FRED KAPLAN ON UZBEKISTAN:
President Bush has declared repeatedly that U.S. policy toward foreign governments will be shaped, above all else, by their fealty to freedom and democracy. If he continues to treat the Uzbek government—which wantonly shoots its own people—as a special American ally when U.S. interests no longer require such favor, then his declarations will be increasingly seen as insincere, and other nasty regimes, which he may try to pressure into reform, will learn not to take his words seriously.
Indeed.
UPDATE: Jonathan Gewirtz agrees:
This is an important point and one too often forgotten by proponents of realpolitik. Our advocacy of human rights and democratic self-rule are not PR, they are force multipliers and critical to our strategy. We use them not to be PC but because the alternatives failed. That’s why it’s important not to brush the Uzbek crackdown under a diplomatic rug, even if the regime is our ally (and why we shouldn’t ignore things like this).
Indeed, again.
MORE: On the other hand, Nathan Hamm at Registan has questions, and sounds a cautionary note:
There’s nothing I’d like more than for Uzbekistan to be a democracy. Yesterday. But I’m hearing a lot of calls for what I must, at my most charitable, characterize as a shoot from the hip, emotionally satisfying response to the Andijon massacre. I can’t deny that a part of me doesn’t want to see that, but this situation is too serious to foul up. Believe you me, I want our policy to improve. But I want us to take fully into account the realities on the ground and be willing to swallow some of the realities that we don’t like for the sake of an effective long-term policy.
Read the whole thing.
MORE: StrategyPage says the bad guys have won, and it sounds like there’s not much we could have done about it:
Uzbek president Islam Karimov appears to have put down the brief uprising in the eastern park of Uzbekistan. Karimov is smart, well organized, corrupt and ruthless. The demonstrators his troops dispersed with force were opposed to the police state methods used to hunt down Islamic radicals. The only group willing to oppose Karimov with armed force are the Islamic radicals, who don’t have a lot of religious support in Uzbekistan. But a lot more people would support the Islamic radicals if it meant a less corrupt, and more effective, government. The unrest in Uzbekistan is more about economics than ideology.
That suggests both an avenue of approach, over the longer term, and a potential downside of not acting. Austin Bay observes:
Hamas played on this same desire – less corruption– among Palestinians sick of Arafat’s kleptocracy. The Taliban played the same game when it took power in Afghanistan, ie “We’re honest, the old regime was not.” Of course the Taliban then proceeded to slide into its own brand of malfeasance (including pay-offs).
He’s posting an interesting series on “how freedom spreads” that’s related, and worth reading.