GREAT EXPECTATIONS The real cause of revolution

...Education can also spawn changes that may not be violent but are no less jarring...

...One can imagine that somewhere in the Kremlin there are mid-level bureaucrats shaking in fear as the search goes on for “who lost Somalia...

...If the strategy succeeds, it can result in a leader being hailed as a great statesman...

...Yet it is the educated elite in developing countries that usually provides the earliest and most vociferous agitators for change...

...Che himself met an inglorious death at the hands of the local militia, in this instance proving how wrong both the liberals and the conservatives were...

...Rather, we should be worrying about the thousands of doctors, technicians, and teachers Cuba is sending throughout the Third World in an effort that puts our own Peace Corps program to shame...

...At the time, the continent was filled with excitement and speculation about the New Men of Africa, many of whom had gone to school at Western universities and returned to lead the fight for colonial independence: Ghana’s Nkrumah and Nigeria’s Azikime (University of Pennsylvania), Tanzania’s Nyerere (Edinburgh), Kenya’s Kenyatta (the London School of Economics), and many others...

...In some countries where the Peace Corps was activeEthiopia is a good example-those who led Marxist revolutions included many students who had been taught by these volunteers...

...The recession in 1974-75, caused by a temporary drop in oil prices, led many middle-class Iranians to demand greater economic and political security...

...we often forget that what comes as a “love tap” to correct inflation here can be a knee-buckling shot to the head in countries that rely heavily on exports for economic growth...

...If Reagan’s script is right out of The Alamo, theirs is inspired by The Magnificent Seven: exploited, downtrodden peasants, pushed to the limits of human endurance by poverty and political terror, rise up against their murderous oppressors...

...Combined with a strong backlash by Islamic fundamentalists against the Shah’s rapid modernization effort, the resentments finally reached critical mass in 1979 and the Shah was forced to flee...

...the Marxist governments of Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and even Zimbabwe are now pleading for Western investment capital...

...If it’s stability we want above all else, my advice is to put your money on the conservatives...

...not only prevented Poland’s default...

...Indeed, when I was traveling in-Third World countries it was clear that host government officials were far more concerned with the economic policies of the Federal Reserve Board and Congress than with foreign aid...

...Once when I was in Africa with former U.N...

...While traveling in the south of the Sudan, I was arrested in Juba, where Congolese rebels were using the area as a military base for raids on their homeland...

...If it’s stability in the Caribbean Basin that we’re after, the United States shouldn’t worry much about the Cuban government, which is performing an inestimable service by draining $3 billion a year from Soviet coffers...

...Between 1945 and 1975, Central America enjoyed real per capita gains in income, GNP, and exports that were among the highest in the developing world...

...The Soviets, first and foremost, are as addicted as we are to stability...

...In an age when few even dreamed of attending a college, 33 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were college graduates...

...The first to the barricades are usually members of the middle and upper classes who, while prosperous compared to the bottom ranks, are angry at the deprivation they feel relative to what they think they are entitled to...

...This let the Russians off the hook by not forcing them to fork over to Western banks some of their scarce foreign currency...

...As a result, throughout Central America the urban middle class saw its recently won prosperity vanish quickly...

...nearly blasphemous...

...Indeed, in my experience it was often not the starving peasants with distended bellies who agitated for change, but the educated and bored young men in cities like Dakar, Abidjan, Manila, and Managua...

...But listen more closely to what the liberals are saying...

...While in jail, my Sudanese coconspirator slipped me a note: when I returned to the US., would I deliver his application to Harvard...

...The slightest hint of instability close to home-in Prague, Warsaw, or Kabul- quickly brings repression and tanks...

...He looked at me as if I had just suggested a preemptive nuclear strike...

...Many of those assumptions, not surprisingly, involved the West and Marxism...

...But that approach would force America to abdicate its hope of exercising some leadership in the developing world, and would betray our most basic principles...

...Those who work at AID or the World Bank channel billions annually to the Third World, but are extremely uncomfortable with the question of whether their efforts prevent or promote instability...

...And it was only after being educated in Napoleonic Europe’s best universities that Simon Bolivar felt inspired to return to Latin America and kick out the Spanish...

...It’s not that they’re tired of having so little...

...Verne W. Newton was executive secretary to the Agency for International Development from 1977 to 1980...

