The Foreign Service Journal, September 2007

and our appreciation for their stalwart support in the War on Terror.” It is almost impossible to describe, if you have not wit- nessed it, the obsessive attention to promoting Karimov’s personality cult by the entire Uzbek media and education system. These U.S. endorsements were continually recy- cled and pumped out again and again by Karimov’s vast propaganda machine. The suffering people of Uzbekistan had no doubt whose side Washington was on — and it wasn’t theirs. That is short-termism, indeed. Conflicting Narratives My cable of Sept. 16, 2002, also referred to the third of the false principles listed above — self-delusion. I wrote: “The U.S. are trying to prop up Karimov economically, and to justify this support they need to claim that a process of economic and political reform is under way. That they do so claim is either cynicism or self-delusion.” In the period of the U.S.-Uzbek alliance, there was an astonishing mismatch between the reality on the ground, and the official version of what was happening. In real life, repression was tightening: There were more political prisoners, an increase in torture, more ban- ning of NGOs, more expulsions of Western media organi- zations, heavier censorship and more rigging or postpon- ing of elections. There were also more nationalizations or forced closures of enterprises, more forcible takeovers of foreign investors’ assets, more consolidation of key assets into the hands of the Karimov family, more closures of roads and dynamiting of bridges, more tariffs, more non- tariff barriers, and more physical sealing of the country’s borders. Yet in the official narrative, censorship was ended, political prisoners released, currency made convertible, agriculture reformed. The economy and trade boomed. The problem was that the official narrative was simply the use of the “big lie” technique. The Uzbek ministers, ex- Soviet officials to a man, had no concept that the official account should match the truth. The amazing thing was seeing U.S. officials struggling to believe them for the sake F O C U S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 45