The El Salvador labyrinth:

...rolling back Soviet power and precipitating Soviet collapse is not...

...Opposing Stalinism but also trying to avoid a cold-war defense of regimes they considered reactionary, this small band looked to the creation of a third camp of revolutionary democrats and socialists who would break loose from the sterile grip of both imperialist blocs...

...The same comparison could have been made in the ancient Hellenic world between Athens and Sparta...

...As often happens with debased theories, evidence gets stretched thin to cover the theory...

...Just as the Kremlin prefers local oligarchs like Jaruzelski to do its dirty work, U.S...

...Brushing away all the brave rhetoric and the brash threats, Reagan's policy is defeatist...

...liberal community, but the revolutionary third force never came into being...

...His attack on a windmill no doubt convinced onlookers of his willingness to fight, but presumably few of them were inspired to seek him out as an ally or leader on pressing real-world concerns.eader on pressing real-world concerns...

...But if the Saigon government could be seen as the necessary incubator of authentic democracy, then all kinds of revolutionary hopes could be invested in an otherwise corrupt and hapless regime...

...The group trained a generation of influential thinkers and made some waves within the U.S...

...involvement...

...Given the confused muddle that currently passes for administration thinking, such an initiative is unlikely...

...A careful look at the turnout figures and results indicated that large regions were either effectively controlled or seriously contested by the guerrillas...

...A variant on the argument has it that U.S...

...According to the myth, the elections were a resounding defeat for the guerrilla opposition, a triumph for moderation and democracy, and a justification for U.S...

...Under these conditions, it is patronizing in the extreme for U.S...

...1. A good, open, and democratic society like ours just isn't as ruthless as a closed tyranny like the Soviet Union...

...Actually, loss of will is always the reason wars end...

...Liberals at least as far back as Franklin Roosevelt articulated a policy of building up democratic forces in opposition to all tyranny, left or right, East or West...

...The left, including especially the Communist left, was willing to participate...

...In the ways in which our own people are treated versus the conditions faced by Soviet citizens, that's true...

...Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts made the first point about Vietnam in their book The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked: "It could almost be said, in fact, that the strategy of perseverance was chosen more for the means it employed than for the ends it expected to achieve, more for the problems it avoided than for the ones it solved...

...Reagan made the parallel explicit by invoking Truman...

...Much of the vitality of the idea in the post-World-War-II world came from the forceful articulation of "third camp" politics by a small and intellectually interesting group of Marxists trained in the Trotskyist tradition...

...that's a useful distinction...

...That's the social revolution U.S...

...A year ago, when we wrote about that election in these pages, the myth was beginning to develop...

...Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Ambassador Kirkpatrick is alleged by the New York Times to be the chief intellectual force behind the Reagan administration's Central American policy...

...An ideology or world view applied well to a local situation where there is a rich understanding of the history and conditions can provide powerful insights...

...JIM chapin is the Chair of World Hunger Year, jack clark is editor of Food Monitor magazine...

...Such democracy would constitute a social revolution...

...In 1944, 1960, 1972, and 1979, the left was either driven out or betrayed...

...In this context, the deaths of two leaders of the ultra-left forces, Salvador Cayetano Carpio (supposedly by suicide) and Melida Anaya Montes-Comandante Ana Maria-look suspicious...

...A large section of El Salvador's ruling class considers unionization, genuine land reform, and the other social goals the U.S...

...This is getting to be a wearisome technique on the part of the American right...

...but if Afghanistan and Poland could achieve Finlandization (internal affairs remaining their own business so long as they avoid becoming enemies with their superpower neighbor), that would represent a great advance in world politics...

...Lost in all this is a key nineteenth-century understanding that statesmanship must be based on an accurate assessment of capabilities and results...

...In the absence of the eloquence of a fighter-observer like George Orwell, of a network of world-wide Trotskyist support such as Nin and the POUM had, and of the personal and political attractiveness of the Catalonian leftists in Spain, the deaths of Ana Maria and Carpio and the destruction of the Salvadoran ultra-left are receiving less attention than Nin's death did...

