[MLUG - DISCUSSION] [POLITICS] Ford (not the car)

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I have been a little surprised by the glowing praise being showered on the 
recently deceased former president, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised 
because this is the typical response to the death of any powerful person. 
Everyone write/speaks about what an unassuming and decent guy Ford was, 
not a self-promoter, but the two words I would have used to describe him 
would have been disappointing and forgotten.  I'm sure many people were 
surprised to hear that Ford was still alive a couple of weeks ago.  Now we 
are learning that it is a courageous act of healing to give a pardon to a 
close political ally and good friend when he has committed criminal acts. 
Every politician now agrees on this because it is more helpful to a 
political career these days to make such statements than it is to tell it 
like it is.  Christopher Hitchens is not a politician and he probably 
makes more money for calling it like he sees it than for kowtowing to the 
powers that be, so here (below) is what he has to say. You might also 
enjoy this article on pro-Ford platitudes:

http://www.slate.com/id/2156780/

--Mike

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http://www.slate.com/id/2156400/

Slate.com
December 29, 2006

Our Short National Nightmare

How President Ford managed to go soft on Iraqi Baathists, Indonesian 
fascists, Soviet Communists, and the shah ... in just two years.

By Christopher Hitchens

One expects a certain amount of piety and hypocrisy when retired statesmen 
give up the ghost, but this doesn't excuse the astonishing number of 
omissions and misstatements that have characterized the sickly national 
farewell to Gerald Ford. One could graze for hours on the great slopes of 
the massive obituaries and never guess that during his mercifully brief 
occupation of the White House, this president had:

1. Disgraced the United States in Iraq and inaugurated a long period of
   calamitous misjudgment of that country.

2. Colluded with the Indonesian dictatorship in a gross violation of
   international law that led to a near-genocide in East Timor.

3. Delivered a resounding snub to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the time when
   the Soviet dissident movement was in the greatest need of solidarity.

Instead, there was endless talk about "healing," and of the "courage" that 
it had taken for Ford to excuse his former boss from the consequences of 
his law-breaking. You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that 
Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather 
exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and 
exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit 
nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the 
law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that 
only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do 
not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of 
the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is 
not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage 
control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that 
actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious 
trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, 
and rightly so. But by the standards of "healing" celebrated this week, 
one could argue that O.J. Simpson should have been spared indictment lest 
the vexing questions of race be unleashed to trouble us again, or that the 
Tower Commission did us all a favor by trying to bury the implications of 
the Iran-Contra scandal. Fine, if you don't mind living in a banana 
republic.

To enlarge on the points that I touched upon above: Bob Woodward has gone 
into print this week with the news that Ford opposed the Bush 
administration's intervention in Iraq. But Ford's own interference in the 
life of that country has gone unmentioned. During his tenure, and while 
Henry Kissinger was secretary of state, the United States secretly armed 
and financed a Kurdish rebellion against Saddam Hussein. This was done in 
collusion with the Shah of Iran, who was then considered in Washington a 
man who could do no wrong. So that when the shah signed a separate peace 
with Saddam in 1975, and abandoned his opportunist support for the Kurds, 
the United States shamefacedly followed his lead and knifed the Kurds in 
the back. The congressional inquiry led by Rep. Otis Pike was later to 
describe this betrayal as one of the most cynical acts of statecraft on 
record.

In December 1975, Ford was actually in the same room as Gen. Suharto of 
Indonesia when the latter asked for American permission to impose 
Indonesian military occupation on East Timor. Despite many denials and 
evasions, we now possess the conclusive evidence that Ford (and his deputy 
Kissinger) did more than simply nod assent to this outrageous proposition. 
They also undertook to defend it from criticism in the United States 
Congress and elsewhere. From that time forward, the Indonesian 
dictatorship knew that it would not lack for armaments or excuses, both of 
these lavishly supplied from Washington. The figures for civilian deaths 
in this shameful business have never been properly calculated, but may 
well amount to several hundred thousand and thus more than a quarter of 
East Timor's population.

Ford's refusal to meet with Solzhenitsyn, when the great dissident 
historian came to America, was consistent with his general style of making 
excuses for power. As Timothy Noah has suggested lately, ...

http://www.slate.com/id/2156300/

...there seems to have been a confusion in Ford's mind as to whether the 
Helsinki Treaty was intended to stabilize, recognize, or challenge the 
Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. However that may be, the great moral 
component of the Helsinki agreement--that it placed the United States on 
the side of the repressed populations--was ridiculed by Ford's repudiation 
of Solzhenitsyn, as well as by his later fatuities on the nature of Soviet 
domination. To have been soft on Republican crime, soft on Baathism, soft 
on the shah, soft on Indonesian fascism, and soft on Communism, all in one 
brief and transient presidency, argues for the sort of sportsmanlike 
Midwestern geniality that we do not ever need to see again.

Finally to the Mayaguez. Ford did not dispatch forces to "rescue" the 
vessel, as so many of his obituarists have claimed. He ordered an attack 
on the Cambodian island of Koh Tang, several hours after the crew of the 
ship had actually been released. A subsequent congressional inquiry 
discovered that he, and Henry Kissinger, could have discovered as much by 
monitoring Cambodian radio and contacting foreign diplomats. Eighteen 
Marines and 23 USAF men were killed in this pointless exercise in bravado, 
as were many Cambodians. The American names appear on the Vietnam memorial 
in Washington, even though their lives were lost long after the undeclared 
war was officially "over." The Ford epoch did not banish a nightmare. It 
ended a dream--the ideal of equal justice under the law that would extend 
to a crooked and venal president. And in Iraq and Indonesia and Indochina, 
it either protracted existing nightmares or gave birth to new ones.

  ---

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book 
is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.


Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

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