Innocence Abroad

...By no stretch of causation or the imagination can any blame for the invasion of Afghanistan be directed at Washington...

...Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy (Simon & Schuster, 319pp., $17.95) byl.M...

...Writers & Writing INNOCENCE ABROAD BY BARRY GEWEN Although Jonathan Kwitny scarcely mentions Jeane J. Kirkpatrick by name, his Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World (Congdon&Weed, 435 pp., $19.95)is in effect a response to ideas associated with the United Nations Ambassador...

...Unfortunately, this is not the only place where Kwitny overstates a valid argument...

...Marx probably would have called it an "oriental despotism...

...Those who don't die of hunger stand a good chance of being swept away by disease...

...The three authors are thoughtful and knowledgeable men with extensive experience in government and roots planted deep in the Establishment...

...If it does not directly rebut Kirkpatrick's theories (since the book deals with an entirely different plane of experience), it renders them largely irrelevant...

...Kwitny recalls that Somalia was a close Soviet ally until its border war with Ethiopia caused it to turn to the United States for help...

...Mobutu says he is one of the three richest men in the world, and he may not be bragging...

...Kwitny is well-equipped to provide us with the tangible ground-level view...

...policy around the globe...

...should pursue a course that supports the former and deters the latter...

...Kwitny devotes considerable space to a nation he knows well, Zaire, and a more unlovely place it would be hard to find...

...The mystery, therefore, is how these obviously capable individuals could have produced so flatulent a book...

...His is not your typical Horatio Alger story...

...Endless Enemies offers a wealth of concrete, worm's eye detail about U.S...

...We should not be surprised to read one day soon that rebellion has broken out in Zaire...

...He checks and double-checks...

...The odor of the mandarin hangs heavy over Our Own Worst Enemy...

...America now lurches unpredictably from one extreme to another in foreign affairs...

...Most egregious of all is the observation that "Castro and Walesa really have much in common...

...He has more than a point...

...In 20 years of wandering, he seems to have journeyed almost everywhere—to out-of-the-way villages in Zaire, to Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion, to rural provinces of Castro's Cuba...

...And the other, and his followers, we have waged war on for 25 years...

...Those who do make it to the end will not be rewarded for their efforts...

...In his most comic example of misapplied categories, Kwitny reports that a tribal war in the '60s had William F. Buckley Jr...

...Mobutu's theft does not end with the cobalt and copper he has dug out of the ground...

...Yet when everybody is at fault, nobody is at fault, and by the time Destler, Gelb and Lake get around to criticizing the effect of television and "our political system as a whole," there will be few left to read these Canute-like complaints...

...Too often he gets carried away with his own iconoclasm, and shoots himself in the foot...

...One Peace Corpsman labeled it a "kleptocracy...

...Destler, LeslieH...

...In particular, a President should not make the mistake of undermining authoritarian friends in the naive hope that they will be succeeded by liberal democracies, as the Carter Administration did with the Shah in Iran and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua...

...Among the criticisms that can be leveled at this perspective is the objection that it is too abstract and hermetic...

...Yet in the midst of this unfathomable poverty, Zaire'sruler, the (authoritarian) dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, has managed to rise from sergeant in the Army to owner of chateaux in France and villas in Spain...

...But before I make up my mind, I think I will wait to hear what the other side has to say in favor of less common sense and greater irresponsibility...

...With the assistance of the U.S., Mobutu seized power in the mid-' 60s, in the face of what Washington perceived to be a Communist threat, and proceeded to plunder the country of its vast natural resources...

...Kirkpatrick, in her now-famous essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards," set forth what has become the intellectual foundation of the Reagan Administration's foreign policy, distinguishing traditional "authoritarian" societies that practice age-old repressions from revolutionary "totalitarian" ones, which introduce a dynamic and wholesale oppressiveness far worse than that of the regimes they replace...

...The authors find blame for this situation everywhere—in overzealous Presidents, an irresponsible Congress, special interests, the press, the new foreign policy elite personified by men like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski...

...do about a revolution against a Third World go vernment possessed of no virtues except anti-Communism...

...When not advising Presidents and congressmen, they ply their talents for the Brookings Institution, the New York Times, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Institute for International Economics, among others...

