The situation in Uzbekistan utterly frustrates me. After 9/11 people asked, “Why do they hate us?” Uzbekistan is a perfect example of why. The Uzbeks are ruled by a despot who does not believe in Freedom (which is supposed to be the one value that we are trying to spread). Uzbekistan however has an airbase that is of vital importance as a staging ground for combat operations in Afghanistan. The U.S. makes the choice to support a government that massacred its own people. American dollars keep that regime in power, thus setting the stage for the possibility of blowback. It would be a mistake to think that this most recent massacre is just a one time thing that surprised our government. Over a year ago I blogged about this article (a MUST READ) reporting on a prison in Uzbekistan. Gulags are “in” right now.
Time Magazine’s Asia edition features Kishore Mahbubani’s new book, “Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World,” which offers other reasons to explain how we squandered our once glorious reputation, and what we can to do change our course (although this second part is reportedly not very substantive):
Some of the ground Mahbubani covers is familiar enough, but much is not. One of his arguments is that the loss of trust between the U.S. and the rest of the world started years before George W. Bush invaded Iraq “unilaterally.” Mahbubani is particularly astute about how the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 damaged America’s image overseas. He writes, for example, about how disillusioned Thais were when the U.S. did not bail them out after it had bailed out Mexico during a similar currency crisis in 1994. The reason the U.S. spurned Thailand may seem obvious to a lot of Americans—”you’re not on our border,” one U.S. Treasury Department official supposedly told the Thais. But for a country that had followed the global financial rules as dictated by Washington—opening itself up to large capital flows from abroad, only to get hammered as that same money flew back out in a matter of days—the truth hurt in ways that most Americans still don’t get. The perception was that the U.S. would prop up another nation if threatened with a massive wave of illegal immigration, but otherwise cared only that big American banks should be able to get their money out of Thailand ASAP. Is it any wonder, Mahbubani writes, that China—the one major country that didn’t play by Washington’s rules back then—now sees its influence gaining steadily, probably at America’s expense?
