Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes

by David Horowitz

  What is missing from these progressive hearts, after all is said and done, is a proper love of country, and therefore a sense of the friends, neighbors, and countrymen they betrayed. A proper love of country does not mean the abandonment of one's principles or the surrender of one's critical senses. It means valuing what you have been given, and what you have, and sharing the responsibility for nurturing and defending those gifts, even in dissent. The Old Left, the Stalinists, the people whom Kazan named, betrayed their country and the real people who live in it, their friends, their neighbors, and ultirnately themselves. They may have betrayed their country out of ignorance, or out of misplaced ideals, or because they were blinded by faith. But they did it, and they need to acknowledge that now by showing humility towards those, like Kazan, who did not.

  VI

  FOREIGN AFFAIRS

  25

  Misdemeanors or High Crimes?

  ON NEARLY TWO HUNDRED OCCASIONS in the three years before the breaking of the China scandal, including innumerable campaign appearances and three State of the Union addresses, the president of the United States looked the American people in the eye and assured them that, because of his policies, "there are no more nuclear missiles pointed at any children in the United States." If you are Bill Clinton, the truth of this statement probably depends on what "are" means.

  But to the rest of us who live in the shadow of a nuclear Armageddon, the president's statement is a morally repulsive and dangerous lie. The shred of truth out of which Clinton has woven his politically useful deception is a meaningless, post-Cold War agreement between Russia and the United States not to target each other's cities. But even if Russia were not a country in a state of near dissolution, the stark military reality is that United States intelligence services normally have no way of telling what targets Russia's leaders have actually chosen for their nuclear warheads. In fact, it would take a mere fifteen seconds for Russian commanders to re-target any of the hundreds of strategic missiles tipped with multiple nuclear warheads they have ready to go.

  More important, the Russians are energetically planning for the possibility of nuclear war with the United States. And they are not alone. Thanks to technology transfers courtesy of the Clinton Administration, China and North Korea are also armed with long-range missiles capable of reaching the American mainland. And they are not parties to the non-targeting agreement. Thanks to six years of tenacious, dedicated opposition by the Clinton Administration to the Strategic Defense Initiative, moreover, America has no defense against incoming missiles and no prospect of deploying one for many years.

  By every reasonable measure, the post-Cold War world is a dangerous one, perhaps even more dangerous than the world during the Cold War itself. That is the conclusion that any responsible commander-in-chief would draw and that is what he would tell the nation whose security depends on his political judgment.

  It is the assessment that any responsible administration would have acted on in the last seven years. But the actual response of the Clinton Administration during those years, as documented by the veteran military reporter Bill Gertz, in his disturbing new book, Betrayal, are different indeed:

  While the Clinton Administration has cut America's military by 40 percent and dramatically drawn down America's nuclear forces, the general in charge of Russia's rocket forces has publicly boasted that his are still at 90 percent of their combat effectiveness during the Cold War. The same general admits that his nuclear command and control systems are already stretched y percent beyond their life expectancy (and thus susceptible to unauthorized acts by rogue commanders).

  While threats from nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism continue to grow, Clinton has used his veto power to resist every effort by Republicans in Congress to authorize an anti-missile defense program. This opposition was mounted in the name of will-o'-the-wisp "arms control" agreements with the Russians (who have failed in the past to respect them) and under the assumption that there was no imminent threat of a missile attack to the United States. In pursuit of these chimeras, as Gertz has documented, Clinton was willing to go behind the back of his own Pentagon and collude with the Russians in blocking the development of a United States anti-missile system. This attitude only changed with the discovery of the wholesale nuclear spy leaks under the Clinton watch and the imminent publication of the Cox Report. Even then, the Clinton Administration refused to make a decision whether to implement such a program until June 2000, which ensured that the nation would remain defenseless in the face of a potential missile attack well into the future.

  While the Clinton Administration has stopped all development of nuclear weapons and is in the process of drawing down America's existing forces and while Clinton's Department of Energy chief (in charge of nuclear weapons development) publicly assailed America's "bomb building culture" and, for the benefit of potentially hostile powers, declassified information on 204 nuclear tests, Russia and China are engaged in a full-scale nuclear arms race to develop and expand their own arsenals. The express purpose of these large-scale nuclear buildups is to gain military superiority over the United States.

  While the United States has largely closed down its own underground military shelters, Soviet rulers are devoting massive resources (in a country on the verge of famine) to building an underground nuclear bunker the size of Washington, D.C.. The evident purpose of this bunker is to allow the Russian elite to survive a nuclear attack so that Russia can prevail in an all-out nuclear war. There is no country besides the United States that could qualify as an enemy in such a war. Meanwhile, Clinton is sending a billion dollars to Russia earmarked for its "nuclear disarmament program" even though the government's own General Accounting Office has already determined that millions of these dollars are going to Russian scientists working to build new nuclear weapons for the Russian military.

