COMMENT

...And many of the leaders of the counter-revolutionay contras have come to recognize that military victory is not in the cards for them, so they, too, have proclaimed their interest in negotiations...

...When it comes to weapons, our shrewd, hard-nosed legislators have hardly ever balked at buying a pig in a poke...

...But Bush must move swiftly...

...Exit Lying In his historic Farewell Address, George Washington left his compatriots with a prophetic admonition to avoid foreign entanglements...

...In other words, Americans have no right to know what their Government is doing in foreign affairs, even if officials are breaking the laws in the process...

...His record offers little in the way of encouragement...

...military budget—a rearrangement of American priorities at home and in the world...

...The winding down of the Cold War has exposed the parasites...

...The Flag, Again The American flag is still a potent political symbol...

...The plot is still the same, and its central theme is still secrecy...

...Even in Central America, where the United States has played a particularly destructive part during the Reagan years, the Bush Administration has a chance to make a new start and, if it is too late to undo much of the damage inflicted in the past, at least begin to head in a more constructive direction...

...Ultimately, their fate, too, is at stake...

...Americans committed to peace and social justice can help him by keeping the pressure on, but the final decision lies in his hands and those of the U.S...

...The United States has no lack of domestic social and environmental problems to solve...

...The Reagan Administration cleverly boxed him in by refusing to release the classified documents he and North's attorneys sought...

...competitiveness...

...aerial assassination attempt against Qaddafi...

...it entails such sinister "pressure groups" as children in need of education, the elderly in need of health care, and poor people in need of a roof over their heads...

...The challenge to Bush is to confront these realities as frankly as Gorbachev has...

...The conviction was reversed on appeal, but the high court in Washington has reopened the matter...

...But we don't need more enemies, we need fewer enemies...

...But if Bush were to move promptly to take advantage of the openings available to him, he would deserve—and receive—the thanks of a grateful world...

...Johnson was fined $2,000 and sentenced to a year in jail...

...If the United States insists on using its good offices—a prerogative to which it is entitled by virtue of its all-out economic and military support of Israel—the PLO's newly enunciated stance can be the prelude to a Middle East settlement that will advance the cause of justice and human dignity while defusing one of the globe's most dangerous flashpoints...

...When two U.S...

...The Libyans offered to allow the U.S...

...The case involves Gregory Lee Johnson, who set fire to a flag during a protest march at the 1984 Republican National Convention, thus violating a state law against "desecration of a venerated object...

...The decline of the Soviet threat might impair the solidarity and arrest the integration of the West," Charles Krauthammer, the ascendant snob of the neoconservative set, writes in The New Republic...

...His pledge to reduce Soviet military forces—unilater-ally-by 500,000 troops and 10,000 tanks, and to cut Soviet deployments in Eastern Europe and on the Chinese border, cries out for a comparable initiative by the United States so that both superpowers can embark on a steady course of further demobilization...

...No one gave much thought to the fact that the Libyans might be rightfully concerned about an imminent U.S...

...The war ended, but the secrecy was sustained and intensified, and it became a cloak that shielded not only the complex technology of atomic arms but also the bungles and blunders committed by the bureaucrats who ran the program...

...No matter that Iraq, Syria, and a myriad of other nations—including the United States—have such plants...

...No one seemed to question what the John F. Kennedy was doing off the coast of Libya in the first place...

...The opportunity is not of Bush's making, nor was the way paved by his predecessor...

...Choking back a sob, we bid farewell to the Great Communicator as he is wafted gently westward in the gondola of his hot-air balloon...

...So it is disturbing that the U.S...

...If, as the former national-security aide and his attorneys claimed all along, he was simply following the orders of high Administration officials, the American people had a right to know that...

...After stacking the Federal courts for eight years with reactionary judges who follow his own right-wing predilections, Reagan weighed in once again against "the notion that judgeships should be used to further privately held beliefs not yet approved by the people...

...Libya is easy pickings...

...Supreme Court has decided to heed the request of a Dallas prosecutor and review a case in which the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals sensibly ruled that burning a flag as part of a political demonstration is symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment...

...Here, too, the conflict is perpetuated—and could be halted— by decisions made in Washington...

...Now it appears we will never find out whether President Reagan or Vice President Bush planned or authorized the diversion of funds to the contras...

