Addicted to Mobutu: why America can't learn from its foreign policy mistakes.

• Author: Weissman, Stephen R.
• Position: Congo President Mobutu Sese Seko

American foreign policy's 37-year investment in the Congo (formerly known as Zaire) has just gone bust. Notwithstanding some $1.5 billion in direct U.S. aid -- and billions more in U.S.-subsidized Export-Import Bank, World Bank, and United Nations assistance -- President Mobutu Sese Seko's "pro-Western" government melted away before Laurent Kabila's advancing rebels. Few observers mourned Mobutu's passing. During his three decades in power, Mobutu enriched himself and his cronies while impoverishing his people; turned Zaire's military into a rabble effective only in preying upon and repressing civilians; and earned the lasting contempt of the majority of important African leaders. His regime's fatal gambit was an association with exiled Hutu militants from neighboring Rwanda. These genocidaires had exterminated hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsi and were using Zaire as a base to return to power. In response, persecuted Zairean Tutsi, aided by the governments of Rwanda and Uganda, formed the core of a multi-ethnic and multinational alliance that finally drove Mobutu from the country. Now, after passing up countless opportunities to press for democratic reforms and wasting billions of dollars to support Mobutu's morally bankrupt regime, the United States confronts the legacy of its policy: Zaire's economy is in shambles, the genocidal Hutu-tutsi conflict in Rwanda and Burundi has spilled across its borders, and the country is now ruled by a military-based regime whose commitment to democracy and human rights is unclear and over whom -- thanks to our long passivity in the face of rising anti-Mobutu sentiment -- the United States has limited influence.

Sadly, Zaire is only the latest example of a structural defect in U.S. diplomacy, one that we have witnessed in such disparate places as the Shah's Iran, Somoza's Nicaragua, Marcos's Philippines, Botha's South Africa, and arguably Yeltsin's Russia. Time and again, the U.S. foreign policy establishment has supported friendly authoritarian leaders, however flawed, based on the assumption that its clients represent the "only" feasible pro-Western political alternative. As in domestic affairs, political elites and bureaucracies cling to outmoded ideologies and old old organizational commitments long after their wisdom has been called into question. But in foreign policy this tendency is even more pronounced, since the counterbalance of congressional and public accountability is relatively weak. Perhaps if we can understand how our policy went wrong in the Congo, we can begin to take meaningful action to prevent such costly fiascos in the future.

The Devil Known

Washington's long affair with Mobutu has its origins in the circumstances of the dictator's rise to power. Throughout the early 1960s the Congo was wracked by violent conflict -- the product of an ill-prepared transition to independence, divisive foreign interventions, and Cold War politics. To end the factional feuding, in 1965 U.S.- and Western-supported forces drove back rebel followers of former Zairean Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, and the CIA orchestrated a military coup by Mobutu. From this experience, the American foreign policy establishment drew a critical, but flawed conclusion: If Mobutu goes, Zaire falls apart. Even as the actual...