World Policy Journal: "Regime Change" and Other Enigmas

World Policy Journal
Volume XIX, No 3, Fall 2002

"Regime Change" and Other Enigmas
Karl E. Meyer

At press time, we cannot be sure whether Saddam Hussein's witching-hour offer of unrestricted inspections is meant seriously, or if the Security Council in any case will authorize the United States to carry out a "regime change" in Iraq. On its face, why shouldn't we applaud such an operation? We are reminded that the old League of Nations proved itself toothless when it stood by as Fascist Italy assaulted Ethiopia. "Collective security," or its facsimile, is seemingly smack on the line.

If ever a national leader provided an argument for proactive military surgery, it is surely Saddam Hussein. In his strong and well-delivered address to the United Nations, President Bush recited Saddam's blatant offenses: his aggressions against Iran, Kuwait, and Israel; his use of chemical weapons against Iranians and his own Kurdish subjects; his defiance of successive Security Council resolutions. Having followed his career for some time, I have yet to hear a favorable word about Saddam Hussein, the exception being during the Iran-Iraq War, when Washington officials implausibly, halfheartedly, and shamefully sought to justify their tilt toward, and covert aid for, the Butcher of Baghdad.

A common view in the Middle East was the blunt judgment proffered to an Israeli correspondent by Anwar Sadat, the late president of Egypt, that Saddam was "a madman, the son of a madman, and grandson of a madman." He is, we need to recall, the Iraqi leader who in the 1970s gunned down his senior party comrades, and more recently, by credible account, killed his two eldest sons-in-law and most of their relations. Besides, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and others contend, replacing Saddam's autocracy with a genuine democracy could transform the Arab Middle East, and drain the septic swamps of autocracy that nurture Islamic terrorism.

Alas, there's the rub. Put aside the matter of waging preventive war, which as David C. Hendrickson trenchantly argues elsewhere in this journal, confounds American traditions and hard-won global norms, and propels Washington on a perilous quest for universal empire. As worrying is the wretched record of past regime change.

A classic, if forgotten, case was the British-encouraged coup in 1971 that ousted Uganda's populist and erratic president, Milton Apollo Obote, and empowered Maj. Gen. Idi Amin, who was esteemed not just in Britain but by hard-boiled army officers in Israel, where he had trained. "Amin is a splendid man by any standards, and is held in great respect and affection by his British colleagues," commented one Briton in a recently declassified confidential report. "He is tough and fearless and in the judgment of everybody, completely reliable." Another colleague usefully added that he was a good rugby player.

In power, Amin began by expelling all Asians and Israelis, followed up by aligning himself with Arab radicals, then instigated an ethnic bloodbath that claimed the lives of as many as 300,000 Ugandans, according to Amnesty International. Amin repaid his erstwhile Israeli promoters by toying cruelly with passengers aboard an El Al airliner held captive at Entebbe airport, prompting a commando rescue that coincided memorably with America's 1976 bicentennial fete. This has been a familiar cycle in externally encouraged regime change-instant relief, followed by pain and embarrassment as the new leaders, most of them braided, excel at torture, extortion, and nepotism, yielding an enduring legacy of bitterness and cynicism, and in extreme cases, opening the way for yet more radical regimes.

The pattern held during the Cold War, when Washington for strategic reasons promoted or assented to coups against inconvenient yet elected leftists and nationalists in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Greece (1967), and Chile (1973). Other regime changes effected with varying degrees of American involvement took place in the former Belgian Congo, South Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Liberia, Cyprus, and, as we too keenly now realize, in Afghanistan, where a Soviet-supported regime change in Kabul in 1978-79 prompted covert American aid to a Pakistan-directed uprising that culminated in a civil war among Afghan warlords, and that finally brought to power the fanatic Taliban regime. By contrast, in pursuing a policy of containment against the Soviet Union, the United States helped precipitate a change from within that was free of any serious taint of foreign machinations.

