Kerry's Cruel Realism

[Jeffrey C. Dege]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/opinion/19BROO.html

Kerry's Cruel Realism

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: June 19, 2004

Sometimes in the unscripted moments of a campaign, when the handlers
are away, a candidate shows his true nature. Earlier this month,
Andres Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald asked John Kerry what he
thought of something called the Varela Project. Kerry said it was
"counterproductive." It's necessary to try other approaches, he added.

The Varela Project happens to be one of the most inspiring democracy
movements in the world today. It is being led by a Cuban dissident
named Oswaldo Payá, who has spent his life trying to topple Castro's
regime. Payá realized early on that the dictatorship would never be
overthrown by a direct Bay of Pigs-style military assault, but it could
be undermined by a peaceful grass-roots movement of Christian democrats,
modeling themselves on Martin Luther King Jr.

As a young man, Payá founded a magazine called People of God, but it
was shut down. He criticized the Soviet Union and was thrown into a work
camp. He was given a chance to escape Cuba, but refused.

Then in the mid-1990's, he and other dissidents exploited a loophole
in the Cuban Constitution that allows ordinary citizens to propose
legislation if they can gather 10,000 signatures on a petition. They
began a petition drive to call for a national plebiscite on five basic
human rights: free speech, free elections, freedom to worship, freedom
to start businesses, and the freeing of political prisoners.

This drive, the Varela Project, quickly amassed the 10,000 signatures,
and more. Jimmy Carter lauded the project on Cuban television. The
European Union gave Payá its Sakharov Prize for human rights.

Then came Castro's crackdown. Though it didn't dare touch Payá, the
regime arrested 75 other dissidents and sentenced each of them to up to
28 years in jail. This week Payá issued a desperate call for international
attention and solidarity because the hunt for dissidents continues.

John Kerry's view? As he told Oppenheimer, the Varela Project "has
gotten a lot of people in trouble . . . and it brought down the hammer
in a way that I think wound up being counterproductive."

Imagine if you are a Cuban political prisoner rotting in a jail, and you
learn that the leader of the oldest democratic party in the world thinks
you're being counterproductive. Kerry's comment is a harpoon directed
at the morale of Cuba's dissidents.

Imagine sitting in Castro's secret police headquarters and reading that
statement. The lesson you draw is that crackdowns work. Throw some
dissidents in jail, and the man who might be president of the United
States will blame the democrats for being provocative.

Imagine if in the 1980's Ronald Reagan had called Andrei Sakharov or
Natan Sharansky or Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel "counterproductive"
because, after all, what they did spawned crackdowns, too.

If there's anything we've learned over the past 20 years it is the
power of moral suasion to buck up dissidents and undermine tyrannical
regimes. And yet Kerry seems to have decided that other priorities
come first.

Over the past several months, Kerry and his advisers have signaled that
they would like to take American foreign policy in a more "realist"
direction. That means, as Kerry told the editors of The Washington Post,
playing down the idea of promoting democracy and focusing narrowly instead
on national security. That means, as Kerry advisers told Joshua Micah
Marshall in The Atlantic, pursuing a foreign policy that looks more like
the one Brent Scowcroft designed for the first Bush administration.

You can see why Kerry thinks that's a clever shift, after the arduous
efforts to promote democracy in Iraq. With realism, you avoid humanitarian
interventions.

But if we are going to turn realist, let's be clear about what that
means in practice. It means worrying less about the nature of regimes
and dealing with whoever happens to be in power. It means alienating
people who dream of living in freedom while we luxuriate in ours. It
means doing little to confront crimes against humanity; realism gives
a president a thousand excuses for inaction. It means betraying people
like Oswaldo Payá again and again and again.

There's a reason Carter, Reagan and George W. Bush all turned, in
different ways, against this approach. They understood that democracy
advances security, kowtowing to dictators does not. Most of all, they
didn't want to conduct a foreign policy that would make them feel ashamed.

--
The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes
a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and has an
almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
- H. L. Mencken