Bush's Buchanan Jitters
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Bush's Buchanan Jitters In this season when the nation becomes preoccupied with who will govern it for the next four years, there is reason to be concerned...
...Five years ago Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's chief America-watcher, Georgi Arbatov, gibed: "You will see, we will deprive you of an enemy, and then what will you do...
...Dulles replied that he would not lift a finger to save Khrushchev...
...From the deportation of Haitian refugees to the reluctance to provide large-scale aid to help bail out former Soviet republics, however, the impact of Buchanan's "America First" rhetoric has been visible...
...The Washington Post exposed a memorandum from National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter proposing a program of "disinformation" against Libya's ruler...
...One can expect to see many gyrations as it negotiates between conservative pressure for tax relief for business and Congressional pressure for tax relief for the middle class...
...Kim II Sung is not sufficiently well known to Americans...
...The lesson Dulles taught me was that, above everything else, a policy-maker prizes predictability...
...This has included dragging the U.S...
...Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times, traveling in mid-February with Secretary of State James A. Baker III in Germany and the new Commonwealth, understood him to suggest that the U.S...
...Occasionally these were picked up by American correspondents and sent back to the U.S.—a phenomenon known as "blowback" in the intelligence trade...
...Although one can only speculate on what contingency Bush may seize, the situation is inherently perilous when an incumbent President is running scared, not only for re-election but for renomination...
...The new premise is two simultaneous regional wars—say, in the Persian Gulf and Korea—while being ready for a major campaign in Europe to hold back, say, a resurgent Russia...
...There are recurrent rumors of a coup, and the question constantly asked is whether Yeltsin will survive...
...After it was criticized by Congressional investigators in the mid-'70s, the CIA promised to try to avoid blowback...
...And nothing seems less predictable than the situation in the former Soviet Union...
...Dis-information—from the Russian dezinformdtsia—was a Soviet invention...
...If not, who, or what, comes next...
...Government Disinformation Recently, a report from Moscow had renegade Army officers offering T-52 tanks for sale to all comers...
...In the bad old days of the Cold War, defense doctrine posited the need to maintain enough forces to fight "one-and-a-half wars"—that is, a major war with the Soviet Union and a simultaneous regional conflict...
...assistance to the newly independent republics has been largely limited to eye-catching airlifts of surplus food and headline-catching job projects for unemployed nuclear scientists...
...Perhaps the Iraqi dictator was more impressed by the menacing leaks than those in this country inured to government disinformation...
...was deliberately spreading aids...
...It is a weapon of covert action, like a report planted in African newspapers claiming the U.S...
...Administration Confusion Democrats in Congress want to make much deeper cuts in the defense budget than the Administration is thus far willing to consider...
...Saddam Hussein's Iraq again, where belatedly-recognized monstrous massacres of Kurds have taken place...
...Now we know the answer—dream up new enemies...
...In the real world we see around us, peace and stability are no longer menaced by big invasions...
...At this writing, U.S...
...John E. Frohnmayer, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a conservative target, was forced to resign...
...Even without an election campaign, the former USSR has become something of a nightmare for the Bush Administration...
...It can—just illustratively—envisage Russia attacking Lithuania with help from Belarus, Lithuania appealing for rescue by NATO, and the U.S...
...media became an issue when the Wall Street Journal and other reputable newspapers were told by " authoritative sources" that Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was renewing his support for terrorism and faced Reagan Administration reprisals...
...You can imagine the sense of deja VP among Washington hands, therefore, when stories from "authoritative sources" cropped up saying that a covert action campaign against Saddam Hussein had been authorized by President Bush?something that, if true, should have been top secret...
...James Hoagland of the Washington Post, talking to Vice President Dan Quayle in Munich, understood that the Administration will not offer significant help, believing that Yeltsin is sinking without hope of rescue...
...George Bush, not famous for harboring many core convictions, has been coming under increasing pressuretotailor government policy and actions to perceived political need...
...Qaddafi's Libya, harboring two alleged perpetrators of the Pan-Am 103 bombing...
...If he does, do we face the prospect of dealing with a democratically elected dictator...
...For the present, that means mainly trying to offset the appeal of Patrick J. Buchanan to the conservative Republican base Bush inherited, perhaps not entirely legitimately, from President Ronald Reagan...
...Buchanan-containing moves in foreign policy are harder to spot...
...might be ready to take part in a multibillion dollar stabilization fund...
