Power and Weakness
WILLIAM KRISTOL WRITES in “Of Mice and Men” (May 24): “We can’t win if we don’t apply ourselves anew to trying to win.” For some reason this simple statement led me to reread Thomas Paine’s The Crisis. Perhaps it is time for all the “reasonable people” referred to by Kristol, and even those who may be unreasonable, to refamiliarize themselves with the first few sentences of Paine’s ringing exhortation to a troubled American populace in late 1776:
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us–that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
The American people and their government must have the perseverance and fortitude not only to lead the battle, but to complete the mission of eradicating terrorism in all its insidious forms. The thought of a defeat in this war must be anathema to all who oppose militant Islam.
Henry Sheffield
Arlington, VA
Trouble Me
AS AN AMERICAN police officer serving in Kosovo, I knew all the Americans involved in the unprovoked attack by the Jordanian U.N. worker that Stephen Schwartz writes about in “The U.N. Brings Trouble to Kosovo” (May 3). They were all my classmates during training in Virgina and Pristina. They were more than just good Americans here on a police mission. They were mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, all here for one reason: to serve the people of a war-torn region. They were my friends.
Schwartz’s reporting suggested that there may have been an argument or exchange of words between the Americans and the Jordian SPU officer before the attack occurred. Yet every account I ever heard from those that were present indicates this was not the case. The Jordanian simply walked the bus line, loaded his machine gun, and let his bullets fly.
Thomas Rosemurgy
Pristina, Kosovo
Georgia Peach
IN “GEORGIA ON HIS MIND” (May 24) Richard W. Carlson seriously misleads the readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Carlson notes he was in Georgia “last month” but fails to mention it was at the invitation and with the full support of Aslan Abashidze, the former strongman of Adjara. Just after the visit, Carlson claims he agreeably peddled Abashidze’s story of an alleged assassination attempt all the way to the White House. On May 6, 2004, Abashidze ended his reign of terror and fled into exile. In the end it was not the delusions of Abashidze that did him in–it was the people of Adjara who had enough of his repression and criminal activity.
Now Carlson has shifted from mouthpiece for a thug to character assassin of a democrat. He misconstrues an interview with President Saakashvili’s wife to compare a democratically elected leader to some of the worst criminals of the twentieth century. Clearly he does not like the bonds that democrats from Serbia and other new democracies in Europe have built with their brethren in Georgia–with the help of the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and, yes, the Open Society Institute founded by George Soros. The experiences gained from exposure to these organizations helped to insure our revolution was nonviolent and without bloodshed. Curiously Carlson omits any mention of the pervasive corruption that led President Saakashvili and other Georgian democrats to break with the previous government. He may think corruption is irrelevant, but Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” had its roots in the people’s anger and disdain over government-sanctioned corruption.
As for the quotes from the “British Helsinki Human Rights Group” included in the article: This is the same organization that compares U.S. military operations in Iraq to Nazi counterinsurgency techniques. They have also railed against NATO enlargement and the so-called military industrial complex for years.
The real story about the new Georgia is that over 75 percent of our new government’s ministers were educated in the United States. As a long-term partner of the United States, Georgia just announced a dramatic increase in the number of forces it deploys in Iraq. That is the new Georgia. Whatever Carlson’s agenda is, it does not include the promotion of a pro-U.S. democracy in the south Caucasus that is setting an example at home and in the region.
Levan Mikeladze
Ambassador of Georgia
Washington, DC
RICHARD W. CARLSON RESPONDS: Levan Mikeladze’s angry and befuddled attack underscores my point about the weird aggression of Georgian politics: A few words of criticism might get you a banana-clip from an AK-47 in response. Mikeladze’s reckless exaggerations underscore the concept, “Deny everything, make fierce counterallegations,” which has become stock phraseology in Georgian diplospeak. The piece made clear that Georgia has a deeply corrupt society, so Mikeladze’s saying I think corruption is “irrelevant” is hard to figure.
The real question I addressed, and that which the ambassador ignores, is: How powerful in Georgia is George Soros, and what is it that he ultimately wants?