...The real culprits came in much more respectable guises: education and economic modernization, to name just two...

...But if the strategy fails, it can turn on a leader with a vengeance...

...Yet perhaps the most striking aspect of the “stability first” approach to foreign policy is how it extends even into the enemy’s camp...

...Accordingly, the only antidote is for America to support those who say they hate communists, their records on human rights notwithstanding...

...It is extremely difficult to promote progress without igniting instability and even violence, and it will require sophisticated thinking on our part to help channel unrest in the developing world to constructive ends...

...By promoting education and higher expectations among the poor, these volunteers may succeed where Guevara so miserably failed...

...Doesn’t he know that the young generation of priests in Central America has been stirring the revolutionary caldrons for 15 years...

...This was the main lesson I learned in the nearly four years 1 worked in the Agency for International Development, helping to dole out several billion dollars a year to developing nations...

...True, the Russians and Cubans are meddling in Central America...

...they’re frustrated at not getting more...

...Small industries flourished, bazaars and shopkeeper groups prospered, and there was considerable social mobility within the middle class...

...The plan came to an abrupt end when I was followed and re-arrested...

...Instead they are silent, as Iran’s young men, whose human rights were once such a cause celebre, are now cannon fodder for Khomeini’s war against Iraq...

...While we were propping up the Soviet empire, they were doing what they could to bring chaos to our hemisphere...

...Businessmen-along with students and professionals-demanded sweeping political changes...

...The flames of revolution are fanned only in distant Africa and Latin America...

...Yet the U.S...

...That was certainly the way it worked in the American Revolution...

...nor do I know of any revolution that spontaneously arose out of longstanding misery and despair, led by oppressed peasants suddenly taking up their pitchforks...

...The resulting conflict is not between the rich and poor, but between what people expect and what they really get...

...Some Third World leaders accordingly have taken a different tack, believing that their political future is best secured by keeping their subjects in blissful ignorance of such matters as economic development and foreign aid...

...Far better to have a foreign policy which encourages change with the full understanding that its consequences may not always be to our liking...

...Tight monetary policies in the U.S...

...Fortunately for us, the other side has been equally inept...

...American foreign policy should be unswervingly dedicated to ensuring that revolutions, when they occur, end in constitutional conventions rather than further repression, assassinations, or civil war...

...Liberals who seek refuge in platitudes about “peaceful revolutions” and “stabilizing social change” resemble the patricians who cheered Louis XVI’s demise at the dawn of the French Revolution but then recoiled in horror when the riots began, disclaiming all responsibility...

...Panama, Haiti, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay...

...They disagree only about what causes revolutions and how they can be prevented...

...With the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973, so much oil revenue began pouring in that the government started using some of it to compete with the private sector...

...Economic modernization also lies behind some of the unrest in Central America and elsewhere in the world...

...From 1962 to 1973, Iran enjoyed a period of growth probably unequaled since the days of Cyrus the Great...

...would I be so kind as to deliver his letter of application to Harvard...

...Economic modernization also is often an enemy of stability, however much everyone sings its praises...

...But I remember the reaction I got when I asked a former secretary of state (a Democrat) why we shouldn’t let Poland default and do to the Soviets in Eastern Europe what they were doing to us in Central America...

...That rising expectations often lie behind revolutions is hardly a new insight...

...And in the repression sweepstakes, El Salvador doesn’t hold a candle to Paraguay or Guatemala...

...The capacity of peasants and slum-dwellers to accept their miserable lot is, I’ve found, truly extraordinary...

...What changed the equilibrium in Iran was not the excesses of SAVAK’s secret policemen so much as dashed expectations...

...Both agree that the best outcome for Central America-not to mention the rest of the world-would be to somehow put the revolutionary genie back in the bottle...

...And since liberals believe that instability in the developing world results from oppressed and deprived masses, it naturally follows that the logical antidote is to pour in foreign aid to eliminate poverty and illiteracy while promoting economic modernization and political freedom...

...After returning home to Saudi Arabia, Tariki became known as “the father of OPEC...

...Doesn’t Mondale realize that it was precisely Carter’s human rights advocacy that helped destabilize such feudal regimes as Somoza’s...

