I Mean, I Think This Happened Before

     The United States wants to locate a missile defense site in Europe, the Russian leader protests and relations between the two nations be- come icy. The U.S. is saber-rattling, threatening another country over the issue of nuclear weapons. And a U.S.-supported dictator embarrasses the administration in the middle of an international conflict.
      Anybody getting a sense of déjà vu?
      Now, as many times before in the recent past, we are suffering the embarrassment of supporting yet another dictator who turns out to em- barrass us at a most sensitive moment.
      U.S. presidents have a long history of supporting the bad guys. Re- member the famous quote of Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Referring to the Nicaraguan dictator, he said, “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” And his overnight guest at the White House.
      Roosevelt was referring to Anastasio Somoza Garcia, the ruthless dictator of Nicaragua whom even ultra-vicious dictator Idi Amin (and once a U.S. "friend") called “a pig.” Somoza Garcia passed on his lead- ership techniques to junior, Somoza Debayle. Junior assumed the reins after his daddy tutor was assassinated, and copied that aspect of his daddy’s leadership by being assassinated himself, in Paraguay after fleeing Nicaragua for his life.
       Roosevelt defended his support as part of his “Good Neighbor Poli- cy” and several presidents, Democrats and Republicans, followed his lead.
       After Roosevelt, the policy became “an enemy of our enemy is our friend,” more generally known as “the cold war,” or it could be called, “the only good communist is a dead one.” And look at this partial list of  dic- tators we supported, all because they expressed an antipathy towards communism. For a while, the U.S. even thought Fidel Castro was anti- communist not long after he deposed one of our dictator friends, Fulgen- cio Batista of Cuba, not Castro's friends.
     Some of America’s Past Dictator Friends:

The aforementioned Idi Amin of Uganda
P.W. Botha of South Africa
Chiang Kai-Shek of Taiwan
Francois Duvalier of Haiti
Francisco Franco of Spain
Ferdinand Marcos of The Philippines
Manuel Noriega of Panama
Park Chung Hee of South Korea
Augusto Pinochet of Chile
Pol Pot of Cambodia
Rafael Trujillo of Dominican Republic
Reza Pahlevi, The Shah of Iran

     The U.S. government even liked communist Josip Broz Tito of Yu- goslavia because he spit in the eye of the Soviet Union, our No. 1 com- munist satan.
     To be fair, President Carter sought to avoid siding with dictators, then realized it was an inate aspect of U.S. foreign policy and he had no political gift for turning it around.
     For the present situation, probably the most relevant anti-communist dictator considered a U.S. friend was Ngo Dinh Diem of South Viet- man. He became such a friend, the U.S. government supposedly had him assassinated.
     So why have we not heeded the warning of the American philosopher at the turn of the 20th century, George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
     The current President Bush is not likely to be able to remember the past even as he lived it. While many of the listed dictators were doing their thing with U.S. blessing, Bush was a legacy student at Yale, ex- periencing all the help that status engenders, snorting coke, drinking heavily and working hard to avoid the draft. He was so interested in his- tory at the time, he never bothered to accompany his father on globetrot- ting trips, even while he was serving as an early ambassador to China. So curious was he, at the time he became president the younger Bush had visited only two other countries, Mexico and Canada.
     And the younger Bush was not the one who backed the Taliban, the group responsible for Al Qaeda and its 9/11 attack, by supplying them with arms and money routed through Pakistan. That was the work of Bush's predecessors, one of them his father, all in the name of blindly being for anything that was against the U.S.S.R., which was occupying Afghanistan.
     But none of that excuses him for repeating, and even topping, some of the worst of our foreign policy blunders. No president serves alone. Taxpayers dole out millions for legions of aides, including his far-more astute vice president, to actually lead the government and establish pol- icy, all with his signature.
     Small wonder then, while United States still supports dictators who either agree with our global policy or simply rule in a strategic location, it is once again embarrassed by a dictator it supported, adored and even had as a guest at the White House: Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.