• Dealing with the devil Dealing with the devil The Bush Administration’s sole surviving rationale for invading Iraq is that by removing a brutal dictator who tortured his people, the United States was prosecuting the war on terror. It turns
• Dealing with the devil
Dealing with the devil
The Bush Administration’s sole surviving rationale for invading Iraq is that by removing a brutal dictator who tortured his people, the United States was prosecuting the war on terror.
It turns out that to prosecute the war on terror, the United States has cut a deal with another dictator who tortures his people in a way that Saddam Hussein in all his infamy never imagined: Islam Karimov has people boiled to death.
Mr. Karimov is the neo-Stalinist president of the Republic of Uzbekistan, a place most Americans would be hard-pressed to locate on a map. The former Soviet state is just north of Afghanistan, and Mr. Karimov was only too happy to let the United States stage attacks on Afghanistan from one of his air bases. In return, he got a visit to the White House last March, and 45 minutes of face time with President George W. Bush.
The Uzbek leader took home to Tashkent a five-point “strategic partnership” agreement with the United States, along with $500 million in aid and credit guarantees. As they say in the Missouri Legislature, this was a “hold-your-nose kind of a deal.” Mr. Karimov has long been criticized by the State Department for human rights abuses. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the urgency was getting into Afghanistan, even if it meant dealing with the devil.
But now the urgency there is over, and there are reports that Mr. Karimov, perhaps emboldened by his new ties with Washington, is getting worse. Craig Murray, Britain’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, presented forensic evidence which he said suggested Mr. Karimov had boiled two dissidents to death.
Mr. Karimov’s enemies tend to be Islamic fundamentalists, which gives him common ground with the United States. He also arrests religious and political activists and homosexuals. According to human rights groups, the Uzbek state security service routinely subjects prisoners to gruesome forms of torture. This same state security service also received $79 million in U.S. aid, according to British press reports.
After blowing the whistle, Mr. Murray was recalled from his diplomatic post for hospitalization with depression. He is now recovered, but has not been returned to Tashkent, where his presence is seen as inconvenient not only to Mr. Karimov but to Mr. Bush.
If U.S. foreign policy is to have any credibility in the Muslim world – indeed in the world at large – it must be based not on convenience, but on principle. It will be recalled that in the 1980s, the United States made a similar deal of convenience with another Central Asian tyrant. His name was Saddam Hussein.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
