All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is Stephen Zunis, Senior Analyst for Foreign Policy and Focus and Professor of Politics and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco and author of the piece today at Antiwar.com, Obama to Aid Uzbek Dictatorship.
Welcome back to the show.
Stephen, it's been way too long.
Oh, it's great to be on.
Great to have you here and horrible to read this incredibly good article today about a terrible subject.
Islam Karimov, the dictator of Uzbekistan, he used to belong to the commies in Moscow and now he belongs to us, is that right?
Oh, yeah, you know, it's kind of funny.
We think back in the 1980s when we were arming Islamic extremists to fight communists and now we're arming communists to fight Islamic extremists.
Good times.
Yeah, Karimov, in fact, by the way...
No, I just got a big dividend check from Northrop Grumman, so apparently it's all working out.
No, really, yeah.
OK, no, that's not really true.
But, you know, in fact, he even took on the...
I forgot what his name originally was.
He took on the first name Islam after Uzbekistan became independent, you know, to try to show his credentials, but you can only...
It was clear world before that, I guess.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right.
You could only be a...
But you can only worship at mosques that are approved by the state and only listen to sermons most approved by the state.
But, anyway, back in his communist days, he was one of the hardliners.
He actually supported the coup against Gorbachev, the attempted coup in 1991.
You know, old Stalinist types, but then suddenly, you know, he finds himself, you know, president of this independent republic in Central Asia.
It's the...
Kazakhstan is bigger in area, but Uzbekistan is actually the largest of the stands in terms of population.
And he's banned all political parties, he tortures endemic, you know, severe restrictions on freedom of expression.
He's forced out, you know, any international human rights monitors or...and various NGOs.
And every harvest time, he forces two million children out of the schools to engage in forced labor for the cotton harvest.
Thousands of dozens have been jailed, many hundreds have been killed.
And he has literally, and I'm not making this up, he has literally had opponents boiled alive.
Yeah, well, and Craig Murray has reported he did that for the CIA.
He boiled them to get them to admit they were friends with Osama.
Oh, yeah, he was on the receiving end of the Extraordinary Rendition, you know, program earlier in the Bush administration.
But, you know, Congress ended up, you know, restricting assistance back in 2005 after a massacre in which 500 pro-democracy demonstrators were gunned down in this provincial town.
200 more were massacred in another town the following day.
But Obama has requested, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has approved a rider in the current foreign appropriations bill that would waive these restrictions and allow the United States to once again start arming Karamov.
Yeah, but you know what, here's the thing, that was all during the bad old days of Bush, Stephen Zunis, and you even quote in your article Hillary Clinton saying that they're showing signs of improving their human rights record, they're expanding political freedoms, and one of her senior State Department weenies said that, I believe him when he says this, he promised, and I take his word for it.
So how do you still have a chip on your shoulder now that hope has changed everything?
Well, somehow I trust Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other groups who actually monitor this kind of situation regarding the human rights record rather than the word of a dictator.
Well, now what interest does Hillary Clinton have in propping up such, I mean, come on, one million people alive, like that's out of the Middle Ages.
Yeah, really, really.
She actually paid him a visit just a couple of weeks ago on October 23rd.
She flew to Uzbekistan to talk about improving ties.
The excuse the administration is giving is that Uzbekistan happens to border Afghanistan.
And they have rail lines, in fact it was through these rail lines and roads that the Soviets invaded the country back 30 years ago or so.
And as you know, our relations with Pakistan have been rocky.
They have been threatening to prevent certain overland resupply of American troops there.
And Afghanistan is a landlocked country.
And as the State Department explains, all the neighbors are dictators or human rights violators to one degree or another.
And so we just have to buck up and support this guy anyway, because he will not allow the United States to resupply our forces in Afghanistan unless we throw in some military aid and other sweeteners.
Yeah, well, and you know, what's gone unsaid so far is that they really rely on this guy, or in case I may have spaced out, I don't think so, because the Pakistanis keep blowing up our troops and supplies on the way to Afghanistan through the land route and through the Khyber Pass there, through Karachi.
And so because of the drone strikes, turning the people, and the forced civil war there in Pakistan over all these years has turned the people of that country against America so badly that that is no longer considered by the military to be a secure way of getting supplies to Afghanistan, landlocked Afghanistan.
