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Bubba
Does Moscow
President William Jefferson Clinton will arrive in
Moscow next Saturday, June 3, for his first face-to-face meeting with
Vladimir Putin. No angry mobs will be waiting to stomp him at the airport.
No columns full of proletarian marchers bearing signs reading “Yankee
Go Home!” will hold up his motorcade on his way in to the Marriott. There
will be no need for a food-taster when he eats Putin under the table at
the inevitable first-night Kremlin banquet. No, Bill Clinton will be safe
in Moscow, and not only from actual physical threats, but, for the most
part, from criticism as well. Whatever resentment Russia feels toward
our illustrious leader will be below the surface-well below the surface.
But make no mistake about it: when Bill Clinton
arrives in Moscow next week, he does so as a conquering Emperor. He is
a Roman Caesar visiting the front, with his new general, Vladimir Putin,
reporting to him on the progress of the campaign. It was under Bill Clinton’s
watch that the old bipolar arrangement was left behind forever, and global
power became firmly centered around a conspiracy of elites. Under this
new system, the Russian nation became a vast, impoverished colony, the
overwhelming majority of its population utterly beholden to a rapaciously
corrupt group of vicious criminals.
Bill Clinton was the patron of those criminals.
He provided them with continual funding in the form of loans, in exchange
for a relaxation of Russia’s international ambitions during a period of
expanding American influence. It was a symbiotic relationship. He scratched
their back; they scratched his. And in the meantime, Russia went to hell.
Throughout Russia’s history, the country’s most
violent leaders have often retained relatively good reputations among
the majority of the population even during the most repressive eras, because
the people often steadfastly refused to believe that the leader was even
aware of the atrocities being committed by his subordinates. It’s one
of the great cliches of Russian politics: “If only the Tsar knew!”
Bill Clinton’s going to get off easy when he visits
next week, mainly because people think that this aw-shucks good ol’ boy
from the American south, this perma-smiling blowjob connoisseur, couldn’t
possibly have been aware of how badly his policies failed here in Russia.
But he knew. The Tsar knew. And here’s what he knew,
a short list of all the Clinton policies toward Russia that will go down
in history-if future historians have any scruples— as his administration’s
biggest mistakes:
1. His government pursued policies that were designed
to destroy Russia economically and emasculate it geopolitically, thereby
squandering absolutely in the space of eight years any and all goodwill
Russians felt toward America at the end of the Cold War.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the U.S.-backed
decimation of the Russian state began, but a good place to start might
be in the Yegor Gaidar era. Among other things, the U.S. advised Yegor
Gaidar’s government to free prices before the privatization of industry,
effectively depriving Russians of their savings overnight as ordinary
citizens scrambled to buy basic necessities at ballooning prices from
monopolistic industries. American advisers subsequently helped design
the voucher privatization campaign and the early direct privatizations,
which were theoretically supposed to be the more egalitarian stages of
privatization, but mainly resulted in the transfer of property from workers
to government insiders and Western investment companies like Credit Suisse.
The presence of large numbers of official American advisers in and around
the Russian State Property Committee during this period left Russians
forever with lingering suspicions that Westerners used to insider information
to buy up the most promising properties. Subsequently, the Clinton administration
did not cut off aid or even verbally protest in any way after the notorious
loans-for-shares auctions, insisting repeatedly that Russia was “on the
right road”. By 1996 it became clear that the whole notion of “shock therapy”,
which was the brainchild of Harvard economist and key U.S. policy adviser
Jeffrey Sachs, had foreseen the instant creation of a super-rich propertied
class which would use its resources to block any move back in the direction
of communism. By Yeltsin’s second term the plan was more or less perfectly
fulfilled, as Russia became a “free market” nation run by a small coterie
of obscenely rich private industrialists sitting atop the back of a nation
of de facto indentured laborers.
The Clinton government also, of course, pushed IMF/World
Bank policies which insisted upon mass layoffs of state workers, an end
to as many state industrial and agricultural subsidies as possible, the
termination of advantageous trade relationships with other former Soviet
Republics, and the immediate exposure of Russian industry to international
competition, which it had no chance of defeating in the short run. The
result of all this was obvious and unavoidable; Russian industry collapsed,
decimated by Western competition, creating the worst depression ever observed
in an industrial nation, with GDP falling almost 50% from 1989 levels
by the end of the 1990s.
2. It turned a blind eye to corruption, both among
its own officials and among the Russians, helping to create a criminal
state.
The Clinton administration’s record in dealing with
Russia-related corruption couldn’t possibly be worse. There was not a
single prosecution of an American official connected with Russian aid
or Russian finance throughout Clinton’s tenure. U.S. officials were conspicuously
careless when it came to adhering to any kind of ethical standards in
the administration of Western aid. The Clinton Administration early on
granted Harvard University’s Institute for International Development (HIID)
$57 million contract to administer American financial aid without a tender,
citing “national security” reasons. USAID subsequently cancelled HIID’s
contract after irregularities were discovered, but the government never
brought the central figure in the scandal, Jonathan Hay, to trial. Anatoly
Chubais’s organizations continued to receive Western aid money even after
he was caught improperly using U.S. money to advertise his political party,
Russia’s Choice, in the early 1990s. The FBI sat on the Bank of New York
investigation for nearly six months, only proceeding with the matter when
British law enforcement officials leaked news of the story to the press;
the investigation has since apparently been halted following the indictments
of a pair of low-level BoNY employees (in Lucy Edwards and Peter Berlin)
who clearly played very peripheral roles in the scandal. In a celebrated
incident, Vice President Al Gore handed back a CIA report detailing the
corrupt activities of then-Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin. Gore, whose name
was indelibly linked to Chernomyrdin’s through the much-ballyhooed Gore-Chernomyrdin
commission, had scribbled “Horseshit” in the margins of the report before
flinging it back at the CIA.
