WhirledView

The US and Southeast Asia: Then and Now

By Patricia H Kushlis

In three days, the international media will have long forgotten last week’s centenary of the Armenian “genocide” and moved on to the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, an event in history which still reigns as a defining moment in the memories of the hundreds of thousands of the mostly young Americans who fought there and in the families and loved ones of those who did not make it home alive. (photo by PHKushlis, 2002:  Cambodia war memorial to the killing fields.)

Yet before the fall of Saigon to Ho Chi Minh’s forces and the messy US evacuation from South Vietnam, came the US evacuation of its embassy in Cambodia, an event that has, for the most part, sunk into obscurity. In fact, the US government had already left Phnom Penh – evacuating its remaining embassy staff - and the killing fields of Cambodia 18 days before the Saigon departure began.   Perhaps had this first US evacuation from French Indochina also been as chaotic - more media attention would have been paid to it. In contrast, it occurred smoothly and proceeded with few if any a ripples.

So what did happen that Saturday 18 days before and why was it significant?  

Forty years ago on April 12, 1975, the US evacuated its remaining staff from US Embassy in Phnom Penh. The staff left by military helicopters – most of the rest had flown to Bangkok by fixed-wing several days before.  Their departures signaled the beginning of the end of American military intervention in French Indochina.  The great US military Southeast Asia draw-down thus began. 

The US left Saigon in a much more troubling, heart-wrenching and photogenic way 18 days later and Vientiane quietly fell to the Pathet Lao in May but, in stark contrast, the US never broke diplomatic relations with the Laotian   government unlike it did with Vietnam and Cambodia. 

The costly and mistaken domino theory

The specter of Communism taking over the rest of Southeast Asia - if we were to leave – otherwise known as the “domino theory,” however, proved false.  None of the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) five – Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Brunei – were taken over by Communist insurgents despite the fact almost all had, or had been, threatened by home grown versions helped from elsewhere – most notably the PRC or the Soviet Union.  Time, of course, proved the domino theory wrong. 

For the fun-loving, king-revering Thai who had never experienced European or American colonization, at least, Communism was far too austere to be attractive for long.   In the Philippines, the Marcos regime was too strong and lasted for another 11 years.   But truth be told, the histories, cultures and peoples of the various countries that make up the patch-work quilt of Southeast Asia are as different as they can be from one another. Had the US government recognized the differences, understood the nationalist forces at work and responded differently it’s likely that the ignominious retreat of US forces and cessation of diplomatic relations with China’s underbelly would never have happened at all.

My story:  what I saw    

Since I arrived in Bangkok in early 1972, the US Embassy in Phnom Penh had been operating under siege conditions.  The city was only accessible by aircraft - planes flown over combat zones by experienced military pilots.  On the ground:  all roads to Thailand or Vietnam were controlled by the Khmer Rouge as their noose tightened around the capital.

Embassy spouses and families lived in Bangkok and as the Embassy in Phnom Pen was evacuated, its staff moved into US Embassy Bangkok – lock, stock and files.  We knew the evacuation was coming beforehand:  the question was the day, not if.  

Unlike the evacuation of US Embassy Saigon during which far too many American and Vietnamese employees were left to their own devices to flee or be captured and interned by the Viet Cong, the evacuation of Phnom Penh was a well-oiled professional job directed by the Embassy in coordination with the US military and enacted over weeks.  It included Cambodians – from high government officials to gardeners who had worked for Americans – people who felt their lives were endangered.  Not just American staff almost clinging to the blades of the last helicopters as they lifted off. (photo by PHKushlis 2002:  US helicopter on roof of the "reunification palace."

Removing Obstacles to Agreement with Iran

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

What’s the difference between a treaty and an agreement?  The most significant difference is Constitutional.  The former must be approved by the Senate, a Senate currently controlled by  Republicans.  Hence, no doubt, the Obama administration’s insistence on negotiating an international agreement, not a treaty, to mitigate the danger from Iran’s nuclear capacity.

