Mark Steyn: South of the Border

Mr Liam Quaide of Co Limerick has complained on this newspaper’s letters page that my “second eulogy in a week to Ronald Reagan addresses none of the main charges against the former president.” There then follows a somewhat lengthy list of charges he wishes me to address, and, alas, a columnist can’t write about everything. But for the sake of argument let’s take the first of my omissions from the Reagan record: “the oppression and poverty inflicted on Central America as a direct result of his foreign policies”.

A few months before 9/11, I went to the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, a rather somnolent affair aside from the anti-globalisation mobs hurling concrete across the perimeter fence. The assembled heads of government were there to plan for a hemispherical free trade area, and I spent a catatonic 48 hours listening to eminently reasonable Foreign and Finance Ministers eager to explain at length why Costa Rica and Bolivia were now open for business. The summit was attended by every President and Prime Minister in the region except one: Fidel Castro. Comrade Fidel had been ruled ineligible to attend because Cuba was not a democracy. Everywhere else was.

One can argue that things have slipped a little in the last three years: fiscal woes in Argentina; the grubby thug Chavez in Venezuela. But still, even by the most pessimistic reading, an area that 30 years ago was wall-to-wall dictatorships is now overwhelmingly democratic. Whatever the continent’s fate, it won’t include a return of the puffed-up bemedalled El-Presidentes-For-Life, like General Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, who abolished Christmas and banned Donald Duck.

That’s what makes Latin America relevant to the Bush project in the Middle East. For much of the last century, the region was mired in the same dead-end victim complex as the Arab world. The celebrated Brazilian sociology professor Fernando Henrique Cardoso was a famous proponent of “Dependency Theory”, which blamed the woes of everybody south of the Rio Grande on Uncle Sam, in much the same way that Arab regimes, invited to explain why they’re sewers of corruption and brutality, bore on about the Great Satan and the Zionist Entity.

SOUTH OF THE BORDER

Mr Liam Quaide of Co Limerick has complained on this newspaper’s letters page that my “second eulogy in a week to Ronald Reagan addresses none of the main charges against the former president.” There then follows a somewhat lengthy list of charges he wishes me to address, and, alas, a columnist can’t write about everything. But for the sake of argument let’s take the first of my omissions from the Reagan record: “the oppression and poverty inflicted on Central America as a direct result of his foreign policies”.

A few months before 9/11, I went to the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, a rather somnolent affair aside from the anti-globalisation mobs hurling concrete across the perimeter fence. The assembled heads of government were there to plan for a hemispherical free trade area, and I spent a catatonic 48 hours listening to eminently reasonable Foreign and Finance Ministers eager to explain at length why Costa Rica and Bolivia were now open for business. The summit was attended by every President and Prime Minister in the region except one: Fidel Castro. Comrade Fidel had been ruled ineligible to attend because Cuba was not a democracy. Everywhere else was.

One can argue that things have slipped a little in the last three years: fiscal woes in Argentina; the grubby thug Chavez in Venezuela. But still, even by the most pessimistic reading, an area that 30 years ago was wall-to-wall dictatorships is now overwhelmingly democratic. Whatever the continent’s fate, it won’t include a return of the puffed-up bemedalled El-Presidentes-For-Life, like General Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, who abolished Christmas and banned Donald Duck.

That’s what makes Latin America relevant to the Bush project in the Middle East. For much of the last century, the region was mired in the same dead-end victim complex as the Arab world. The celebrated Brazilian sociology professor Fernando Henrique Cardoso was a famous proponent of “Dependency Theory”, which blamed the woes of everybody south of the Rio Grande on Uncle Sam, in much the same way that Arab regimes, invited to explain why they’re sewers of corruption and brutality, bore on about the Great Satan and the Zionist Entity.

In the Seventies, the west’s foreign-policy elites were happy to take the losers at their own estimation: just as the so-called “realists” insist today that Islam is incompatible with liberty, so three decades ago there were wise old birds who said the same thing about Catholicism. Easy to scoff now, but back then, remember, the dictators ruled not just Latin America but also Spain and Portugal. Cultures can change.

Pre-Reagan, nobody thought much about this. The defeatist Democrats of the Carter era took it for granted that Communism would advance across the hemisphere, and some of them frankly found it a bit of a turn on: dig out that old picture of a starry-eyed Senator Kerry with Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. Twenty years ago, the Commie cutie was the darling of the salons of the west: On one memorable occasion, he turned up in Holland Park, in his best-pressed Sandinista fatigues, to take tea with Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser, plus Salman Rushdie, Melvyn Bragg, etc.

