Lee is laughing, but with deep understandable pride. Sometimes it seems that the famous flagship national carrier wins almost as many international awards as the nation’s math and science students. But Singapore Airlines didn’t just happen to become one of the world’s best airlines. It takes hard work and a commitment to excellence—and maybe an LKY breathing down your neck to make sure you don’t screw up.
Some years ago, the airline pilots threatened to strike for
higher wages. Management wouldn’t back down. A strike would have blemished
Singapore’s controversial image for order over law.
There was no strike. LKY brought the two warring sides into his office
separately for a long intense chat. Singapore Airlines still hasn’t suffered a
strike.
Strongmen have their uses, weak leaders have their excuses. Virtually without ideology, LKY admires people who get results. He admires foreign leaders who got things done for their country under the most quarrelsome of parliamentary democracies as well as takeover generals who got things done for their people despite the cavils of narrow-vision Western human rights groups. He favors no one form of government except the one that works. He automatically opposes only one form of government not out of ideology, but out of disbelief of it ever working effectively—Communism.
His repulsion to Communism comes more from their severe Leninist methods than their Marxist ideals. He can tolerate ideology if it provides positive results; a regime that’s a military junta is not necessarily to be condemned if its people are benefiting.
His quarrel with Myanmar’s [Burma’s] generals, for instance, is not that they are strongmen but that they are such ‘stupid’ strongmen, as he put it in an interview with me and Professor Jeffrey Cole of the University of Southern California in 2007. They so badly mismanage the resource-rich Myanmar economy that you can almost feel Lee wanting to get his hands on it to show the stupid idiots in military dress-up how to do it. They could remind him of another incompetent general who shouldn’t be running so much as a corner grocery store, Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya, a country with more oil than Mobil and a small population. The place is still mostly dirt poor.
I stare across at the famous man with the hair once so black and eyes that still are. Over his 31 years as prime minister (and then two decades after that in putative backseat positions), those eyes have seen so much that is both good and bad in man, and good and bad in himself.
In his general neighborhood, for decades the strongest of the strongmen had been Indonesia’s General Suharto. On January 27, 2008, on a typically hot and humid day in Jakarta, the 86-year-old strongman died. His body had barely gotten cold when the Western media began revving up the recycled clichés about the cruel and corrupt dictator.
The accounts almost forgot to mention that the three-decade rule of this Javanese military man was remarkable not just for human rights controversies, but for determined and stoic nation-building. Thrown together more out of criminal negligence than geopolitical logic by the Dutch, who vanished as if in the middle of the night so eager were they to leave, Indonesia was a coherent nation only in the thrown-together, claptrap manner of, say, the former Yugoslavia.
What did strongman Lee think of strongman Suharto?
So I ask: “I remember when Suharto died, almost everyone said, thank goodness, the good dear old fogy’s dead and the family is corrupt and good riddance and goodbye, and you stood up and said, hey, wait a minute. And you had good things to say about him and I thought this was very much you. You could have just said nothing, but you stood up and said your piece.”
Lee fiddles again with his heat pad; he just can’t seem to get it the way he wants it: “Well, because you’ve got to judge a man from where he stood in his society and where he had come from and what his ambitions were. He was a farmer’s child who had joined the Japanese territorial force as a private and became a corporal or something. Then during the fight for independence, he emerged as a leader of one of the forces fighting the returning Dutch and he became part of the army. Now, he never had any secondary education, and his view of himself and of Indonesia was that he was the biggest sultan of all sultans and that was his view of his position, and as the biggest sultan of all sultans, he’s entitled to give his family and friends the patronage that they needed.”
‘Sultan’—just when you think it’s an ancient term consigned to history’s dustbin or some animated Disney film—it gets resurrected to explain the contours of a traditional political culture in a way everyone can understand.
He goes on: “But in spite of all that, in spite of the graft and the inefficient administration he inherited from the Dutch who never built it up, he had to sort of improvise as he went along, and each minister sort of built up his own little administration or empire, but he made progress. It was patchy, it was mainly in Java and some cities like Medan or Makassar or Bali, but out of the chaos and hyperinflation of Sukarno [his communist predecessor], he brought the place down to earth.”
I point out: “And he stopped the communists from taking over. In your view, that’s a big deal.”
Lee vigorously agreeing: “Or it would have gone the other way and
there would have been a lot of trouble for this entire region. They were going
to carve up this archipelago of perhaps
17,000 islands between China and Sukarno. That was part of the deal, but in the
end, the Chinese could not intervene; they did not have the capacity to help,
compared to what the Americans did for Suharto. So, he triumphed.”
Survival. When your fate is to live on a small island of four-plus million, in the shadow of a sometimes unstable goliath of 17,000 islands holding 241 million people, you tend to get your facts down and your history straight. So LKY will not bother to quarrel with you if you insist on calling attention to the human rights abuses during the three decades of Suharto. He would just ask you to imagine what Indonesia’s human rights record would have been like with, say, Kim Jong-il of North Korea in charge.