What's the Right Word?

Since the resulting document will be a multilateral accord, I find myself wondering which word the Russians are using and the Chinese and the French.  I figure the Brits are in sync with the U.S. on terminology, so how are the others’ preferred terms normally translated into English?  That should help us determine if the Obama administration is using doublespeak to avoid a Senate veto, as many Republicans claim, or whether the document should be regarded as a “mere” agreement, however important.

Whoops!  I almost forgot the most important language of all − Farsi.  What are the Iranians calling the endpoint?   How does it normally translate into English?

Even if the other signatories to potential accord are employing a word that’s closer to agreement than treaty in English, the Senate may not be persuaded that its consent is unnecessary, since the U.S. is supposed by hyper-nationalists to be the all-powerful, exceptional country that makes the rules.  (If only the exceptional part were true in regard to torture, the treatment of minorities and the tendency not to take rape seriously!)

The Nature of the Opposition

But non-Constitutional issues are also playing a role in the tussle between a Republican Senate and a Democratic President, some largely unspoken, others argued loudly.  For one thing, if an agreement is finalized and formalized by all parties in June, or thereabouts, it will be a very big deal.  That achievement plus the Affordable Care Act would put Barack Obama pretty close to a slot in the Great President category, enough in itself to tempt Tea Party Republicans into sabotaging the negotiations. Other Senators, especially those who often seem to have trouble remembering they weren’t elected to Israel’s Knesset, will be waiting for Bibi Netanyahu’s guidance before they cast a vote. And finally there are the unappeasable, essentially racist obstructionists who’d love to impeach Obama for being a black Muslim born in Kenya but would settle for blocking him from accomplishing anything at all.

A Workable Compromise

During these long years of deadlock and gridlock in D.C., I’ve thanked my lucky stars that I’m not still being paid to explain the politics of U.S. governance to foreign publics, but the recent compromise on how to handle any agreement coming out of Vienna is one I wouldn’t shrink from.  Not only do the procedures make a certain amount of sense, there’s a deadline for action.  All in all, this −um − agreement is a pretty good sample of democracy in action.  Given the fact that some of the sanctions that the Iranians wish to remove can only be rescinded by Congress, the argument that no agreement can work without Senate action has always had a certain validity.  This compromise circumvents stonewalling based on the separation of powers, and it also rules out of consideration unrelated matters like whether or not Iran has recognized Israel’s right to exist.  Not bad. 

A caveat: although a deal with Iran has high odds of being approved under this compromise, it could also end up in the trash can, an incentive, some say, to hard bargaining in Vienna.

Democrats and Autocrats

Meanwhile, it’s clear that President Rohani of  Iran has no understanding of governance in a democracy. “We are in talks with the major powers and not with the Congress,” he sneered recently.  Well, maybe in a theocracy like Iran or a One Party State like China or a neo-autocracy like Russia the top dog can act without reference to the people and/or their directly-elected legislative representatives.  Maybe the leaders in these 21st century dictatorships can ignore the rule of law, constitutional or statutory.  But the U.S. is a democracy and a pretty feisty one at that.  Yes, the Constitution gives to the President aka the executive the power to conduct foreign policy, but only as a representative of the people.  Moreover, it is the judiciary, not the executive, which can nullify a legislative act such as the imposition of certain sanctions on Iran, and then only on Constitutional grounds. 

It’s not simple to run a democracy, but sloppy or not, democracies have a number of advantages, especially this one: where principled compromise between political parties is possible revolutions are improbable.  What’s more, agreements made by an outgoing party are more likely to be generously honored by a successor party if both were reasonably satisfied with its terms.   Fiat may be efficient, but it can be fragile.  If the U.S. eventually signs a hard-negotiated agreement with Iran and the rest of the P5, it will probably stick, even if the Democrats lose the presidential race in 2016 and Bibi Netanyahu howls, in which case  the latter should internalize this: no American likes to be pushed around by anybody. 

