Mr Reagan's warmongering
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington The President, the Congress and the Supreme Court have cleared out of town and won't be back until the second week in September. In times past this escape from Washington's summer weather has brought with it a diminution, if not a surcease, in official nuttiness. But with Reaganites one cannot be sure. They appear to play Calvin Coolidge's game, but they show no disposition to give up sailing the ship of state in order to go and aestivate in the countryside.
They remind one of the boys who pined through their entire childhoods for a set of toy battleships, and now that they have them by God they're going to play with them. Having no fewer than 13 atomic air- craft carriers, these kids have a lot of toys to shove around the globe.
Nevertheless, the snarls coming from the aircraft carrier Eisenhower and the rest of the Sixth Fleet off the coast of Libya are disconcerting. Resigned and/or reasonable people concede every administration the joy and pleasure of pushing one small country around at a time. We had all presumed that Nicaragua had been nominated, so the resumption of argument with the preposterous Colonel Gaddafi over exactly where, in the Mediterranean, his boun- daries end or extend, took some of us by surprise. We were all the more unprepared for the announcement that the United States was sending arms and advisers to save the brave and freedom-loving people of Chad from . . . well, that is not too clear.
The United States has more nuclear air- craft carriers than it has citizens who can tell whether Chad is a nation, a fish or the name of a rock band. The number of enemies, threats, crises and delicate and dangerous situations has far outstripped our national capacity to understand. Almost every morning an armada of ghastly power has been dispatched to some other place which only the ideological fanatics in the Administration are interested in.
This was not supposed to happen with the ascension of the calm George Shultz to the office of Secretary of State. He was go- ing to cool off the Strangelovian creatures in the White House basement, although we did not necessarily expect such predicted changes as a shift over to a more sym- pathetic stance toward the Arabs. If anything, the United States is closer to giv- ing Israel a carte blanche. When the West Bank Arabs are treated the way we used to treat the Seminole Indians, Washington says less than it ever did. Mr Shultz is prov- ing that because a man smiles, is jovial, gracious and polite it does not mean he is
not 'hard-core'. Like the men he works with and, incidentally, has been associated with for many years, he believes there is one mission for the United States — which is to extirpate Marxism, collectivism and socialism wherever it or anything that looks like it is discovered on the globe.
Bear that in mind and nothing which has happened or will happen these next months is going to surprise you. Such intimations are too painful for some and so the rumour is afloat that Mr Shultz, aghast at discover- ing he is keeping company with mainline fanatics who have usurped his powers and prerogatives, is heading for the sidelines. This line of speculation has it that Judge William Clark, the National Security Ad- viser, is doing a Kissinger and squeezing out the Secretary of State. Don't you believe it until you hear it from Shultz's lips.
Judge Clark, who is regarded as a parochial hick who has read even fewer books in his lifetime than Mr Reagan, was Mr Shultz's deputy at the State Department before moving over to the White House and his present job. If he and the Secretary were unable to work together or did not see eye to eye on major policy questions, nobody outside their immediate circle knows it.
All the top men in this Administration are in fundamental agreement. There are no doves, there are no moderates, there are no second thoughts, no advocates of what used to be called enlightened self-interest. These people have not spent the kind of money they have on armaments in order not to use them. From day one, before day one, when Mr Reagan and his friends were campaign- ing for office, they said they were going to build American power and use it. And they weren't talking about moral power or the power of example. Yet one might have ex- pected Mr Shultz to have injected a degree of orderliness into the carrying out of the crusade. Instead it has been done helter- skelter, with carelessness and a negligent contempt for what people who are not their heart-and-soul partisans might think.
Mr Reagan's performance has been so slipshod that at a press conference he told the country there was nothing particularly out of the way in sending two armadas — each with a firepower exceeding that of the entire World War II American fleet — off the coast of Nicaragua. Then in the next breath he told the country he didn't know how many ships were involved. He explain- ed that one of the reasons for this demonstration was that the Russians had a freighter heading towards Nicaragua, carry- ing 'military equipment, helicopters, transport helicopters for military purposes and so forth'. Was he forgetting that Nicaraguans have as much right to waste their money on these lethal trifles as the rest of the world's homicidal fools? A few days later, an American man-of-war stopped the Ulyanov on the high seas and demanded to know its cargo and destination. The Pen- tagon explained that the captain did not know who or what this mystery freighter might be. He should pay more attention to his commander-in-chief.
In the midst of dire admonitions about America's safety being imperilled by events in the Isthmus of Panama, the same Ad- ministration signed a wheat sale agreement with the Russians and concluded an agree- ment with the Chinese to sell them technically advanced electronics. If the communists are confused, so are many Americans. While we are making grain deals with Moscow, another branch of government here is out in public with new information on 'yellow rain', the poison biochemicals which the Russians are said to be dropping on the Laotians. The truth of these charges has engendered a hot con- troversy among a very small number here. In the 20th century you never know which atrocity stories are true. Russian biochemical warfare against whoever it is they are doing it to is true enough for the Administration to ask Congress for permis- sion to resume making poison gas which, officially anyhow, we have not been doing since 1969.
Not all war crimes are unopposed. The nation's dog lovers recently let out a coast- to-coast howl when it was learned that the army was intending to shoot but not kill dogs so that its surgeons would have real gunshot wounds to practise on. Mr Shultz's long-time collaborator both in government and in the private sector, the Defence Secretary Casper Weinberger, put out a one-sentence statement cancelling this part of the army's 'wound laboratory' work. However, the same programme continues using pigs, who lack the organised consti- tuency which you need in the United States if you want your group or species pro- tected.
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