The Art of Getting Confirmed

...It is why Mussolini attacked Abyssinia (now Ethiopia...

...His hold on power would be increasingly insecure...

...More seriously, what struck me in the course of observing the early developments from the Colorado Rockies was how the plot seemed to be following a Soviet pattern...

...It represented no threat to the United States, but it assumed political significance in 1979 when Democratic Senators Richard Stoneof Florida and Frank Church of Idaho, angling for conservative support, went public with demands that the Carter Administration get Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev to withdraw the brigade...

...Lacking such weapons, or some prospect of having them, Saddam would become a two-bit tyrant with a fast-fading charisma...

...But if Bush's purpose in raising the issue when he did was to shelter the peace conference from a premature controversy over the settlements, the result appeared to be the opposite...

...That is why Hitler rearmed Germany in defiance of the Versailles Treaty...

...Before confirming Judge Thomas by a vote of 52-48, the Senators undoubtedly spent more time analyzing their incoming faxes and phone calls than studying the Judiciary Committee hearings...

...Clarence Thomas, in his initial round with the Judiciary Committee, opened a window of opportunism by backing away from some of his extreme positions and fudging others...

...In Colby's case, former Director Richard Helms was still around to join him as a target, dispute him, and be accused of deceiving Congress...

...The Iraqi dictator is the bone in the President's throat that Fidel Castro used to be...

...Robert Gates, who finally secured an 11-4 vote of approval from the Select Committee on Intelligence, illustrated the uses of amnesia with a dash of remorse...

...Shamir expressed his shock that the settlement issue was being linked to Israel's humanitarian request for $10 billion in loan guarantees to construct immigrant housing...

...Itismyown theory that Lee Harvey Oswald, having read Castro's complaint in a New Orleans newspaper, became the self-appointed avenger of his Cuban hero...

...The televised confirmation process has come to put a high premium on disingenuousness...

...In a country that had no nationwide elections for its leaders, the coup became one means of bringing about succession...

...Tactics...

...It is, at least in part, why Stalin's tanks rolled into Eastern Europe...

...The subsequent agreement of Presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin to pull some 10,000 troops out of Cuba, including a brigade formation, was probably a small price to pay as Secretary of State James A. Baker III announced the easing of conditions for American financial and material assistance...

...Gates was able to point to high-handedness and duplicity on his predecessor's part without fear of contradiction...

...The first Soviet military advisers arrived in Cuba in September 1960, when Castro had probably learned of plans for an American-sponsored invasion...

...The brigade became a hot issue again as the Reagan Administration focused on Cuban involvement in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the Bush Administration missed no opportunity to raise the question with the Soviet government...

...Perils of the Mideast The perils of Pauline are nothing compared to the perils of peacemaking in the Middle East...

...It did not remain a secret long, and began a remarkable three decades that saw Cuba, as a Soviet military outpost, become an irritant in American politics, spawn an attempted invasion, and set off the most dangerous nuclear crisis of the Cold War...

...A Moscow TV reporter contrived to elude his superiors and tape for the evening news Boris N. Yeltsin, the first-ever elected leader of the Russian Republic, standing on top of a tank hurling defiance and demonstrating that the fait was not accompli...

...Ultimately, the Senate managed to convert a historic conflict of values into a contest between a black man and a black woman, and while doing so debased them both...

...I managed to corner the two of them before a CBS camera at a crowded reception, and asked Castro about reports that he was negotiating for Soviet military aid...

...For Shamir, the principle, no less passionately held, was that Israel's highest imperative is making room for Jewish immigrants, and that even a temporary freeze on settlements would prejudge the status of the contested territory in favor of the Palestinians...

...Anita F. Hill, to defend her credibility, took a lie detector test...

...Should the loan guarantees be submitted to Congress early in the New Year, it is likely that conditions will be attached intended to discourage further West Bank settlements...

...Second, he has a knack for marching back and forth to the brink of confrontation, for testing the attention span of a superpower distracted by crises from the Middle East to the Soviet Union...

...Third, the fact is that Iraq emerged from the war President Bush abruptly ended last February 28 with considerably more conventional firepower and chemical, biological and nuclear potential than American intelligence realized...

...In the past, of course, a coup was over by the time it was announced...

...And that was the way the coup-key crumbled...

...Saddams Shell Game It is essential that a dictator retain the capacity for violence outside his borders to make credible his embodiment of nationalist ambitions for expansion...

...In Havana in February 1960, I covered the first visit of a highranking Soviet official to Cuba...

...Now television, radio, telephone, and fax leaped across borders...

...The latest tense episode had our heroine, the peace conference, now set for October 30, once more hurtling toward the precipice while Bush and Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir slugged it out...

...replies, "Yes, but I don't necessarily agree with them...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR The Art of Getting Confirmed It is awesome to contemplate the events that compressed years of change into the weeks since I wrote my prevacation column for the July issue: The August 19 coup against President Mikhail S. Gorbachev that was intended to press the "reverse" button on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but pressed "fast forward" instead...

...So, just as with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1964, the Party Politburo decided that Gorbachev was sicker than he knew—certainly too sick to continue governing...

