Kerry's Cruel Realism
OP-ED Columnist
By David Brooks
The New York Times
June 19, 2004
Sometimes in the unscripted moments of a campaign, when the handlers are
away, a candidate shows his true nature. Earlier this month, Andres
Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald asked John Kerry what he thought of
something called the Varela Project. Kerry said it was "counterproductive."
It's necessary to try other approaches, he added.
The Varela Project happens to be one of the most inspiring democracy
movements in the world today. It is being led by a Cuban dissident named
Oswaldo Payá, who has spent his life trying to topple Castro's regime. Payá
realized early on that the dictatorship would never be overthrown by a
direct Bay of Pigs-style military assault, but it could be undermined by a
peaceful grass-roots movement of Christian democrats, modeling themselves on
Martin Luther King Jr.
As a young man, Payá founded a magazine called People of God, but it was
shut down. He criticized the Soviet Union and was thrown into a work camp.
He was given a chance to escape Cuba, but refused.
Then in the mid-1990's, he and other dissidents exploited a loophole in the
Cuban Constitution that allows ordinary citizens to propose legislation if
they can gather 10,000 signatures on a petition. They began a petition drive
to call for a national plebiscite on five basic human rights: free speech,
free elections, freedom to worship, freedom to start businesses, and the
freeing of political prisoners.
This drive, the Varela Project, quickly amassed the 10,000 signatures, and
more. Jimmy Carter lauded the project on Cuban television. The European
Union gave Payá its Sakharov Prize for human rights.
Then came Castro's crackdown. Though it didn't dare touch Payá, the regime
arrested 75 other dissidents and sentenced each of them to up to 28 years in
jail. This week Payá issued a desperate call for international attention and
solidarity because the hunt for dissidents continues.
John Kerry's view? As he told Oppenheimer, the Varela Project "has gotten a
lot of people in trouble . . . and it brought down the hammer in a way that
I think wound up being counterproductive."
Imagine if you are a Cuban political prisoner rotting in a jail, and you
learn that the leader of the oldest democratic party in the world thinks
you're being counterproductive. Kerry's comment is a harpoon directed at the
morale of Cuba's dissidents.
Imagine sitting in Castro's secret police headquarters and reading that
statement. The lesson you draw is that crackdowns work. Throw some
dissidents in jail, and the man who might be president of the United States
will blame the democrats for being provocative.
Imagine if in the 1980's Ronald Reagan had called Andrei Sakharov or Natan
Sharansky or Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel "counterproductive" because, after
all, what they did spawned crackdowns, too.
If there's anything we've learned over the past 20 years it is the power of
moral suasion to buck up dissidents and undermine tyrannical regimes. And
yet Kerry seems to have decided that other priorities come first.
Over the past several months, Kerry and his advisers have signaled that they
would like to take American foreign policy in a more "realist" direction.
That means, as Kerry told the editors of The Washington Post, playing down
the idea of promoting democracy and focusing narrowly instead on national
security. That means, as Kerry advisers told Joshua Micah Marshall in The
Atlantic, pursuing a foreign policy that looks more like the one Brent
Scowcroft designed for the first Bush administration.
You can see why Kerry thinks that's a clever shift, after the arduous
efforts to promote democracy in Iraq. With realism, you avoid humanitarian
interventions.
But if we are going to turn realist, let's be clear about what that means in
practice. It means worrying less about the nature of regimes and dealing
with whoever happens to be in power. It means alienating people who dream of
living in freedom while we luxuriate in ours. It means doing little to
confront crimes against humanity; realism gives a president a thousand
excuses for inaction. It means betraying people like Oswaldo Payá — again
and again and again.
There's a reason Carter, Reagan and George W. Bush all turned, in different
ways, against this approach. They understood that democracy advances
security, kowtowing to dictators does not. Most of all, they didn't want to
conduct a foreign policy that would make them feel ashamed.
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