Grave Concerns - 27 August 1999

The name Bishkek does not come trippingly off the tongue or, I imagine for most of us, off the memory. Yet - if this weekend's omens are ill - Bishkek could go down in history as a name as fateful as Sarajevo, Munich or Pearl Harbor.

It is the capital of Kyrgystan home of the dreaded Kyrgis tribe - a mountainous region of formerly the Soviet Union - and dominated for generations before that by Russia.

I mention the Kyrgs, or Kirghis, because they have a dramatic connection with American history and a lucky one, not only for Americans but for the European allies that fought Germany in the First World War.

The Kirghis were evidently, for centuries, ferocious and hardy nomads who, at unpredictable times, used to come down from the mountains (the highest peak is a perishing 24,000 feet) and perform vengeful massacres on the Russian settlers.

There came a time, in the early 1870s, when one Russian village had had it with these murderous invaders. The villagers couldn't believe their eyes when someone showed them a newspaper containing an advertisement - an invitation rather, from America's Union Pacific Railroad to come and emigrate to the prairie and accept 160 acres of free land to grow a crop on.

So these first Russians went across the Pacific, and took the train from San Francisco 1500 miles to the bare plains of Kansas - each of them carrying a bushel of a tough strain of wheat that (unlike what Yankees pushing west had tried) could withstand fierce summer heat and lie low in paralysing winters. This small band of villagers arrived in their settlement in 1876 and called the place Catherine, after Catherine the Great, who had invited their ancestors - German farmers - to come into the Volga Basin and improve the agriculture.

Well, so - you may ask as Shakespeare asked - the "concernancy" - with the Allied armies in France in the '14-'18 war. The wheat, the turkey red wheat, those Russians planted in 1876 took root and flourished mightily, so that 20 years later, they were the granary of the Allied armies in the First World War. Thanks, we might say, to the ferocious habits of the Kirghis.

Well, today they constitute about 60% of the republic - technically called the autonomous republic - of Kyrgyzstan. The native Russians are about 20%. As I speak, there is a meeting in the capital city of Bishkek of three or four men who between them command 4m active soldiers and something like 20,000 nuclear warheads. Mr Yeltsin and the leaders of China have come together at "a friendly summit" while we are worrying about cutting taxes, or the result of the Islay by-election to replace the upwardly mobile Lord Robertson?

What I've read so far is speculation on why the Russians and the Chinese have chosen to hold a summit - and it doesn't really take much speculating to figure that this is one of the, unfortunately for us, rare times when both American-Russian relations and American-Chinese relations are chilly. The United States, to take only one massive bone of contention, wants to know how those billions in economic aid to Russia were laundered and swiped by the Russian Mafia through American banks.

And a heating-up issue that Washington has been trying for a year or more to cool is the tricky - and potentially dangerous question - how many Chinas should we recognise?

In the long ago, once the Second War was over, the United States put its faith and its money in the island of Taiwan as the true, official China - it has turned into a prosperous and vigorous democracy and for 20 years or so Taiwan took the Chinese seat in the Security Council of the United Nations. And Communist China has never gone back on its promise (which has lately become a threat) to make the offshore island of Taiwan a province of Communist China.

The president of Taiwan meanwhile has chosen the same moment to defy the mainland bosses and say Taiwan will remain an independent democracy, so go ahead and shake your fist. This is an attitude the United States would dearly like Taiwan to abandon. The trouble is that the US has a treaty with Taiwan (approved by the Senate, as all treaties must be) which declares in just so many words, that any attempt by Communist China to use force in making Taiwan part of the mainland nation would be - quote - "of grave concern to the United States." That was always taken to suggest to the Chinese that they'd better not lift a finger or else.

But that declaration was made at a time when the Chinese did not have their finger on the nuclear trigger, and when one of the most comforting factors about American relations with Russia then was that Russia was plainly the enemy of China. No more - it seems.

A quarter century ago, I ended a talk by quoting - at that time - America's most distinguished political columnist, Walter Lippmann. Asked, in a rare interview, what was the worst thing that could happen to the world, he thought for the longest time and said, "China on the loose."

