Secretary Baker's licentious OKs - James A. Baker, sanction to use of force by Soviet armed forces to bring order to Azerbaidzhan - column

National Review, Feb 19, 1990 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Secretary Baker's Licentious OKs

NEW YORK, JANUARY 19

Miss Margaret Tutwiler, spokesman for the State Department, has given explicit sanction to the use by the Soviet Union of its armed forces to bring peace and order to Azerbaidzhan. In December, Secretary of State James Baker said that he would have no objections to the use of Soviet troops to help bring order to Rumania. There are those who froze at the association of Soviet troops with "law & order." The kind of law and order associated with the use of the Soviet military brings to mind the dispatch of the army to Afghanistan in 1979, precisely to bring law and order to Kabul.

One wonders: Why does Mr, Baker want to baptize the use of Soviet troops in Azerbaidzhan? History acknowledges that there are ancient rivalries between Armenia and Azerbaidzhan [see below]. But these rivalries are unattached to the much larger question, which has to do with the separatist inclinations of the Azerbaidzhanis, who were incorporated into the Soviet Union, as usual by force, in 1920.

Now the problem of the Union of Synthetic Soviet Socialist States is not the problem of the United States Government, just as the problem of the independence of Bangladesh was not an American problem. What is very much an American concern, however, is the strength and size of the Soviet army. The day after Secretary Baker gave his sanction to the use of Soviet troops in Azerbaidzhan, Czechoslovakia asked that Soviet troops be withdrawn within two years, and that was a week after Poland requested the withdrawal of Soviet troops by the end of this year. We are talking about big figures: 380,000 troops in East Germany, 40,000 in Poland, 65,000 in Hungary, 70,000 in Czechoslovaki. Mr. Gorbachev has not committed himself to recalling these troops, and one legitimately wonders whether circumstances will arise in which their use to maintain law and order will be invoked. After all, Mr. Baker invited the use of those troops for just that purpose in Rumania. And admirers of Mr. Gorbachev expect miracles from him. Strobe Talbott of Time magazine would certainly not have been surprised if Gorbachev had succeeded in resurrecting Ceausescu.

We should be wary of facile analogies to Abraham Lincoln and his fight to preserve the Union. That fight bore directly on the question of slavery. Mr. Lincoln was opposed to slavery, but wedded to constitutionality, and was even prepared to guarantee the survival of slavery in the slave states, until the voters themselves voted for emancipation. But the constitutional compact of 1789, he held, was sacred. There is no equivalent of any such compact, freely arrived at, binding the Soviet socialist states to each other. And, interestingly enough, at Stalin's insistence two of these states, Byelorussia and the Ukraine, vote independently in the United Nations. More accurately, they vote separately. They vote, of course, at the dictation of Moscow. But Moscow has maintained the position that they are separate states.

So what if they wish, as the Baltic states so vociferously do, to dislodge themselves from the Soviet union? Or, failing de jure dislodgment, what if these states wish to work out a kind of autonomy consistnet with what they think they can manage by themselves? Moscow will probably send its armies to prevent this from happening: but why should the U.S. lend its prestige to such an enterprise? And what if Moscow decided that friction between the Turks and the Bulgarians requires pacification by the Soviet military? Would we be prepared, a few months later, to dispatch General Scowcroft and Assistant Secretary Eagleburger to Moscow to reaffirm our conviction, sealed in champagne, that Moscow was a major power with which we have a continuing need to search out common interests?

I fear that Mr. Baker is running into the same kind of trouble we ran into in 1956. Then, Israel, strongly backed by England and France, mounted a campaign against Nasser's Egypt. Khrushchev was quick to take the opportunity to send his tanks into Hungary to repress the freedom-fighters. Eisenhower went cuckoo-mad at our allies for making a gesture that was imperialistic in appearance. Just so, Mr. Baker no doubt is obsessed by our Panamanian venture, and is anxious to spread the word that the Soviet Union is also free to go about sowing law and order. The difference being that that is exactly what we are engaged in in Panama, while every use of the Soviet military since the world war has been to suppress human appetites for freedom.