Meanwhile, the more subtly defeatist Republicans of the Nixon era thought the best bulwark against Communism was strongmen of various degrees of unsavouriness. This is the doctrine to which John Kerry, having gotten over his crush on Comrade Ortega, now subscribes to for the Middle East: he may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch. And, as I’ve been saying since 9/11, the opposite is more to the point: he may be our sonofabitch, but he’s a sonofabitch. I remember years ago hearing some CIA guy talking about Washington “getting in bed with Noriega”. You wouldn’t be so blasé with your metaphors if you’d literally had to get into bed with him: for 30 years he routinely raped prisoners of both sexes.

More to the geopolitical point, in most cases you were trying to prop up the unprop-upable. The Latin American state existed strictly for the enrichment of the extended family of whoever was President-for-Life that week. So they had bloated bureaucracies and oversized militaries that had to be supported by almost wholly unproductive economies. The classroom with no desks and the hospital ward with no beds were common features, regardless of whether the passing dictatorship was of left or right. If Mr Quaide seriously believes “oppression and poverty” were “inflicted” on Central America by President Reagan, I highly recommend Manual del perfecto idiota latinoamericano (Manual for the Perfect Latin American Idiot), an entertaining round-up of the good old days by three reformed lefties, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Alvaro Vargas Llosa. “I confess here that I only have one pair of shoes,” the corrupt Peruvian President Alan Garcia touchingly declared. “I really do not need more.” A casual glance at the week’s official photographs revealed that his footwear inventory was as unreliable as the rest of the government statistics.

What changed the dynamic in the region? Two things: Mrs Thatcher’s Falklands War, which was a decisive defeat for Latin-American macho militarism; and Ronald Reagan’s determination to roll back Communist expansion, at a time of Castro-friendly coups in Grenada and elsewhere. After the 1982 US-backed elections in El Salvador, Reagan addressed Parliament in London and committed America to a “campaign for democracy”. This was as big a break with the realpolitik crowd on Central America as last year’s Bush speech - also at Westminster, also on liberty - was with the realpolitik crowd on the Middle East.

If you think the democratization of Arabia is a long shot, so was the democratization of Latin America. But it happened. And the only thing to argue about is how much credit you want to give the Reagan Doctrine. You want to blame the US for acts of genocide against the Mayans by the Guatemalan military? As you wish. But that, in fact, is an example of what happens when Washington is absent. The Guatemalans reckoned they could handle the insurgency and buy arms on the international market, so they set to it, without any pesky foreigners around to complain about human-rights abuses (unlike, say, the Balkans, where the atrocities occur in plain sight of the UN peacekeepers).

But anyone who thinks Reagan wanted to oppress Central Americans and keep them in poverty doesn’t understand his profound belief in economic prosperity as the engine of peace and freedom. Central America in the first half of the Eighties had negative GDP growth: minus one per cent. In the second half, there was annual GDP growth of two per cent; in the Nineties, five per cent. Throughout Latin America, voters turned to parties who promoted privatization, free trade, hard currencies – or, in a word, Reaganomics. Ask yourself this: does today’s Latin America incline closer to western values or Che and Fidel’s?

Fernando Henrique Cardoso knew the answer. He wound up as President of Brazil, abandoned “Dependency Theory”, embraced globalization, and advised his people to “forget everything I wrote”. They did. Maybe the west’s dewy-eyed liberation theologists still mooning for Daniel Ortega should do the same.
The Irish Times, June 21st 2004

WHEN IRISH EYES AREN'T SMILING

The Iron Lady was on cracking form in her eulogy for President Reagan. Cannily anticipating the faint praise with which he would be damned by the media, she hailed him not as the Great Communicator – ie, a genial snake-oil salesman – but as the Great Liberator, and then gave a roll call of Eastern European capitals to prove it.

By contrast, I thought Brian Mulroney, the former Canadian Prime Minister, rather misjudged the room. He began with an anecdote about him and the Gipper watching their wives step out of a limo. “And as they headed towards us, President Reagan beamed. He threw his arm around my shoulder and he said with a grin, ‘You know, Brian, for two Irishmen we sure married up.”

It drew polite laughter, rather than the real thing. It was a bit too generic – the sort of thing any two Irish pols might say to each other on the stump in Boston or Chicago. Friday’s service was dedicated to the proposition that Ronald Reagan was special: you could talk about him toppling the evil empire – that’s pretty special – or you could tell some Ronnie anecdotes, but they had to be special, too, and Mr Mulroney’s wasn’t.