...But Latin America already is Eastern Europe, our Eastern Europe...

...During the course of a long struggle, the other armed groups in the opposition also gain advantages while in a coalition which reaches power through negotiations, the Communists can exercise their bureaucratic strengths, which are considerable...

...So, too, in El Salvador...

...Through this rather twisted route a theory having its origins in Leon Trotsky's vision of the permanent revolution became an inspiration for the growing neoconservative movement around Commentary...

...The timing of the change in the theory proved fortunate for it brought new vitality to that cold war liberalism which was collapsing under the weight of liberal opposition to the war in Vietnam...

...policy-makers to assume that the democratic left has sided with Communist and ultra-left guerrillas out of some sort of "soft-headed romanticism...

...The myth persists, and it is worth some effort to go back to the evidence and look at some trends since then...

...But one needs to be careful about seeing the administration view as simple anti-Communism...

...Far from being defeated by the elections, the revolutionary opposition was largely unaffected by them...

...policy under Ronald Reagan, claims to want...

...In a prolonged war, the Communists will fight it out with the various ultra-leftist factions for ultimate control...

...The government, meanwhile, is in the hands of rightists who are losing ground to more extreme rightists...

...Max Schactman was the leader of this group, and in the late 1940s its adherents included Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, and dozens of trade union activists and lesser-known intellectuals...

...Administration officials, speaking "off the record" to major newspapers, talk of a protracted war in Central America lasting seven years...

...then when the citizenry naturally tires of trying to make up for the deficiencies of our ally, charge that the war was lost only because of a loss of will...

...involved in backing losers in a foreign war...

...and (2) manuevering has already begun in domestic U.S...

...Events in Chile in 1973 were far bloodier than anything that happened in Poland recently and represented the same level of superpower intervention...

...Reagan and his advisors have ordained El Salvador a democracy by the simple fact of elections having occurred on March 28 of last year...

...The Communists are a different and far more moderate group...

...claims we're backing to be nothing less than Communism...

...It's worth remembering that the Communists have good reasons for avoiding a strategy which insists on armed resistance and the victorious march to the capital...

...Oddly enough, that virtue of our system is most often trumpeted by people who decry our domestic qualms and wish we acted more "realistically" and intervened more boldly, presumably like the Russians...

...In the endless and fruitless search for a political center by both the Carter and Reagan administrations (and it's worth noting that their policies are not all that different), a recently published book, El Salvador in Transition by Enrique Baloyra, provides some worthwhile guidance...

...But you can't conduct a social revolution under the aegis of the class which opposes the revolution...

...3. You must draw distinctions between authoritarian and totalitarian governments...

...More crudely and polemically, we are fighting to prevent Central Ameria from "becoming another Eastern Europe...

...politics to pin the blame on the other guy for losing El Salvador...

...Where does that leave the U.S...

...Yet little more than a year after the elections, the guerrillas seem stronger than ever and control large portions of the country...

...Not as ' 'backward'' a country as North Americans sometimes assume, El Salvador is the most industrialized nation in Central America...

...They express doubt about Americans' willingness to see it through, but they decide to muddle on...

...The conclusions of this argument may be anti-Soviet but its form mirrors the arguments of those true-believing Marxists who know that the Soviet Union is a bad society yet stumble around trying to explain the ways in which it remains "progressive," assuring themselves that the ultimate success of the Soviet' 'experiment'' is just around the corner, and insisting that it must be defended at all costs...

...Finland has become nearly a curse word for the neoconserva-tives and the American right...

...If this is true, she is absolutely correct about the consequences of bad ideas...

...As we wrote a year ago here, the March 28 election only served to decide things within one group in El Salvador: the governing coalition...

...in a legal, electoral, or negotiated settlement, the power struggle on the left will be between the Communists (who will control many popular institutions and command obvious international support) and the left Christian Democrats and social democrats (who will have the support of large sections of the middle class, as well as of the church, and command a different and broader but less intense international support...