In Lee’s eyes, America was smart to stand by Suharto. It was a lesser evil than letting Indonesia go to the wicked embrace of the communists. And, as mentioned before, he believes U.S. intervention in Vietnam, which we Americans almost universally bewail, gave Southeast Asia valuable time to catch its breath and get its anti-communist political act together.
Lee believes America does some very good things, then, inexplicably, forgets it has done them, and then—worse yet—sometimes positively uproots them! So sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the senior statesman is more amused than irritated by American diplomatic incompetence.
He looks back to 1997, to the Clinton administration: “I strongly believe that [former U.S. Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright and [former Clinton Deputy Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers knew nothing about the history of Indonesia and were wrong in wanting to use the [Asian financial crisis of 1997] crisis to oust Suharto.”
Lee recounts how the International Monetary Fund, backed by the U.S. Treasury, forced on General Suharto onerous fiscal-tightening conditions—in return for IMF aid—that could only hasten the collapse of the general’s rule. He also vividly recounts Summers’ blustery performance that at one point triggered a gigantic food panic in Jakarta.
“So, I told my prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, you’d better ring up Bill Clinton and say, look, this careless remark has led to a very panicky situation in Indonesia; better send somebody out to reassure the public that it’s not as bad as it is. So, they sent [IMF head Michel] Camdessus and Larry Summers, and before they went there, Larry Summers came here to Singapore because we had alerted them; he knows nothing about Indonesia.”
I jump in: “It doesn’t stop them; just because we don’t know what we’re talking about, it doesn’t stop America from telling people what to do.”
He again shakes his head sadly: “That’s right. So, Summers was here for one night. I spoke to him for about two and a half hours, together with Goh Chok Tong, and finally, he said, we must have discontinuity [in government—that is, Suharto must go now]! I said, you must be bonkers; you want discontinuity? What you need now is continuity! Suharto is just an old man running his last few laps, getting to put a good deputy in charge, a vice-president, who will take over and slowly unwind all these knots that he has created.
“But Summers did not think so. So, he went there and they
imposed terms and Suharto decided to ignore the terms, and then the Western
bankers and the fund managers pulled their money
out and that debacle led to a collapsed economy. They are unscrambling
Indonesia now for ten years.”
He continues, with some heat: “And now the U.S. says Indonesia is the third greatest democracy in the world. So, they are all puffed up and the terrorists hit back and then everyone is back down on the earth. If you are the third largest democracy like Indonesia, why can’t you collect these terrorists and stop them from propagating more young terrorists with the madrasas?”
He laughs and shakes his head: “So, Suharto had his heart attack, as usual, as everyone expected. He was old and his wife had died, and he was a bit downcast because he’s got nobody to talk to and confide in. He would have gone down, as he did [without the U.S. pushing], and the vice-president would have taken over, the system would have been gradually altered. As it was, the entire system collapsed under the U.S./IMF push. Successor Habibie made a mess of it. Then Gus Dur made a bigger mess. Megawati calmed it down. SBY [the initials for the current Indonesian president] has improved it slightly, but there’s a long way to go.”
That was quite a breathtaking recounting. And, oddly enough, Lee thinks of himself (and should be so thought) as pro-American.
I say: “Are we Americans basically hopeless?”
“No, these are mavericks in the American administration. When I deal with the people in power, even Bill Clinton in the end came around [after all the troubles with Michael Fay in 1995] and he launched the U.S.-Singapore free trade agreement which the Bush administration completed with the present president of the World Bank.”
I add: “Clinton got better as president every year. By the end of the second term, he was doing a lot of good things, particularly in the international realm. Maybe we should get rid of that deal where you can only be president for two terms.”
“That’s for Americans to decide. I don’t know Americans.”
American democracy, in his view, is good because it has worked—not that it works because it is good. Look at it this way: Singapore has lower infant mortality rates and higher life expectancy; it spends 4 percent of its nation’s wealth on health care, the United States 17 percent. Maybe, I suggest, Americans would be better off if their system were more Singaporean than American.
I break the silence: “Don’t want to go into that, okay.”
He says this: “Americans will not change their Constitution because other people want to have a crack at it. They believe a chap with three or four terms like Roosevelt would be uncontrollable.”
Not to mention a chap like Jimmy Carter, whom Lee would presumably find unbearable.
I almost forgot to mention that while General Suharto was dying in hospital, few foreign dignitaries came to Indonesia to be at his bedside. The first one—and almost the only one—was Lee Kuan Yew, visiting two weeks before his colleague was to pass away. Lee explained afterwards that it’s not a perfect world but that respect had to be paid. This seems very Confucian.