Even in the Eighties, of these three doughty warriors of the Anglosphere, Mr Mulroney brought up the rear: he was supportive without being helpful, which is about as much as Washington and London can expect from modern Canada. Maggie and Ron were best known for battling Communism together, so that’s what she talked about. Brian and Ron were best known for being Irish together, so that’s what he talked about. (They famously sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” arm in arm at the so-called Shamrock Summit in Quebec City in 1985.)

For his next slab of sentimental blarney, he turned to a poem by Thomas Darcy McGee, Irish-born but one of Canada’s Fathers of Confederation:

Am I remembered in Erin?
I charge you speak me true.
Has my name a sound, a meaning
In the scenes my boyhood knew?

“Ronald Reagan will not have to worry about Erin,” the Prime Minister assured us, “because they remember him well and affectionately there. Indeed they do. From Erin to Estonia, from Maryland to Madagascar, from Montreal to Monterey, Ronald Reagan does not enter history tentatively. He does so with certainty and panache.”

Well, they certainly remember him well and affectionately in Estonia. But Erin? I very much doubt it, if the correspondence I’ve had this last week from Dublin, Limerick, Mullingar, Bray, etc is anything to go by. My glowing tribute to the great man appeared in various countries last week, but it generated by far the most hostile mail from readers in Ireland – you may have seen a couple of responses on the letters page here. Ronald Reagan was certainly remembered at Dublin Castle, where Morrissey, the elderly pop star, announced the President’s death and the crowd cheered. The famously morose Mancunian, whom I’d assumed had retired around the same time the Gipper did, then said he only wished it had been Bush who’d died. The crowd gave an even bigger cheer.

I don’t know whether the good folk of Erin would go that far, but my sense is that Morrisey’s closer to their thinking than Brian Mulroney. The Irish would agree that Nancy Reagan and Mila Mulroney had married down, but seem less anxious to recognize either Ron (born Tampico, Illinois, in the great flatness of the mid-west) or Brian (born Baie Comeau, Quebec, an old paper town on the lower north shore of the St Lawrence) as “two Irishmen” rather than one insane B-movie warmonger plus his overly slobbering poodle.

Shamrock-flavoured blather is not what it once was in North America, and St Patrick’s Day has never really recovered from the “queering of the green” – the battle by Irish gays and lesbians to march as such in the parade, which has led either to its cancellation (Boston), its subversion by an alternative “inclusive” parade (New York), or its general fading as a demonstration of political muscle. But John Kerry still thought it worth passing himself off as Irish for two decades (he’s not; he’s of Jewish extraction, but for reasons best known to him buried that and played up the Oirish). And the lion’s share of green cards in the annual lottery are reserved for the Irish, thanks to an artful wheeze by Ted Kennedy. Plus, if you fly there from Shannon, you get to pre-clear US immigration, a privilege extended to no other country apart from Canada.

With Canada, there are compelling economic reasons for facilitating cross-border traffic. With Ireland, it’s pure sentimentality – and largely unreciprocated at that. These days, when it comes to the Great Satan, Irish eyes aren’t smiling, but American eyes are too moist and blurry to spot it. Mr Bush is about to touch down on the Emerald Isle for the US-EU summit, a huge waste of everyone’s time except insofar, as one Dubliner wrote to me, as it enables Dubya to be arrested and tried for war crimes at the Hague.

Mr Reagan’s death reminds us that Bush is not the first President to be unloved in Europe. In this week’s Weekly Standard, David Gelernter compares Reagan’s trip to western Europe in 1982 with JFK’s in 1962: “Both arrived bearing the same message: America will stand by Europe. America and Europe will face down the Soviet threat.” George W Bush, like Kennedy and Reagan a tax-cutter at home, will also arrive with that message – common values against a common enemy. But four decades ago le tout Europe loved Kennedy and was happy to stand with him; two decades ago, the Euro-left reviled Reagan and thought he would lead them to Armageddon; today, not just the left but a big chunk of the European right loathe Bush as the most dangerous man on earth, and half the cabinet ministers in the EU aren’t shy about saying so in public.

The same message, more or less, across 40 years. But, like Ron and Brian singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”, the old song doesn’t play so well in the old country. Certainly, there are differences in style: Kennedy was an East Coast aristocrat with a consort partial to Parisian chic; Reagan was a Hollywood actor with a folksy mien; Bush is a drawling Texan who likes mentioning God. To European eyes and ears, there isn’t much further to fall: on present trends, in 2020 the US President will be a stump-toothed Appalachian mountain man with his 14-year old cousin as First Lady.

But stylistic revulsion doesn’t quite account for the ever widening gulf - for that would mean western Europeans are simply frightful snobs and nothing more, wouldn’t it? It’s the broader underlying trends in Europe – social, demographic, economic, religious - that make America more and more foreign to it.

