God Is on Our Side

...And, even when the evidence mounted that he really wasn't—the shipments to Iraq in contravention of the embargo, the repeated diplomatic demarches to save Saddam and get us off the battlefield, the snide remarks about our exceeding the limits of the U.N...

...And what's even more important, you won't have to become like them to deal with them...

...At last report, Mosbacher and Baker were preparing to decontrol Patriot technology (so the Soviets and their friends can use it against our planes and missiles in the next war), advanced night vision technology, and countless other goodies that the Soviets have been unable to develop by themselves...

...Swallowing our disappointment, we staggered good-naturedly onward, reassuring ourselves that Gorbachev was still with us...

...Instead of recognizing their mistake and cutting off the torrent of technology to the Soviets and their friends, Bush's men have kept our wagon hitched to Gorbachev's flickering star...

...and no matter that by selling to the Soviet bloc they automatically enabled the likes of Sad-dam to buy the stuff as well...

...One can only hope that Congress moves quickly to stop this madness, or that our ally in paradise acts once again tosave us from our own follies...

...Nasty People uncovers the weapons others use to get what they want...

...When told last summer that high-tech furnaces—which were destined to make missile warhead components—were about to be shipped to Baghdad, Under Secretary of Commerce Dennis Kloske pronounced the deal legal and legitimate...

...Despite their best efforts to the contrary, B&B don't want to be remembered for helping crush the democratic revolution in the Baltic states...

...Thus, our actions were "coordinated" with those of the worthy Shevardnadze and Mikhail Sergeyevich, no matter how often the Soviets changed their line...

...And even John Sununu, the New England philosophe, traveled to Moscow for tutorials in How to Manage a Government in Modern Times...

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...We agreed, and studiously refrained from embracing the brave Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians, even though we had never recognized the legitimacy of Soviet rule in the Baltics in the first place...

...The trick is knowing how to deal with them...

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...So did we...

...Never again will you be defenseless against office gossip, the false friend, the know-it-all spouse—even a real SOB...

...The big international financial institutions were talking in hushed tones of An Opening...

...This theological insight into international affairs has never been more apposite than nowadays, as we grope and stagger toward the New World Order...

...Once the war had begun and the entire world could see that Iraq was doomed, he hunkered down, lobbed his Scuds from time to time, and ordered his nation to fight to the last Iraqi...

...Part of the "Save Gorbachev" movement was the notion that we should make it easier for him to get whatever kind of Western technology he wants, even if it has military applications...

...No matter that the only part of Soviet industry capable of absorbing advanced technology was the military...

...Nasty People, in the simplest language, explains how to spot and conquer nasty behavior...

...No thanks to Bush's guys...

...Once you can do that, the people who enjoyed bugging you will actually lose their power to do it...

...And yes, one's family...

...It supplies the necessary information on how to respond to critical social and business situations...

...But he would have none of this cowardly strategy...

...So the diplomats from Vilnius, Tallinn, and Riga are at last getting a hearing in Washington...

...When the war is over, there is bound to be a big investigation into "Who Sold Chemical/Biological/Nuclear Weapons to Saddam Hussein...

...On the eve of a crucial Senate vote on contra aid, he approved a Nicaraguan invasion of contra camps in Honduras, thus winning a vote for the Gipper...

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...We gave him every chance to thwart us...

...We can now recognize Primakov's emergence for what Shevardnadze undoubtedly knew it to be at the time: a signal of yet another change in Gorbachev's policy...

...And whatever the zigs and zags in domestic policy—whether Gorbachev endorsed central planning or promised to junk it, whether he called for more rapid privatization or proclaimed himself a convinced Communist—we liked it, we thought he was great, and we were going to support him...

...The low point was finally reached when Baker was utterly hoodwinked by Shevardnadze's successor, Aleksandr Bessmertnykh,-on the eve of Bush's State of the Union, and our man in Foggy Bottom signed on to yet another one of those dreadful joint statements that endorse the linkage we say we are firmly against...