...In Iran the revolution would have ended with the appointment of Mehdi Bazargan in February 1979, and the liberals who called for the Shah’s departure would today be walking tall and boasting of their roles...

...Demonstrators poured into the streets...

...Yet however obvious these observations seem, many liberal policy-makers prefer to avoid them...

...Economic modernization cuts both ways...

...Abdullah Tariki, for example, learned something he consideredtruly sublime while attending the University of Texas-how the major oil companies, working through the Texas Railroad Commission, manipulated the production of crude oil to keep prices artificially high...

...These rebels somehow convinced me to travel with them to the Congo to plead with the American ambassador for military equipment...

...The Shah, Pinochet, and even Somoza once enjoyed such accolades...

...And on both scores, the two sides have something else in common: neither is right...

...Peace Corps volunteers brought a different approach, encouraging their students to think for themselves and question their assumptions...

...Let’s look more closely at some of the real causes of revolution...

...What else is one to make of the strange alliance between liberal Mike Barnes and conservative Jack Kemp, cosponsors of a congressional resolution declaring that “stability in Central America is of enormous strategic importance to the United States...

...Haiti and Bolivia, where there is no revolution, are much poorer than Nicaragua...

...should be bankrolling the overthrow of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua...

...This story line, of course, was explored to excessive but unrewarding lengths in Southeast Asia...

...But such an approach would recognize some realities that liberals and conservatives prefer to gloss over, and in the long run may prove more capable of promoting the values elsewhere in the world that we believe in...

...Take the most recent unrest in Chile...

...GREAT EXPECTATIONS The real cause of revolution BY VERNE W. NEWTON There’s a lot of heated debate these days about American policy in Central America, and to hear both sides tell it, there’s an enormous gulf between the attitude of liberals and that of President Reagan regarding revolution in the isthmus...

...It wasn’t the threat of police and tanks-the leaders of the protest decided to take advantage of a three-day weekend to go to their country villas...

...I came to appreciate this phenomenon in 1965, when I was hitchhiking through Africa as a moreadventuresomethan-prudent 20-year-old from Iowa...

...The problem comes when those pressing for a greater realization of economic prosperity or security slam into the rigid walls of existing political arrangements...

...The education systems the colonial powers left behind in Africa were designed to turn out a nation of docile clerks...

...The demands were met with flexibility in Costa Rica and Honduras but with repression in El Salvador and Nicaragua...

...One alternative, of course, is to embrace the conservative’s traditional approach: ignore a country as long as its natives stay quiet, but lavish its government with military aid if someone shouts “communists...

...But while the U.S...

...In that time, I became convinced that if one were going to slap up “wanted” posters of the villains behind political unrest, such malevolent figures as Cuban military advisers, KGB agents, poverty, and social injustice would be only minor accomplices...

...Then there’s this trenchant analysis from Senator Christopher Dodd: “If Central America were not racked with poverty, hunger, and social injustice, there would be no revolution!’ Dios mio...

...Because these programs are represented as the thinking man’s answer to revolution, foreign aid bureaucrats have as much incentive to admit that their activities promote instability as the Joint Chiefs of Staff have in admitting that their colossal expenditures on military hardware may actually undermine national security...

...policy is unilateral and global, the Soviet approach is only regional...

...But when it comes to revolutions, liberals and conservatives are in agreement: they hate them...

...But still to come were the September Massacres, the Reign of Terror, and the Napoleonic wars...

...Many African governments, however, have learned that Soviet military hardware and pamphlets won’t grow maize or run factories...

...Yet after the bloodiest day of rioting, leaving 24 dead, an eerie calm descended over the capital of Santiago...

...At the same time, liberals should not be so naive as to sell more political freedom, education, and economic modernization as an insurance policy against instability...

...During the economic boom of the 1970s, two-thirds of the voters ratified a constitution that allowed General August0 Pinochet to postpone elections until 1990...

...LET POLAND BE BANKRUPT Hannah Arendt observed 20 years ago that in the contest between the U.S...

...This triggered deep resentment in middleclass merchants who felt they were being cheated out of some of their rightful gain...

...our efforts also helped rescue Romania and Czechoslovakia...

...Two can play the destabilizing game, of course...

...The Reagan view holds that all Third World conflicts are mere footnotes to the great East-West superpower rivalry...

