The Suave Gorbachev Wears No Clothes
Ledeen, Michael
Michael Ledeen THE SUAVE GORBACHEV WEARS NO CLOTHES Gorbo's New York speech was an admission of failure, an appeal to creditors for more money and more time, and a general cry for help. The...
...the USSR is falling further and further behind the West in crucial areas of technology...
...If we are to invest our money in the Soviet economic system, we want to be absolutely certain that we're going to get a real return for it...
...011ie and Bets v. I YourHel North P ow...
...We can help Gorbachev if he helps us achieve greater security...
...Unless Gorbachev finds a way to obtain Western technology, his society is doomed to obsolescence, with all the commercial and military consequences it implies...
...Poland is the most dramatic example, for the two main sources of political legitimacy in Poland today are the Pope and Solidarity...
...In 1988, it will be even less, with almost a third of the empire's hard-currency earnings coming from credits courtesy of European bankers...
...Cuba sucks up $5 billion a year to stay afloat (and is at the center of a vast drug-running operation to generate additional funds...
...Nicaragua, Cuba, and Vietnam are all economic disasters...
...There is a considerable amount of evidence to suggest that the process of disintegration is fairly well advanced: •The defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan...
...For example, at last report there was not a single supercomputer in the Soviet Union...
...The collapse of the Communist economies...
...If we are to ease restrictions on technology, we want to be absolutely certain that it will not be turned against us and our allies...
...If these policies are a prime cause of Gorbachev's welcome gestures, it would be folly to abandon them just at the moment we are about to cash inon our investment...
...Once upon a time, the Michael Ledeen is the author of Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair (Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Unable to compete, Gorbachev has turned, of necessity, to calls for a reduction in military spending...
...A bove all, don't rush to any agreement...
...It would be folly to keep the Kremlin afloat if it continues to subsidize the subversion of the Western Hemisphere through Cuba and Nicaragua...
...That is why Gorbachev hardly gives a speech on East-West relations without denouncing the restrictions we have put in place on the sale of high-tech items to the Soviet Bloc...
...That suggests the following outlines for a new Soviet policy: First, maintain the export controls that deprive the Kremlin of militarily useful Western technology...
...Second, as Bush put it in an interview with me for Le Figaro in early November, there must be "no untied loans to the Soviet Union...
...As a starter, we should require a withdrawal of the Soviet military presence from our hemisphere...
...It is, finally, the message from some of Gorbachev's closest advisers, at least one of whom—the unfortunate Yeltsin—was removed from office for speaking the truth...
...This means a free economy, not the phantasm of "free zones" in a command economic system...
...All this has produced the predictable internal strains at the imperial center in Moscow...
...Finally, revive the old notion of "linkage...
...But it is unlikely that Western bankers and businessmen can save the 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 Soviet empire...
...The bankruptcy of the distant outposts of the empire...
...And no wonder that Gorbachev has now decided—if he spoke the truth in New York—to cut back on military salaries by reducing the size of his standing army...
...Vietnam is a shambles...
...His vaunted reform program has not yielded any positive results, save in the field of public expression of ideas (and progress in this limited sphere is quite uneven...
...is talking about selling off its money-losers at the fringes of the empire: the Cuban expeditionary force in Angola, the Red Army occupation force in Afghanistan, and the Vietnamese occupation force in Cambodia...
...The end of Communism...
...We are almost certainly at a great turning point in this century, and it has arrived in large part because of our own sound policies...
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...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 17...
...After 20 years as a Marine — a highly decorated hero — • After 5-1/2 years at the National Security Council where he worked so hard to rescue hostages, combat terrorism, and fight communism — • 011ie North was thanked for his service by an indictment brought by an Independent Counsel in the District of Columbia...
...Such a man should be politically discredited instead of being treated with deference, and George Bush, who will want to demonstrate his own leadership qualities quickly and effectively, is just the man to do it...
...The mounting discontent of the ethnic minorities and the Baltic nations...
...As in the crisis of 1981, the Polish Communist party has no effective role to play...
...Date Signature NAME I ADDRESS CITY LATE / ZIP MIN MIN NI= IIIIIIII This is the only fund authorized by Oliver North to request contributions...
...Mail your contribution today or call the toll free number below to make your pledge...
...President Bush would do well to begin by exposing the shameful policies of the Federal Republic of Germany, whose foreign minister, Hans Dietrich Genscher, has elevated appeasement to new levels of hyperactivity...
...For Communism has failed, and any true "restructuring," as Gorbachev likes to call his reform program, will have to go far deeper than cosmetic tampering with limitations on central planning, and inspirational appeals for greater industrial efficiency...
...Last November, in fact, Genscher traveled to Tehran and, upon hearing the venom of theayatollahs, returned to Bonn just in time to cancel a scheduled visit from the young Shah...
...Our military rebuilding program has clearly exhausted the resources of the Soviet economy, and the two great diplomatic/propaganda campaigns designed to slow us down (the anti-SDI program and the massive operation against the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe in the early 1980s) both failed...
...Help even the odds...
...And that is why he is wooing Western bankers, philanthropists, and businessmen with an ardor reminiscent of the heartsick heroines in the romantic novels of the last century...
...I have enclosed a check or money o NORTH DEFENSE'IlZUST P.O...
...By_any objective yardstick, the Soviet empire is weaker today than it was when he took power...
...Exp...
...p resident Bush should keep in 1 mind that he is dealing with the representative of a failed system, whose empire may be on the verge of collapse, and who is trying to con us into saving it all for him...
...Gorbachev himself revealed that the growth rate of the Soviet economy has been only half what had been claimed by the Kremlin (and estimated by the CIA) over the past fiveyears...