Perhaps he seeks only benign democracy in corrupt, former Communist societies, as he says. Perhaps not. Who can know for sure? Certainly Soros has had a seismic effect on world money markets over the years and now wants to do the same to governments he doesn’t like. In the early 1990s he attacked the British pound and left it devalued by 12 percent as he walked off with a personal profit of about $1 billion. He has been accused of similarly destabilizing other world currencies and damaging the economic lives of millions of people. His Open Society Institute is active in dozens of countries and has been forcibly shut down in Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Belarus. However, the Open Society Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia, has been a hive of activity.
The real potential prize in Georgia, a country more impoverished than Haiti, is the Caspian Sea oil pipeline, which will traverse Georgia and end in the port of Batumi, in the Autonomous Republic of Adjara on the Black Sea, seized a few weeks ago by President Saakashvili and his supporters, who successfully drove the elected president of Adjara, Aslan Abashidze, into exile in Russia.
Mikeladze claims I misconstrued statements by Georgian president Saakashvili’s wife. But it was Mrs. Saakashvili who, with no explicable prodding, compared her husband to three other “strong” Georgian leaders: the monsters Stalin and Beria, and Gamsakhurdia, who either brought himself to room temperature or had someone else do it for him.
Based on her statements, it is fair to believe that Mrs. Saakashvili may want her husband to follow the Russian ex-KGB tough-guy model, an antidemocratic style of governance Vladimir Putin is making popular in the former Soviet Union. That is, knocking down any opposition, ignoring the rule of law, closing down critical media, having the secret police seize suspects or political annoyances at home in the dark of night, and locking them away for interrogation–all activities Saakashvili now engages in. The fact is that for all his supposed U.S. education–hardly a guarantee of sophistication in my experience–Saakashvili is a rube whose sputtering and spitting domestic rhetoric has little in common with the face he shows to the West, exactly in keeping with the actions of his former mentor Eduard Shevardnadze.
It was Shevardnadze, the former darling of the West, now disparaged as a vicious crook by Mikeladze (and by me, for that matter), who appointed ambassador Mikeladze to his job in Washington, and to whose interests he remained servile until last fall, when Saakashvili, also a Shevardnadze appointee and protégé, stepped in with a snootful of George Soros’s money and sent Shevardnadze packing–but not, it is noted, to the prison sentence he so deserved. In fact, the father of the “pervasive corruption” Mikeladze refers to lives comfortably only a few blocks from Saakashvili in Tbilisi.
Love Story
AT MY ADVANCED AGE, I thought there was little chance of my falling in love again, but your May 24 issue has me falling head-over-heels in love with THE SCRAPBOOK. The entire section that week was perfect: from the item poking fun at Bob Woodward for donating his proceeds from Jeopardy‘s “Power Players Week” to the Sidwell Friends School, to the item on New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield’s (mis)use of questionable prison statistics. Bravo!
James G. Baird
Woodstock, GA
Multilateral Man
MARIO LOYOLA WRITES that in my book From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations, I reject “the Bush administration’s foreign policy in general.” It depends on which year he is talking about (THE STANDARD READER, May 24).
Recently the Bush administration has embraced a much more multilateral approach (especially in dealing with North Korea and Iran); has become much more eager to have the blessing of the United Nations; has drawn on allies’ military forces rather than go it alone; and has learned that “democratizing the Middle East” is a considerable task. My book strongly favors these trends–none of which ties the United States down unduly. And the book salutes President Bush’s repeated statements that we are not at war with Islam (and surely not with other civilizations) but with “evildoers” defined as terrorists.
Amitai Etzioni
Washington, DC
Twice the Paine
BOB KOHN’S blistering indictment “The Decline and Fall of the New York Times” (May 24) made one recall Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s outburst half a century ago: “These are the New York Times that try men’s souls!”
Ernest W. Lefever
Washington, DC
Errata
THE PRICE OF SCOTT STOSSEL’S new biography of Sargent Shriver, Sarge, is $32.50, not $52.50 as listed in Michael Novak’s “The Last Liberal” (May 24).
Also, the full title of Michael Barone’s new book, reviewed by Noemie Emery in the May 17 issue, is Hard America / Soft America :Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for America’s Future.