...These two determined men, with a singlemindedness verging on obsession, have thwarted our every effort to strengthen them and their nations, even when we were quite prepared to pay for it ourselves...

...Time and again, he took surprising steps that worked out in our favor...

...Henceforth the Soviet Union was going to be run the old-fashioned way: by the KGB and the army...

...Indeed, one of the most dramatic acts in Gorbachev's death-defying circus took place just after Baker got Shevardnadze and Gorbachev to agree to the U.N...

...What's next...

...Even today, six years Michael Ledeen is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...In the end, it took some non-government lawyers to point out that such shipments violated nuclear safeguards, and could be stopped on that basis...

...after Gorbachev's seizure of power, there is not a hint of an economic policy that would withstand the scrutiny of randomly selected freshman scholars of Econ 101...

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...It would be divine if Gorbachev's continued crackdowns, and the lessons learned from our adventures with Saddam Hussein, made it politically impossible even for the thoroughly enchanted secretary of state to compromise our technological advantage over the Soviets...

...N203 126 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...

...S it was not surprising that we sub- 1. 3 mitted our every diplomatic move in the Gulf crisis to the Kremlin for vetting...

...Just as Saddam left us no option but war, so Gorbachev, in the end, left us no option but to begin to deal with the new republics from the old USSR...

...People at the office...

...His own handpicked leaders for the satellites—from the forgettable Egon Krenz in East Germany to the defunct successors of Janos Kadar in Hungary—shriveled up like mushrooms in the first rays of post-Stalinist sunshine...

...and rarely has any nation achieved so much despite itself...

...that keep saving us from the consequences of our own folly...

...it's other people...

...10011 Please rush me copies of Nasty People (1604586) at the special price of $5.95 each...

...God protects the blind, the drunk, ‘,..3 and the United States of America...

...Forget the all-too-common saying, "Don't get mad, get even...

...Unfortunately, divine intervention has still not saved us from one of the truly horrific errors of recent history...

...resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq if Iraqi troops had not left Kuwait by January 15...

...The resulting tumult simply makes it very difficult for Bush and Baker to stand loyally by his side...

...Doing that just makes you into what you shouldn't want to be: just another nasty person...

...Throughout the Cold War, whenever we were on the verge of finlandization, the Soviets invariably shocked us out of our reverie, as with Leonid Brezhnev's providential march on Kabul just as Jimmy Carter was preparing to deliver the coup de grace to our national defense...

...You'll be in control...

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...So great was the enchantment that the steely-eyed Jim Baker determined that the top priority of American for-eign policy was to Save Gorbachev...

...And Gorbachev's eleventh-hour efforts to save Saddam from George Bush may have providentially irked our President enough for him to start dealing with Soviet democrats starting with Boris Yeltsin—as well...

...Look, there always seems to be someone around who enjoys 'getting on your case' or 'stressing you out...

...His "program" of "reforming Communism" was patently absurd from the beginning...

...Characteristically, we misdefmed our objectives: instead of demanding Saddam's surrender and the dismantling of his facilities for weapons of mass destruction, we limited our mission to the expulsion of Iraqis from Kuwait...

...All of this was an embarrassment— after all, one of the great things about the collapse of the Soviet Empire is that we don't have to worry about Soviets in the Middle East anymore—but no real damage was done, thanks almost entirely to Saddam...

...For Gorbachev not only savaged the Soviet Empire, he also raced to our side in moments of need...

...Rarely has any nation tried so hard to prevent itself from achieving serious objectives as the United States...

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...He enchanted the Western world with little more than a sexy birthmark and a sparkling personality...

...They endorsed Baltic independence...

...At the same time, the Man of Peace, the Man of the Decade (as Time magazine had intoned), was going to toss peres12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991 troika into the dustbin of history and go back to basics...

...and even promises of billions of yen from the hive in Japan...

