Nothing new in Belarus.

EVENT

Dozens of Protesters Arrested in Belarus.

That's the New York Times, reporting from Minsk.

While I do believe that, as I've heard from many sources, Lukashenko is a dictator refusing to relinquish control, this article illustrates how even a "straightforward" issue is thorny and problematic in the real world.

Not knowing much of the situation beyond what I've read here and there, it does seem that Lukashenko enjoys a broad base of support within his country. That's a difference that separates him from Milosevic, Yanukovych, and Ceausescu (other former Eastern European dictators), and it looks likely to be a decisive difference. Opposition protests seem to be losing momentum as time goes by, the opposite of what occurred in the Ukraine in 2004. A possible upshot: editorially, perhaps we don't object to the notion of a dictator as we might like to think. Perhaps it is not enough for a dictator to intimidate and coerce his opponents; we require some more accentuated combination of gratuitous disenfranchisement and low standard of living.

On that note, however, I am even more intrigued by the reception this has gotten abroad, or rather, I'm interested in the little moments that can slip through in a brief article.

In the White House profile:

Scott McClellan, said on Monday that the United States does not accept the results of the election. "We support the call for a new election," he said.

And how fascinating given the Bush administration's own questionable record of disenfranchising voters. There's a suggestion, then, that the difference is in having disenfranchisement circumlocutioned by lawyers and upheld by the Supreme Court instead of Slavic mafioso types and the KGB. Follow up question: what rhetorical force can we possibly impose upon Belarusian evildoers given this contradiction?

And finally, the last comment of the New York Times, the bastion of American journalism:

In Moscow, underscoring the widening gap between the West and Russia over the conduct of elections and the state of reform in former Soviet republics, the Kremlin rushed to applaud the result. The Foreign Ministry said, "The elections were testament to a high civic awareness and an interest amongst the Belarussian people for stability."

The statement made no mention of the mass arrests, wide-scale intimidation and the fawning official media coverage of Mr. Lukashenko and his policies.

Yes, and there's nothing repugnant or extravagent about the article's last unattributed, unsupported, and unspecified statement.

I doubt we'll see any startling changes in Belarusian policy in the upcoming weeks, and if our moral declarations fail to bolster our economic sanctions, well, we've only ourselves to blame.

END OF POST.