Siss! Siss! Siss! Boom, Boom, Ba! Tajikistan
U., Rah! Rah! Rah! Yes, folks, that's the ticket, as the U.S. of
A. rolls out the University of Central Asia as the human face of
Pipelineastan's repressive regimes that are propped up by the American
taxpayers. From Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan, from Kyrghistan to Tajikistan
and Turkmenistan, the most barbarous and tyrannical governments
pay homage to their great benefactors, George W. Bush and his team
of monochromatic warmongers. Never mind that the U.S. G. wants to
off Saddam Hussein for being a tyrannical lunatic possessor of WOMDs
(weapons of mass destruction.) The pack of crackpot dictators that
rule Central Asia makes him look like King Solomon.

Oh, yes, the despotic rulers are only temporary,
we are told. Remember Jeanne Kirkpatrick's famous distinction between
authoritarian regimes and totalitarian ones? The distinction that
enabled America to overthrow and murder Allende and put the hateful
Pinochet in power in Chile, to be advised by Milton Friedman, while
we strove to assassinate Fidel Castro? Well, the good old days are
back. The right timing for democracy is something we and we alone
control. So in Central Asia, we will give them the University of
Central Asia, where Central Asian students can gradually learn how
democracy works, so in, say, three hundred years, after we have
plundered all the oil and gas, they can govern themselves properly.
And in the process, American professors can go over there and draw
down gigantic salaries in a gigantic boondoggle, so they can come
back and bore everyone at dinner parties about good old Tajikistan
U. "Can you imagine, we had raw yak meat and fermented camel's
milk for dinner!"

Heading up this specious enterprise is Fred
Starr, an amiable American who served as president of Oberlin College
and who is now with the Johns Hopkins University, the institution
that will oversee the creation of Tajikistan U., undoubtedly with
C.I.A. oversight, and with U.S. A.I.D. funding. He is just the right
sort to put the human face on the empire. But we have been down
this road before, and I can attest to the disastrous consequences.

You see, I was a professor of law at the Haile
Sellassie I University in Addis Ababa, where the students, who were
supposed to learn about the rule of law in a repressive and archaic
monarchy that was of strategic importance to America during the
Cold War (our planes took off from bases there to rescue the Saudi
royal family from an attempted coup by young air force officers)
all turned into communist revolutionaries who despised America for
supporting a backward and undemocratic regime. They overthrew the
old emperor and helped to install a particularly ruthless Marxist-Leninist
regime headed by Colonel Mengistu, who promptly had them all put
to death.

But the Americans who keep up these futile policies
are like the Bourbons of France, of whom it was said, "They
learned nothing and they forgot nothing." In the mindless self-righteousness
of American colonialism, we sow the seeds of our own destruction.
And when the disasters strike, we want to know why they hate us.
Hey, it's the repression, stupid.

September
2, 2002

Richard
Cummings [send
him mail] taught international law at the Haile Selassie
I University and before that, was Attorney-Advisor with the Office
of General Counsel of the Near East South Asia region of U.S.A.I.D,
where he was responsible for the legal work pertaining to the aid
program in Israel, Jordan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is the author
The
Pied Piper – Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream,
and the forthcoming novel, The Immortalists.