Another of America's kept anti-communist dictators has gone sour - looting, butchering, oppressing his own people - and so U.S. foreign policy has actively sponsored removal of Zaire's President Mobutu Sese Seko.
As a propped-up defender of America's interests against America's enemies in Africa, Mobutu had a rewarding 32-year run before coming into disfavor, certainly longer than many other onetime U.S. allies who found themselves at odds with changing U.S. politics and global intent.One dimly remembered ally, for example, was North Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh who, in what must have seemed the blink of an eye in 1945, changed in the American view from a patriot fighting alongside Americans against the Japanese to an instrument of worldwide communism.
Americans were not much concerned with his politics during World War II when Ho and his communist guerrillas battled the Japanese in what was then Indochina and shared victory with the Western allies. The celebrations ended quickly, though, when American policy came down on the side of attempts to shove the Vietnamese aside and return French colonialism.
In that shameful business Japanese troops were allowed to remain under arms in Indochina and under Western allies' orders to fight Ho and his army. The post war Western mission was to preserve economic plundering for French nationals, many of them the same French citizens whose Vichy government - after the French surrender to Nazi Germany - had willingly served both Germany and Japan, America's enemies.
The line that runs between an American double-cross of a onetime friend and fighting ally in Vietnam and the 32-year American support of the Zairian despot Mobutu is communism.
In the official American view, communism demonized Ho, who, never-theless, died a loved, respected and finally victorious patriot among his own people. And communism, in another way, made Mobutu one of Africa's richest and most hated leaders, encouraged to rob and victimize his country because succeeding American governments admired what was seen as his staunch anti-communism.
Tragically, the lost war in the name of anti-communism in Vietnam cost more than 58,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of Vietnamese lives. Fortunately for America, U.S. troops were never sent to Zaire to save our bought and paid for anti-communist, Mobutu.
But political upheavals in Africa, fed mightily by rival shipments of Soviet and American arms, have killed, starved, left homeless, brutalized and embittered millions of Africans, many of whom probably have a clearer picture of what U.S. policy has done than U.S. policymakers.
It's been much of the same mixed success elsewhere in the world. Americans and American money came to the side of self-advertised anti-communists in South and Central America to help them kill communist rebels and guerrillas who posed no threat to America and with whom Americans had no quarrel.
In Afghanistan we again proved our anti-communism, feeding billions of dollars in American arms to our friends, that same breed of "freedom fighters" who've often shown up as our proxies and in Afghanistan successfully battled invasion by the dying Soviet Union.
As it turned out, the Afghanistan victory was somewhat dimmed when our victorious freedom fighters turned against one another in ecstasies of religious warfare and - still using our weapons - slaughtered each other and reduced the country to a smoking ruin.
There have been other American anti-communist adventures since we handed Ho Chi Minh the thank-you cigar that went off in his face. We had big investments in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, places we've known about and places we'll probably never know about.
Now, after more than 50 years of the American fight against the worldwide menace of godless communism that, we were told, threatened to dominate the world and infiltrate our country and its institutions right down to Little League baseball and the PTA, it looks like we've won.
The Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe went belly-up and now plead for help to turn themselves into free enterprise democracies. China is a surviving Red menace but increasingly dependent on trade and help from Westerners.
So it's a fitting time to wash our hands of Zaire's Mobuto, hopefully the last of the worst anti-communist despots we'll ever have to buy.