Wither Democracy?

OK, I am probably out of my depth here and running the risk of Google Blog searches sending many unwanted viewers to my sleepy little Blog, but I may as well spout off anyway. This post is about the naïve view of democracy as practiced and shoved at the world by the Bush Administration and others who have turned into political pushers of this drug of majority rule.

The most recent evidence that democracy isn’t for everyone just occurred in Pakistan – or nuclear-armed Pakistan, as the media prefers. Of course we all know about the recent assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Her reason for coming out of exile was due to a grand plan hatched by Condoleezza Rice and the President that was supposed to put a power sharing arrangement in place with Pakistan’s current president, Pervez Musharraf who arrived as president in the decidedly non-democratic manner of leading a military coup and naming himself the leader of the government.

Of course this is where things get dicey because Musharraf is an enemy or our enemy (Al-Qaida) and, as a leader of a huge military, he is seen as something of a stopgap of growth of the terror group. Although he has not been altogether as successful as we would like, he does just enough to keep Washington’s billions headed his way. His willingness to hold elections gained him even more support.

Enter former Prime Minister Bhutto, who became a “former prime minister” after being sent into exile on corruption charges, leaving a mostly hostile country behind but not without at least $20 million to avoid living in exile on a skimpy budget.
American and European meddling forced Musharraf to hold “free and fair” election – a wonderful catch-phrase that doesn’t even work in our own country – and he won a sizeable majority of sitting lawmakers. An independent Supreme Court in Pakistan attempted to nullify the election but Musharraf fired the court and suspended the Constitution for several weeks. It is believed Bhutto declined to run for president because of the power-sharing agreement that was being worked out between her and Musharraf and pushed principally by the U.S. Naturally any agreement put in place that appears to exclude the voters, no matter the amount of international symmetry, was bound to smell to everyday Pakistanis and they viewed it as a deal between a corrupt former prime minister working in concert with a corrupt president. Of course they were likely correct.

All this set the stage for Bhutto to make a triumphant return to Pakistan for what was supposed to be a coronation. Everything seemed to be aligned; the international press, full of press kits from huge PR firms such as the U.S.’s Burson Marsteller (you can’t have a PR firm or a press without press kits), cleaned up her image outside of Pakistan while world leaders rejoiced at their own progressiveness of backing a woman in a male-dominated culture. Someone forgot to include the one million suspects who wanted her stopped at all costs and we had what most real analysts would say was a predictable result. Not only was her murder the second attempt on her life, Musharraf too has been a target, narrowly escaping two assassination attempts, all in Rawalpindi, coincidentally, which happens to be the head of the Pakistani military apparatus. This would be the equivalent of attempting to assassinate a sitting president in the U.S. in the middle of Fort Bragg.

So we have one sacrificed at the altar of democracy and this didn’t need to happen. Bhutto shouldn’t have believed her international press clippings and should have stayed in England as a permanent opposition group, and we shouldn’t have forced democracy on a people who are neither ready for such a form of governance nor ready to be governed, for that matter. I head one Pakistani say the killing of Bhutto was the same as the Kennedy assassination. Maybe to him it was, but I don’t remember a riot breaking out in the streets after Kennedy was shot and I don’t recall 50 people being killed from the civil unrest that’s been pushed by Bhutto supporters. Pakistan, with all its tribal factions among 170 million diverse people probably needs more of a dictator than someone promising a newest pro-democracy phrase, “rule of law.”

Why is what happened in Pakistan so important, I hear you ask before giving up on this messy post? Mainly because pushing democracy on an unsuspecting people has been done before and will be done again, and our Western leadership seems to have learned nothing from it. The Lebanese were pushed into voting for new leadership and the voters gave us a power struggle between two warring terror organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas. The moderates we supported came in third. We wanted free and fair elections in Nicaragua and because of American intervention, we got Daniel Ortega back in power with only 37 percent of the vote. What we was fought with bullets in the Eighties was turned around 20 years later with ballots.

The new weapon of choice of over-the-hill lefties is democracy, not armed conflict. In the past five years, voters have elected Socialist leaders in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Mexico. These four countries make up more than 70 percent of our oil imports so we have to be nice even if we don’t like them.

