Happy New Year!
I'm starting what I'll call a "3-D blog" to see if I can encourage friends to meet in the online virtual world of Second Life to discuss foreign policy news and views. It's a great way to interact, show content, multi-task, and save on travel costs! Get started at secondlife.com, put me down as your referral, and email me for help as it can be a bit daunting getting started if you are not used to working avatars.
Barbara Crossette has an interesting interview in the Nation with the UN's greatest go-to man, Lakhdar Brahimi. She quotes him as saying:
Somebody told me--I don't know if this is true or not--that Yeltsin, when he took over and was very close to the Americans, thought of dissolving the Communist Party. And the Americans told him, You're crazy. Don't do that. That's the state. And yet, they go to Iraq and they dissolve the army, which was part of the system. And the Baath party.
It's true that when the Party and the state are "one" and you dismantle parties, you can prevent the people who know how to turn the electricity on and run the factories from doing their jobs. But there's no need to be extremist about it. There is always a way to define crimes of high office -- one could posit that anyone in the old Soviet Union at the level of an oblast secretary might have by his very job definition had to commit specific crimes. So prosecuting deeds, not party affiliation, is part of creating the public record of distinguishing right from wrong and preventing impunity.
Yeltsin did indeed outlaw the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but there was huge public outcry, and fear that most of the parliament at that time would be "lustrated". An attempt was made by the Constitutional Court to try the Party, but even the Supreme Court Justice at the time, Zorkin, said, "We weren't all Sakharovs." I don't recall hearing, however, that the Americans gave Yeltsin this piece of advice about not dismantling the party-state -- anyone?. Sounds more like a KGB concept.
I'm told by those who follow this better than I do that Saddam made everybody a general to reward them with honorifics to keep them loyal, and therefore in fact all these generals didn't in fact know how to turn on the electricity. Even Brahimi mentions the experience with regime change and removal of "100". No matter -- the destruction occurred, and we see the results.
Brahimi goes against the received wisdom by saying the Shiites of Iraq will *not* be directed from Iran, and that the solution to Iraq can't be done without the Americans. In the end, he has an interesting regional conference solution:
I think that Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey--with the other Arab neighbors--have got to come together and go to the Iraqis and say, We'd like to help you solve your problems. If they go together, I think the Iraqis would listen.
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