting government in an investigation while the
trail is hot, but it's our job to keep on it from our end in any
case.  Chavez needs to ensure a future for the people of Venezuela. 
Ultimately, if the cost is that we have to keep digging without the
kind of confirmation we could get in a trial, who are we to ask that
Venezuelans take the risks of our curiosity?

A few interesting off-the-record quotes;  a surreal one, given
alleged US support for democratic principles first and foremost, from
a US official who apparently thinks he's _defending_ the response of
the US to coup plotters earlier this year:

"We said we can't tell you to remove a president or not to remove a
president... we did not wink, not even wink at anyone."

Okay, now full stop here.  Why was it the US was unwilling to say
something along the lines of "if you remove a President by
extraconstitutional means, the OAS charter prescribing isolation, and
the US laws prescribing the same, will of course come into full
force?" I mean, there are actual, honest-to-goodness laws that
Congress passed and stuff involved here.  The administration is not
at liberty to bring them up?  Of course it's not ordering them not to
stage a coup -- we wouldn't want to openly admit that they'd take our
orders one way or another -- but it's sure as hell a lot more strongly
suggesting that it'll Cause Trouble than to say, essentially, "We
won't take a stance on your plans for against.  (But have you read
our criticism of Chavez?  Here, let me give you a reprint on the way
out.)"

And here's one from a high-ranking Mexican pol:  "The United States
handled it badly, as is its wont" [...] U.S. policy, he said, is
"multilateralism a la carte and democracy a la carte."

Now, this fellow needs to read more of Chuck Krauthammer's material. 
Our new policy -- the Bush Doctrine -- is unilateralism, pure and
simple.  Where others happen to do the USA's bidding it will be called
multilateralism and, if the US can persuade enough people to vote
according to our instructions, then of *course* the Land of the Free
will support democracy.  The agency here is entirely on other
countries' shoulders, not on the US.

There is no a la carte for Uncle Sam.  He's having an all-he-can-eat
meal, and others can feel free to try and snag scraps from the table.

If you haven't read Krauthammer's exegesis of his theology of
fascism, the Post still has it up and I'm including a copy.  This
Op-Ed, and a longer version commissioned by the Weekly Standard, have
become important reading after 911, as they provide a theoretical
basis for US behavior that is quite popular on the right and doesn't
depend on the increasingly dull, even for them, "ooooh, terrorists!"
opening -- but is certainly strengthened by it.  This column defends
our anti-missile boondoggle and Kyoto backsliding in particular;
later variants go on to encompass our refusal to cooperate with
chemical weapons inspections -- the very infraction we're set to
invade Iraq over. --PB]


Washington Post - April 16, 2002, page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56800-2002Apr15.html

U.S. Seen as Weak Patron Of Latin Democracy
By Karen DeYoung

The Bush administration said yesterday that its policy toward the
dizzying events in Venezuela had been fully in tune with the rest of
the hemisphere, and that it will continue to work with its Latin
American partners to preserve Venezuelan democracy and justice.

"We'll be guided by the Inter-American Democratic Charter," said
State Department spokesman Philip Reeker, referring to the
Organization of American States' seven-month-old agreement to condemn
and investigate the overthrow of any democratically elected OAS
member government and, if necessary, suspend the offender's
membership.

But much of the rest of the hemisphere saw the administration's
response to the last five days in Venezuela in a somewhat different
light. In the view of a number of Latin American governments, they
were the ones who rose to defend democracy, while the United States
came limping along only when it became clear late Saturday that the
Friday morning coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had only
temporarily succeeded.

"The United States handled it badly, as is its wont," said a former
Mexican official with close ties to the government of President
Vicente Fox. U.S. policy, he said, is "multilateralism a la carte and
democracy a la carte."

A senior administration official yesterday repeated denials of
allegations by Chavez supporters that the United States had
encouraged the coup, although he acknowledged that U.S. officials had
met with a number of Chavez opponents. "They came here ... to
complain and to inform us and to tell us about the situation," he
said. "We said we can't tell you to remove a president or not to
remove a president ... we did not wink, not even wink at anyone."