I ended that ghoulish bulletin with a slightly more chilling prospect - the possibility that China and the Soviet Union would decide they had more to gain by being together than perpetually at odds, and might conclude a pact as unthinkable as the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939, which guaranteed the Second World War. Let us pray that the summit at Bishkek will signify no such decision.

I took a secret vow, a month or two ago, not to start talking about the coming presidential election (and the pack of candidates already announced and running) until next spring. Why? Because the coming election is coming in November 2000 AD. Never before has a presidential election campaign got into action so ludicrously soon.

Likely candidates usually declare themselves in the winter and then in the New Year get out on the road and right through the main primaries, through the beginning of June, keep up the pitiless tramp through New Hampshire, through Iowa, Ohio, the Carolinas, all the primaries ending with California. If you win the California primary, you're halfway home to the nomination.

I can only guess that the Republicans were straining at the bit during the impeachment hearings and trial, and that once the president survived that disgrace, they were determined they should advertise as soon as possible a man or men, a woman or women who were made of different mettle. The campaigners started saluting Governor Bush, Mrs Dole, Mr Forbes and the rest, as people who would restore respect for, and renew the dignity, of the office of president. Fair enough. Why they jumped to it a year earlier than usual, nobody can truly say.

The Republican contenders started on their continental tramp last December - almost two years ahead of the election. And it is a fact, if an absurd one, that the media have recruited about 600 reporters (apart from the foreign mercenaries) to cover, day by day, a presidential election 14 months away. But let me say now why I've had to break my vow about the remote election.

Something came up in the past week or two that touches once again on the incessant drive known as "the people's right to know." Or, how much should a candidate's private life affect his or her running for public office. Or, as in the last dreadful case, the right to stay in public office.

What we're talking about, in a word, is one word that has never before sullied a presidential campaign. The word is cocaine.

For several months a rumour has been floating underground that only in the past week or two came to the surface. The rumour was that some time in the past, Governor George Bush of Texas, the overwhelmingly favourite Republican presidential candidate had used cocaine. Nobody says when, how, for how long - in other words, no witnesses. An important, perhaps a triumphant point in the minds of Governor Bush and his advisers. For all the charges against President Clinton had witnesses or friends to corroborate the victim's charges.

So - did Governor Bush at once declare the rumour was false and defamatory? He did not. He said it's time to say enough is enough and put an end to the destroying of people's reputation with gossip. That surprising response immediately set off an alarm bell in the press, and the rest of us. Why didn't he say "preposterous, totally untrue"?

Instead Governor Bush told us he had made (as every candidate does now - except Mrs Dole) "youthful mistakes," that he had given up drinking, that he had been absolutely faithful to his wife (nobody asked him). The more he confessed other sins or, as we like to say, "mistakes," the more people saw him desperately waltzing round the truth - doing a series of Clinton side-steps and evasions.

He never slid into the Clinton masterpiece ("it all depends what "IS" 'is'") - but he did say he was being asked to "prove a negative." Well, he may have come clean by now - but as I speak he's left saying that by the FBI's security clearance standard, he'd not used cocaine for seven years, indeed for 25 years - "so there." Neither he nor his advisers seem to see that every new stretch of time to which he extends his innocence only makes us all the more eager to know did he use cocaine in his 20s - ever.

Public opinion is divided. Some say an admission would ruin his candidacy. Others say a clean breast would leave him in the clear. Others say he has to explain away why he has sponsored the toughest laws in the country against drug possession - sending anyone to jail for years who possesses the tiniest amount of cocaine - jailing teenagers alone with adults. Did he or did he not himself commit this felony?

A slight majority of people surveyed think the whole thing - confession or no confession - will blow over. These people must be at one with the few learned cynics who say the people no longer care to make moral judgments about their governors - that this country, and the West, is well along the declining road which brought forth Gibbon's comment, at a similar moment in Roman history - "The people grew inured or indifferent to the debauches of the emperor, so long as he solicited their indulgence by building new roads and remitting taxes."

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.