Am I remembered in Erin?

Yes, Mr President, but you don’t want to hear the details.
The Irish Times, June 14th 2004

STARSKY AND PUTSCH

Americans don’t get Europe. On the day of the Madrid massacre, I received a ton of e-mails from US readers along the lines of: “3/11 is Europe’s 9/11. Even the French will be in.” Friends told me, “The Europeans get it now.” Doughty warriors of the blogosphere posted the Spanish flag on their home pages in solidarity with our loyal allies in the war against terrorism. John Ellis, a savvy guy with a smart website, declared that “Every member state of the EU understands that Madrid is Rome is Berlin is Amsterdam is Paris is London is New York.”

All wrong. Within 72 hours of the carnage, Spanish voters sent a tough message to the terrorists: We apologize for catching your eye. Whether or not Madrid is Rome and Berlin and Amsterdam and Paris, it certainly isn’t New York. Is it London? Hard to say. I do know if I happen to be in the United Kingdom a week before the next election I shall take sensible safety precautions and avoid using public transit.

One reason why Madrid isn’t New York can be found by taking a trip to the multiplex to see the new Starsky & Hutch movie, based on the old Seventies cop show. Don’t worry, you won’t have to sit through the whole thing. You can leave after ten minutes and go to some dreary Miramax thing with Nicole Kidman valiantly spending four hours in make-up each morning to look wan and sallow. But my point is a simple one. Starsky & Hutch is one of a zillion Seventies retreads around these days. They’re all the same: S&H opens with Barry Manilow, but it could as easily have been the Starland Vocal Band or the Partridge Family or the Village People. And after the song come the cheesecloth shirt jokes and the flyaway collar jokes, and afros and discos and Tab.

That’s the difference. If you’re American, the Seventies mean tank-tops, Charlie’s Angels and Jimmy Carter. If you’re Mediterranean, the Seventies mean Franco, Salazar and the Colonels. Not so funny. In Madrid and much of the rest of Europe, the day before yesterday means dictatorship. The men and women who run Spain today grew up under Franco; they were young adults when King Juan Carlos stood firm against a coup determined to overthrow the country’s new democracy. For many Spaniards, the desire to reach an accommodation with the forces of history is natural – indeed, the default mode.

So, three days after their fellow citizens got blown up, they shrugged to the Islamists, “You’re right. We’d rather sit this one out. Go blow up the Anglo-Saxons.” “Don’t mention the war,” John Cleese instructed Manuel the Spanish waiter in “Fawlty Towers”. Manuel has no intention of mentioning the war, and if the British are foolish enough to keep doing so they can take it up with al-Qa’eda themselves.

Just over a year ago, in one of those wretched Security Council performances before the Gulf War, the French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, turned to Colin Powell and offered the umpteenth variation of the familiar argument that, if we Europeans are resistant to ze idea of war, it is because we have seen so much of ze horrors of ze war. The reality is the other way round: the reason they’ve seen so much of the horrors of war is because they’re so resistant to the idea of it - until it’s too late and conflagration is all that’s left.

If one had to cast the great Continental fatalistic shrug in a less jaded light, one would do it this way: the Second Republics and Third Empires, Fascists and Communists and European Unions come and go; they’re mere political forces. The ancient buildings, the old vineyards, the big stinky unpasteurised cheese your village has made for centuries and which the wimps at that Yankee Federal agency responsible for regulating all the taste out of American food won’t even let into the country: this is the essence of a man’s identity; the political fashions of the day come and go, but underneath you endure. By contrast, an American’s sense of himself as an American is much more explicitly political – it’s about First and Second Amendments, or, according to taste, a “woman’s right to choose”. The United States is a political project in a way that Spain – imperial, Fascist, monarchist, republican, pacifist, Euro-federalist, your-ideology-here-ist – isn’t.

They’re right in a way. For most Communist or Nazi foot-soldiers, the label was a flag of convenience. But that’s not true of the jihadi. And the tragedy for the Continent is that this time it’s their core identity that’s at stake. If you think that Spanish election result is a disgrace, look down the road two or three years, to the next election cycle, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands. In the US, psephologists speculate on the impact of Ralph Nader’s two or three per cent. Think about an election where 20% of the voters are a culturally unassimilated Muslim bloc. If Washington has a hard time getting any useful contribution to the war from Europe now, you do the math five years hence. The incompatible buddy-cop routine works in Starsky & Hutch, but America and Europe have stretched the formula way beyond breaking point. It can’t be put back together.
National Review, March 29th 2004

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