It is hard, by contrast, to discern a single illustration of the benign results of externally promoted regime change. Given Iraq's ungovernable past and its bedlam of factions, it requires a willing suspension of disbelief to assume Washington has the wisdom and resolve essential to establishing a stable democracy in Baghdad. The odds are that the successor to Saddam Hussein will be a soldier, like Idi Amin, who will be touted as a splendid fellow, reliable and a good soccer player. "For sure," as Anwar Sadat liked to say.

Yet this scarcely exhausts the most far-reaching of unintended results of regime change. Incomparably more lethal were Stalin's orders to his German comrades in the early 1930s to assail German Social Democrats as "Social Fascists," even at the risk of destroying the Weimar Republic and bringing the Nazis to power, which duly occurred in 1933. As fateful was the decision taken in mid-1917 by Germany's vaunted General Staff to promote a regime change in Petrograd, where a new and shaky democratic government had assumed power only a few months before. The Germans had long cultivated Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks, who vowed they would take Russia out of the war. Here is Winston Churchill's mordant summary in the final chapter of The World Crisis:

Full allowance must be made for the desperate stakes to which the German leaders were already committed. They were in the mood which had opened unlimited submarine warfare with the certainty of bringing the United States into the war against them. Upon the western front they had from the beginning used the most terrible means of offense at their disposal. They had employed poison gas on the largest scale and had invented the "Flammenwerfer" [flamethrower]. Nevertheless it was with a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.

The Greatest Pole

Apropos of Lenin, it was with keen interest that I learned the mayor of Moscow reportedly may approve reinstalling the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the Polish-born founder of what became the KGB , on his old pedestal facing the security service's Moscow headquarters. The giant statue had been toppled by rejoicing crowds following the dissolution in 1991 of the Soviet Union. Many Russians want to recall it from exile as part of a nationalist effort to rehabilitate the KGB, in which President Vladimir Putin also served. I could not help but remember a visit to Warsaw in 1988, the twilight of the Gorbachev era, when foreigners were regaled with an oft-repeated joke: "Who was the greatest Pole of them all?" "Why Dzerzhinsky, of course - no Pole killed more Russians." How odd that Iron Feliks is now a symbol of pride for Russian nationalists, surely the ultimate Polish joke.

The Gulag of the Unreviewed

The postbag brings a copy of Korean Endgame by Selig Harrison, a onetime Washington Post foreign correspondent and a justly respected authority on Asian nationalism, in all its varied hues. No American writer knows more about North Korea, the hermetic country whose leaders he has repeatedly interviewed, his expertise attested to by the glowing comments on the dust jacket, beginning with former president Jimmy Carter, who calls Korean Endgame "the best analysis I have seen of the difficult policy choices facing the United States in Korea." It has been our privilege to have published an essay by Harrison on the military threat posed by North Korea in our fall 2000 issue.

Yet you would scarcely know the book has appeared, even though North Korea forms a third of George W. Bush's "axis of evil." The main reason is the lack of reviewing space devoted to works on foreign affairs, aside from those written by celebrity authors. Treatises like Harrison's linger in a kind of literary gulag, still alive, their existence known to a select few. In former days, New York had two weekly book supplements, in the Times and the Herald Tribune, while Time and Newsweek normally reviewed three or four titles in each issue. This is no longer the case, putting a heavier and unfair burden on the surviving Sunday New York Times Book Review. Where would we be without the biweekly New York Review of Books, which regularly finds space for significant works on human rights and political theory? Or without the broad-gauged, unpredictable, and lively new entry in the field, the Los Angeles Times Book Review?

In less populous Great Britain, generous book sections appear in a dozen daily and Sunday national newspapers, together with the weekly Times Literary Supplement and biweekly London Review of Books, plus a wide assortment of other periodicals, political and literary. As American authors fortunate enough to be published on both sides of the Atlantic can attest, the likelihood of a book on a foreign theme being reviewed is two or three times greater in the United Kingdom than in the world's indispensable superpower. Globalization, so far as publishing goes, begins at the water's edge.

It is a scandal for which, alas, I see no ready remedy. For the record, Korean Endgame is published by Princeton University Press. It won't hurt to ask if your local bookshop or library has a copy.