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Throughout history many of the worst atrocities have been perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. Passion is a poor guide to policy. The racist obsession of many black African leaders, while understandable in terms of their priorities, ought not to dictate ours. The sort of holy war they preach, to eradicate in southern Africa all vestiges of special privilege or even special protection for the white minorities, would be bloody even beyond the standards of Idi Amin; and it would destroy the economic and political structures on which both black and white depend for such freedom and prosperity as they have.
A race war against South Africa is not the way to end racism in South Africa, nor will economic warfare against the most economically advanced nation on the continent resolve the issue. Here in the United States we fought a civil war in part over the issue of slavery, and it took another century before even those racial discriminations sanctioned by law were wiped away. With our own history, we are hardly free enough of sin to cast the first stone—or even the second. Without condoning South Africa’s racial policies, we should be more understanding of the need to change them peacefully over a period of time, and more sensitive to the other issues besides race that are at stake in the future of that tortured part of the continent.
The “Soft” Underbelly
With our eyes riveted on the successive crises in NATO Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa, we have lost sight of the growing world of power to the south of us in Latin America. Geopolitically it has long been accepted that we are an “island nation,” but if we maintain our past neglect of this area we may well awaken to find that the enemy is ashore on the “island continent” to the south of us. The Soviets already have outposts of influence on the offshore islands—in Cuba and some of the smaller Antilles. By the time this book appears, they may be ashore in Central America.
Latin America usually makes the front pages of our newspapers only when there is a revolution, an earthquake, or a riot at a soccer match. But it deserves attention equal to that we give Europe, Asia, and Africa, and in some ways even more because of its proximity to us.
Latin America is a prime Soviet target for three major reasons: it has enormous natural resources; by the end of the century its population will be substantially greater than that of the United States and Western Europe combined; and it is close to the United States—it is our soft underbelly.
The nations of Latin America won their freedom largely as a result of our example. They were able to keep that freedom during their early years because of the protective mantle the Monroe Doctrine spread over them. By allowing a Soviet client state in the Americas—Cuba—we seemed to them to have abandoned that doctrine. They see little resistance from us to the establishment of Cuban influence in the islands of the Caribbean and now on the mainland of Central America. They see us abandoning many of our friends on the grounds that they are not pure on the matter of human rights. They notice that the Soviets do not abandon their friends over matters of ideology, as long as interests coincide. They have watched as our friends in South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Iran have been defeated and overthrown, in some cases with the help of Cuba. They can hardly help wondering how firmly they can count on us in the future.
Many use the term “Latin America” as if it were an undifferentiated mass. But Latin America embraces an expanse far larger than Europe and contains an immense diversity of peoples. Each country has an old and proud tradition of independence and individuality. They all have a common religion. By the end of the century half of the Roman Catholics in the world will be in Latin America. Some countries, such as Argentina, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, have populations that are almost exclusively European in origin. Others, including Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador, have a large Indian component. Many have large numbers of people with German, Italian, and other European backgrounds besides Spanish. In Brazil people of African and Portuguese origin have joined to produce a new civilization. There are wide differences in the degree of development and sophistication in these countries; in size, they range from the giant Brazil to such tiny countries as El Salvador.
Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina are rapidly becoming industrial nations. Brazil has more people than Britain and France combined, well over 100 million, and in some respects is already an industrial giant, with the tenth largest GNP in the world in 1978.
Mexico is taking great strides toward development. Revenues from its vast newly found oil reserves will enable it to move rapidly toward a better life for its 70 million people, but these riches also make it a tempting target for subversion.
Argentina, with a basically homogeneous and highly educated population, is keenly motivated and is engaged, like Brazil, in building vast new dams to provide electricity and power for its burgeoning industry. It needs only political stability to move forward even faster.
In Chile, the ruling junta has embarked on what has been labeled “a daring gamble . . . to turn the country into a laboratory for free-market economics.” Investment has shot up, taxes have been cut, and tax reform enacted. Critics focus exclusively on political repression in Chile, while ignoring the freedoms that are a product of a free economy. In Cuba there are neither political nor economic rights. In Chile, the latter may well be the precursor of the former. Rather than insisting on instant perfection from Chile, we should encourage the progress it is making.
The Andean countries have shown promising signs of a growing ability to work together. Venezuelan oil wealth, Colombian diversity, Ecuadorian oil, and Peruvian minerals could be used to bring new hope to the underprivileged in the area.
