Stanley Kutler: The Company We Keep
[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and other writings.]
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, according to a New York Times report last week, admittedly accepts large cash payments from the Iranian government. The political and religious dynamics of the region are complex. Iran obviously has an interest in keeping the Taliban at a distance and at the same time countering Pakistan’s influence in the area. In this caldron of intrigue we have a huge American expenditure in treasure and blood aimed at keeping Afghanistan in our camp, so to speak....
Think of the American experience in then-South Vietnam. The country did not survive, let alone its leaders. Is it déjà vu all over again? In 1954, we created a classic state where there had been none. In a whirlwind of publicity, we anointed Ngo Dinh Diem as president of South Vietnam. The old “China lobby” saw him as a savior who would rescue East Asia from the clutches of Red China and immediately hailed him as the “George Washington of Asia.” (How we trifle with the reputations of our great leaders!) Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country and with little indigenous following, perhaps except for his Catholic brethren, then refugees from the Vietminh state in the north.
In nine years of rule, Diem managed to alienate large segments of his country’s populace, amid what was to become a familiar pattern of authoritarianism and nepotism involving his relatives, most notably his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, an opium addict attracted to the Gestapo practices of the Nazi regime. Corruption was rife within Diem’s family, involved as it was in drug dealings, rice contracts with the U.S. government, and coerced contributions to the Catholic Church—headed in South Vietnam by Ngo Dình Thuc, archbishop of Hue, who happened to be Diem’s older brother. Madame Nhu labored mightily to install her version of morality upon the Vietnamese....
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President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, according to a New York Times report last week, admittedly accepts large cash payments from the Iranian government. The political and religious dynamics of the region are complex. Iran obviously has an interest in keeping the Taliban at a distance and at the same time countering Pakistan’s influence in the area. In this caldron of intrigue we have a huge American expenditure in treasure and blood aimed at keeping Afghanistan in our camp, so to speak....
Think of the American experience in then-South Vietnam. The country did not survive, let alone its leaders. Is it déjà vu all over again? In 1954, we created a classic state where there had been none. In a whirlwind of publicity, we anointed Ngo Dinh Diem as president of South Vietnam. The old “China lobby” saw him as a savior who would rescue East Asia from the clutches of Red China and immediately hailed him as the “George Washington of Asia.” (How we trifle with the reputations of our great leaders!) Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country and with little indigenous following, perhaps except for his Catholic brethren, then refugees from the Vietminh state in the north.
In nine years of rule, Diem managed to alienate large segments of his country’s populace, amid what was to become a familiar pattern of authoritarianism and nepotism involving his relatives, most notably his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, an opium addict attracted to the Gestapo practices of the Nazi regime. Corruption was rife within Diem’s family, involved as it was in drug dealings, rice contracts with the U.S. government, and coerced contributions to the Catholic Church—headed in South Vietnam by Ngo Dình Thuc, archbishop of Hue, who happened to be Diem’s older brother. Madame Nhu labored mightily to install her version of morality upon the Vietnamese....