In case you think this is a Bush Administration problem – and it is a big one – this happened under President Clinton too. How many remember the reason we sent the military to Haiti? Jean-Bertrand Aristide won what some say was the first democratic election, which ended the regime of the Duvalier family. Actually the younger Duvalier was, in fact, elected but immediately named himself ruler for life, a good job if you can get it. A well-armed American military re-installed Aristide who quickly lived down to most Haitian leaders, was re-elected in what is largely viewed as a Chicago-style, vote-counting scandal, only to be voted out by a former ally because he had done little to improve the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. Makes one wonder why we helped in the first place.

Clinton also decided to become indirectly involved in internal Israeli politics by sending U.S. tax dollars to his politicos James Carville and Paul Begala to make sure Ehuad Barak was voted in instead of the strong-willed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It seems Clinton couldn’t work a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians and it was having a negative impact on his Nobel Peace Prize chances so he made sure the dance cards were re-arranged. A wimpy Barak eventually made a deal with the devil with the Oslo Peace Accords which ultimately resulted in peace in our time as evidenced by the First and Second Intifada.

Clinton also let Richard Holbrooke try his hand at dictatorship in the Balkans when the spoils of bombing former allies in Serbia allowed us to dictate who held the pink slip on Bosnia, the center of ethnic cleansing from all sides. Holbrooke’s idea – with a lot of help from other idiots – took place in the drafting of the Dayton Accords which said Bosnia would be trifurcated into a Muslim area, a Serb area and a split Muslim and Croat area. Leadership would be supplied by interested Europeans in what is called the Office of the High Representative, which can remove elected leaders from office and pretty much do what he or she wants. It is the only dictatorship in Europe, but don’t ask and don’t tell on that one as nobody involved likes to admit it.

Also out of the Balkans sprang up Kosovo. A district of the former Yugoslav Republic and strongly viewed by Serbs as a historic region of greater Serbia (strong as in willing to go to war to keep it from going independent). The Western world feels sorry for the ethnic Muslim Albanians who lead this tiny region that has no economy and no ability to survive on its own, so it’s forcing independence down the throats of unhappy Serbs. This has led to other breakaway republics around the world anxiously raising their hands and saying, “me too,” despite the fact that wankers like Holbrooke insist Kosovo is not a precedent. Fortunately his involvement in any future government is not a precedent either.

Bush doesn’t have clean hands in ensuring dummies get elected either. We spent what some will admit to be $160 million (probably twice that) to elect leadership-challenged Victor Yushchenko as president merely because he was not pro-Russian. I was there and I am certain that the U.S. government and its European allies stole the election from Viktor Yanukovich, thereby splitting the nation down the middle. All Yushchenko has done since elected is name is 22-year-old son as his economic minister and head for the office around noon where he paints for four hours before returning home. Meanwhile, the country is in the tank. The democracy pushers are very good at fixing elections but fall well-short when help is needed to actually lead a country. It should be no surprise that his approval rating is at 12 percent, up from nine percent after a number of Americans came on the scene to improve his image.

When the U.S. wishes to scold countries around the world for not being democratic enough, it likes to pick on Russia and its neighbor Belarus. We all hear about the evils of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose personal approval rating is nearly four times that of President Bush. We read in self-important journals that the great former chess players Gary Kasparov has been marching to stem the rolling back of democracy in Russia and his travails are well-chronicled. What is not so well-chronicled is that when he marches, he has fewer than 1,000 supporters and it only looks like more because he marches alongside the neo-Bolsheviks who believe Putin isn’t autocratic enough.

In poor Belarus, where life is relatively safe and stable, U.S. leaders don’t like their president in Alexander Lukaschenko, who has won recent election in Castro-style with almost 90 percent of the vote (strangely American leftists don’t mind such lop-sided elections in Cuba). A New Jersey Congressman named Chris Smith got the “Belarus Democracy Act” passed, which essentially ends economic relations with the country and making them even more dependent on Russia for survival. Essentially a Congressman from a state like New Jersey has told the Belarusian people to vote out their president if they want to do business with us and become a nice puppet for future NATO expansion.

This seems like a good place to finalize the endless sham of democracy. While we do have this Belarus Democracy Act and thunderous media denunciation of President Putin, we seemed to have missed putting in place the Saudi Arabia Democracy Act or the Chinese Democracy Act or even the Azerbaijan Democracy Act. I guess if you sell us oil, give us space to put air bases and produce lead-based toys for our children, you can skip right beyond the need for democracy. And if we Americans don’t like that, we can always have a vote. I think there is one here next November. I wonder if the computer voting screens will be in place by then.