Remora

The exchange between Annie Applebaum and the always odious Strobe Talbott in Slate is a little treasure trove of Clintonia -- remember that magic time when the White House was inviting crooked Chinese and Indonesian money into the coffers of the Democratic Party, while palling around with the Mafia, uh, I mean government of Boris Yeltsin and his shifty-fingered ilk?

Applebaum is less scoriating on this subject than I'd like her to be, but she does put the bite on Strobe's Gray Flannel trousers act. Here's a nice graf:

You are arguing, essentially, that in order to destroy something bad (communism), we had to let something less bad (oligarchic noncapitalism) grow in its place. Well, maybe we didn't have much influence over this change anyway (despite the fact that U.S. policy�and U.S. rhetoric�often implied that we did).

Yet you are also arguing that it was OK for us to give our tacit approval to this change because we got some political concessions in exchange. Here I disagree: I would argue that Russia made most of the political concessions (agreeing to NATO expansion, getting troops out of the Baltics) because it is weak and because it had no other choice, not because Yeltsin and Clinton were friends. We didn't have to look on, smiling, while a handful of people stole the Soviet Union's assets, and we didn't have to lend the Russian government the money that it was no longer able to collect in taxes and oil revenue.

To my mind, the crucial thing is to stop thinking about Russia as exceptional and to stop treating the country as if it were always a special case. In the 1990s, the IMF created special loans, just for Russia, with special rules�thanks, largely, to political pressure from the United States. Instead of that, we should offer Russia fair rules, free trade�that is, not make up reasons to exclude Russian products�and insist that Russia join the WTO on the same terms as anybody else. Loans to Russia should be made on the same terms that loans are made to Bolivia. Russia should be allowed to remain a member of the Council of Europe only if it abides by the Council of Europe's rules, which means no human rights abuses in Chechnya.

Strobey gets a bit ruffled by the barking and biting. He brings out, as our ace in the hole, Gore's friendship with Chermonydryn:

"Go back and take a look at the sections in the book (at the end of Chapter 2, for example) on what we did, through technical assistance and exchange programs, to promote civil society. This was also a major theme of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission�which I believe would have accomplished a lot more if Chernomyrdin had lasted longer (but that gets me into the tricky territory of counterfactual history, and we've got our work cut out for us on the solid ground of the factual)."

Yes, I bet Chernoblyn wishes he'd lasted longer too -- he was making out like a bandit. Here's an old NYT story about Strobe's buddy:

"When the CIA uncovered what its analysts considered to be conclusive evidence of the personal corruption of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin of Russia in 1995, they sent it to the White House, expecting Clinton administration officials to be impressed with their work," reports James Risen of the New York Times. "Instead, when the secret CIA report on Chernomyrdin arrived in the office of Vice President Al Gore, it was rejected and sent back to the CIA with a barnyard epithet scrawled across its cover, according to several intelligence officials familiar with the incident."

"At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.," Risen continues, "the message seemed clear: The vice president did not want to hear allegations that Chernomyrdin was corrupt and was not interested in further intelligence reports on the matter. As a result, CIA analysts say they are now censoring themselves. When, for instance, the agency found that it cost a German business executive $1 million just to get a meeting with Chernomyrdin to discuss deals in Russia, it decided not to circulate the report outside the CIA, officials said."

But Chernobobin found soul mates at the Clinton White House, no doubt about that. Here's a background report by Ann Williamson that goes back to the voucher program (a Bush senior era program that was sanctified by all the free enterprising poobahs, and that was evidently an invitation to corruption) and up to the stropping up of the always drunk Yeltsin as a viable candidate for capitan of the Titanic in 1995. Williamson includes such gloriously tawdry details of the Clinton Administration's dealings with Yeltsin as the Tyson factor:

"Following the Russian Communists� success in the December 1995 parliamentary elections, the Fund proceeded into even dodgier territory with the 1996 $10.2 billion loan, which came front-loaded with a billion dollars meant for Yeltsin�s re-election. Tape recordings of conversations between Mr. Clinton and Mr. Yeltsin made public demonstrate that in return longtime Clinton supporter and campaign donor Tyson Chicken�s exports to Russia � a $700 million annual business � were protected from a threatened 20 percent tariff increase."

In the words of my favorite punk Asian american duo, Cibo Matto:

I know my chicken...
Or -- I'm still glad I voted for Nader.