...But after the OPEC oil shocks and the American-led recession among the industrial nations, wages plunged and inflation soared...

...But in none of these countries did hungry peasants and slum dwellers answer the call to revolution...

...That night one of my Sudanese co-conspirators slipped me a note in jail: since I could not join them in their mission, when I returned to the U.S...

...And as observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to North Vietnam’s General Giap have observed, the most perilous moment for a bad government is when it tries to reform itself...

...I am unaware of a single revolution in which communist outsiders were anything more than supporting players...

...Life is much easier when you imagine another Marshall Plan lurking in every new foreign aid proposal...

...But do the conservatives really believe all would be calm if the communists suddenly departed the scene The liberals have a somewhat more romantic view of what causes revolutions, but it’s no less muddled...

...Even with a new location and a largely new cast (but with a cameo appearance by Henry Kissinger), the reviews so far on Capitol Hill and among the public have been skeptical and with good reason...

...Living standards improved and women, especially, made great strides...

...If long-smoldering embers of poverty and repression cause revolutions, everything south of the Rio Grande should now be in flames...

...Americans who volunteered for the Peace Corps during the early 1960s also sensed that knowledge could be a dangerous thing when it came to preserving the status quo...

...Then the world recession sent the country into a tailspin...

...also contributed...

...At first I was allowed restricted movement around town, and I fell in with some young Sudanese rebels who had been educated by American missionaries and were fighting their government...

...These schools emphasized rote learning and considered the question “Why...

...Don’t believe it...

...In countries such as Egypt the Russians have been booted out as irrelevant to the serious job of nation-building...

...There’s a reason why Mondale and other liberals prefer to avoid these questions: the reforms they traditionally advocate in the name of “stability” often are the real agents provocateurs of revolution...

...That country was certainly in the throes of rising expectations, with Solidarity pressing for greater political and religious freedoms...

...It was America, remember, that headed off the greatest financial crisis in the history of the Soviet bloc in 1981 when conservatives and liberals alike worked frantically to prevent Poland’s default...

...I remember what one senior AID official told me when I asked if any formal studies had been done on the question: never do a study if the results might be used against you...

...Zaire’s Mobutu and Haiti’s Duvalier are two who adhere to a not-uncommon principle of Third World political science: steal the money intended to benefit your countrymen, and preserve the status quo...

...Walter Mondale boasts of how the Carter administration tried “peaceful solutions” in El Salvador, advocating human rights, land reforms, and working with the church and the “broad middle class” to “create an environment of stability...

...and the U.S.S.R., “those who understand revolution will probably win...

...Both conservatives and liberals find it convenient to misunderstand the causes of revolution...

...Into the mountains of Bolivia went Che Guevara to arouse the oppressed...

...Find me a single liberal who would oppose improving educational levels in the Third World...

...This is not to say violence is an inevitable outcome of revolution or an unavoidable cost of progress...

...If that were possible, the French Revolution would have ended bloodlessly in August of 1789 with the Declaration of the Rights of Man...

...LOUIS, LOUIS Unfortunately, one cannot always control sudden social and political change, much less finetune it...

...Stability” is the key here, and both liberals and conservatives worship at its altar...

...Senator Edward Kennedy’s recent message to his daughter’s graduating class at Tufts was that the “flames of revolution” in Central America had their origins in “longsmoldering embers of poverty and repression...

...In most developing countries, these reforms are the very stuff of revolution, capable of setting in motion powerful forces that may prove impossible to control...

...it should be familiar to anyone who’s taken a college survey course on Western civilization...

...Indeed, in many respects the communists suffer the same delusions as to what causes revolution as American liberals...

...And doesn’t he know that it is from the ranks of the “broad middle class” that the barricades are often first manned...

...Start with education...

...In 1959 Cuba organized the Granma Expeditions and exported cadres of middle-class students to lead uprisings in Venezuela...

...When it comes to stability, the conservatives don’t try to have it both ways...

...Ambassador Andrew Young, he told me that there were at least 30 American-trained Ph.D.s in the rebel camps of Richard Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, fighting for the independence of Zimbabwe...

...There may be disagreements about where to send the 7th Fleet for maneuvers, and whether the U.S...

...They have far fewer qualms about preserving order, even if it means the brutal repression of a country’s citizens...

...Iran under the Shah is a good example...