Tragedy in Ice Blue: Leviathan is Hardly a “Good” Fight

By Patricia H Kushlis

Years ago when I was visiting Finnish Lapland over Easter vacation, the color of ice blue dominated land and sky.  The horizons were immense.  The terrain was flat, little vegetation grew to obscure the earth’s austere Arctic vastness and the sun – a fiery orange ball on the horizon at dusk – already set late in the evening.  The ubiquitous Lapland mosquitos, however, had yet to appear.  

It’s been a long time since a Russian film took prizes in international film festivals.  This must be the first to have been set in Teriberka, a small fishing village near Murmansk on the Barents Sea close to where Russia’s Kola Peninsula and Norway meet. Further north than the upper reaches of Finland or Sweden. (film poster photo via Wikipedia)

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker reviewed the film in January.  The review’s title, a review which began with Lane’s views on another film entitled “Two Days, One Night” was “Good Fights.”  But was “Leviathan” really a good fight?  Not from what I saw.  It pitted a poor schmuck against the powers of a thoroughly corrupted state embodied in the village’s corpulent mayor seated in front of a picture of Putin acting in cahoots with its sanctimonious Russian Orthodox priest.   

That same ice blue dominates the background of the recent Cannes award winning Russian film “Leviathan.”  I saw it via the Internet at a friends’ house just a few weeks ago.  I don’t think “Leviathan” has made it to the local art cinemas here yet in Santa Fe – but I could be wrong.

"Leviathan" is at its simplest the tragic story of a poor Russian mechanic wrongly accused and convicted of a death that he did not commit so that the entrenched powers – the mayor and the village priest - could steal his house, tear it down and confiscate the land on which it stood for their own venal purposes. One of those purposes was a church, the other was a hotel.  The film’s title, of course, comes from the book of Deuteronomy or the Tanakh.  In it, Leviathan is a huge sea-creature or sea-monster. The monster appears in the film as the bleached bones of a large whale washed ashore on the beach where the mechanic’s wife commits suicide. 

What makes this film different from those of the Communist period – and even a powerful movie like “Burnt by the Sun” made in its aftermath – is its visual window dressing, not the underlying depiction of power and its excesses.  That was always there.  Yes, the characters dressed like they belonged to the 21^st century and drove newly minted western vehicles.  But the scenes could have been filmed years before – just substitute the Communist Party’s First Secretary for the Orthodox priest - and the result would have been the equivalent. 

It’s no wonder that this film was effectively barred from the Russian public – with the exception of a single showing in a small cinema in St. Petersburg - because it is highly critical of the way Russia is ruled today from top to bottom.  Yes, many ambiguities are there but this one takes little imagination to see.

What is surprising is that “Leviathan” received partial funding from the Russian Ministry of Culture and that the Russian authorities allowed it to compete in prestigious international film festivals.  It is also a surprise that director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s inspiration for this film came not from Russia but from an incident in Colorado which drew the director’s attention.  It is less of a surprise that this film can be seen in a more universal context:  the excesses of uncontrolled capitalism working in tandem with corrupt state religion – each propping up the other. 

In a sense, “Leviathan” is a throw-back to the centuries of Tsarist Russia when the state controlled religion and religion kept Russian subjects in line through threats of the fear of a vengeful God.  The vast majority of them were indentured serfs until 1861 – then during the Communist era the peasants were chained to the “kolkhoz” or collective farm – and under Stalin, the “rich” ones were murdered - so there wasn’t much difference. 

There’s a scene in the film where teenage boys from the village are found around a camp fire set in the ruins of an old orthodox church outside of town.  Given the strong use of symbolism throughout the movie, I assume this scene is also meant to be symbolic but of what I’m unsure.  Irreverence for religion? The irrelevance of religion to today’s youth?  Or maybe not.

"Leviathan" moves at far less than lightning speed but the action builds block by block, scene by scene.  It provokes thought:  its messages and images churn in the brain well after the theater lights have been turned on.   Isn’t that – in the end - the gold standard for a lasting film or a play?