An Open Letter to Petro
Poroshenko
By Michael Pesek
March 08, 2015 "ICH"
- "Antiwar"
- Dear Petro Poroshenko,
Be careful of American
support.
Now that you are about to
become a close ally of the US and a dictator
at the same time, you should be warned that
this might not be the beginning of a
long-living love affair that inevitably ends
with an account full of dollars, an army
equipped with the finest stuff ever produced
to kill your enemies, with the warm feeling
of security because your American advisers
taught your people how to get rid of your
opponents, and with standing ovations at the
UN Security Council for whatever you will
say against Russians and other foes.
This is a little history
lesson to remind you that the weather in
Washington is much more capricious than the
continental climate of Eurasia.
The US certainly won Cold
War, but not necessarily their Allies. One
of the first to experience that fine
difference was Saddam Hussein, Washington’s
close ally in the Middle East for much of
the 1980s. Hussein was a CIA asset to
overthrow the Qassim-Regime, which was for
the Americans too close to Soviet Union. In
1963, he successfully organized a coup and
rewarded his American supporters by killing
hundreds of Iraqi communists and with
oilfields for American companies. But only
in 1979, after another coup in Iraq and one
in Iran, Hussein became chosen by the US as
" our bad guy" in the region. When the
Mullahs in Iran blow away the Shah, he
became a useful idiot to take revenge for
one of the biggest failures of American
policy in the Cold War. Whatever he wished
from the US to wage a war against Iran, he
got it. Americans can be very generously, no
question about it. They even provided him
with chemical weapons to kill whoever he
liked to kill.
However, it took not a
long time after the Soviet Union collapsed,
that the Americans changed their attitude
towards Saddam Hussein. For their new grand
gamble to rebuilt the Middle East, he was
now more useful as an enemy than as an ally.
Hussein was trapped to invade Kuwait to
provide a pretext for the First Gulf War,
followed by years of the sanctions, the
no-fly-zone, and it ended with another gulf
war, and a hole as the last refuge for
Saddam and a not so nice execution in the
dark of the night.
Lesson learned? You can
kill as much as enemies of the US as
possible, you can sell your natural
resources, but it will not shield you, when
the storm from Washington takes another
direction.
Do you remember Mobuto
Sese Seko, the long-standing ally of
Americans in the heart of Africa? You
should, Ukrainian peacekeepers went there to
tame the chaos that was left by his downfall
in 1997. With the help of the CIA, Mobuto
took over the Congo by a coup d’etat in
1965, and since then he was their most
willing ally in Africa. He was their man to
deliver weapons for the UNITA in the Angolan
civil war and for the RENAMO in Mozambique,
and of course, he was to ensure the
unhindered plunder of the Congo by American
companies, most notably the plutonium for
American atom bombs. But then in the 1990s,
Americans lost their interest in Africa, and
Mobuto with all his eccentricities, his
corruption and incompetence became a burden
for President Clinton, who was propagating a
new world order free from such oriental
despots. If Mobuto had lived long enough to
read the leaked telegrams of the US Embassy
in Kinshasa, he would have learned that
despite all the services he did for the US,
he wasn’t in such high regard by his
American allies.
Lesson learned? You can
shake as many hands of American presidents
and politicians as you want, you will never
know what they really think of you.
Not scared enough, because
you think these are fancy tales from the old
times of the Cold War? How about Noriega,
trained by the CIA to control the Panama and
to help them with their war against the drug
cartels in the 1980s. But then, in the wake
of the Contra-Iran scandal of 1986, his
involvements in drug smuggling became
somehow a nuisance for the dirty warriors of
the US. In order to get rid of him, the US
invaded Panama at the end of 1989 and
arrested him after they treated him with
noisy rock music for days to force his
surrender. He was sentenced to 40 years in
prison, released after 17 years only the
take another round in a French prison.
Lesson learned? American
pop culture is not only for entertainment it
can be a weapon, too. You may have buried
your not so humble origins in war of
oligarchs in the 1990s, but there is
certainly some file at Langley waiting to be
opened if it suits somebody.
There are so many other
dictators who tried to strike a deal with
the US only to end up in prison or on a
graveyard. What about Colonel Muammar al-Ghadafi?
Okay, he was an arch enemy of the US for
most of his life. But when he tried to
change the sides and supported the American
war on terror by offering the services of
his torture experts to hunt Al-Qaeda, he was
not awarded with American friendship but
with bombs that drove him out of his palace
and an assassination squad that killed him.
Assad of Syria, who tried to buy time by
offering similar services, barely missed
that fate, but only with the help of Putin.
Russians, it seems, are more loyal to their
"bad guys". Think about Castro! Who was
freed from his debt burden by the Russians
last year. Do you hope the IMF will be that
generous? Or the Chinese, after all the
years, they still stick to Mugabe even if Xi
Jinping is miles away from Zhuo Enlai, who
laid the foundations of this special
relationship in the 1960s. I guess, they
even still sing together revolutionary songs
behind closed doors, after some drinks.
Lesson learned? The
University of Kiev, where you made your
degree, is, after all, not Ivy League and
that is all what counts. As a former
apparatchik you will never know if your
conversion to a democrat and capitalist is
taken seriously by your American allies. You
will be under suspicion as all the other
converted ex-terrorists, ex-Marxists,
ex-dictators, who bow to the American flag.
American politics, you
should know, are a snake pit. There are so
many agencies, institutions, lobby groups
involved that you will never know who is in
charge of foreign policy. There are dozens
of think tanks that, in order to be heard in
this choir of voices, come up with a
constant stream of new strategies,
priorities and emerging conflicts to be made
relevant to the US. The president, despite
all the glamor and pithiness surrounding his
office, is only a moderator between all
these different factions and voices. The
American empire is overstretched, there are
so many conflicts to be manipulated, so many
interests to be served that you can never be
sure what is your actual ranking on the
priority list. After all, the only thing
what counts are domestic politics, the polls
and the contributions for the re-election
campaigns. In this murky world of an empire
that regards itself as chosen by god and as
indispensable, you are what you are: an
outsider, an useful idiot in your best days,
a burden when the US changes its priorities
or loses its interest for you.
I hope you will sleep
well.
Michael Pesek is a
lecturer in global history at the
Humboldt-University of Berlin for many
years. He has been published in major German
and French newspapers.