Few Latin American officials appeared to believe the United States
was involved.

But they expressed a rueful lack of surprise at what they saw as the
administration's failure, despite President Bush's frequent
statements on the importance of hemispheric relations, to publicly
oppose it once it happened.

Instead, diplomats concentrated on what the Latin Americans had done
themselves, saying they were pleased that the OAS, a plodding,
historically powerless body that has long been dominated by
Washington, had actually managed to convene an emergency meeting on
Saturday, adopt a strong resolution condemning both the coup and the
violence that led up to it -- apparently instigated by Chavez backers
-- and dispatch its secretary general on a fact-finding mission to
Venezuela.

They were pleased that, despite their near-universal dislike of
Chavez, a left-leaning populist who has irritated or worried most of
them, they had defended democratic principles that have been so often
violated in many of their own countries.

"It's an example of how it should work," said a diplomat who asked
not to be named.

As recently as Friday, President Bush hailed the Democratic Charter
in the White House's annual Pan-American Day proclamation, calling it
an antidote to terror. The charter was approved by the 34 OAS member
nations in Lima, Peru, on Sept. 11, the day of the terrorist attacks
in New York and Washington. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
attended the gathering, but had to leave early to attend to more
pressing matters in Washington.

The charter put more teeth in an earlier OAS democracy declaration
signed in Santiago, Chile, in 1991. It was invoked on a number of
occasions by President George H.W. Bush, and by President Bill
Clinton, when unconstitutional actions threatened the governments of
Peru, Paraguay, Guatemala and Ecuador over the last decade. The
current Bush administration has referred to the documents as symbols
of the democracy that now prevails in all but one nation in the
hemisphere, Cuba.

Yet the first time elected governance was interrupted under Bush's
watch, his administration punted. Last Friday, South American
presidents attending an unrelated meeting in Costa Rica broke off to
sign a resolution condemning the apparent coup that had overthrown
Chavez that morning and invoking the Inter-American Democratic
Charter. As they were composing the document, White House spokesman
Ari Fleischer was announcing in Washington that Chavez had provoked
the crisis and resigned. "A transitional civilian government has been
installed," Fleischer said. "This government has promised early
elections." There was no mention of the Democratic Charter.

Most member countries have ambassadors at OAS headquarters here in
addition to their envoys to the U.S. government. But while the OAS
prepared Friday afternoon to convene an emergency meeting required
under the charter, the Bush administration summoned all the
hemisphere's bilateral ambassadors to a State Department briefing.
According to several participants, Assistant Secretary Otto J. Reich
told them the United States did not approve of coups and had not
promoted this one, but that Chavez had it coming.

When the OAS meeting began Saturday morning, a Caracas businessman
was occupying the presidential palace. Roger Noriega, the U.S.
ambassador to the OAS, took the floor to chastise member states for
being less concerned about Chavez's anti-democratic behavior over the
past 24 months than events of the last 24 hours.

But as the day wore on, Venezuela's new president started taking some
anti-democratic actions of his own, dissolving the National Assembly,
shutting the Supreme Court and voiding the constitution. Chavez
supporters flooded the streets.

"As it started to unravel," a diplomat said, "the United States
became less and less eager to try to lead" the debate.

When Sunday morning found Chavez back in power in Caracas, Latin
American governments hailed it as a victory for democracy. White
House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told NBC's "Meet the
Press" viewers that she hoped Chavez had learned his lesson.

At the State Department, Reeker described the Venezuelan situation as
"fluid," and said the administration was continuing to monitor it.
The important thing, he said, "is the mission of the OAS. We want the
OAS and the Democratic Charter that countries of the region signed up
to to play an important role in this process."


Washington Post - June 8, 2001, page A29

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=opinion/columns/krauthammercharles&contentId=A38839-2001Jun7&notFound=true

The New Unilateralism

by Charles Krauthammer

While Washington wasn't looking -- distracted by tax cuts, campaign
finance reform and the exquisite spectacle of Jim Jeffords wrestling
his conscience to a draw -- the Bush administration gave the nation a
new foreign policy. It is far from fully developed, but it is clear
and carries enormous implications.