...The President was defending his passionately held belief that Israel should not prejudge the future of the West Bank and Gaza by expanding Jewish settlements there...

...Let me try to catch up with a few of these matters, beginning with the last first...

...Saddam Hussein is likely to be around for some time...

...He managed to come off as a convenient lightning rod for the longgathering storm against abuses during the reign of the late Director William J. Casey, just as William E. Colby was put on the Congressional rack in the mid'70s to answer for misjudgments in the agency going back a decade or more...

...Fidel Castro, by then out of the closet as a Communist, was showing Deputy Prime Minister Anastas I. Mikoyan around the island, and in long meetings they discussed what support the Kremlin would give him...

...The Soviets, after pulling out their missiles, left behind advisers and troops as a reassurance to Castro...

...His Senate supporters sought to discredit Professor Hill as vengeful, delusional or both...

...A weakened Gorbachev finally yielded, ending the three decades of Soviet military involvement in Cuba, and of raw nerves in America...

...I remember how the whole confrontation began...

...He threw up his hands and replied, "But that's a secret...

...Syria, after seemingly having been persuaded by Secretary Baker to take part in all aspects of the conference without conditions, took up the President's lead and went back to demanding full Israeli withdrawal from the disputed areas before it would participate in discussions about regional cooperation with Jerusalem...

...Say what you think, as Judge Robert H. Bork did, and you become a target...

...Thomas reminded me of the old joke about the man who admits to no view on anything and, when asked by a friend, "Don't you have any opinions at all...

...Now public revulsion against the Senate, indicated in opinion polls, joins the revulsion against the checkbouncing House...

...Remembering such stormy periods as the 1956 British-French-Israeli invasion of Suez, when the Eisenhower Administration forced a rollback, and the furor created by the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, one hesitates to speak of a "new" low in American-Israeli relations...

...Although the Bay of Pigs landing in April 1961 turned out to be a fiasco, Castro was able to exploit fear of another invasion to induce Khrushchev to deploy medium-range missiles in Cuba, leading to the 1962 missile crisis...

...Total control of information and communications made it possible to seal off Kremlin struggles from a population kept remote from such machinations and powerless to affect them...

...But times had changed...

...Look the supposedly inquiring Senators in the eye and say that nothing you've said previously counts, and they're frustrated...

...Ask yourself if you had any trouble determining the biases of the Judiciary Committee interrogators, who went into the hearings split seven to seven and came out the same way...

...Fact-finding...

...But they certainly reached the lower depths, accompanied by some intemperate language onbothsides.The President gave vent to his irritation with the pro-Israel lobby...

...A two-track strategy was pursued on the Thomas side...

...Committee members competed for their shares of air time in this X-rated TV movie...

...Like other recent plebiscites by television that have substantially replaced decision-making on the merits, they featured tactics of innuendo and smear...

...That brigade had been a long-standing bone in the throats of U.S...

...President George Bush taking on Saddam Hussein over hidden weapons in his land and Yitzchak Shamir over Jewish settlements in contested land (and sometimes sounding as though he had trouble distinguishing between certified foe and ostensible friend...

...In California, where I spent most of the days related to Hill's testimony, contempt of Congress seemed to fit the mood of alienation that has brought about term-limitation for the state's legislators...

...In between, the CIA, at times in league with the Mafia, was trying to assassinate Castro, and Castro was issuing public warnings of retaliation...

...Since a black woman could not be credibly portrayed as leading a lynch mob, she was portrayed as the tool of a lynch mob—a marionette manipulated by dark forces (pardon the expression) bent on destroying an uppity African-American...

...Their attack left the Judge himself free to travel the high road and claim victimization by the process...

...The confirmation hearings on Robert M. Gates for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court, award-winning demonstrations of the art of playing to the Senate and the television audience...

...Presidents, a symbol of Soviet penetration of the Western Hemisphere...

...Consequently, the game of now-I'll-show-you, nowI-won't is critically important to the Iraqi ruler, and he comes to it with certain advantages...

...Those hearings, jokingly called factfinding sessions, were gripping but not edifying...

...That converted a lot of polygraph-loving conservatives into instant civil libertarians...

...The outbreak of civil warin Yugoslavia, heraldingthe New World Disorder of ethnic conflict that is undermining the authority of the nation-state...

...A series of angry exchanges between Washington and Moscow followed, with the Kremlin insisting that the unit was only a training outfit and refusing to bend to American pressure...

...In 1975, American intelligence found, through radio intercepts, that references were being made to a "brigade," normally some 2,500 troops in four battalions of infantry and artillery...

...And it is why Saddam Hussein, his cease-fire pledges notwithstanding, has persisted in his shell game of trying to conceal his remaining potential for weapons of mass destruction...

...Thus the challenge of sexual harassment was countered by the challenge of racial harassment...

...A Coup Dividend The key to bringing off the coup in Moscow was support of the Army and the KGB, which turned out to be divided...

...First of all, there is the obvious reluctance of his wartime adversaries to renew hostilities...

...One can expect rising support for term-limitation in Congress, and then perhaps in the Supreme Court...