Washington-Moscow Fearmongering: Desperate Strategy To Sell Absurd Concessions?

The Center for Security Policy today bemoaned the script now being used by the Bush Administration and the Kremlin, the centerpiece of which is an alarmist warning of global conflagration if Gorbachev is not supported unconditionally in his various domestic and international undertakings. In the process, President Bush seems to have become an overinvested equity partner in Gorbachev’s ultimate public diplomacy coup — namely persuading the world that only he stands between it and imminent danger or chaos.

This disturbing development marks a distinct escalation in the Administration’s rationalization for supporting perestroika. At the Malta summit last year, the public was told that the full weight of Western economic, financial and technological assistance was required simply to ensure the success of this great Soviet "reformer." Whatever risks to Western security might accrue from doing so were minimized in March by CIA Director William Webster who asserted that "it is highly unlikely that there ever will be a reversal of the collapsing military threat from Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces in Europe, even if Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev is ousted from power and replaced by a repressive hardliner."

Now, in stark contrast to Webster’s pollyannish forecast, the party line in Washington and Moscow — and other Western capitals — is that disgruntled Soviet military officers and other, unidentified "hard-line" "conservatives" are waiting in the wings — prepared to take over if Gorbachev is denied whatever he demands. As President Bush put it in his 3 May press conference: "I think [Gorbachev] is under extraordinary pressure at home, particularly on the economy, and I do from time to time worry about a takeover that will set back the whole process." Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze put it somewhat more starkly according to the Washington Times: "Soviet hard-liners, exploiting popular unhappiness as a means of undermining President…Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika policies, may touch off a ‘social explosion’ that could ignite the country’s nuclear and chemical weapons arsenals."

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director said, "Claims that Gorbachev’s agenda would produce genuine democratic and economic reform inside the Soviet Union have long been overblown. While the Bush Administration at last appears to be recognizing this reality, its two-track response is quite astonishing: On the one hand, the Administration evinces no apparent concern over the catalytic effect the Webster testimony is having on congressional efforts to gut the defense budget. On the other, it mistakenly believes the alternative to Gorbachev is an array of unspecified and dangerous ‘conservative’ forces."

Gaffney added, "In fact, in the aftermath of Gorbachev’s crackdown on genuine reformers bent on self-determination and economic opportunity in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania — and that threatened against those in Latvia — as well as the cavalier suspension of the autonomy of the elected, reform-minded Moscow Council, it should be obvious that the real alternative to Gorbachev is not shadowy ‘conservative’ forces. Actually, it is those championing the sort of radical transformation of the Soviet political and economic system to which Gorbachev continually pays lip service, yet never seems to realize in his deeds."

The magnitude of the Bush Administration’s error on the latter point was amply demonstrated by the 4 May remarks of Gorbachev’s close political ally and fellow Politburo member, Alexander Yakovlev. Yakovlev engaged in classic Kremlin "spin-control" by characterizing the tens of thousands of participants in the Red Square May Day ceremony who called upon Gorbachev to resign and criticized the communist party as "ultra-right wing forces" that "hate the democratic process and are prepared for violence." As a rising Soviet democratic leader, Ilya Zaslavski, put it to the Washington Post upon learning of Yakovlev’s diatribe: "…What does he mean ‘right wing’? I guess in the Western sense it is right wing: pro-market, anti-communist. But here we call that left wing, don’t we?"

The Center believes that the American people are owed a better assessment of the prognosis for genuine, democratic and free market reforms in the Soviet Union. Such a reassessment is urgently needed so as to minimize the losses now being incurred by the Bush Administration’s continuing, unstinting support for the Gorbachev regime — at the expense of the very forces within the USSR most disposed to pursue such reforms.

Should the Administration continue to rely exclusively upon the clearly deficient analysis performed to date by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Center feels the Congress must demand that a "second opinion" be obtained in the form of an independent assessment by a non-official panel of experts akin to the 1976 "Team B" review produced for then-CIA Director George Bush. The alternative is to watch the Administration’s policy toward the Soviet Union drift toward the same shoals as its China policy.