  Now the Cox Report has revealed that even while the Clinton Administration was steadfastly "engaging" China as a friendly power, the Chinese were systematically plotting to infiltrate the Democratic Party and current administration, subvert America's electoral process, and (with the help of the president himself) steal America's advanced weapons arsenal. The result is chillingly captured in the Wall Street Journal's summary of the bipartisan report: "The espionage inquiry found Beijing has stolen U.S. design data for nearly all elements needed for a major nuclear attack on the U.S., such as advanced warheads, missiles and guidance systems. Targets of the spying ranged from an Army antitank weapon to nearly all modern fighter jets. Most of the theft wasn't done by professionals, but by visitors or front companies. Lax security by the Clinton Administration is blamed in part, and satellite makers Hughes and Loral are criticized."

  Loral and Hughes are the companies that provided the Chinese with the technology to deliver their nuclear payloads. They were able to accomplish this with indispensable assistance provided by the Clinton White House that allowed them to circumvent technology controls instituted for national security purposes by previous administrations. Loral and Hughes are large Clinton campaign contributors. In fact, the head of Loral is the largest electoral contributor in American history.

  Pennsylvania representative Curt Weldon, who is chair of the National Security subcommittee on military research and development, and is fluent in Russian, has characterized the six years of Clinton's administration as "the worst period in our history in terms of undermining our national security." In May, Weldon traveled to Russia, in company with ten other congressmen. On that trip, in his presence, a Russian general threatened the assembled congressmen, warning that if the United States put ground troops in Kosovo, Russia "could" detonate a nuclear device in the lower atmosphere off the eastern United States. The resulting electromagnetic pulses, he claimed, would "fry" every computer chip in the country, shutting down phones, airplanes, electrical grids, and so on until the country was thrown into absolute chaos. This threat was not made during the Cold War by a ruler of the former Soviet Union. It was made by a Russian genera
l, in May 1999.

  These revelations are disturbing enough, but in the initial reactions to the Cox Report there was enough complaceny and denial to add an ominous element to the mix. Before the report was even issued, the Clinton cover-up squad had begun its famous spin cycle. Spokesmen for the White House and congressional Democrats explained that the damage resulting from all the spying was not that great because China only has eighteen missiles, while the United States has six thousand. Well, that may be fine, temporarily. But the theft has given China a twenty-year jump in its nuclear weapons development — an eternity in terms of modern technologies. What happens five or ten years in the future when the Beijing dictatorship has hundreds of missiles aimed at American cities and decides that it wants Taiwan? What consolation would it be to people in Los Angeles, who have already been threatened with a nuclear attack over the Taiwan issue, should Beijing decide to launch even one missile in their direction, given that their president has denied them a missile defense? In the event of such an attack, would Washington be willing to trade seventeen American cities in a retaliatory nuclear exchange to defend Taiwan?

  On the other hand, if historical experience is any guide, the communists just might. In Vietnam, the communists were willing to sacrifice two million of their own citizens (a figure comparable to seventy-two million deaths in the United States) against the prospect of victory, while fifty-eight thousand proved too great a sacrifice for Americans. The Chinese Communists have already killed an estimated fifty million of their own population in their pursuit of a revolutionary future. Why would they not risk another fifty million to achieve a goal their leadership deems worthy?

  In addition to making the false and irresponsible claim that the thefts reported by the Cox committee were not so serious, Clinton and his spinners argued that they themselves were not really guilty because "everyone does it." Shame on Democrats who have gone along with this argument, as they did with similar mendacities during the impeachment process over the President's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. This is not about a squalid presidential affair but about reckless and perhaps criminal behavior affecting the very lives of the American people. Yes, nuclear spying took place in previous administrations, and in every administration no doubt since the invention of the atom bomb. The difference is that previous administrations cared about such leaks and prosecuted the offenders — and had not accepted millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions from the military and intelligence services of the foreign power that pulled off the theft. Previous administrations did not lift security controls that supplied the thieves with additional vital military technologies, after the thefts had been discovered. Or systematically disarm their own military forces while this was happening. Or vigorously oppose the development of necessary defenses in the face of the threat. But the Clinton Administration did.

  One of the key technological breaks China received without having to spy to get it was the delivery of supercomputers once banned from export for security reasons. Supercomputers underpin the technology of modern warfare, and not only for firing and controlling missiles. A supercomputer can simulate a nuclear test and is crucial to the development of nuclear warheads. But, according to a Washington Post editorial on May 26, 1999, "In the first three quarters of 1998 nine times as many [supercomputers] were exported [to China] as during the previous seven years." This transfer was authorized three years after the spy thefts were detected. What rationale (besides stupidity, greed, or some treasonous motive) could justify this decision? What responsible president or official in any government would allow the massive transfer of national security assets like these to a dictatorship they knew had stolen their country's most highly guarded military secrets? And if they did do it, why did they?

