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November 16, 2004

Centrist cleansing

With a zeal that would make Slobodan Milosevic proud, Bush is using his claim of a mandate to purge the government of moderate voices:

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has resigned as expected a day after his boss and close friend, Colin Powell, announced he was stepping down, a State Department official said on Tuesday.

This follows similar developments at the CIA:

The White House has ordered new CIA Director Porter Goss to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George Bush or of leaking information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official. "Goss was given instructions...to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president’s agenda."

And on the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Sen. Bill Frist, the Republican majority leader, said Sunday that he was troubled by recent remarks by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., about potential judicial nominees, and that Specter must convince his fellow Republicans that he deserves to be chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Arlen made some statements the day after the election," Frist, of Tennessee, said on Fox News Sunday in an interview with Chris Wallace. "They were disheartening to me; they were disheartening to a lot of people."

Specter said just after he won re-election that Supreme Court nominees who wanted to undo abortion rights would face tough confirmation fights in the Senate. Those remarks, in keeping with Specter's support of abortion rights and with his maverick personality, put him at odds with conservative Republicans and annoyed the White House.

Why does this all sound so familiar?

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything like a nail.” In contemporary Russia, President Vladimir Putin is wielding a particularly active hammer, taking on just about any institution capable of holding him and his associates to account.

Paradoxically, Putin has willfully smothered the very institutions that are indispensable if Russia is to improve the quality of its public policy decision-making and meet the profound security and economic challenges his country faces.

The Kremlin’s most recent steps to exert greater control have focused on regional governors, the State Duma, and the judiciary. Until now, half the members of the lower house, the Duma, have been elected in first-past-the-post contests. Going forward, the entire Duma will be composed of party lists, which will push aside independent legislators. Until now, the governors of Russia’s 89 regions have been directly elected. From now on, they will be chosen by the president. The careers of Russia’s politicians will now depend even more on the president himself.

Meanwhile, Putin has squeezed the judiciary. Last month, Russia’s upper house of parliament approved a bill that gives Putin effective control over the Supreme Qualification Collegium, the body that approves candidates for the country’s higher courts and disciplines senior judges.

But these efforts to rein in independent institutions and curb dissenting voices are part of a pattern of power consolidation that began far earlier in the Putin administration.

Independent media, especially television, have already been systematically pushed to the margins. The firing this summer of Leonid Parfyonov, the host of the popular news magazine Namedni, and the cancellation of the live political discussion program Svoboda Slova drained NTV, the most independent of the national channels, of the last of its programs with a political bent. Since that time there has been no meaningful critical broadcast voice in Russia. In September, Raf Shakirov, the editor in chief of Izvestiya, was forced to resign because of his paper’s frank and critical reporting of the Beslan horror.

Likewise, the Kremlin has neutered independent policy and polling organizations, and has put independent academic research under surveillance.

I guess now we know what Bush meant, when he said of Putin:

I used to think that we'd establish a relationship of trust with one another and then the other members of our administrations would have greater trust in one another. Trust is an important concept.

I'll never forget the first question I was asked after meeting Putin in Slovenia. "Do you trust Vladimir Putin?" I said, "Yes." I was asked why and I said: "I have looked him in the eye and seen his soul." We'd just finished a very long conversation.

We talked about family matters, our personal lives. I realised that Vladimir is a genuine person. He's someone I can trust. That doesn't mean we agree on everything. It means we have a common platform, the basis for relations between our governments to develop.

Well, at least Bush wouldn't use a tragedy to consolidate power.

Posted by Mike at November 16, 2004 02:21 PM

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