...Take the first step in dealing with nasty people in your life: get this book...

...they dismantled enthusiastic$5.95 THAT'S A LOT LESS THAN A THERAPIST What bugs people—really bugs them—and drives them to the couch is generally not German reunification or Federal deficit...

...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991...

...It reveals the secrets of how to handle their misdeeds by using everything from humor to confrontation...

...They said, no, this is going too far, too fast...

...God simply intervenes—usually by causing our enemies to save us...

...A very wise man has said, "There are small Hitlers around us every day...

...In the days of the Baker Shuttle, which took the secretary of state to virtually every Middle East capital (except Jerusalem), Shevardnadze and Gorbachev were constantly consulted...

...So people like Secretary Mosbacher at Commerce and the Fabulous Baker Boys at Statestarted to dismantle the system of export controls that had been established by the Reagan Administration...

...With the West in thrall, he was in a position to cash in: billions of deutschmarks from the gulled Germans, billions of francs from the enthusiastic French...

...If that's been a problem for you, Nasty People is the solution...

...All of a sudden, you're feeling small or incompetent or insufficient...

...Saddam could have pulled out anytime before February 22, waved goodbye to our half million fighters, and then, with his military might intact, asserted his hegemony over the region...

...It was against that backdrop that a new Soviet diplomat—Comrade Primakov—suddenly preempted Shevardnadze and began wheeling and dealing with Saddam Hussein...

...We would not have entered the Second World War in time to defeat the Axis had it not been for Japan's thoughtful attack on our fleet at Pearl Harbor, followed by Hitler's thoughtful declaration of solidarity with his honorary Asian Aryans...

...The Gorbachev case virtually defies rational explanation...

...Shevardnadze resigned, both because he didn't like the way the domestic winds were blowing, and because he'd been cut out of the foreign policy action...

...He was the only world leader who sent a telegram to Ferdinand Marcos, congratulating him for "winning" the election against Cory Aquino...

...If that miracle happens, the Saddams of this world will have a much tougher time becoming regional superpowers . . . and we won't have to go to war so often...

...No matter...

...Mikhail Sergeyevich employed just enough violence to inflame the Baltic peoples striving for democracy and independence, but not enough to achieve an effective repression...

...And why not...

...Andthe investigators are going to find that the Departments of State and Commerce, with only occasional resistance from the Pentagon, permitted Saddam to purchase an awesome amount of American technology for his evil projects...

...We are now beholden to Saddam Hussein and Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev...

...The author, Jay Carter, of Nasty People is a respected psychological counselor and teacher who, not unlike Freud, having learned from his own problems, can share it with others...

...Curiously, there was none of the usual indecision...

...he inspired awe, adulation, indeed mania, and he was crowned a Man of Peace despite the Tbilisi massacre, not to mention the killings of Armenians and Azerbaijanis...

...People at school...

...Resolute in his convictions, he declined every possibility to turn the situation to his own advantage, leaving even the timorous Baker no option but war...

...With the fall of Iraq, the closest thing he's got to a client state is Syria, and Hafez alAssad is not your typical puppet...

...mandate—we ignored it, and continued to consult with the Man of the Decade about the postwar Middle Eastern Order...

...Nice Guy, Gorbachev was going to try to save one of his last two outposts in the Middle East...

...Nasty People helps you deal with a spectrum of people and situations such as: • How nasty people think • The nasty boss • The nasty husband or wife • The typical 'victim' • What to do if you think you might be a 'nasty person' • How to break the cycle of nastiness If any of these scenarios sounds familiar to you, Nasty People is absolutely the book for you...

...IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Expiration Date Month/Year IIIII THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991 13 ally . . . and disastrously...

...Baker was not prepared to match the largesse of the Bundesbank, but he offered currency of a diplomatic sort: a Soviet veto over American policy in Europe and the Middle East, and blind American support for most any Gorbachev policy at home...