...But in both instances, massive public support will be available to a President who seizes the opportunity to take bold steps toward easing international tensions...

...Hell, it's only Libya...

...Libya, Take Two Ronald Reagan needed one last fling with power, so he returned to a favorite target: all-purpose bogeyman Muammar Qaddafi...

...The rationale for this huge expenditure is said to be embodied in a document called the 2010 Report (because it looks forward to the year 2010), and the document is—well, it's secret, of course...

...Will Bush be able to seize the opportunity...

...He cited the "risk that a quantity of classified national-security information would be compromised by a public trial," and he noted that a conspiracy trial would "touch upon a number of highly classified covert programs...

...Protecting his right to do so is what the First Amendment is for...

...Only the cast of players has changed...

...Not all the fault lies with Walsh...

...This is not so much a psychological principle as a political principle...

...And his performance as a conventional conservative politician, equally devoid of courage and of imagination, provides no basis for optimism...

...Throughout the Third World, military conflicts and economic crises could be significantly eased by the adoption of more enlightened U.S...

...Once again, the American people were ripped off...

...For the first time since the beginning of the Cold War, it is possible to contemplate the possibility of real detente and total nuclear disarmament...

...George Will scrapes his palette trying to paint Gorbachev as Stalin, and neoconservatives bemoan the loss of enemies...

...At this point, the only impediment is the durable hatred of the U.S...

...Justice Dropped When special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh dropped the theft and conspiracy charges against Oliver North, the Iran-contra scandal whimpered to a close...

...By 1955, the cult of secrecy was so firmly entrenched that even the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission did not learn about a serious and near-catastrophic accident at a breeder-reactor in Idaho until a reporter asked him about it five months later...

...As an alumnus of the Central Intelligence Agency and a veteran Cold Warrior, he is hardly an odds-on favorite to lead a turnabout in U.S...

...Take away one, and they find another...

...One recent public-opinion survey showed a majority of Soviet citizens willing to sacrifice their nation's vaunted space program so that basic domestic needs can be addressed...

...nuclear-weapons program was conceived in secrecy during World War II...

...Is George Bush capable of rising to these challenges...

...Repeatedly during his final weeks in office, Reagan blamed an "iron triangle" for his failure to bring the Federal budget into balance—a dark conspiracy composed of Congress, the media, and "special interests...

...He caused no physical harm to another human being, and he wasn't engaged in an act of arson...

...In El Salvador, a counterinsurgency war sponsored by the United States promises to become the next major site of U.S...

...For Bush, these developments represent an extraordinary opportunity to pick up the ball Reagan fumbled after his meeting with Gorbachev at Reykjavik...

...Administration officials spread story after story about the plant, and the President himself openly discussed the possibility of bombing it...

...politicians and powermongers may seek out new enemies in the Third World, as Michael Klare warned in these pages last month, or they may heighten anti-Japanese hostility to compensate for the decline of U.S...

...these ought to serve as the "mobilizing symbols" of the nation, not some phantom "other" whose image distracts and corrupts us...

...Some Pig, Some Poke The U.S...

...And in the Soviet Union, as in the United States, military expenditures are the principal obstacle to a rational ordering of national priorities...

...to inspect, but Reagan wasn't interested...

...And he stubbornly insisted that his tax cuts for the rich and his huge expenditures for the military had nothing to do with the Federal deficit...

...Establishment...

...Their economy is in a critical state, and public dissatisfaction with the acute shortages of housing and consumer goods increases steadily...

...In the Middle East, too, Bush can be the fortunate beneficiary of developments he had no part in shaping...

...Early in January, word leaked out that the Department of Energy plans to ask Congress to appropriate $81 billion—$81 billion—for a twenty-year program of "modernization and environmental restoration" at the U.S...

...The Sandinista government of Nicaragua, facing its own severe economic disarray, is more than eager to come to some sort of understanding with the United States...

...Reagan's concept of special interests is something else entirely...

...Ronald Reagan, true to form if not to precedent, is marking his departure by issuing one last grand belch of falsehood...

...More was at stake than North's guilt or innocence...

...The Democrats, as usual, either kept quiet or went along...

...Will Congress go along with an outrageous request of this kind at a time when the nuclear-arms race is supposed to be winding down...

