Editorials
commonweal CARTER, KENNEDY & AFGHANISTAN "The implications of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan could pose the most serious threat to the peace since the second World War." —President Carter,...
...To take only the most obvious example, think of the young man of good health in a time of war...
...The argument that a boycott will unfairly penalize our athletes has merit...
...The memory may well prove a thorn in the side...
...But this will probably be impossible because the Olympics have assumed such mastodonic proportions...
...provoked the Soviet action by urging Pershing missiles on NATO...
...There is simply no way our athletes can avoid conniving at this, no matter how far that might be from their thoughts or wishes...
...True, some of them are in it simply for the money they will make blessing deodorant soaps and jogging shorts with their winner's smiles (and some have been feckless enough to say so...
...Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Georgetown Address, January 28 ' 'This situation demands careful thought, steady nerves, and resolute action—not only for this year, but for many years to come...
...These critics do have some valid points, but one is left with two nagging questions: What evidence, if any, would they accept of a serious Soviet threat...
...15 February 1980: 69...
...Most importantly, Kennedy renewed the link between international and domestic policy...
...Human rights...
...This after Andrei Sakharov and who knows how many other potential troublemakers have been shipped out of town...
...The left is rightly fearful of a new Cold War and traditionally skeptical of the demands for greater armament and military "preparedness...
...REPEATING OURSELVES "With hindsight," Cyrus Vance said recently, recalling the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, he wished the United States had not participated...
...Of course, moving the Olympics would obviate the sacrifice and disappointment...
...Others, trying to offset belligerent interpretations by hard-liners, have emphasized elements, like Moscow's fears for its borders, its own Moslem population, or its traditional prestige in Kabul, that suggest this is a limited, regional episode, not a major challenge to Western security...
...But it would be wrong to simplify matters by regarding them as typical...
...Third World...
...The current controversy over the Moscow Olympics has focused attention on this more general issue, and brought forth some interesting suggestions...
...Selig Harrison, in the Washington Post, has argued that military aid to Zia, which in any event may provoke further hostilities with India, should be tied to internal reform...
...But some voices in these ranks are making excuses: the U.S...
...We believe that the same reasoning applies to the 1980 Olympics in Moscow...
...but he also warned that Afghanistan should not fill up the entire horizon of American attention—in short, a restatement of the original Carter foreign policy...
...has frequently done (although such interventions by the U.S...
...Better to acknowledge that the typical Olympic athlete has struggled toward an honorable goal only to have it snatched from him or her at the last moment...
...President Carter IT WOULD be better for all of us if the debate over Afghanistan could be conducted within the framework of these warnings...
...It did better by nuclear proliferation and SALT...
...Moscow was removing a fanatical Afghan Pol Pot (not that much had been said in these quarters about that fanaticism before the invasion...
...That, alas, has the ring of Vietnam-era wishful thinking...
...The fact is that Carter's earlier foreign policy, as set forth at Notre Dame in May 1977, for example, was based on "confidence" in our way of life—and this confidence has been sapped less by Soviet adventures than by our own inability to devise new policies to deal with inflation, unemployment, and energy...
...It failed to exercise control over conventional arms sales...
...To govern is to choose...
...The Russians were doing no more than the U.S...
...We do not want to create further chaos in a nation bordering on the U.S.S.R...
...On December 13, 1935, in an editorial subsequently reported on the first page of the New York Times, Commonweal argued that "for every Catholic, or Protestant, or Jew, or believer in the inviolable dignity of the human personality, the trip to Germany unwittingly made in 1936 is bound to mean regret and even torment in later years...
...Talk of warm-water ports and the Straits of Hormuz seem to exaggerate Soviet intentions...
...He'd better try harder, even if it means standing up for several of the sensible principles he enunciated at the beginning of his term...
...But in the European context, as a State Department official has said, "Jesse Owens was a footnote...
...Arms limitation: The strategic arms race should be countered through SALT...