...Illusions about the revolutionary opposition are not necessary or helpful...

...In two important respects, though, our Salvadoran policy is like our Vietnam policy: (1) each step is calculated not so much to win or advance a long-term strategic goal as to avoid losing...

...But the arguments against the comparison just don't hold up...

...debate dooms our policy there...

...Quite simply, it provides the rationale for our endless search for a political center on the far right of El Salvador's spectrum...

...If Poland were El Salvador, Cardinal Glemp would have been assassinated in his cathedral, and the crowd mourning him would have been machine-gunned in the streets...

...Poland is an authoritarian country, El Salvador totalitarian...

...policy, even U.S...

...The Soviets also withdrew from their section of Austria...

...2. Cuba and Nicaragua prove that it's possible to leave the U.S...

...She's right...

...This argument, too, fails the test of history...

...In part that view can be attributed to blind and nearly paranoid anti-Communism...

...It would be as if the British were to have supported the South in the American Civil War as a means of gaining the abolition of American slavery...

...Ironically, Pinochet was one of the few leaders who expressed understanding of Jaruzelski's position...

...Too often, left and right apply ideological preconceptions blindly...

...Reagan's request for an emergency aid appropriation is aimed at postponing a guerrilla victory in the field which seems a very real possibility...

...Of the eight nations under Soviet domination at the end of World War II, two (Albania and Yugoslavia) have left the bloc, one (Rumania) has secured a great deal of freedom within the bloc...

...The good, democratic Athenians slaughtered the people of Mytilene...

...policy-makers prefer indirect solutions (Guatemala 1954, Brazil 1964, Chile 1973) to direct interventions like the Dominican Republic in 1965...

...the evil Spartans were relatively restrained in foreign policy...

...In large part, it derives from a good or at least very appealing idea which has been misused...

...Again, that argument is usually advanced by people who actually want to overthrow Cuba and Nicaragua, thus formulating a sort of capitalist counterpart to the Brezhnev Doctrine...

...New York Times columnist William Safire has been dropping warnings that the Democrats should beware lest they're blamed for losing El Salvador...

...Democratic restraints may indeed have limited U.S...

...In El Salvador, as we wrote last year about the election, a lack of understanding and appreciation of Salvador's history on all sides of the U.S...

...he, after all, knows how difficult it is to rule against the will of the working class...

...left has long sought a "third force" in world politics between the Soviet bloc and the often domineering, even brutal foreign policies of the United States and its allies with their remnants of colonial empires...

...And from Trotsky to Schactman to Podhoretz, Kirkpatrick, and directly on to Ronald Reagan, one can trace the impact of this idea...

...Comparing Soviet oppression in Eastern Europe to U.S...

...The moderate left has formed a coalition with the far left because it has nowhere else to go...

...The president takes to the airwaves to say that we have to fight to show our allies that we're brave and trustworthy...

...The largest and most powerful nation ever to enter the Soviet bloc (China) has become the USSR's most immediate and feared enemy...

...Such resistance is necessary, in the Reagan-Kirkpatrick view, not only for reasons relating directly to our own security, but also to make life more pleasant and decent for the majority of the people of Central America...

...Pure realpolitik might not have sufficient appeal to Americans to justify a terrible war, nor were the various Saigon regimes exactly inspiring...

...The central thesis of the president's speech and of his administration's policy in Central America is that we must resist Communist expansionism in Central America as surely as we resisted Communist expansionism in Europe after 1945...

...The Communists may be repeating the sort of bloody internal discipline exercised during the Spanish Civil War when armed elements to their left (the POUM led by Andres Nin) were eliminated...

...At various points, parts of its ruling elite expressed a desire for a Mexican-style system with a multi-class, all-embracing political party...

...Government soldiers would rape and kill nuns, disembowel "subversive" priests, and murder thousands of peasants and workers for years on end without fear of being prosecuted, Still, REAGAN and his advisors persist in seeing El Salvador as part of the democratic world resisting Communist tyranny...