...Gregory Lee Johnson wasn't committing a criminal act when he lit up the flag...

...F-14s shot down two Libyan MIGs in early January, the Democrats and the media fell right into line...

...In 1979, after the accident at Three Mile Island, a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told his fellow commissioners that if the First Amendment permitted full press coverage of such events, it ought to be repealed...

...Otherness" becomes "alien," "alien" becomes "subhuman," and the subhuman can be killed without remorse...

...He was making a political statement...

...Dwight Eisenhower's final Presidential message was arguably the most notable achievement of his public life: a solemn warning against the perils posed by America's burgeoning military-industrial complex...

...tensions of the postwar world...

...This is the lesson of Hitler and Pol Pot, My Lai and Dresden...

...Mendacious to the last, Reagan spoke once again about the homeless who "make it their own choice" to sleep on grates and park benches...

...foreign policy...

...Reagan and Bush thus eased the case not only against North but against themselves as well...

...bombing, given the rhetorical buildup and the 1986 U.S...

...All of a sudden, we were told, Libya had a chemical-weapons plant that was threatening "the free world...

...Parties and countries need mobilizing symbols of'otherness' to energize the nation and to give it purpose...

...The dramatic announcement Gorbachev made at the United Nations in December urgently needs a response...

...The first and most momentous of those openings is, of course, the astonishing series of changes instituted by the Soviet government under Mikhail Gorbachev—easing internal restraints, candidly addressing the crimes of Stalinism, withdrawing from the disastrous intervention in Afghanistan, and, most of all, moving boldly toward massive military cutbacks...

...To prepare the way, the Reagan Administration spent the holidays banging the drums for a bombing raid on Libya...

...George Bush has been presented with an opportunity to chart a new course for American foreign policy in these last years of the Twentieth Century, and to remove, or at least substantially ease, the threat of nuclear war that has hung over the planet for forty years...

...What began as a scandal has ended as a scandal...

...Because of the successful Palestinian uprising in the territories occupied by Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization has found the courage to articulate the position its leadership has, in fact, held for some time—the recognition of Israel's right to a secure existence...

...And Qaddafi's nuts, right...

...Among these are the intractable Federal deficit, the calamitous decay of domestic programs and the ensuing human misery, the growing restlessness among many Americans who sense that something has gone wrong with our national values, and the unwillingness of America's allies to perpetuate indefinitely the...

...Given his feckless promise to impose no new taxes, Bush can head in only one direction that promises real relief: A reduction in international conflict and in the bloated U.S...

...Surely this Nietzschean formulation should frighten all but the most steel-toed among us, for it is this craving for enemies that has wrought much of the horror in the modern world...

...Just as any move toward accommodation with the Soviets will embroil Bush with the unreconstructed Right of his own Republican Party, so any move toward a Middle East settlement will draw anguished opposition from the formidable Israeli lobby in the United States...

...Probably, if past performance offers any guide...

...Walsh's reasons for dropping the two charges demonstrate how undemocratic our country has become...

...U.S...

...an inspection's no fun...

...When Reagan spoke of special interests, however, he was referring not to the military contractors about whom Eisenhower cautioned us, nor to the corporate polluters who despoil the natural environment and make the taxpayers pick up the tab, nor to the global enterprises that soak up public subsidies while exporting jobs to low-wage havens in the Third World...

...Nations need enemies," he continues...

...But Bush, like Gorbachev (and Daniel Ortega and Yasir Arafat), faces some imperatives he cannot ignore...

...Government for the Sandinista revolution...

...nuclear-weapons production complex...

...policies...

...The Progressive Comment George Bush's Opportunity lot for many decades, perhaps never before in I American history, has a new President entered the White House under such potentially auspicious circumstances...

...Generals, military contractors, Krem-linologists, and other profiteers who fed off the Great Confrontation can barely contain their dislike for Mikhail Gorbachev's peace initiatives...

...The Pledge of Allegiance hullabaloo settled that...

...In Search of Enemies Idon't mind a parasite," Humphrey Bogart told Peter Lorre in Casablanca...

...And the media failed to scrutinize the Administration story, much less air the opinions of critics...

...I object to a cut-rate one...

...Undoubtedly, the Soviets have their own reasons for putting forward these initiatives...

...intervention unless the Bush Administration faces up to the realities...