So now they have to rely on this guy Karamov that much more.
Exactly, that's the rationale.
I'm sorry, you may very well have said that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, basically, there are a lot of critiques to that rationale.
I mean, the obvious one is what the hell are we still doing in Afghanistan after all these years?
You know, even the National Security Advisor of the United States admits there are less than 100 al-Qaeda operatives left in that country.
They don't have a base, per se.
They don't have a means of planning or doing terrorist attacks out of Afghanistan.
So what are we doing being bogged down in a tribal war?
I'm sure on your show you've talked about this a fair amount already, so I don't have to reiterate it.
But even if we were to assume that we needed to stay in Afghanistan, or at least we want a safe way for the troops to get out, our tax dollars pay for thousands of these C-130s and other transport planes that could fly people in and out.
It's a little more expensive, but we've got to fly them into Uzbekistan anyway.
And yeah, you need overflight rights to do that, but even the Pakistanis aren't going to dare shoot down a U.S. transport plane, for God's sake.
Yeah, it's their civilians who are attacking our supply lines.
Yeah, so I find this whole rationale pretty dubious, frankly.
So what is it then?
They just like vicariously boiling people to death?
Because it's fun?
Because that's what Democrats are about?
Or what?
Yeah, I don't know.
To Obama's credit, he rejected the dangerous neoconservative ideology of the Bush administration, but in certain ways he's fallen back onto the old realpolitik of previous administrations.
Which is just as bloodthirsty, just a little bit different direction.
Exactly.
And you know, of course, Bush did for democracy in the Middle East and Central Asia what the Soviets did to socialism in Eastern Europe.
I mean, basically it made it difficult in certain ways to talk about democracy, even sincerely, without some dictator screaming foreign intervention or whatever.
So again, I can understand why some of the Obama people are being a little more cautious in pushing democracy, or at least saying they're pushing democracy.
In reality, of course, Bush supported more dictators than anybody, as long as they're our allies.
But the underlying thing is that there's no excuse for them just turning around and using the old policy of using our tax dollars to profit these despots.
All right, hold it right there, everybody.
We'll be right back with Stephen Zunes, author of Obama to Aid Uzbek Dictatorship at Antiwar.com today and at Foreign Policy in Focus, where he's a senior analyst.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Scott Horton, I'm talking with Stephen Zunes from Foreign Policy in Focus.
Man, I love that website.
If I was a millionaire, I'd find a way to merge Foreign Policy in Focus with Antiwar.com and call it AntiForeignPolicy.com or something.
Anyway, we run all y'all's stuff anyway, man.
We love it.
All right, now, a couple of things here.
I was reading something, I believe it was Craig Murray's blog, where he was talking about how Uzbekistan is a total dictatorship, and by that he means no pretense of a court system or a legislature whatsoever.
This former Soviet satrap does it all himself, including, as you say, forcing children to work in the fields.
And now, I guess what I wanted to get to was, is there really anything to Hillary Clinton's claims that this is beginning to change?
Because after all, the tortured dictator George Bush even called off aid to this country, as you said.
Now Obama's putting it back in force.
Is he really that much worse than George Bush on issues like this?
Or do they have even the slightest propaganda they can hang their hat on as to how life is improving for people in Uzbekistan these days?
Well, there have been some noted political prisoners that have been released, but most of these are pretty token.
I haven't seen any evidence of major shifts.
It was rather revealing that this State Department spokesperson was asked about the 2005 massacres, and he just responded, oh, we've definitely moved on from that.
And these are massacres that were personally ordered by Karamoff.
I think, again, there are some slight shifts in the sense that, first of all, Bush did not want to stop aid to Karamoff.
He even blocked a NATO investigation of the massacre.
He was essentially forced by Congress and by public opinion.
So it was really, he was drag kicking and screaming on this.
My contact in the White House, who's actually, I can't mention his name, but he's one of the better people there, I think.
He basically was saying that it's different than Bush's policy.
Bush is like a total blank check, whereas if indeed we get this waiver, and if we indeed take advantage of it, it's going to be conditional, and it's going to be monitored, and things don't improve.
And he said that when President Obama talked to President Karamoff on the phone a few weeks ago, that he said more about human rights in that 20-minute conversation than Bush did in the eight years of his presidency.