...Indeed, nothing would be more effective in countering the chauvinist appeal of Pat Buchanan than some new confrontation with an unpopular adversary...
...When President Bush said he would "do what it takes" to get re-elected, he might have added, "and to make sure I get nominated...
...In 1986 disinformation in the U.S...
...One form of resistance in the Pentagon was to draw up seven scenarios of possible future conflicts, including an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait plus Saudi Arabia, a North Korean attack on South Korea, and the emergence of a new expansionist superpower —unnamed, but presumably Russia...
...Watching his sinking poll ratings, he must have noticed that their highest points came during the hostilities in Panama and Iraq...
...I made the point that Nikita S. Khrushchev, facing hardline opposition in the Politburo to his policy of peaceful coexistence, might need to show some concrete results in order to maintain control...
...It spread fake stories abroad about instability and internal feuds in Communist countries...
...Even before the February 18 New Hampshire primaryrang thoseloud alarm bells in the White House, we had witnessed an Administration so nervous that it could, within days, cut back the antirecession program promulgated in the State of the Union address, supposedly the fruit of months of reflection...
...Secretary of State John Foster Dulles invited me to breakfast to discuss the post-Stalin thaw...
...He went on to say that he really preferred the stern yet cautious Stalin to the ebullient, unpredictable Khrushchev...
...A series of moves in rapid succession suggest a bad case of Buchanan jitters...
...They are threatened, rather, by civil wars, terrorism and low-intensity conflict: Serb against Croat in Yugoslavia, Israeli against Palestinian near the Lebanese border, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria, communal strife from Haiti to Somalia...
...A budget proposal that would have required churches to report contributions of more than $500 to the Internal Revenue Service was hastily rescinded because Evangelical churches, in particular, objected to providing names of their financial supporters...
...Then I asked Dulles a hypothetical question: If it were in his power, would he make some arms control concession to ensure Khrushchev's ability to fend off Stalinist opponents...
...President Boris N. Yeltsin may proclaim Russia is now an ally of America, but the Pentagon is not easily taken in...
...The uncertainty has been heightened by the fact that Yeltsin himself, desperate for help, has been dramatizing his peril...
...In the fading glow from Desert Storm new challenges have arisen on the world scene...
...and launched Desert One, the abortive effort to rescue the hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran...
...All this has reminded me of 1955 when, at year's end, I returned on leave from Moscow, where I had opened the CBS bureau...
...A KGB defector said the story was a hoax, disinformation generated by the KGB to discredit the military cutback...
...feeling obligated to respond—as it did not in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968...
...A nuclear-armed North Korea...
...Castro's Cuba...
...Another story had CIA Director Robert M. Gates consulting in the Middle East about how best to oust Saddam...
...As a result, the Administration's policy confusion is so great that two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists could talk to high officials and reach opposite conclusions...
...This prompted, among other things, the resignation of Bernard Kalb as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs...
...Or maybe, adds Eduard A. Shevardnadze, a combination of both...
...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Bush's Buchanan Jitters In this season when the nation becomes preoccupied with who will govern it for the next four years, there is reason to be concerned about how it will be governed this year...
...After New Hampshire, officials promised that the President would "stay the course" on economic policy, betting the economy would turn the corner...
...During the Cold War the CIA also learned the uses of disinformation...
...But an Administration that seems to have tied its policies to the groundhog's shadow cannot be counted on for resoluteness...
...Bush, though, has long been committed to punishing Israel for building new settlements on the West Bank, so Buchanan's pressure has had only marginal effect in reinforcing his determination...
...The last time that happened, in 1980, Jimmy Carter was under challenge from Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass...
...A tentative move to open several underused veterans' hospitals to nonveterans was canceled because of opposition from some veterans' groups, especially in the rural South...
...Alas, that is not the stuff of defense budgets, with their bombers, nuclear missiles and carrier task forces...
...But the internationalist Bush Administration, forced to contend with Buchanan isolationism on the one hand and the deficit straitjacket on the other, has held back from a broad program to help the Commonwealth of Independent States make the passage to a free market...
...He has warned that should he fail, next will come the Communist Red Shirts or the Nazi Brown Shirts...
...Buchanan has appealed to anti-Israel sentiment by denouncing what he calls the Israeli Defense Ministry's "amen corner in Washington," referring to the pro-Israel lobby...
...feet on a commitment to the International Monetary Fund to contribute $ 12 billion to a planned $60 billion in aid for Russia and other liberated republics...
Vol. 75 • February 1992 • No. 2