...Kwitny is right to note that much of what passes for ideology in the Third World is merely a matter of convenience and arms supplies...

...Former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown more reasonably suggests that in cases where there is no clear national security interest at stake, we should withdraw our support and take our chances on what follows...

...In a country whose per capita income is $ 127 a year, most of the population spends its time simply trying to ward off starvation...

...The situation there may be extreme, but, as Kwitny observes, it is not unique, and the question arises: What should the U.S...

...Similarly, Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan guerrilla leader who is now a favorite of Ronald Reagan and the Wall Street Journal, used to spout Marxist anti-American slogans when his army was being trained in North Korea...

...To finance his egomaniacal construction projects, he has borrowed heavily from foreign banks, mortgaging whatever future his unhappy country may have had by running up a debt of $6.5 billion (approximately double his personal fortune, according to one estimate...

...The categories normally employed by the State Department do not apply to either the economic or political system of Zaire...

...Yet one man, and his followers, we idolize...

...Repeatedly throughout the book, the authors say they will offer their solutions once they have completed their "diagnosis...

...It is a distortion to refer to Cuban police informers as "local busybodies...

...Ironically, Kwitny notes, Mobutu centralized the economy as firmly as any Communist, while quashing all opposition and installing a personality cult that might have made Mao Zedong envious...

...We have lost a coherent sense of United States national interests," they write, "the enduring purposes of policy that flow from values, geography, and our place in the hierarchy of world power.'' The consensus of the post-World War II period, a Golden Age of "mature internationalism," has been shattered, and the foreign policymaking apparatus crippled by politicization...

...However flawless its logic may be, the argument exists in a void, far removed from the grimy and confusing immediacy of people's lives, where it is not especially easy or meaningful to differentiate the authoritarian whip from the totalitarian knout...

...The Soviet Union would still be out there attempting to extend its influence by subverting non-Communist governments, and not all of them would be as nasty as Mobutu's...

...The International Monetary Fund is now tightening the economic screws, demanding that the populace reduce its already dismal standard of living still further in order to pay off the loans Mobutu was greedy enough to seek and the banks were foolish enough to grant...

...They have had a hand in some of the most important decisions of recent years...

...Moreover, Kwitny appears to be a reliable reporter...

...But the book is better than that...

...Normally, such comments are found in the kind of Leftist or anti-American tract that one dismisses without a second thought, and unsympathetic readers will seize upon them as proof that Endless Enemies is only a mindless polemic...

...Certainly, serious scholars long ago concluded that the writings of Marx had little to do with the policies of China, Cuba, Ethiopia, or Angola...

...A1980 survey of 20,000 villagers found that four out of five were suffering from malaria, measles, whooping cough, malnutrition, or some other potentially curable debilitation...

...celebrating the capitalist spirit of the Balundas, while Eleanor Roosevelt was championing the progressiveness of their opponents, the Bangalas...

...Thanks...

...Should a key figure refuse to talk to him or answer evasively, he carefully notes that fact in his narrative...

...Kwitny himself attempts to finesse the question by asking whether the term "Communist" has much meaning in a Third World context...

...It raises challenging questions that are going to have to be answered in years to come...

...By yielding to a sophomoric impulse to outrage, Kwitny has done himself a disservice...

...He is unlikely to reach the audience he should be most eager to attract...

...He has been a Wall Street Journal correspondent for 13 years, and before that he was a Peace Corps volunteer and tour leader...

...These arrive near the conclusion of the final chapter, in the form of suggestions for intellectual honesty, common sense, an awareness of real political self-interests, and a return to responsibility...

...Since Communists will almost invariably play a part in any such uprising, Kirkpatrick's authoritarian/totalitarian schema leads to the unsatisfactory conclusion that just about the only revolutions Washington can condone are those against Marxist regimes...

...There is no capitalist free market, but neither is Zaire in any sense socialist...

...were not intervening to oppose it...

...Gelb and Anthony Lakeis, Like Endless Enemies, a broad critique of our international relations...

...For reasons both of humanitarianism and national interest, shesays, theU.S...

...He is wrong, though, to declare that Third World Marxism would cease to exist if the U.S...

...He tracks down sources...

...Just because Dean Rusk had been president of the Rockefeller Foundation does not mean he was a lackey of the Rockefeller family as Secretary of State...