...Get the U.S...

...And the Communists now are pushing a more moderate line...

...Then Kirkpatrick and friends say that we are of course defending Mexico against falling dominoes...

...What does an obscure semi-Trotskyist insight have to do with our current intervention...

...If we don't, all might be lost in the darkness of Soviet-style totalitarianism...

...One can't resist the Vietnam analogy in examining Reagan's policies...

...domination of Latin America may seem extreme or provocative...

...The armed ultra-leftists began their fighting in the cities, have repeatedly shown scorn for all bourgeois democratic forms, and have been compared by some who know them well to the Pol Pot forces...

...Beyond that, there is the concept of "Finlandiza-tion," which could serve as a useful model for the region...

...Both are former national directors of the Democratic Socialists of America...

...That the physical safety and lives of oppositionists who might have participated in those elections was not guaranteed seems not to matter...

...Particularly important in this view is the effect of any foreign struggle on one's own society...

...Changing the republic is exactly what the most cynical wing of the Reagan coalition is about...

...We can't help thinking of Don Quixote...

...We can't turn our backs...

...The Japanese could have gone on fighting after Hiroshima and Nagasaki except that they "lost the will...

...If a republic cannot sustain a nasty little imperial frontier war in the age of mass politics and mass media, then the solution must be either to change the republic or end the war...

...sphere of influence, but no country can leave the Soviet bloc...

...Ronald Reagan's speech to a joint session of Congress on April 27 illustrated her case perfectly...

...Following Kirkpatrick's famous distinction, we are backing "moderately repressive authoritarian regimes'' instead of the more brutally effective totalitarian Communist regimes which threaten to replace them...

...The non-Communist U.S...

...policies in some cases, but again, historic experience doesn't bear out that this has yet made a decisive difference in Latin America...

...actions are restrained by democratic institutions while the Soviets don't face internal restraints...

...By the mid-1960s, Schactman and some of his most loyal followers had revised their theory in light of the struggle in Vietnam...

...The model might even extend to Cuba...

...But Finlandization is a prudent, real-world possibility...

...Baloyra traces the history of efforts to reform El Salvador peacefully and legally...

...The third camp in world politics could only emerge, they concluded, in the context of capitalist societies with at least limited degrees of pluralism...

...Only old illusions about rolling back the Soviet empire until, the USSR itself collapses offer any more room for the Poles or the Afghans...

...At one point the administration speaks of "isolating" Mexico on the Central American question...

...At other times, the promise of legal elections and democratic participation was offered...

...A prolonged struggle could heighten the danger for Nicaragua, Cuba, even the Soviet Union...

...Then, with strong intimations of treason, one can blame the liberal Democrats for losing...

...When Lech Walesa and his fellow-leaders of Solidarity called a press conference, they would have ' 'disappeared" to be found the next day with their left arms, tongues, and hearts cut out...

...A large section of the ruling elite simply refused to end terrorism in the countryside and tolerate a democracy without coercion...

...An alternative could be shaped around the region-wide negotiations which the "Contadora group" (Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama) have suggested...

...That coalition had been moving right-ward since the reform coup of October, 1979, and the election hastened and legally confirmed the rightward drift...

...Obviously the analogy fails in some crucial ways: El Salvador is closer, more important to us, more vulnerable to our power...

...If we persevere, a political center committed to democracy and social justice will emerge...

...This is Kirkpatrick's major point...

...Choose China, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, but not Cuba, which the Republicans "lost...

...Similarly, in Central America, an agreement whereby the nations of that region would be free to work out their own political systems but bound not to become our enemies or join alliances against us could prove workable...

...The ultra-left guerrillas took up their guns while the Communists were still seeking a legal and peaceful road...

...The election was held, The forms of democratic capitalism are present...

...The revised Schact-manite theory coincided with traditional cold war liberalism which Schactman and his earlier followers had bitterly opposed...

...That's happening right now with the Salvadoran elections of 1982 and the persistent myth-making around them...