Share & save this story:
Also in Top Stories
Hey Dude, Where's My Vacation?
David Moberg, In These Times
SiCKO Is Michael Moore's Best and Most Powerful Documentary
David Corn, TheNation.com
The Purple Brain: America's New Reefer Madness
Marsha Rosenbaum, Paul Armentano, AlterNet
U.S. Officials Have Absolutely No Clue about Iraq's Oil Law
Ben Lando, UPI
Wind: The Farmer's New Cash Crop
Joseph D'Agnese, E Magazine
After Iraq and Afghanistan, Muslim Feminists Are Leery of Seeming Close to the West
Katha Pollitt, The Nation
In March, when the U.S. State Department announced its new global survey of human rights, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that the report demonstrated America's commitment to civil liberties, the rule of law, and a free press.
"We are recommitting ourselves to stand with those courageous men and women who struggle for their freedom and their rights," she said. "And we are recommitting ourselves to call every government to account that still treats the basic rights of its citizens as options rather than, in President Bush's words, the non-negotiable demands of human dignity."
Flipping through the report, however, one cannot help but notice how many of the countries that flout "the non-negotiable demands of human dignity" seem to have negotiated themselves significant support from the U.S. government, whether military assistance (Egypt, Colombia), development aid (Azerbaijan, Nigeria), expanded trade opportunities (Angola, Cameroon), or official Washington visits for their leaders (Equatorial Guinea, Kazakhstan). The granting of favorable concessions to dictatorial regimes is a practice hardly limited to the current administration: Bill Clinton came into office having said that China's access to American markets should be tied to improved human rights -- specifically its willingness to "recognize the legitimacy of those kids that were carrying the Statue of Liberty" at Tiananmen Square -- but left having helped Beijing attain its long-cherished goal of Permanent Most Favored Nation trade status. Jimmy Carter put the promotion of human rights at the heart of his foreign policy, yet he cut deals for South American generals and Persian Gulf monarchs in much the same fashion as his successor, Ronald Reagan.
How is it that regimes widely acknowledged to be the world's most oppressive nevertheless continually win favors in Washington? In part, it is because they often have something highly desired by the United States that can be leveraged to their advantage, be it natural resources, vast markets for trade and investment, or general geostrategic importance. But even the best-endowed regimes need help navigating the shoals of Washington, and it is their great fortune that, for the right price, countless lobbyists are willing to steer even the foulest of ships.
American lobbyists have worked for dictators since at least the 1930s, when the Nazi government used a proxy firm called the German Dye Trust to retain the public-relations specialist Ivy Lee. Exposure of Lee's deal led Congress to pass the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), which required foreign lobbyists to register their contracts with the Justice Department. The idea seemed to be that with disclosure, lobbyists would be too embarrassed to take on immoral or corrupt clients, but this assumption predictably proved to be naive. Edward J. von Kloberg III, now deceased, for years made quite a comfortable living by representing men such as Saddam Hussein of Iraq (whose government's gassing of its Kurdish population he sought to justify) and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (for whose notoriously crooked regime he helped win American foreign aid). Two other von Kloberg contracts -- for Nicolae Ceauscescu of Romania and Samuel Doe of Liberia -- were terminated, quite literally, when each was murdered by his own citizens. In the 1990s, after Burma's military government arrested the future Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi and cracked down on the pro-democracy movement she led, the firm of Jefferson Waterman International signed on to freshen up the Burmese image.
Although there are distinct limits to what they can achieve, lobbyists are the crucial conduit through which pariah regimes advance their interests in Washington. "It's like the secret handshake that gets you into the lodge," as one former lobbyist told me. Occasionally, firms will achieve spectacular successes for a client: one particularly remarkable piece of lobbyist image management, for example, occurred in the mid-1980s, when the firm of Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly helped refashion Jonas Savimbi, a murderous, demented Angolan rebel leader backed by the apartheid regime in South Africa, as a valiant anti-communist "freedom fighter." Savimbi visited Washington on numerous occasions, where the lobby shop had him ferried about by limousine to meetings with top political leaders, conservative groups, and TV networks. Black, Manafort checked repeated threats by members of Congress to cut off aid to Savimbi's rebel group, which was burning and raping its way through Angola with the help of American taxpayers.
Generally, though, lobbyists' victories are more discreet. In 2004 six former members of Congress served as "election observers" in Cameroon and offered an upbeat assessment of President Paul Biya's overwhelming reelection victory, which a local Roman Catholic cardinal described as "surrounded by fraud." It turned out that the firm of Patton Boggs, which worked for the Cameroonian government, had arranged the trip of allegedly independent observers, whose expenses were paid by the Biya regime. Between 1999 and 2000, the Carmen Group received more than $1 million from the government of Kazakhstan to help "establish President [Nursultan] Nazarbayev as one of the foremost emerging leaders of the New World." The lobby shop sent four writers -- syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, Providence Journal associate editor Philip Terzian, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. of The American Spectator, and Scott Hogenson of the Conservative News Service -- on all-expenses-paid trips to Kazakhstan, and upon their return all wrote stories, ranging from critical but sympathetic to slavishly fawning, which the Carmen Group circulated on Capitol Hill.
See more stories tagged with: lobbying, washington
Ken Silverstein is the Washington Editor for Harper's Magazine and writes Washington Babylon for Harper's online.
No comments:
Post a Comment