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04/01/2006:
"Toni Solo: The Anti-Americans"
Jean Kirkpatrick's recent intervention in Nicaragua's internal politics is a helpful reminder that US government foreign policy is marked not just by hypocrisy and sadism but also by delusional stupidity. Take this quote from an interview Kirkpatrick gave to the publication "Religion and Liberty" (1) :"I don't think that Fidel Castro knows how to run a government that must provide the necessities in a society. He is quintessentially a revolutionary, committed to world revolution. Since that's his profession, I don't think he can last."
Despite decades of US economic blockade promoted hard by Kirkpatrick, Cuba's people enjoy better education, better healthcare and better disaster prevention and relief services than most people in the United States. This truth was dramatically highlighted last year by the contrast between the US government's response to Hurricane Katrina and the Havana government's response to a series of equally devastating hurricanes in Cuba. Jean Kirkpatrick's views on Cuba are absurdly counterfactual. Her policy advocacy on Cuba has been a complete failure.
Try this anti-historical gem from the same interview:
"... no authoritarian state has ever evolved out of a democratic welfare state, nor has a democratic welfare state ever evolved into an authoritarian state."
Even given the limited relevant historical period she corners in this foolish remark one has to assume that Kirkpatrick's European history studies wound up just before the Weimar Republic, to name only the most obvious example. Yet this person is a leading guru of the United States foreign policy elite. No wonder the Bush regime's criminal aggression against Iraq has involved the people of the United States in their country's worst foreign policy debacle since Vietnam.
Nicaragua at the UN. Kirkpatrick's career nadir?
Perhaps the most embarrassing diplomatic debacle of Kirkpatrick's career was the bungled attempt by US diplomacy to prevent the election of Nicaragua to the UN Security Council in 1982. Kirkpatrick and her colleagues desperately struggled to promote the candidacy of the Dominican Republic in order to prevent Nicaragua's election. She and her team failed dismally. Nicaragua's Chancellor at the time, Padre Miguel D'Escoto remembers,
"I spoke with all the foreign ministers of the world gathered there in the context of bilateral exchanges of about half an hour with each. But I was not alone. I could count on a marvellous support team from our foreign ministry and on Nora Astorga. But it was our heroic people under arms and Daniel (Ortega) who most accompanied us and made possible our victory thanks to the admiration and respect the world feels towards people of consequence."(2)
The vote was a personal triumph for D'Escoto and an almost unprecedented blow to US prestige. By rejecting the Reagan administration supported candidate, the vote indicated the contempt most of the world felt for the Reagan government's advocacy of vicious terror regimes and groups around the world at that time. For that flop, blame Kirkpatrick first.
Continuities : from El Salvador to Palestine and Iraq
Just as the career of Kirkpatrick's fellow death squad promoter John Negroponte spans from the Reagan government's crimes in Central America to the Bush regime's crimes in Iraq so too do the echoes of Kirkpatrick's pro-terror rhetoric from the early 1980s. When the US-trained Salvadoran army murdered three US nuns and a US woman lay missionary in 1982, Kirkpatrick notoriously tried to justify the killings by accusing the women of being political activists working for the Salvadoran guerrillas. What a contrast with the US government's reaction to the killing of four US mercenaries in Fallujah which led to the destruction of the city by thousands of troops backed up by artillery, armour and air-power.
zmag.org
