Tin soldier on maneouvers

It appears that Washington's tin soldier is on maneouvers in Islamabad. After two weeks of tumultuous rumblings all across Pakistan, Gen. Musharaf is looking increasingly like a cat on a hot tin roof. Pakistan is under martial law; normal activity, including political action, is under severe restrictions. Droves of political and social opponents of his military regime have been arrested; brutalised by state forces and generally oppressed. And now Washington seems to be preparing for a possible successor to the general. The plot seems to be souring.

Well, does not that scene ring a bell. Was it not Saddam Hussein who once was the useful dictator who served US regional interests in the Persian region until he became a little too big for his boots and started calling the shots? What a terrible slide was in store for Mr Hussein. The maneouvers went horribly wrong and so the US took most of their military over there to sort things out. Not quite - they have since got stuck there; the country is ransacked and things have taken a turn for the worse.

On the other side of the world there was once upon a time a certain Gen. Pinochet, a rather brutal chap as it turned out, who was most useful to US interests over there in containing the spread of communism in South America. But he reached shelf life soon enough and Chile has spent two decades since recovering from his exploits.

One wonders if the latest bad boy turned choir boy, the Colonel of Libya, will become the latest tin soldier in US International Enterprises Incorporated. For one, Col. Gaddafi is a rather enigmatic and mercurial character, more so than the rather straight-forward thug that was Hussein. Libya sits on quite a bit of oil - an increasingly rare commodity. Gaddafi will certainly play his hand carefully as well as play the harp of counter-terrorism, certain to strike the right cord with Washington.

Africa saw them ebb and flow: Gen. Mobuto Sese Seko, Jonas Savimbi, to name but two. All started out with lots of promise and noble goals. And the each time the maneouvers went south and dragged down the local population into pits of despair, war and tragedy. Each time the halls of Washington rang with chants of democracy and freedom to the foreign oppressed. But each time it was US regional interest that spelled the real intent.

In the Congo, it was ostentatiously about opposing Soviet expansion and, more sinister, about controlling the local diamond trade. In Angola, it went superficially over the big bad Soviet wolf, but under the covers, off-shore oil interests as well as the diamond trade - yet again - with both Washington and Pretoria in on the deal.

Oh, how sweet is the sound of freedom talk amidst the glitter of hundreds of carats in the vaults of New York; Amsterdam and Johannesburg, while the dull thuds of land mines abruptly tore off limbs of children in the far away bushes of Angola.