Items for the New President's Agenda
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Items for the New Presidents Agenda Several events that occurred shortly before the election suggest items that shouldbeonthe agenda of our new...
...And neither can the Soviets, who remain so shaky about nuclear accidents following the Chernobyl disaster that they have scaled back their plans for new nuclear power plants...
...In Chile 15 years ago, the CIA helped to bring down a democratically elected Left-wing government headed by Salvador Allende...
...The Mideast Threat to Peace Another new international fact of life was introduced by events in the Middle East before the November Israeli election—which included what the American lacked: a sharply defined issue and an October surprise...
...Nevertheless, the U.S...
...Libya has now been revealed as a major potential producer of chemical weapons...
...Little of this was heard during the election campaign, which remained in the Reaganesque straitjacket of superpower rivalry...
...The confrontations of late in Yugoslavia, which has been outside the Soviet bloc since Marshal Josip Broz Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, are an example...
...The mold into which Eastern Europe was poured during and after World War II is cracking...
...The Serbian Party chief has suffered a tactical setback in the national Party Central Committee, but he continues to represent a challenge to the Tito precept that only a weak Serbia can sustain a strong Yugoslavia...
...In Montreal, starting in 1957, a leading American psychiatrist, D. Ewen Cameron, used LSD and intense electric shocks on some 50 unwitting subjects, leaving some of them unable to function...
...Unable to assure an adequate supply of tritium, the unstable component in nuclear warheads that needs to be constantly replenished, the United States can no longer claim to be bargaining entirely from strength...
...Contrary to the conventional wisdom that there would be no movement on the Palestinian question until both contests were decided, Jordan's King Hussein, Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and the Palestine Liberation Organization's Yasir Arafat made conciliatory statements designed to tip the Israeli balloting in favor of the Labor Party and its leader, Shimon Peres...
...It reflected an attempt to capitalize on Iranian weakness, and to rally traditional Arab elements against religious fundamentalists and secular radicals, Syria being the odd country out in this coalition...
...Then there is Guatemala, where the CIA contrived, in 1954, to topple the Left-wing government of Jâcobo Arbenz Guzman...
...Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has been openly saying that the current burden of military expenditures is too great for his country—and possibly for the United States—to continue bearing...
...Star Wars may be in terminal trouble in the next Congress, anyway...
...Aside from representing an astonishingly blatant intervention in Israel's election campaign, the move had wider significance in terms of the balance in the Islamic world and the East-West relationship...
...Former Undersecretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger warns that, "unless we recognize the transition that is taking place and reorganize the West to deal with it, the problems of the next 20 years will eat us alive...
...The Example of Yugoslavia American policymakers will have to consider, too, the implications of the centripetal forces of economic failure and resurgent ethnicity at work in Eastern Europe...
...Enough evidence survived to underpin a suit by survivors in Canada that the agency strenuously tried to keep from coming to trial—and settled last month when a trial became imminent...
...Yugoslavia creaked along for eight years after Tito's death, perhaps for lack of a charismatic leader strong enough to challenge the status quo...
...But that equation will have to be amended in the light of the belated recognition that producing nuclear materials safely will cost a lot more than producing them with a nonchalant attitude about radiation leakage into the air and ground water...
...The Department of Energy has its reflex answer: It talks of repairing, remodeling and replacing the closed down facilities at a potential cost of $130 billion...
...Maybe more will be heard about the post-Cold War world after inauguration day...
...After Tito died in 1980, it was widely predicted that no one else could hold together the loose confederation of six republics and two autonomous provinces...
...They especially objected to the autonomy that had been granted to Vojvodina and Kosovo, making Serbs a minority within a minority in regions geographically part of Serbia...
...When the Shah was ousted in a revolution led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the United States became "the great Satan...
...It also appeared to reflect the efforts of the superpowers to keep the lid on the Palestinian cauldron by nudging their clients toward an international conference with the Soviet Union maintaining steady pressure on the PLO and the United States exerting its influence on Israel, Jordan and Egypt...
...Yet perhaps this is the time for a new look at bilateral disarmament...
...Most of therecords of these experiments were destroyed by the CIA when Congressional investigations started in the mid-1970s...
