It's hard to tell whether some people are just ignorant or plain sinister. At the
National Review Online, Rich Lowry makes a particularly poisonous and curiously weak defence of John Negroponte, one-time US ambassador to Honduras, the UN and Iraq, and now domestic intelligence czar for Bush II.
Leaving aside the fact that much of Lowry's 'defence' of Negroponte covers actions and policies that he did not, and could not, have contributed to in any meaningful way, the piece is riddled with the usual bias and inaccuracy. Lowry begins:
Carter-administration policy in the 1970s was to topple human-rights-abusing allies of the United States, then walk away, not caring if totalitarian left-wing governments rose up in their place.
Really? Did that ever happen? Has the US ever toppled a regime because of its human rights record, let alone then walked away? How many 'totalitarian left-wing governments' appeared on Carter's watch? Carter did withdraw support for Nicaragua's Somoza family dictatorship franchise in 1977, but to imply the administration had a hand in installing the Sandinista regime stretches credibility, to say the least. Or does he have somewhere else in mind? With a completely unsupported smear like that, it is very hard to tell what exactly he means.
Skipping through the usual tyrant-apologist, 'he may be a sonofabitch but at least he's our sonofabitch' rubbish (as well as this: 'Reagan policy was to encourage human rights and democracy across the board, by resisting the advance of Communism in the Western Hemisphere and encouraging military governments to democratize.'), Lowry gets down to business defending his friend:
The specific accusation against Negroponte is that he knew about abuses committed by the Honduran military. Did such abuses occur? Yes. The strategy of his critics is basically to tar him with that fact — i.e., he was U.S. ambassador, so he must somehow have been responsible for everything that happened there.
No, the specific accusations against Negroponte are that:
1. During his time as ambassador to Honduras he oversaw an increase in military aid to the country of over 1800% when he knew the army was carrying out widespread human rights abuses (see 2.).
2. He knew about the Batallion 3-16 death squads that were targeting student leftists and union organisers and did nothing.
3. He knew about the El Aguacate air base torture regime, since the base was used by US military trainers working with the Contras. When the base site was excavated in 2001, 185 bodies were exhumed.
4. He lied to Congress about all of the above, and more.
(A more detailed summary than I can provide here was published by the Baltimore Sun in 1995.)
I'm not saying all or any of the accusations are true, just that these are they. And that Lowry well knows this and chooses not to address any of them. Lowry claims, basically, that Negroponte knew very little about what was going on right under his nose. How does this recommend him for a shiny new job at the peak of the intelligence community? Actually, don't answer that.
Lowry then jumps, for some reason, to defending Reagan:
Reagan's dual-track policy was to undermine the left-wing Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua while encouraging reform elsewhere. The left made every possible excuse for the Sandinistas and argued essentially that their totalitarian rule should simply be accepted.
Well, leaving aside the fact that the Sandinistas overthrew one of the most revolting dictatorships in Latin American history — just think how bad it was for that to be true — and that this guy clearly has a funny idea about what 'totalitarian' might mean (think Hitler, Stalin, erm... Ortega?), the Sandinistas were a funny sort of 'dictatorship'. The kind that allows internationally-monitored elections and, when faced with defeat at the polls (1990), abides by the decision and walks away from the top job. I'm not trying to imply they were perfect, very far from it, only much, much better than what came before. In any case (within reason — no nukes pointed at Miami, no large-scale, systematic human rights abuses, Contras aside), the internal politics of Nicaragua being none of Negroponte's or Reagan's bloody business.
He continues:
But the Sandinistas were bent on expanding Communism throughout the region, so a necessary condition of democratic reform in Central America was driving them from power. Negroponte was a key point man in this project.
Quite simply, paranoid, McCarthyite rubbish. The Sandinistas were a socialist movement, yes, but primarily motivated by a nationalist and anti-oligarchical ethos. Just how deluded would you have to be, as a little old Nicaraguan, to dream of spreading your particular brand of Marxism through the isthmus? To think that Uncle Sam would be happy to stand by and allow you the freedom of the ballot box or the gun to spread your word? The sort of deluded that would find you in the local asylum, not at the head of a successful revolutionary army and later government.
Anyway, Lowry's wrapping up now:
In the end, it was military pressure that made the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador opposing the elected government there and the Marxist government in Nicaragua both come to the negotiating table and eventually make peace.
No, it was relatively free elections that saw the end of (official) Sandinista power in 1990 and a stalemate in the guerilla war that led to a UN-brokered peace in El Salvador between the FMLN and the government, with the signing of the accords in Mexico in January 1992. Had the US government, long after Reagan and Negroponte had moved on, not continued to throw US taxpayers' money at the savage Salvadoran military, that peace would probably have come sooner.
Guatemala made a transition, with Reagan's support, to democracy in 1985.
Well, when I was in Guatemala in 1991 there were still death squads roaming the streets of Guatemala City and roads to Atitlan and Xela, and the Peten was impassable as a result of insurgency and counter-insurgency 'measures'. So, a funny kind of democracy. One we should call 'Reaganocracy'?
At the beginning of Reagan's term, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay were military dictatorships...
Agreed.
...Nicaragua had just fallen to a Communist insurrection
An insurrection against...? No, the (nationalist, more than anything) Sandinistas had managed despite the best efforts of the US and others to rid themselves of the bloody Somoza regime.
And then a final flourish:
By the end of or shortly after Reagan's term, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay had democratized. Nicaragua held elections won by the opposition, and El Salvador became a model in the region. That John Negroponte was crucial to the policy that affected this revolution should be a recommendation, not a criticism.
Let's leave aside the nonsensical claims about Reagan's democratization of South America. Actually, let's not: the very most the US can claim is that they backed away slightly from tacit, sometimes active, support for murderous military dictatorships. Which, if you think about it, is like Harold Shipman popping up tomorrow to claim credit for the drop in the murder rate since his incarceration and suicide. He is responsible for that drop, in a way. Whether it's relevant or not I don't know, but with the inauguration of Tabare Vasquez in Uruguay, all the governments Lowry cites are now profoundly leftist.
But back to Negroponte: scroll up a page or two and Lowry's claiming he didn't even know much about what was going on in Honduras. Now he's a lynchpin of Reaganocracy across the South American continent. You can't have it both ways, Rich.
Now, I'm not trying to say Negroponte is the Antichrist or anything, nor that he was especially different from what came before in the realm of US policy-making in Central America. He wasn't responsible, for example, for the overthrow of the democratic Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 when it dared to face down United Fruit (just a little) — probably the nadir of CIA-backed actions on the isthmus (bizarrely, Arbenz wasn't even especially left-wing). Negroponte didn't do any torturing in Honduras himself, as far as I know.
But equally, it's impossible to exonerate him from some of the dirtiest of dirty politics the West has seen. Which is why I can't understand Lowry choosing to defend him so poorly on this ground. The Right are always berating the Left, often justifiably, for muck-raking through history to bash the US. But on this occasion, I didn't bring history up. He did. And it's boring, not to mention revisionism of the worst kind.
Why not defend Negroponte on his record at the UN or in Iraq? Surely there must be something there to recommend him. Even a 'no comment' defence on the shaky territory of Honduras is better than the lame one put up by Lowry. Personally, I don't care either way about Negroponte getting his new Bush II job, other than for what it says about the administration's attitude to past sins. I don't live in the US — it's primarily a domestic job and so fundamentally none of my business. But if we're going to have a public debate about it, let's at least make sure we're debating fact not fantasy.
Read on...
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