European Security Act — Two Steps Forward on NATO Enlargement, One Ill-Advised Step Back on Missile Defense

(Washington, D.C.): The Senate Foreign
Relations Committee is scheduled this
afternoon to complete work on legislation
intended to reorganize and streamline the
institutions responsible for formulating,
conducting and explaining the Nation’s
foreign policies. Long a priority of the
Committee’s chairman, Senator Jesse Helms
(R-NC), this initiative received critical
momentum when — as part of the Clinton
Administration’s bid to secure Senate
approval of the controversial Chemical
Weapons Convention — Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright agreed to eliminate
several bureaucracies and consolidate
their responsibilities in the State
Department.

Among the entities expected, until
recently, to be subordinated to State’s
managerial and budgetary control — and
inevitably, therefore, to its policy
dictates — is the Broadcasting
Board of Governors. This organization was
created in 1994 to oversee the range of
U.S. government and government-supported
international broadcasting operations.
The former (i.e., the Voice of America,
Worldnet and Radio and Television Marti)
are currently run by the U.S. Information
Agency.

Importantly, the 1994 legislation
recognized the necessity of
preserving the bureaucratic and
editorial independence of the latter
(i.e., Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty
and Radio Free Asia) — a
feature deemed critical to the ability of
such “Freedom Radios surrogate
broadcasting Radios” to attract and
retain their respective audiences. During
the Cold War years, this feature of
“surrogate” broadcasting
(affording access to accurate news and
other information to populations denied
it by their own, communist-controlled
media) was assured by an independent
Board for International Broadcasting.

But for the leadership of
Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), now the
Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking
minority member, the Freedom Radios would
have been a victim of the naive notion
that — with the collapse of the Soviet
empire — such surrogate broadcasting no
longer was needed and could not be
justified as a government expenditure.
At the time, faced with intense pressure
from Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI), who
made terminating the Freedom Radios a
personal cause célèbre, and in
the absence of appreciable support from
Republicans, the best Sen. Biden could do
was to provide a stay of execution for
the Freedom Radios: a new institutional
arrangement that more closely tied them
to USIA and that set arbitrary timelines
for eliminating government subsidies to
RFE/RL and the national foreign language
services they provide.

Changed Circumstances

It has become increasingly apparent in
recent years that, if anything,
the post-Cold War world is one in which
U.S. interests require increased
capability to provide factual information
to the peoples of Eastern and Central
Europe, Eurasia and the Middle East in a
form that is not discounted by the
audience as propaganda put out by the
mouthpieces of the American government.
One painful case in point has been the
Balkans, where control of most
information sources by totalitarians bent
on aggression and genocide contributed
greatly to the popular support for ethnic
cleansing. It is nothing less than tragic
that U.S. government policy toward the
former Yugoslavia prevented Radio Free
Europe from broadcasting to that region
in Serbo-Croatian at a time when the
truth may have undercut the sense of
grievance on which the likes of Slobodan
Milosevic relied to justify and sustain
his war machine.

A similar opportunity beckons today:
The recent, overwhelming defeat in
Iran of the candidate of the
fanatic clerics is proof that the people
of that long-suffering country are
yearning for an end to
“Islamic” tyranny. What
they largely lack, however, is
information that makes clear that such
change is not only necessary but possible;
that freedom-loving peoples elsewhere
support this goal and are willing to do
their part to help — at a minimum,
through the dissemination of news and
analysis which both encourages and equips
the growing opposition to the Iranian
government. This could be easily
and cost-effectively accomplished via the
creation of a Radio Free Iran service
providing broadcasting, ideally, in
Farsi, Arabic, Kurdish and Balouchi via
the organizational structure and
equipment of Radio Free Europe.

(In fact, such an effort should be just
one part of a larger U.S. government
effort to facilitate the emergence of
unified democratic opposition to the
extremist Iranian theocracy. In this
connection, Congress would be
well-advised to provide
government support comparable to
that going to private institutions
engaged in such democracy-building
efforts elsewhere to the
Foundation for Democracy in Iran
— an organization that has demonstrated
an extraordinary ability to forge a
common front among various Iranian
religious, political and ethnic
constituencies to work for change in
their homeland.)

The Clinton Administration’s signaling
that it sees in the election of a
relatively “moderate” Iranian
cleric as “hopeful” evidence
that change is afoot in Tehran, however,
underscores the importance of keeping
surrogate broadcasting as far away as
possible from the State Department. That
is the only reliable means of mitigating
the danger that the U.S. government’s
policy du jour (for example, one
that indulges yet again in the absurd
delusion that Iranian
“moderates” who operate in a
government under the thumb of radical
clerics is one with whom the United
States can safely do business) will
constrain the flow of factual news and
pro-change/pro-democracy editorials and
analyses from reaching the people of
Iran.

The Bottom Line

The State Department reorganization
legislation affords an important
opportunity to enhance one of the most
powerful and least expensive
instruments for promoting freedom around
the world: surrogate broadcasting.
Senators Helms and Biden are to be
commended for their bipartisan efforts to
put the Freedom Radios and other
instruments for international
broadcasting on a footing that continues
— and builds upon — the enormous
progress made to date by Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty in reducing its
costs while significantly increasing
their reach and influence. To do
so will require both
institutional independence from the
policy-making apparatuses of the U.S.
government and a continuing commitment of
public funding for the operations of the
Freedom Radio.

– 30 –