  Was this the reason for the Chinese cash flow to the Clinton-Gore campaign? If not, what was the payoff the Chinese expected? What was the payoff they received? And who in the administration is responsible for the cover-ups, the laxity, and the leaks that made the Chinese conspiracy work as effectively as it did? Is there, for example, any connection between this security disaster and the fact that Sandy Berger, the president's National Security Advisor was a lobbyist for Chinese companies before being appointed to his post? Or that he and other top Clinton officials responsible for this mess have been left-leaning skeptics about Communist threats in the past, and radical critics of American power?

  In the immediate handling of the national security disaster, a profound disservice was done to the American people, in fact, by both political parties. Shell-shocked by Democratic attacks during the impeachment process, Republicans on the Cox Committee became complicit in an essential part of the cover-up in the name of bipartisanship. This was the decision to de-couple the spy scandal and the technology transfers from the Clinton money trail to Beijing. This removed a large potential area of conspiracy from the perspective of the Cox report. In all, 105 witnesses to the illegal funding of the Clinton-Gore campaign by people connected to the Chinese military and Chinese intelligence either took the Fifth Amendment or fled the country to avoid cooperating with investigators. They did this with the tacit acquiescence, if not active help, of the Clinton Administration. What were they hiding, and why the did Clinton Administration, at the very minimum, not care?

  The entire debate has taken place in a surreal atmosphere of politics-as-usual: the partisan defense of the White House, the denial of the real magnitude of the nuclear danger, the political decoupling of the Chinese plot to infiltrate and influence the Clinton-Gore Administration, and the failure even to acknowledge that what is at stake is a probable massive betrayal of the American people's trust by its national security leadership.

  Someday, the American people may want to revisit questions they disposed of during the president's perjury over an illicit affair in light of the unfolding national security drama. Is bad character an impeachable offense? Does reckless behavior and lying under oath make a leader unfit to be commander-in-chief? Whatever their answers, and whatever the results of the investigations in progress, one thing is certain: the already revealed facts will redraw the legacy of this presidency as the most reckless and dangerous in our lifetimes.

  26

  A Question of Loyalties

  EVEN AS OFFICIALS WERE PREPARING to release the Cox report on how the communist dictatorship in Beijing had stolen the design information for America's nuclear weapons systems, the Democratic National Committee was announcing the appointment of its new "political issues director," Carlottia Scott, a former mistress of the marxist dictator of Grenada and an ardent supporter of America's adversaries during the Cold War. What could the DNc have been thinking to make such an appointment at such a political juncture? And what might this tell us about the roots of the nation's security crisis, the dramatic erosion of its defenses and military credibility, and the theft of its nuclear arsenal by an opponent the administration thinks of as a "strategic partner," while its communist leaders regard America as their "international archenemy"?

  Carlottia Scott was for many years the chief aide to Congressman Ron Dellums, a Berkeley radical who, with the approval of the congressional Democratic leadership, was first appointed to the Armed Services Committee and then to the chair of its subcommittee on Military Installations, which oversees United States bases 267 worldwide. The Democratic leadership apparently detected no problem in the fact that every year during the Cold War with the Soviet empire, Congressman Dellums introduced a "peace" budget requiring a 75 percent reduction in government spending on America's defenses. Nor did they have any problem with Dellums's performance during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred on Jimmy Carter's watch. As Soviet troops poured across the Afghanistan border and President Carter called for the resumption of the military draft, Dellums told a "Stop the Draft" rally in Berkeley that "Washington, D.C. is a very evil place," and the only "arc" of a crisis that he could see was "the one that runs between the basement of the west wing of the White House and the war room of
the Pentagon."

  Among the government documents retrieved when the marxist government in Grenada was overthrown were Scott's love letters to Grenada's anti-American dictator Maurice Bishop. Scott wrote that "Ron has become truly committed to Grenada. . . . He's really hooked on you and Grenada and doesn't want anything to happen to building the Revolution and making it strong. . . . The only other person that I know of that he expresses such admiration for is Fidel." Bishop and Fidel were not the only communists in the Americas favored by Dellums. About the time these letters were retrieved, Dellums was opening his congressional offices to a Cuban intelligence agent organizing support committees in the United States for the communist guerrilla movement in El Salvador. Yet when Dellums retired, the Clinton Administration's Secretary of Defense, William S. Cohen, bestowed on him the highest civilian honor the Pentagon can award "for service to his country." After Dellums's retirement, Scott became chief of staff to Dellums's successor, Berkeley leftist Barbara Lee. I met Barbara Lee in the 1970s, when she was a confidential aide to Huey Newton, the "Minister of Defense" of the Black Panther Party, whose calling card was the "Red Book" of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.

  Also among the documents liberated from Grenada, were the minutes from a politburo meeting of the marxist government attended by Barbara Lee. The minutes state that "Barbara Lee is here presently and has brought with her a report on the international airport done by Ron Dellums. They have requested that we look at the document and suggest any changes we deem necessary. They will be willing to make the changes."