3. It supported the development of an overtly undemocratic
style of government in order to isolate and protect U.S. interests from
the wishes of the Russian people.
For all the talk about “reform” in the nineties,
the Clinton administration generally relied on Presidential decrees issued
by Boris Yeltsin to get U.S.-backed legislative inititatives into the
books. (This is not surprising, of course, since Clinton himself has issued
more Executive Orders than any other two American presidents combined).
It supported Yeltsin when he bombed the White House, and helped him author
a constitution which gave him the power to dissolve the Duma, effectively
declawing the parliament. The United States never once protested abuses
of press and speech freedoms by the Yeltsin government, helping bring
about a situation in which Duma elections in 1999 and presidential elections
in 2000 were decided mainly on the strength of gross manipulations of
public opinion. In fact, the Clinton administration’s absolute indifference
to Russian violations of democratic principles-can anyone remember the
Clinton government complaining about voter fraud, censorship, or workers’
rights?-might be the most striking feature of this administration’s Russian
policy. Almost overnight, America went from being a nation deeply concerned
about the treatment of each and every last Soviet dissident, to being
a country totally indifferent to the fate of tens of millions of Russians
who suffered violations of rights most Americans would consider inherent
on a daily basis. It was this indifference that cost America the average
Russian’s faith in American values. This happened exclusively on Clinton’s
watch; when Bush left office, America was still the good guy in these
parts. It is worth noting that the Clinton administration in the United
States loudly lamented the difficulties it faced in its first term when
it tried to create a national health care system; in Russia, however,
the United States supported IMF reforms which actually destroyed an existing
national health care system, leaving the vast majority of Russians without
access to good care or medicines.
4. It made far too many strange bedfellows.
Actually, some of the Clinton administration’s unseemly
relationships predated its actual ascension to power in America. Al Gore,
for instance, had a longstanding relationship-through his late father,
the U.S. Senator Al Gore, Sr.-with the late industrialist and reputed
Soviet agent Armand Hammer. When ABC news correspondent Bob Zelnick tried
to write a book detailing Gore’s relationship to Hammer, Gore spokesmen
told him flatly it would be very displeased if he were to continue pursuing
the matter. When Zelnick ignored him, he quickly got an ultimatum from
his employers at ABC, who told him that his broadcasting contract would
be canceled if he continued with the book project. Zelnick resigned and
published the book, entitled “Gore: A Political Life”, anyway. Strobe
Talbott, the first ambassador to Russia nominated by Clinton, had a longstanding
relationship with reputed Soviet double-agent Viktor Louis, a relationship
he was questioned at length about in Congress prior to his subsequent
confirmation as Deputy Secretary of State. Clinton’s team maintained close
contacts with Chubais even as mountains of evidence of the latter’s corruption
piled up. In general, the Clinton administration’s unflagging devotion
to figures like Chubais, Gaidar, and Sergei Kiriyenko-each of whom seldom
recorded approval ratings above two or three percent in national polls—
severely damaged the American reputation in Russia. As author Anne Williamson
notes, “The U.S. made a big mistake when continually supported the most
hated figures in Russia.”
5. It made the world a much more dangerous place.
Without a doubt, the Clinton administration’s biggest
mistake with regard to relations with Russia was the war in Kosovo. The
ramifications of that action are not obvious, but they will be more and
more telling as time wears on. Clinton’s mistake in Kosovo was not only
in firmly establishing the U.S. in Russia’s eyes as an immediate military
threat; that had become obvious to Russia long before that, through the
expansion of NATO right up to Russia’s borders (in particular the courtship
of Ukraine and the Baltics) and the various Partnership for Peace programs
and numerous joint military exercises which led to Russians seeing U.S.
military maneuvers all around their border. Its mistake was also not limited
to the failure to consult Russia about the Kosovo attack, though this
also helped firm up Russian enmity to the U.S. The war also humiliated
Russia’s top brass, as well as its hitherto apolitical youth, to such
a point that it made the Second Chechen War that much more plausible,
even necessary in the eyes of many in Russia. No, what was probably the
worst thing about the Kosovo attack was that it convinced other countries
around the world that it would only be able to protect itself against
U.S. attack by owning its own nuclear weapons. As Williamson says, “Kosovo
made it almost inevitable that other countries would try to acquire nuclear
weapons from Russia. The attack made nuclear weapon ownership the standard
for sovereignty.” Having destroyed the rest of Russia’s domestic industry
through its economic programs, the Clinton administration almost singlehandedly
revived the Russian military-industrial complex by creating markets for
Russian weapons in third world countries spooked by the NATO action in
Yugoslavia.
Most Russians naively believed the Clinton Administration’s
early rhetoric about its intention to embrace Russia as an equal and an
ally, but eight years later, most polls show that Russians view NATO as
a military threat to their nation. Rather than building a lasting alliance,
the Clinton Administration succeeded in creating the impossible: it laid
the foundations for a second, albeit lop-sided and unpredictable, Cold
War.
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