Rhetoric and Reality

Jaan Kaplinski asks in his 25 July Postimees column whether U.S. Assistant Secretary for Political Military Affairs Lincoln Bloomfield has ever read George Orwell's "Animal Farm." Like most Americans of his generation, I suspect he has. Orwell, a man of the democratic left, risked his life fighting Fascism in Spain, but he wrote Animal Farm as a call to intellectuals of the democratic left to resist Communist totalitarianism equally. Orwell was not blinded by ideology. I cannot imagine him acting as an apologist for Saddam Hussein's mass graves simply because anti-Americanism is again in fashion among some intellectuals. The question that came to my mind after reading Mr. Kaplinski's column was what book was he reading? The United States, the Estonia, and the European Union he describes must exist in some work of fiction.

Where to begin? Perhaps it is the characterization of the EU as an organization that will protect Eastern Europe from the Americans. There was a union in Eastern Europe that had as its purpose opposing America and "protecting" Europe from American gangsters and capitalist plutocrats. It was called the Soviet Union. That Union is gone forever.

The European Union I have worked with for more than twenty years has been a partner of the United States since its creation. The European Union I know shares the world's largest trading and investment relationship with the U.S. It works hand-in-hand with the United States in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Korea. As with any big partners with global interests, there are elements of disagreement, but these are dwarfed by what the EU and the U.S. do together. Moreover, the United States consistently has supported Estonia's EU membership aspirations. If the EU were really a bulwark against the United States, we would take a very different position. How Estonians decide to vote on September 14 is a matter strictly for Estonians. But, I think it would be truly erroneous if anyone voted for membership in the European Union because they thought they were restoring the Soviet Union's role as a "protector" of Eastern Europe against the U.S.

Is it grounded in reality to characterize the United States as a weak reed, as Mr. Kaplinski wrote? Perhaps we ought to ask the South Koreans, who are marking the 50th anniversary of the Korean War this week. Tens of thousands of Americans died in that conflict 14 thousand kilometers from home.

Mr. Kaplinski takes great pleasure replaying the scenes of the end of the Viet Nam War, a war that consumed my generation and ended in defeat. But, it was a conflict that my generation maintained even farther from home than Korea for eight years at the cost of more than fifty thousand American lives – a number of whom were my friends, colleagues and schoolmates. The United States I know spent fifty years, trillions of dollars and risked its very existence to ensure that Europe would one day be whole, free and at peace. I do not see Russian troops in Estonia today. I believe a President of the United States had something to do with that fact. I understand Estonia is joining the world's most successful and powerful alliance. This was done with the constant opposition of a large and important neighbor of this country. Another President, nevertheless, pressed this decision forward. Are these the actions of a weak reed?

Does Mr. Kaplinski really believe that the members of Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen and Special Republican Guard who are attacking U.S. troops are doing so because President Bush was deaf to dialogue? It is true there was and is a debate in the U.S. and in the world over U.S. Iraq policy. Thank goodness the United States and its allies are democracies that can air their policy differences publicly. War was President Bush's last option. He and everyone else in the U.S. government knew that with war would come a lengthy, expensive and difficult process of stabilization, reconstruction and democratization. As was the case in Europe after World War II and Korea in the 1950's, this process will more likely take years than weeks.

Let us not, however, slip from that fact that the war is both difficult and controversial to the fantasy of romanticizing who the attackers of coalition forces are. These are the same people who created Iraq's mass graves and used rape and torture as instruments of domestic policy. They are conducting attacks in the hopes that publics in the coalition capitals will become frightened so that a dictator can return to power. Those who advocate running from the risks of post-conflict Iraq, must also sign up for the consequence of a return to power of mass murderers and international aggressors. But, it does not appear that this fits with the plot of the novel Mr. Kaplinski is reading.

Although it is being ignored in the international media, inf fact the activities of Saddam Hussein's dwindling forces are increasingly limited to a fraction of Iraq's territory. The work of the overwhelming majority of coalition forces in the bulk of Iraq is now focused on stabilization and reconstruction. When the Estonian parliament voted 69-1 to send a unit to Iraq, it approved sending it to be part of a stabilization force. Estonian forces are doing just that and they are doing it well. The forces of 17 other countries already join them. Soon there will be forces from 30 countries participating. The Estonian government did not sign up to be part of some caricatured version of the Viet Nam war and it is not participating in such. That said to be a part of a stabilization force is to recognize there is instability. This means there are risks. Estonians can be proud of how their forces are dealing with those risks.

The next Kaplinski fantasy is that the U.S. seeks immunity from the rules of international behavior. It is true that we will not adhere to the treaty that created the International Criminal Court. Neither have the countries with the bulk of the world's population and the bulk of the world's military forces. This is not because we feel above the law. Indeed, the U.S. military has already begun cases against several members of the U.S. armed forces who are suspected of abuses in Iraq. We believe the court will be abused as a tool to prevent U.S. forces from acting in international crises, just as Maoist activists in Belgium sought to abuse that country's war crimes law to harass the U.S. (In Belgium, Secretary of State Powell and the first President Bush were indicted for their role in the first Gulf War, which was conducted under UN Security Council auspices.)

Clearly, it is not consistent with the novel Mr. Kaplinski is reading, but the great crimes against humanity of the past century were not committed by the United States. They took place where the U.S. did not act or did not act soon enough. The gulag, the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide, and even the massacres in the former Yugoslavia were not American crimes. Indeed, if I recall correctly, it was the arrival of U.S. forces that put and end to the massacres and rape factories in the former Yugoslavia and the arrival of allied forces in Europe than ended the Holocaust. I seem to recall it was Americans who pressed the Soviet Union to live up to its obligations under the Helsinki Charter – including releasing some rather prominent Estonians. Those who want the U.S. to perform its historic role of intervening to stop such crimes might wish to consider the irony of the current debate.

For some, all that is ill must be laid at America's door. From my viewpoint, to blame American policy and the Voice of America -- as Mr. Kaplinski does – for the fate of the Forest Brothers and of those courageous enough to seek the truth during the Soviet occupation is to reverse morality and to do serious injustice to a generation of Estonians. But, for some rhetoric is more important than reality and fiction more real than fact.