WHISTLING PAST THE (CHECHEN) GRAVEYARD

(Washington, D.C.): If the Clinton
Administration’s determined effort to
ignore the warning signs emerging from
Russia were not so portentous, it would
be comical. As the evidence mounts that
the man on whom President Clinton bet the
farm — Russian President Boris Yeltsin
— is either chronically infirm,
politically irrelevant or Stalinesque in
his deceitful brutality, the
Administration is adopting an
extraordinarily pollyannish view of what
is afoot in Russia and its dire
implications for U.S. interests.

‘It Takes a City’

The most serious warning signs are now
coming from Chechnya. In the wake of
Yeltsin’s U.S.-backed reelection, his
government has intensified its genocidal
campaign against the Chechen people and
is currently poised to complete the final
destruction of their capital of Grozny.

The Clinton see-no-evil syndrome was
starkly in evidence in comments by
Administration officials reported today
by the Washington Post.
According to one senior official who
backgrounded the Post, there was
no reason for concern about the absence
of clear and consistent policy direction
from the Kremlin: “There is
bureaucratic infighting, but [it’s] in
the context of forming a government after
elections. It’s a work in progress.”
Another official, according to the Post,
said “August in Moscow is like
August in Washington, and the fact
that such key Yeltsin advisers as reform
economist Anatoly Chubais are on vacation
is a sign of normality.”
(Emphasis added.)

On The Record!

Worse yet, Deputy State Department
Spokesman Glyn Davies yesterday
simultaneously asserted that Boris
Yeltsin “is still in charge” —
hence, no reason for concern about
Russian stability — and (in the Post’s
words) that “it is not clear who is
issuing the orders in Chechnya” —
hence Yeltsin is not responsible for the
genocide. Davies declared: “I don’t
have any evidence that there’s been any
kind of a generalized breakdown that
would portend chaos in the ranks of the
Russian military.” How
“generalized” does a breakdown
have to be to be a problem for U.S.
security and other interests?

And White House Spokesman Mike McCurry
made light of the fact that — with the
exception of a few fleeting moments —
Yeltsin has been absent from the scene
since before his reelection seven weeks
ago. McCurry said yesterday that
President Yeltsin “has indicated a
desire to take some vacation time after a
strenuous campaign period. That
doesn’t seem to be too unusual. One
might hope that the American president
would do likewise.” (Emphasis
added.)

The IMF: Hardly a Reliable
‘Second Opinion’

Perhaps the Administration’s most
egregious distortion, however, arises
from its attempt to find an independent
authority to bolster its claim that all
is well in Russia. According to the Washington
Post:

“To support their view that
Yeltsin’s government is not
disintegrating, Administration
officials cited an announcement
yesterday by the International
Monetary Fund that it was releasing
another $330 million of a $10.2
billion loan to Russia. [According to
the IMF, its] executive directors
were satisfied that the Russian
government and central bank met their
July targets and are pursuing
policies consistent with the
attainment of macro-economic
objectives of the program.”

Unfortunately, the IMF has
ceased to be a reliable barometer for
economic reform in Russia — to say
nothing of a stable and liberalizing
political system. Its decision-making
with respect to Russian loans has,
instead, been politicized and suborned by
the Clinton Administration and allied
governments. Indeed, such
pressure in the past prompted the Fund to
release billions of dollars that would
otherwise have been unjustified on
economic grounds but that were deemed
necessary to assist in Yeltsin’s
reelection bid.

It’s Going to Blow

Irrespective of whether General
Alexander Lebed succeeds in his latest
attempt to broker a temporary cease-fire
— a prospect made more problematic by
Yeltsin’s criticism of his National
Security Advisor today — one thing is
perfectly clear: The foregoing
comments by Clinton Administration
officials indicate that President Clinton
is whistling past the Chechen graveyard.

The reason for such disingenuous is
unlikely to be that the Administration is
as out of touch with reality as these
remarks suggest. Instead, it is
symptomatic of a presidency obsessed with
its own reelection prospects and,
therefore, desperately determined to
conceal for the next three months the
full import of its failed policy of
appeasing Yeltsin’s Russia.

Mr. Clinton’s
“keep-a-lid-on-it” strategy is
likely to become increasingly problematic
as a series of other erupting crises
force the public to perceive a pattern of
incompetence, if not malfeasance, in the
conduct of foreign policy. For example:

• the Administration’s failure to
  address underlying institutional
  and other conditions necessary to
  foster and sustain genuine
  democracy in Haiti
  is assuring that the latest
  outbreak of political violence
  will not be an isolated incident;

• the certainty that next month’s
  elections in Bosnia
  — the lynchpin of the Dayton
  Peace Accords — will be neither
  free nor fair confirms the
  unworkability of that Faustian
  deal; and

• Turkey’s recent moves toward
  forging strategic partnerships
  with both Iran
  and Iraq
  foreshadows the demise of Clinton
  Administration’s
  on-again-off-again policy of
  “dual containment” of
  these two pariah states.

The Bottom Line

The truth will out, later if
not sooner. Will it be in
time to inform the American people’s
decision about renewing Mr. Clinton’s
mandate?

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