Pretoria and… Washington?

The first parallel has to do with Washington's current campaign for "democratization" in the Middle East and indeed (as President bush stated it in his February "State of the Union" speech) throughout the whole world.
In the days of south African apartheid, let us remember, for a long time the 87% of the country's people who did not fit into the racial classification of "white" had no right at all to participate in the country's "democratic" system, which was reserved only for the use of the lucky "whites". Later, in the 1980s, when the regime came under considerable internal and external pressure to democratize, it introduced two innovations: one the one hand it set up two additional parliaments, one for the people who fell into the classification of "colored", and one for the country's "Indians"; and on the other hand it said that that vast majority of the country's people who fell into the classification "black", or "Bantu" should be allowed to have their own little "parliaments" in their own Black homelands or "Bantustans", and that all the country's Blacks should over a period of time be herded into those Bantustans and told that that was the only place they could ever have the right to vote.
It is with that period of apartheid that I would compare Washington's current campaign for "democratization" around the world.
I'll stress again that the analogy is not perfect. Nonetheless, there are enough parallels to be interesting:
In the 1980s, the apartheid bosses in Pretoria certainly planned to continue to control every significant decision made by the new political bodies it was setting up, despite the fact that it tried to portray these bodies as the result of a "democratic process". The "democracy" enacted by them, in short, was always kept within the limits set by Pretoria, which did not hesitate to intervene in the work of these bodies whenever it wanted.
Crucially, Pretoria was vigilant to make sure that the new bodies would not make any heavy claims against Pretoria itself. In particular, the apartheid bosses wanted to make sure that the unequal, colonial terms of trade they enjoyed with the Bantustans would not be challenged and that they could continue to expropriate the riches of the continent with a minimum of interference from anyone else, in order to support the extravagant lifestyle enjoyed by the Whites-- even while people were dying of starvation in the Bantustans.
Many people in the White regime in Pretoria seemed honestly to believe that establishing the new political bodies, even though they had almost no real power at all, was a "bold" and "reformist" step.
Regarding the first of those points, there is a mounting body of evidence that-for all the Bush administration's calls for democratizing the Middle East, and the rest of the world-- it wants to make sure that, where this "democratization" is undertaken, the process remains as tightly as possible under the control of Washington. Of course, this is easier for them to achieve in the countries where they already have a lot of influence over the regimes, like Egypt and Jordan. For example, regarding Jordan, the well-informed columnist David Ignatius has reported that when King Abdullah explained his plans for political reform to President Bush last March, Bush reportedly responded with general approval-but he also cautioned the King, "Take it easy!"
It is harder, obviously, for Washington to control the "democratization" process in places where it has less influence. Like Lebanon, for example, where Washington's urgent calls for the disarming of Hizbullah's militia have gone quite unheeded-and where, indeed, even the Hariri family who two months ago were the toast of Washington entered the most recent electoral process in alliance with Hizbullah, rather than against it.
On the second of the points above-this is one of relevance to Washington's relationship with the whole of the non-American world, not just the Middle East. But we can note that, for all its rhetoric about the value of "open markets", and for all the real pain, suffering, and actual deaths that Washington-inspired "structural adjustment" has inflicted on people in the world's low-income countries, still, Washington has continued to act quite unfairly in many parts of the world trade system, has been extremely stingy with its foreign aid (especially compared with countries like Norway or Denmark), and has in general seemed shockingly blind to claims made upon it by people in the low-income countries. This, while obesity and fatness have emerged as prominent health problems within the US, and while US drivers continue to guzzle up gas reserves that are sorely needed, but not affordable, by many communities in low-income countries.
And on the third point, many people in Washington, too, consider that calling for "democratization" is somehow a bold and reformist step-and that is often the case even though they realize that the form of "democratization" called for by Washington is still extremely constrained and inequitable…
Well, I suppose people always like to see themselves as bold, wise, generous, forward-looking, and above all extremely good. It is hard, sometimes, for any individual to be confronted with compelling evidence that shows that the effects of what he has done have not, by any means, all been good.
(This brings me to another strand of the broad parallel between Pretoria in the time of apartheid and Washington today: the fact that both regimes have been motivated in their "messianic" pursuit of hegemony over the relevant portions of the earth by a strong sense that a very similar kind of--Protestant Christian-- God has somehow chosen them to do this. For Christians, as for anyone else, this sense of being "chosen by God" can easily blinker a person from seeing the very harmful effects his actions have had on many of his fellow-humans all around him.)

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