After eight years during which foreign policy success was largely
measured by the number of treaties the president could sign and the
number of summits he could attend, we now have an administration
willing to assert American freedom of action and the primacy of
American national interests. Rather than contain American power
within a vast web of constraining international agreements, the new
unilateralism seeks to strengthen American power and unashamedly
deploy it on behalf of self-defined global ends.

Ends such as a defense against ballistic missiles. (We are -- most
Americans do not know -- entirely defenseless against them today.)
Indeed, the Bush administration's most dramatic demonstration of the
new unilateralism was its pledge to develop missile defenses and thus
abolish the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union.
And the most flamboyant demonstration of the new unilateralism was
Bush's out-of-hand rejection of the Kyoto protocol on global warming,
a refreshing assertion of unwillingness to be a party to farce, no
matter how multilateral.

With ABM and Kyoto, the new unilateralism is earning notice. It began
with a great gnashing of teeth by our allies: Nations that spent the
better part of the last 500 years raping and pillaging vast swaths of
the globe now pronounce themselves distressed at the arrogance of the
United States for refusing, at the height of its power, to play the
docile international citizen.

The French have charmingly dubbed us not a superpower but a
"hyperpower." The newly Democratic Senate is already giving tremulous
voice to similar misgivings about the new unilateralism, though
without the charm. "I have great concerns about a unilateral decision
[on missile defenses]," worried Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top
Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, "because I believe
that it could risk a second cold war -- Cold War II, I call it."

On Tuesday, Levin and other committee Democrats pilloried Douglas
Feith, President Bush's nominee for undersecretary of defense for
policy, for daring to suggest -- as he did in a brilliant legal brief
he co-authored two years ago -- that the 1972 ABM treaty expired when
its only other signatory (the Soviet Union) expired. Another defense
nominee, Jack Dyer Crouch II, was similarly attacked for daring to
oppose the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty -- an unenforceable
agreement that the Senate itself voted down in 1999.

A more measured response came from The Post, which editorialized that
"unilateralism [is] not an end in itself." True. It only describes
how one will conduct foreign policy. Nonetheless, how one conducts
foreign policy immeasurably affects what one ends up doing.

When you start, as did the Clinton administration, with a
self-declared foreign policy of "assertive multilateralism" -- a
moronic oxymoron that, if it meant anything, meant submerging
American will in a mush of collective decision-making
-- you have sentenced yourself to reacting to events or passing the
buck to multilingual committees with fancy acronyms.

Small countries are condemned to such constraint. Nations like Israel
and Taiwan have almost no freedom of action. Their foreign policy is
driven by destiny, dictated by the single goal of sustaining their
own existence. Even middle powers, such as Great Britain and Germany,
find foreign policy largely dictated by necessities of power and
geography.

An unprecedentedly dominant United States, however, is in the unique
position of being able to fashion its own foreign policy. After a
decade of Prometheus playing pygmy, the first task of the new
administration is precisely to reassert American freedom of action.
That means:

- Cutting our anachronistic offensive nuclear arsenal -- a legacy of
a bipolar world that no longer exists -- whether or not Russia
follows.

- Intervening abroad, not to "nation-build" where there is no nation
to be built but to protect vital interests.

- Shaping our defenses against new enemies -- like Iran and Iraq --
rather than, absurdly, against a former enemy, namely Russia.

- Dismissing environmental agreements so bizarrely self-flagellating
that they exclude India (population 1 billion), China (population 1.3
billion) and the rest of the Third World from their pollution
restrictions.

For a decade after the Cold War, reactionary liberalism gave us a
foreign policy frozen in the habits and conventions of the dead
bipolar era: foreign policy dominated by treaties, summits, arms
control, signing ceremonies.

The time warp is over.

The new unilateralism recognizes the uniqueness of the unipolar world
we now inhabit and thus marks the real beginning of American
post-Cold War foreign policy.

 
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