WASHINGTON REPORT: In Darkening Africa

...It was a very long time before Kissinger was able to grasp that there was a world ootside this country, Europe and Japan, and that bloc's rival, the Soviet Union, and its dependencies in Eastern Europe...

...What he really said was that the Russians were not living up to the agreements as those agreements had been interpreted to Congress by Dr...

...In the whole profession of arbitrage, it can probably be maintained that the dishonest broker is at least as important as the more celebrated honest broker...

...Who wouldn't...

...The Admiral didn't get into deceptions, practiced by Kissinger on the American people at large, but that would be at least as fruitful a field as the one cultivated by the former naval person...

...The Communist bloc consisted of all nations which would not ally themselves with American arms merchants and was strictly controlled by the Kremlin...

...Subsequently, Zumwalt published a book that gave great detail on specific deceptions practiced by Kissinger on Congress, the President and the military establishment...

...You didn't buy the arms, you were a tool of the Kremlin...

...Both sides therefore welcomed the old shuttler and happily signed up...

...So he reverted to the delicate statecraft he had so brilliantly applied to the Middle East, bought a commuter pass on the white-black shuttle and announced, apparently somewhat prematurely, that peace was at hand...

...When people got around to reading what Zumwalt actually said, however, that wasn't quite it...

...The reason the Mideast shuttle "worked," as everyone except a few scattered recalcitrants like myself agrees that it did, was that both parties really wanted peace...

...This subtlety of thought, no doubt, is what has made Kissinger the intellectual hero of such savants as James Reston of the Times, where that dead-pan headline appeared on the.front page...

...By bending interpretations of agreements in favor of both sides at once, each contradictory interpretation given privately, the dishonest broker can bring contending parties step by step toward some sort of agreement...

...The announcement and the reelection were followed swiftly by one of the alt-time great bombings of civilians in a history that includes the Thirty Years War and Kissinger's countryman, Hitler...

...This allowed the Israelis to get on with trying to build a society and an economy on a democratic-socialist basis...

...That moment of illumination for him seems to have been at about the time of the capture of Angola by the Angolans...

...The whites want to keep it and will fight to keep it...

...When deeply held principles are reinforced by a keen sense of self-interest-as the most deeply held principles do tend to be-such a cheerful finale is unlikely...

...WASHNGTON REPORT IN DARKENING AFRICA The headline of the month for October has to have been printed on the first day: "Kissinger, at U.N., Urges Africans To Resist Any Outside Interference...

...If you've got a pajama manufacturer trying to stay in business and a union leader trying to get seven-and-a-half cents for the troops, that kind of persiflage may indeed bring industrial peace and a cross-class clinch by the curtain...

...speech amounts to a classic example of American misunderstanding of the world outside this country, Europe and Japan...

...That pusillanimous Congress even made the subtle sage call off .the CIA operation in Angola, which had been keeping the war going for a decade or so...

...The African blacks are not about to make a nationalist revolution on the Irish model, in which the foreign oppressors hang on to everything they've always had and the natives get to elect themselves to public office...

...If I were an African of any color, I'd be inclined to starting digging when Kissinger told me peace was at hand, but I suppose if I were James Reston, I'd hail him for another masterful work of statecraft...

...The blacks want the farmlands, the diamonds, the gold, the chromite, the works, and will fight to get it...

...The militant Arab states wanted peace because they realized at last that the Israelis were not going to be driven into the sea, could fight better than Arabs because they were better motivated, and the Arab states were beginning to look silly even in their own eyes...

...His U.N...

...the blacks want their country back...

...Interestingly enough, the rapid collapse of the African peace-at-hand bears out exactly the principal criticism of Kissinger made by his principal political critic, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt...

...Just as he tries to pass as an American by assuming an increasingly heavy German accent during our period of increasing militarization, so now he has successfully passed in his own mind as an African and we may expect him to turn up in blackface any day now...

...On the contrary, the parties, black and white, want mutually contradictory things: the whites want the loot they have enjoyed since their arrival there...

...Congress, not at all to Kissinger, the model will not be Vietnam...

...The reason the Angolans were able, to capture Angola from the freedom-loving Portugal of Dr...

...After all, the odds are very small indeed that no matter how desperately pressed the Secretary becomes, he will actually bomb James Reston...

...You bought our arms, you were a free nation...

...But watch out for those dread outsiders...

...Someone had been lying, Zumwalt concluded and he obviously was not taking it for granted it was the Russians...

...Since Kissinger himself had just wound up several weeks of vigorous-and apparently duplicitous-personal and national involvement in African affairs, the obvious conclusion is that he does not regard himself as an outsider at all...

...The degree of actual political freedom within such countries had nothing to do with their status as Free Worlders, just as the degree of subservience to, or active opposition to, the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the status of non-anns-buyers as Soviet satellites...

...The model is probably going to be Algeria, but, thanks entirely to the U.S...

...This, apparently, is Kissinger's concept of himself as human shuttle, the dishonest broker whose dishonesty serves the higher purposes of peace or the containment of Communism or the advancement of the Free World, whichever is taken as the supreme good at a given time...

...What was missing in the original, premature Kissinger peace-at-hand announcement was precisely any word whatever about the loot...

...It was at that moment that Kissinger realized he was not going to be allowed to apply his delicate statecraft to the continent of Africa as he had so brilliantly to Southeast Asia...

...The Free World consisted of all nations that would .either take our arms as gifts or pledge major shares of their national incomes to buy those arms...

...The Israelis wanted peace because they have always wanted peace, need it desperately just to survive...

...In Rhodesia-and, next on the agenda, South Africa -there is no mutuality of interest in peace or anything else...

...Until then, he, like all his predecessors in office starting with Dean Acheson, assumed that the world was divided into two great "camps," as the Soviets call the groupings, the Communist bloc and the Free World...

...Salazar and his successors was that the United States Congress refused to let Kissinger and Ford bomb them...

...The last time Kissinger announced that peace was at hand, of course, was just before the reelection of his fellow-statesman, Richard Nixon...

...It allowed Syria to turn to the serious business of first, destroying the Palestinian militancy it had created and second, conquering the momentarily independent Lebanon that had been part of Syria prior to World War I. There was a mutuality of interest in peace: if Kissinger hadn't existed, he would have been invented by the parties...

...When Zumwalt first raised the question of whether the Soviet Union was living up to the SALT-One agreements, such as they were, his remarks were widely interpreted as the more or less standard warning against perfidious Russia and a call for ever greater American arms efforts to be expected from top-ranking military men...

...FRANK GETLEIN...