...And while the KGB and the GRU have greatly increased their technological espionage against the West (this, too, is part of perestroika...
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...Left to its own devices, the Communist world seems surely doomed...
...T he Soviet president stood stark I naked before the United Nations in early December, and all the courtiers and ladies-in-waiting gushed and cooed over his imaginary robes and royal jewelry...
...His adversary — an Independent Counsel with unlimited funds, 30 attorneys, and 50 investigators...
...Official Washington stands idly by to watch North fight this out alone...
...The Ortega regime in Nicaragua—according to its own figures—has achieved a 50 percent drop in gross GNP after nearly a decade in power, which may be a world's record for economic ruination...
...This should surprise no one, for Gorbachev's record—aside from his masterful "image making" on the world stage—is a near-total failure...
...Le Monde commented that photographs of the pro-Khomeini demonstrations in Azerbaijan looked as if they were taken in Tehran...
...We hold most of the key cards in the East-West game, and the key question is how we should play them...
...YES, 011ie and Betsy, I am making a contribution of $ to help with your legal and security fees...
...The first step in designing a game plan is to recognize that some of our policies during the past eight years are at least partially responsible for Gorbachev's desperate plight: •Our insistence on a coherent program of export controls on military and dual-use technology from the entire Western world has made it increasingly difficult for the Soviets to obtain the technology that they cannot develop on their own...
...For example, it is now—for the first time in Soviet history—quite legal for special security forces to shoot women and children in emergency situations...
...Any credits that go to the USSR should be strictly tied to Western business activities, and these must be evaluated on a "business" basis...
...The major foreign-policy development the Bush Administration must deal with is the collapse of the Soviet empire...
...So poor is the Soviet Union that the Kremlin gratefully accepted foreign aid for earthquake relief in Armenia...
...This, too, is part of perestroika...
...Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria are desperately in debt...
...No wonder that USSR, Inc...
...No such voice of realism broke Mikhail Gorbachev's fantasy fashion show in New York...
...The major foreign policy development with which George Bush and Jim Baker must deal is the collapse of the Soviet empire...
...As the workers at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk have reminded the Communist leaders of Poland, there can be no economic salvation for the empire without a political revolution...
...Gifts are non-tax deductible...
...The Soviets seem willing to cut back, but we want them out altogether...
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...In practice, this will mean a relatively low level of Western investment, for there is not much sound business to be done in the miserable economic system that Communism has created...
...From the Armenians to the Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians, the "captive nations" are demanding greater freedom...
...Indeed, so great is the fear of mass uprisings that a new set of laws has been passed, legalizing some of the worst excesses of Stalinism...
...The only thing missing to bring the full fairy tale to life was the little child crying out, "but the emperor has no clothes...
...As we enter the endgame, let's stick with the methods that have brought our historic opponents close to defeat, and gently dump them into the dustbin of history...
...That is as if Henry Kissinger had negotiated the Vietnam Accords with the Viet Cong in Havana...
...With Western help, it may yet survive to fight another day...
...He can start by reminding Herr Genscher and the rest of our allies that Western proposals for East-West arms reduction are far more sweeping than those offered by Gorbachev, and that the alliance should pursue them...
...Not only does he swoon at every gesture from Moscow, he even appeases the likes of Khomeini...
...The New York speech was an admission of failure, an appeal to creditors for more money and more time, and a general cry for help...
...Third, insist—as we have with all Third World economies—that there be a real restructuring of the Soviet system before we make available large-scale credits through the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund...
...And they did so in a particularly humiliating way, as Deputy Foreign Minister Vorontsov traveled to Taff, Saudi Arabia—a country with which the Soviet Union has no diplomatic relations—to negotiate with the mujahedeen...
...20090 rder...
...Time is working against the Soviets, and our opportunities are not likely to diminish in the future...
...Communist parties are increasingly enfeebled in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and anti-Communist demonstrations are growing throughout the satellites, even in East Germany...
...That is also the message from the publications made possible by "glasnost," to which the Kremlin reacts by extremes, sometimes shutting them down, sometimes pointing to them as examples of the new freedom...
...Kremlin proclaimed the infallibility of the Brezhnev Doctrine (according to which a country, having entered the Soviet Bloc, could never leave), but now they have been compelled to sue for peace...
...Gorbachev has bet his future, and that of his empire, on his ability to convince the West to save him by permitting the Kremlin to obtain Western technology, know-how, and money...
...The Kremlin had to send a massive military contingent into Armenia before the earthquake to forestall ominous public demonstrations, and there are similar movements among the growing Islamic minority...
...It's a battle that North will win, but he needs your help now to defray legal costs and to assure that his family is properly guarded and that no harm comes to them...
...We don't want to have a repeat of the enormous losses suffered through misguided loans to Poland, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Bulgaria, and Hungary...
...The symptoms range from a resurgence of the most vulgar forms of anti-Semitism to rumors of anti-Gorbachev maneuvering in the dark corridors of the Kremlin (just a few days before the New York speech, pro-Gorbachev leakers in Moscow were telling Western diplomats that there had been a failed coup in September—stressing the delicacy of Gorbachev's position...
...Gorbachev's Soviet empire is dead broke, about to enter the international version of Chapter Eleven unless an emergency bailout can be arranged...
...In 1987, the Soviet Union earned between $30 billion and $35 billion in hard currency—less than half of what a major American auto company takes in in sales each year...
...This will require patience, cool heads, and a significant effort to educate our own people throughout the Western alliance in the realities of international power relations...
Vol. 22 • February 1989 • No. 2
