Jennifer Edwards. "Gorbachev captivates crowd"

     MIDLAND It has been 15 years since the U.S. and Russia laid down the Cold War nukes and longer than that since the Berlin Wall fell.
     It seemed almost fitting that former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev visits the United States amid a new nuclear crisis and a U.S. plan to build a wall on the border with Mexico.
     On Tuesday, Gorbachev visited President George W. Bush’s hometown — and with him, brought both words of hope and stern cautions for Americans.
     Gorbachev, who spoke to audiences as part of the University of Texas of the Permian Basin’s John Ben Shepperd Distinguished Lecture Series, said that the United States is hurting its chances to solve international problems.
     “The United States has developed a disease for which there is no vaccination,” he said.
     That ailment, he said, is something he’s dubbed “winner’s disease,” a kind of arrogance that is blighting its efforts on international security and cooperation.
     “The U.S. seems to believe it has won the Cold War and everything is OK and there is no need for change,” he said through a translator to a capacity crowd of about 6,000 at Midland’s Chaparral Center.
“Now we are in a situation again where we need to rethink what we do.”
     At least one in the audience remembered being part of the historic felling that ended the Cold War.
Midlander Elizabeth Moses brought with her a palm-sized piece of the Berlin Wall that she said she chipped off three weeks after the historic divider fell in 1989.
     “As people were leaving, they handed off their sledgehammers because they couldn’t take them on the plane,” she remembered.
     She said she also remembered how the East German guards continued to patrol their side of the wall — yet still reached through the holes to shake her hand.
     “I guess that’s why I came,” she said. “It was such a great event in history. I wanted to hear (about) it from someone who had been there.”
     Gorbachev said since the collaboration that ended the Cold War, the “capital of trust,” established between the two countries “was mostly squandered.”
     It’s not that trust cannot be rebuilt, he said — but to do that, the U.S. must team up with other countries to establish global goals. The United States must also re-establish a deeper friendship with Russia, he said — a friendship that was damaged after the fall of the U.S.S.R.
     “Under Clinton, I think there was a big mistake after the breakup of Russia,” he said. “(The perception) that Russia was weak and could be a kid brother to the U.S.
     “The Russians don’t like it … when they are patted on the back or treated with condescension.”
      That treatment left the Russians with grave doubts about its partnership with the United States, he said.
     “The Russians wondered, ‘Does the West like it when we are in such bad shape? Is that friendship’,” he said.
     “It is a lesson and Russia will not forget it.”
     Gorbachev also had advice for President Bush – leave Iraq before he leaves office.
     That said, Gorbachev also told audiences that he believed that European and Middle Eastern countries still seemed willing to cooperate with the United States — particularly where the Iraq conflict is involved.
     However, he said, “I am against thinking we could solve this problem just by using brute force.”
Instead, he said, the answer was to target the causes of terrorism: Economic privation marginalized populations and hunger.
     Despite worsened relationships between the United States and Russia, he said the country was continuing to move forward.
     “There are some who would not want Russia to move forward rapidly … including some in this country and this administration,” he said. “What we find strange is that when our country was in a catastrophic state under Yeltsin, the West supported us. When we are getting back on our feet, the West doesn’t like it.”
     He sees a difficult road ahead for his own country.
     “Overall, the standard of living for most people is worse than it was when we were a communist country,” he told journalists during a pre-talk press conference.
     “But we can say (Russia) has pulled itself out of the past and it is a free country,” he said.

Odessa American, 18.10.2006