Shocking, When Others Do as We Do

Senate Republicans have been complaining loudly that the media are paying insufficient attention to their investigation into John Huang’s financial finagling on behalf of the Democratic Party. Eager to make amends, I sat in the Senate hearing room for too many hours last week, hanging on every word while Chairman Fred Thompson and the majority’s staff made the case that the Chinese Reds tried to influence the past U.S. election.

Not one to hold back, I let the outrage flow. Shocking, to hear that as much as $2 million may have made its way from a Chinese company through an Indonesian company into Democratic Party coffers. Or maybe it didn’t, since the Senate committee failed to come up with any proof of that proposition. But what is clear from intelligence intercepts, according to the senators briefed on their content, is that the words “money” and “elections” were used in the same communique between Beijing and its embassy in Washington.

As I said, shocking. The Chinese Reds have no respect for the rules of the game. It is the U.S. that is supposed to buy other people’s elections, not the other way around. For the past 50 years, at least, the U.S. government has intervened in almost every election in the world. It’s our thing.

Remember that 1948 Italian elections when we thought the communists might win and the U.S. pumped in so much money it was embarrassing? Or Iran, in 1953, when the CIA bought one dandy street riot to topple Premier Mohammad Mossadegh, the country’s last democratic leader? The next year, the same fate awaited Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemala’s democratically elected leader, whom our spooks didn’t like any more than Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile who was assassinated in a 1973 CIA-supported coup. Heck, the Indonesian government in cahoots with the Lippo conglomerate that Huang worked for is in power only because of past U.S. intervention.

And so it has been right up through the last Russian election, where we bought Boris Yeltsin a safe margin of victory. The $2 million Red Chinese outlay may sound like a lot until you consider that the U.S. has a secret budget between $30 billion and $50 billion devoted to “intelligence,” a misnomer for rigging the politics of friends and foes throughout the world.

But, you might say, we have a right to meddle in everyone else’s affairs because we stand for truth and virtue. It’s quite another matter when Communist Chinese money comes here to subvert the world’s greatest democracy.

Good point, I thought. But when I raised it with veteran Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles), he laughed and said, “The Chinese already have the whole U.S. defense industry lobbying for them along with all those other companies doing business over there. If they really did try to pull this stunt, they were just wasting their money.”

Not that he approves, but Waxman’s point is well taken. With lobbyists from Boeing, AT&T;, Caterpillar, Ford and GM pleading China’s case, you wonder if there are any politicians left to buy. Backing them up is a Who’s Who of consultants and lawyers including Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Cyrus Vance, Al Haig and Lawrence Eagleburger, all of whom have stoutly insisted that human rights concerns not intrude on U.S.-China trade, which is adding mightily to the richness of their retirement years.

But why pick on China? Any dictator can legally buy all the influence in Washington he can afford, as Heydar Aliyev of Azerbaijan knows.. Like Russia’s Yeltsin, Aliyev was also once a member of the Soviet Union’s Politburo, but he was too corrupt even by their pathetic standards and was demoted. Thanks however to the breakup of the Soviet Union, Aliyev, soon to be received at the White House, now has his very own country, and as luck would have it, there’s a whole lot of natural gas and oil sitting under his turf.

There is so much oil that American companies are rushing over there and making deals left and right. To sweeten their offers, they also want U.S. taxpayers to supply economic aid to Azerbaijan that has been on hold ever since that country blockaded Armenia. So, Azerbaijan has a public relations problem, particularly since there are a lot of Armenian Americans who vote. But with potential oil revenues, you can fix that. Just ask James Baker, John Sununu, Lloyd Bentsen, Brent Scowcroft and the other still well-connected ex-officeholders from both parties who have signed up to espouse Azerbaijan’s dubious cause.

This week, I get to go back and listen while Senate committee Democrats try to prove that foreign money illegally flowed to the Republican Party. It’s certain to be shocking.