ASK THE ARMENIAN PRIME MINISTER

Los Angeles Times, CA
Oct 19 2007

On Friday, October 19, the editorial board will host a discussion
with Armenian Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan. Where do you come in,
dear readers? Give us some questions!

Click on the "Comments" button, or send us an e-mail with your
hard-hitting queries. And to see a whole barrel of links related to
the controversial congressional genocide resolution, keep on reading
after the jump.

Here’s the prime minister’s itinerary while in the States. Here’s a
Turkish Press writer warning about the visit. Here is a dense analysis
of the new-to-me "problems of Javakhetia" (having to do with ethnic
Armenians living in bordering Georgia). Here is a totally unrelated
story about an Armenian member of Parliament who was stabbed repeatedly
in a Moscow casino; it was the second time he’d been attacked in the
Metropol Hotel.

More to the point, Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt
heaps scorn on the genocide resolution:

Imagine what the Armenian diaspora might have accomplished had it
worked as hard for democracy in Armenia as it did for congressional
recognition of the genocide Armenians suffered nearly a century ago.

It’s even possible that modern Armenia would be as democratic as
modern Turkey. […]

Things began well [in post-Soviet Armenia], with the honest election
of a former dissident as president. But authoritarian tendencies
soon emerged, the former dissident rigged his reelection in 1996,
and things went downhill from there. As Freedom House noted last year,
"all national elections held in Armenia since independence have been
marred by some degree of ballot stuffing, vote rigging, and similar
irregularities." Meanwhile, opposition politicians have been jailed,
protests have been brutally suppressed, and broadcast media have been
taken under government control. […]

[T]he two main Armenian American lobbying organizations in Washington
have focused more on security questions — opposing arms sales to
Azerbaijan, for example, and opposing Turkey, Azerbaijan’s ally —
than on promoting democracy in Yerevan. Armenia’s rulers have known
that, no matter how they trample on individual rights at home, the
lobbying groups will cover for them here.

Others in the
I-can’t-freaking-believe-they’re-even-talking- about-this-resolution
camp include The Nation’s Nicholas Von Hoffman, The Guardian’s Simon
Tisdall, Time’s Joe Klein and syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell,
who calls it "another effort to sabotage Iraq war." Witnesses for
the resolution include Michael Moodian in the L.A. Daily News and
Salon’s Gary Kamiya, who make an interesting-to-me point about how
this issue is symbolic of a largely unremarked-on flight to Realism
among the foreign-policy Left:

One of the stranger reversals wrought by Bush’s neoconservative foreign
policy has been the rejection by much of the left of a morality-based
foreign policy. Angry at the failure of the neocons’ grand, idealistic
schemes, some on the left have embraced a realism that formerly was
associated with the America-first right. But by throwing out morality
in foreign policy because of the neocon debacle in Iraq, these leftists
are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The problem
with Bush’s Middle East policy hasn’t been that it’s too moralistic —
it’s that its morality has been flawed and incoherent.