Central America and the Caribbean are critical regions because of their strategic location, and because economically and militarily they are among the weaker areas of the hemisphere. Radical governments are now installed in Grenada and St. Lucia. Cuba has made efforts to ingratiate itself in Jamaica and Panama, and has intervened in Nicaragua. This could be the first step along a road that leads through Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala to the threshold of the great Mexican oilfields in the area of the Tehuantepec Isthmus. The Soviets and their allies may well try to repeat in Latin America the squeeze play they engineered in Afghanistan, South Yemen, and Ethiopia around the oil-producing lands of the Middle East. As Rowland Evans and Robert Novak have put it, the “Central American dominoes are falling.” The primary reason for these reverses is one man on one island: Castro and Cuba.
If Soviet client regimes come to power in Central America, the western hemisphere will have been cut in two at its “slim waist.” From their position in Central America such regimes would threaten the two largest oil producers in Latin America, Venezuela and Mexico, as well as the Panama Canal. We cannot afford to let this happen.
The Monroe Doctrine must be revitalized and redefined to counter indirect aggression, which was not a threat 150 years ago. The United States should make it clear that we will resist intervention in Latin America not only by foreign governments but also by Latin American governments controlled by a foreign power. Of the total of 10 million Cubans, more than 40,000 are now acting as proxies for Soviet expansion in Africa. This is the equivalent of sending an army of nearly 1 million Americans overseas to fight—almost twice the highest number we had in Vietnam. Tiny Cuba, under Soviet tutelage, has become a major imperialist power. Castro has made Cuba a disaster area. He must not be allowed, with Soviet support, to foist his discredited economic and political systems on other countries in Latin America. Any such effort at subversion should be firmly and unmistakably checked, and both Soviets and Cubans should be told in advance that any interference here will bring far more than a diplomatic protest from us.
At the same time, we must work with the nations of Latin America in building their economies and helping them to help their people escape the poverty that still is the lot of so many. As the dismal failure of the Alliance for Progress to achieve its grandiose goals demonstrated, a “war on
poverty” in Latin America will not be won by primary reliance on government aid programs. Government aid is limited by budgets; private investment is limited only by opportunities. To attract the investments they need, Latin American countries will have to provide guarantees against expropriation and ensure that there are sufficient incentives. For their part, American and other private investors must come in as developers and not exploiters. As the Latin American countries industrialize, the markets of the West must be opened to their products. The United States, in view of our special relationship with these countries, should provide preferential tariff treatment for Latin American products.
Economic development will make Latin America an even more tempting target for Soviet expansionism. But by demonstrating that free economies produce progress, Latin American political leaders will enormously strengthen their hand against revolutionary leftist elements.
In everything that we do, we must remember that how we do it counts more with our proud and sensitive Latin friends than with any other people in the world. It is vital that we treat them as partners, not as patients; and, as the giants in this area grow, we must acknowledge their new status in the world. We must learn not only to take our Latin neighbors seriously, but to treat each nation individually, just as we do the nations of Europe. We must also remember that these are proud people, who will not be browbeaten into making our values their own.
Terrorism
If World War III is defined in one way by the tide of refugees, it is defined in another way by the tactic of terrorism. The first shows the human cost. The second shows the Soviets’ inhuman contempt for even the most basic of civilized standards. In recent years the Soviets have stepped up their terrorism campaign with devastating effect.
Many of those who romanticize revolution prefer to view terrorism merely as one of the ills of modern society, or as an outraged response to intolerable social conditions. But “senseless” terrorism is often not as senseless as it may seem. To the Soviets and their allies, it is a calculated instrument of national policy.
An international fraternity of terrorists, with the Soviet Union as the chairman of the rush committee, has enabled the Russians to engage, as Senator Henry Jackson has put it, in “warfare by remote control” all over the world. Other members of the international club include North Korea, Cuba, South Yemen, East Germany, Libya, and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Malcontents from all over the world are trained by them—many at the appropriately named Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow—in the arts of kidnapping, assassination, sabotage, bomb making, and insurrection, and then sent off to ply their trade. Their tutors are careful to keep them well supplied with weapons and to provide sanctuary when they need it.
One of the most famous alumni recruited by the KGB for Patrice Lumumba Friendship University is the Venezuelan-born terrorist known as “Carlos”; or “The Jackal.” The Venezuelan Communist Party footed the bill for Carlos’ “education,” and he has since used it to kidnap for ransom eleven participants in an OPEC conference of oil ministers in 1975, as well as to assassinate numerous businessmen, intelligence agents, and innocent bystanders. Carlos has won celebrity status, but there are many more like him who are less famous.
