The Enigmatic Havel

On the heels of my exploration into the minds of wise Czech presidents this past week, the Wall Street Journal today published an interview with Vaclav Havel which better articulates why I called his biography, To the Castle and Back, "strange" in my earlier post. Havel is disarminingly honest, in a manner that is rarely seen by few Western politicians. Additionally, I believe he finds himself uncomfortable self-identifying with any particular worldview, i.e. neoconservative versus realist or liberal versus conservative.

In his autobiography he gives wide praise to both Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, telling Hillary to her face that he believes she would make a great president. Yet, Havel is widely identified as supporting the neoconservatives' push for global democracy as seen in his putting together the recent Democracy and Security Conference in Prague, where President Bush gave this remarkable and inspiring speech, akin to his Second Inaugural Address, about the importance of the United States being a beacon of hope for those persons living in totalitarian regimes.

One of the more interesting aspects of the interview came in Havel's belief that those living in totalitarian or despotic regimes must live in truth -- a notion that a citizen of such a state should refuse "to participate in the everyday lies that were the cornerstones of totalitarian rule: sham elections, hypocritical expressions of solidarity for the oppressed, patently fraudulent statistics on the economic progress of the socialist bloc, and so on."

And I suspect it is for this reason that Havel remains uncomfortable with the reasons why America and the Coalition went to War Against Iraq:

The argument for war based on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction "did not play well with me," he says. The rationale for war was "not well-articulated" and the "timing of the attack was questionable . . . you could ask why it wasn't done five years earlier or five years later." The absence of international support for the war was also problematic, he says. And he warns the U.S. -- with a nod to Sen. William Fulbright's book "The Arrogance of Power," an early favorite of his -- about the dangers of setting oneself up as the world's policeman.

Still, Mr. Havel defends what he calls "the idea that the world could not be indifferent forever to a murderer like Saddam Hussein." This, too, is a longstanding theme of his. Earlier in the day, he had warned the other dissidents at the conference that while "a big danger of our world today is obsession . . . an even bigger danger is indifference."

But perhaps most important is Havel's reiteration of the fact that: "It is not true that there are some places in the world where only authoritarianism is possible," he says. "We have people at this conference from China, from Iran, all these people who are connected by their desire to lead a dignified life. By democracy we can understand the conditions that respect this desire."

Which is why I am so puzzled at Havel's support for Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, who seek an end to the War in Iraq, and pushback from the aggresive approach at combating terrorism that Bush has implemented. But maybe Havel knows something of their character that I don't. At least we can hope.