And I have no reason to doubt that, but, of course, it's one thing to talk about human rights, and it's one thing to say you're going to condition the aid and then actually doing it.
I mean, you may remember back in Central America in the 1980s, we had this line, oh, we've got to support the Salvadoran junta, and our aid will help train them in human rights.
And, of course, while they were massacring civilians by the tens of thousands with the very equipment we were giving them.
Yeah, and we ought to be able to parse this, too, between having normalized relations with anybody.
Because I'm a Nixon-goes-to-China guy.
I don't want a Cold War with Mao or Deng or anybody else, and I don't want a Cold War with Karamoff.
But there's a difference between having an open relationship with them and giving them money so that we can have a military base there, and having them hiring him to torture people for the CIA.
Yeah, really.
And I don't know if you've heard about this new Iran sanctions bill that's going through.
There's a clause in there that literally would forbid the U.S. government from having any diplomatic contact whatsoever with the Iranians.
Yeah, I talked with M.J. Rosenberg about that, and I guess he had made some calls to some experts just to make sure this is unprecedented in American history.
Really, really, even in wartime.
And here's the extreme.
I'm totally with you.
Yes, we should keep lines of communication open with governments, even the really, really awful ones.
But that's very, very different than using our tax dollars to prop them up and give them the means to oppress people.
Well, and, all right, you know what?
Let me switch the direction of this thing a little bit here.
I could have this totally wrong, and I'm speaking in vagaries deliberately because I'm not exactly right.
That much is for sure.
But it sort of somewhat seems like you've got the neoconservatives and perhaps even, I don't know whether you include Hillary Clinton in this, you have more neocon pro-war with Iran factions inside the government.
And then you have people who are, as you call them, the more realpolitik, realist types who presumably have some more things in common with somebody like Zbigniew Brzezinski who has warned numerous times against war with Iran.
And we all know his policy because he's published it repeatedly, and that is to continue rolling back the Soviet Union until there ain't none no more.
And I wonder whether all of this basing for supplies for the war in Afghanistan is possibly just a pretext for continuing the containment and rollback of the former Soviet Union, now the Russian Federation, and the ultimate conquering of their old foe, which seems like something they could get the neocons on board for, too, seeing how they're ex-Trotskyites and hate Russia and all that.
Right, right.
And it's interesting, because Central Asia, the line from the old realpolitik people is all you need to know about the Soviet Union is what order people are on on the reviewing stand in the May Day Parade, and they totally, you know, the U.S. is totally unprepared for all these independent countries that have their own agendas and their own histories and everything like that.
So, you know, the State Department, does anybody here speak as Becky?
I mean, they were totally at a loss when things suddenly fell apart 20 years ago.
But there's been kind of a power struggle in Central Asia, the old Silk Road.
I mean, this is where the infamous great game of the late 19th century is, because you have the Iranians who particularly have interest in the Shiite minorities there.
You have Turkey, because Uzbekistan and a number of other countries speak a Turkic language, and they want to have their influence.
The Russians, of course, want to keep the influence they had from the Soviet era.
The United States has their interest.
The Chinese, because of their Uyghur population in the Northwest, which borders these countries, they're kind of rested.
So you have this old-fashioned kind of effort by countries to wield influence.
But, you know, they're notoriously unstable.
We've seen popular revolts that have twice overthrown governments in Kyrgyzstan.
The most recent one was a U.S.
-backed regime that had set up where you had a base on, but we don't need more because the people brought in a government that wasn't so happy with our supporting the previous one.
So, you know, there are all sorts of pitfalls of this stupid game that we seem to be getting involved in.
Well, do you think that it breaks down in D.C. at all, the way I portray it, between people who would rather focus on a kind of, you know, continuing Cold War with Russia versus those who would rather have some massive hydrogen fusion-based conflagration with Iran?
Not quite that simple.
But, you know, I think what we need to do is challenge both of these kinds of ideologies and say, you know, our foreign defense policy should be based on defending the United States and not on getting embroiled in these crazy conflicts in these countries we can't even pronounce.
Yeah, right on.
That's the bottom line.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time, Stephen.
Really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Everybody, that's Stephen Zunis from Foreign Policy In Focus.
He's got a new one on Antiwar.com today.