...The world was multipolar, not bipolar...
...President Carter and Senator Kennedy have been cast as antagonists in this debate, but in fact, despite their significant differences, both have addressed the foreign policy issues posed by Afghanistan far more responsibly than numerous voices to their left and right...
...According to this outlook, the U.S...
...The answer, unfortunately, doesn't come wrapped in a handy slogan...
...There are choices, of course, that neither Kennedy nor the president dealt with, and the outstanding one is the question of arming General Zia and mortgaging our future to what is an insecure and murderous minority government...
...A war atmosphere has been created," writes George F. Kennan...
...The only prescription, urged by such 15 February 1980: 67 commentators since the mid-forties, is more arms, alliances with anti-Soviet regimes regardless of their domestic character, and a strong stomach, virtually an eagerness, for confrontation...
...Connivance will be enforced by the very conventions of sportsmanlike behavior...
...A rising Soviet military budget and an apparent willingness to act directly or through proxies beyond Russian borders have forced the administration, step by step, to retreat from this premise...
...Although a move toward the Persian Gulf might always have meant out-and-out war, President Carter was right to make this unmistakably clear: miscalculation is the seedbed of catastrophe...
...But in many ways Kennedy's admonitions were useful qualifications rather than blunt contradictions to the president's position...
...Its assumptions about multipolarity and the Third World do not appear any less true today than three years ago...
...Likewise any winning American athlete will be no more than a footnote to the massive Russian image-building already underway...
...Both the influence of the U. S. abroad and the legitimacy and popularity of its foreign policy at home would be strengthened by public commitment and diplomatic pressure on behalf of human rights and freedom...
...That cannot be blamed on the administration alone...
...An extended period of social change and political turmoil would engulf the developing nations...
...Kennedy criticized the administration sharply for its lack of consistent concentration on Soviet actions, both in Afghanistan and Cuba...
...That policy could be outlined under four headings: U.S.-Soviet relations...
...For them, the world is always on the brink of a Munich...
...What we can say to such a person is that sacrifices are never distributed fairly, and yet they sometimes must be made...
...Hitler used the Games cynically to establish his regime's international respectability, mere months after his invasion of the Rhineland...
...It is an ironic fact that history shows no one in as much danger from Russian power as Communist rulers...
...President Carter, State of the Union Address, January 23 "Exaggeration and hyperbole are the enemies of sensible foreign policy...
...It has married the Afghan question with the Iran imbroglio as a general indication of failing U.S...
...But a concern with the Soviets would no longer dominate American policy to the near exclusion of everything else...
...strength...
...The U.S...
...Our plunge toward Pakistan, like the pressures for "unleashing" the CIA, seem precipitous...
...This policy, it was recognized from the start, would entail compromises, but to therefore relinquish the cause of human rights altogether would be to relinquish America's special claim to moral authority...
...Kennedy seconded the emphasis on conventional arms in the area, but urged that arms control not be abandoned or that irrelevant strategic weapons systems not be illogically linked to defense of the Persian Gulf area...
...Recent comments by American participants in the 1936 Olympics show that for many of them our warning was prophetic...
...On the one hand, it does seem that the Russian thrust into Afghanistan is a limited action, sufficiently motivated by Moscow's unwillingness to tolerate a dramatic reversal of a Communist regime...
...Similar clarity between the two nations about Yugoslavia ought to be obtained on short order...
...Perhaps they might be permanently located in Greece or a neutral country or two...
...Senator Kennedy was himself engaging in hyperbole when he said at Georgetown that Afghanistan had, in any case, "passed behind the Iron Curtain, not in 1980, but in 1978...
...On the other hand, intentions aren't everything...
...The administration did not always live up to this policy...
...has been suffering from "post-Vietnam syndrome": our leadership is so afflicted with "guilt" that it has been unwilling to assert American interests and wield American power...
...We've been this way before...