...It is hard to fit into that picture the reported negotiations for the sale of advanced Soviet fighter bombers to Syria...
...His name, known to you as you read this, was unknown to me as I wrote this—ah, lead time...
...The results of some of them are still being played out today...
...Indeed, the reactions to some of those events underscore how the campaign tended merely to perpetuate the outdated concepts of the Reagan years, ignoring the signs of change...
...Once the implications of Fernald, Rocky Flats and Hanford are fully absorbed, the new American President may perceive that the U.S...
...InTito's Yugoslavia, the Serbs felt put down in many ways...
...There seems to be little perception of the new realities, however, in the twilight of the Reagan years...
...Take the shutdown of the three plants making nuclear weapons material because it has been found that their continued operation is dangerous...
...In the post-Cold War era, attention will clearly need to be focused on the role and accountability of the CIA...
...does not stand so tall as to be able to wait indefinitely for nuclear arms reduction on its own terms...
...In October of this year, Chile voted to rid itself of the repression of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who replaced democracy with his own brand of dictatorship...
...In Iran 35 years ago, a CIA team calling itself " the Cowboys," led by Kermit Roosevelt, unseated the Leftist government of Mohammed Mossadegh and restored the exiled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi to power...
...Although the house is preserved as a national monument, foreign VIPs are not usually taken there, and Nixon had to insist on going...
...With ethnic passions fueled by economic discontent, a populist leader has now emerged in the person of 46-year-old Slobodan Milosevic, who possesses some talent for demagogy...
...Since Dwight D. Eisenhower's Administration, it has often been said that nuclear weapons are much cheaper than conventional forces—that they provide a bigger bang for the buck, a bigger rumble for the ruble...
...But what is to be done now that these plants have been exposed as too decrepit to operate safely...
...The Role of the CIA The mind-set that excused exposing Americans to radioactivity licensed a lot of violent intervention around the world in the name of combating Communism...
...In the period when the phrase "international Communism" seemed to justify the most outrageous kind of action, the CIA further strove to match rumored Soviet and Chinese capabilities for controlling behavior...
...He has galvanized huge demonstrations in support of his demands for constitutional change and greater influence in the autonomous provinces...
...and the USSR seemed to be exploring an opportunity for tacit cooperation through parallel action—like the flagging of Kuwaiti tankers that helped end the Gulf war...
...An agreement for a 50 per cent cut in strategic missiles, stymied by President Reagan's stubborn refusal to relent on anti-missile defense, would obviously reduce the requirements for plutonium and tritium and might save much of that $130 billion that must come from God knows where...
...Daniel Schorr is currently the senior news analyst for National Public Radio...
...It sought ways of brainwashing a subject into carrying out implanted commands to commit violence —a Manchurian Candidate sort of thing...
...I have visited Yugoslavia frequently, but my most vivid memory goes back to 1970 when I saw Presidents Tito and RichardM.Nixonsittingonabedinthe crude little house in Kumrovec, near Zagreb, where Josip Broz was bom in 1892...
...There seems to be an emerging understanding between Moscow and Washington that the next threat to peace will come not from nuclear or conventional weapons in the hands of the superpowers, but from poison gas, long-range missiles and terrorism in the Middle East, plus instability elsewhere in the Third World...
...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Items for the New Presidents Agenda Several events that occurred shortly before the election suggest items that shouldbeonthe agenda of our new President...
...The reason is that Kumrovec calls attention to the Croatian roots of Tito, who for 35 years succeeded in preventing an eruption of the country's volcano of ethnic rivalries...
...Otherwise, it says, the United States could not assure the viability of its nuclear arsenal and that would mean, in effect, unilateral disarmament...
...A chronic problem was Serbia, largest of the nationalities in population and an independent state before World War I, when Croatia and Slovenia were still part of the Hapsburg Empire...
...We can understand, thoughnot forgive, thepast— the 30 years of "friendly fire," nuclear style, that made Americans the principal casualties of weapons being fashioned for potential use against the Soviet Union...
...This was followed by years of repression and death squads under military rule...
Vol. 71 • November 1988 • No. 19