...Whatever led Russia into Afghanistan in the first place, it now has the strategic capacity for all kinds of destabilizing actions, and some of them, like incursions into Pakistan or the backing of Baluchi rebels, may flow almost automatically from the pressure of events...
...Does Afghanistan mean that now it should turn about-face and make the threat of Russian expansion the preoccupying and controlling element in foreign policy...
...interests...
...They want a new Cold War, and for them the Afghan invasion has been a gift horse...
...It doesn't realize that American "weakness" vis a vis Teheran is largely of our own choosing...
...should have confidence in the long-run attractiveness of democracy, but we should recognize the impossibility of controlling the many twists and turns, advances and reverses of immature and insecure regimes throughout the world...
...They take years to settle their weight anywhere and years to move again, and, for all the glory they bring with them, they frequently leave local economies flattened...
...Its human rights policy was often obscured by ineffective rhetoric but has, nonetheless, restored American prestige and unsettled dictatorships in parts of Latin America and Africa...
...The Carter administration did try to construct a foreign policy that absorbed the'' lessons of Vietnam," but it had nothing to do with guilt or an abandonment of U.S...
...it is unmitigatedly expansionist, on the model of Nazi Germany...
...The public, in any case, is in no mood for such arguments...
...More attention ought to be given to other matters in their own right: the Mideast, ties with Europe and Japan, economic questions...
...In some ways, and not always skillfully, President Carter has tried to moderate the mood...
...It is our own set of policy priorities that stay our hand toward Iran...
...That way more people would see some heroes and heroines in the flesh, while images of the rest bounced off satellites to the whole world...
...The problem, of course, is with the general deemphasis on the Soviet challenge...
...and despite Kennedy's image as the candidate of expansive government, he was warning that America could not have all the conventional forces it needed without thinking twice about new missile systems, that we could not risk war or in effect call for sacrifices by the young or the poor without risking strong measures for controlling energy consumption and inflation or demanding sacrifices from banks and corporations...
...Much as we may regret it, the Olympic Games are highly politicized, and to play host to them is a specifically political triumph...
...Unembarrassed by anything so stupidly vulnerable as the Nazi racial theories, Russia will present itself to the world as the benign and gracious host of a festival of sport, as fun-loving and downright cute as its Teddy-bear Olympic mascot...
...It is the product of an effective campaign by veteran Cold Warriors, of the crisis in Iran, and of the Soviets' policy too...
...In America we tend to remember Jesse Owens, the black American who triumphed over his German opponents and over the theory of their Aryan superiority...
...Perhaps—and we like this idea better—their several events could be scattered across the world...
...This is a caricature...
...Decentralized and stripped to running shoes and shorts, the games would become as sinewy and lithe as their participants...
...In this case, Commonweal can claim credit for more than good hindsight...
...Never since World War II has there been so farCommonweal: 68 reaching a militarization of thought and discourse in the capital...
...Obstacles should be established to nuclear proliferation and restraints put on the sale of conventional weaponry...
...The Soviet Union is more than a great power pursuing interests and influence...
...Years from now the pageantry and conviviality and the innocent striving of sport may look hollow and false in the light of what was happening in Afghanistan...
...For to have given aid and comfort to the enemy, however unconsciously, must remain forever a thorn in the side of a brave man...
...And what, given the drawbacks of various Western countermeasures, do they propose be done—except carry on as though absolutely nothing had happened...
...were previously considered outrageous...
...We want to keep the hostages alive...
...But the public's mood of frustration makes it aripe target for ihesimplificateurs of the right...
...If this argument brings only cold comfort, there is the other argument that we made in 1935...
...Rolf Pauls, the West German ambassador to NATO, startled his own government recently by suggesting that "if the world had boycotted Hitler's 1936 Olympics, the course of history might have been different...
...Conflict between the two superpowers was still a reality...
Vol. 107 • February 1980 • No. 3