The Soviets, Libya, and the PLO were all heavily involved in the campaign to overthrow the Shah. The quasi-anarchy that followed his downfall in Iran provided the perfect culture medium in which fanaticism and terrorism together could flourish, and could be exploited by those whose calculated policy it is to exploit fanaticism and terrorism. The “students” who took over the American Embassy and seized the American hostages were clearly taught by experts in things other than the Koran, and the manipulators of that exercise gave international terrorism new dimensions of subtlety and effrontery. They also demonstrated what we invite when, like the baby and the bathwater, we mindlessly throw out authority along with authoritarianism. The guns are not put away; they simply are taken over by the mob.
Even as the American hostages were being held, across the Persian Gulf another terrorist team staged a meticulously prepared attack, breathtaking in its sheer audacity, on the holiest shrine of all Islam: the Grand Mosque at Mecca. The 500 who took part were led by a small group, apparently trained in South Yemen, the Soviet proxy state on the Arabian peninsula. Their cover story was religious fanaticism; their real intent was political: to undermine the stability of Saudi Arabia. The terrorists were so concerned with disguising their origins that they deliberately burned and mutilated the faces of their dead. Their leaders had been expertly schooled in guerrilla tactics, which enabled them to smuggle large quantities of food and modern weaponry into the Grand Mosque, take it over, and hold it for two weeks before finally being ousted with the help of 1,000 members of the National Guard, with hundreds killed in the fighting.
In Nicaragua the Sandinist offensive was aided by what British columnist Robert Moss calls “a miniature international Communist brigade, including ‘volunteers’ from West Germany’s terrorist underground.”
Fidel Castro was involved in terrorist activities in South America long before he came to power in Cuba, and he has sponsored them ever since.
Terrorism also plays a key role in communist “wars of liberation.” The British expert on revolutionary war, Sir Robert Thompson, has pointed out that it is crucial to understand the relationship between the guerrilla cause and their organization. In most cases, the cause that originally draws people to the guerrilla organization is not love of communism but hatred of foreigners. Many people joined Mao Zedong’s guerrilla forces in order to fight the Japanese invaders between 1937 and 1945, Tito’s forces to fight the Nazis during World War II, and Ho Chi Minh’s to fight the French from 1946 to 1954. The communists were, in all cases, only one of many groups fighting the foreigners; but they were the most ruthless and effective.
Thompson notes that once the original cause has been attained, the key issue is the remaining efficiency of the guerrilla organization. Once the French, Japanese, or Nazis are gone, how can the communists rally the population? Love of communism or hatred of rival national leaders is not enough; terrorism is necessary to maintain organizational discipline and preserve power for the leaders. A prominent German journalist, Uwe Siemon-Netto, recently provided a vivid illustration of how communist guerrilla groups use terrorism to effect their purposes. Siemon-Netto, who accompanied a South Vietnamese battalion to a village the Vietcong had raided in 1965, reported: “Dangling from the trees and poles in the village square were the village chief, his wife, and their twelve children, the males, including a baby, with their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths, the females with their breasts cut off.” The Vietcong had ordered everyone in the village to witness the execution. “They started with the baby and then slowly worked their way up to the elder children, to the wife, and finally to the chief himself. . . . It was all done very coolly, as much an act of war as firing an anti-aircraft gun.” He noted that this was no isolated case: “It became routine. . . . Because it became routine to us, we didn’t report it over and over again. We reported the unusual, like My Lai.”
This is how the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong won the hearts and minds of the rural population—by cold-blooded butchering intended to intimidate those who were left.
Terrorism can strike at the heart of Western civilization as well. The Soviets secretly subsidized the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany. In Italy, in March of 1978 Aldo Moro, former Premier and the leading candidate for the presidency, was kidnapped and his five bodyguards shot in cold blood by the Red Brigades. Italy was traumatized as he was held captive for nearly two months before he was gruesomely assassinated, his body deposited in the back seat of an abandoned car in the center of Rome. There were more than 2,100 terrorist attacks in Italy in 1977, and the number rose in 1978.
Dr. Ray Cline—a former CIA official now with Georgetown University—points out that the current wave of world terrorism began after 1969, when the KGB succeeded in
having the PLO accepted at the Kremlin as a major political instrument in the Middle East. The Soviets then proceeded to boost PLO terrorism by providing money, training, and weapons and by coordinating communications. What the Soviets and their equally conscience-free allies have done is to create an “international troublemaking system” that trafficks in wholesale murder for political purposes.
Terrorism threatens all governments except those engaged in it. All therefore must join together in developing tactics to deal with it. The number of international terrorist incidents nearly doubled between the first nine months of 1978 and the same period of 1979; according to one estimate, 60 percent of the terrorist incidents that have taken place in the last decade have occurred in the last three years. Not surprisingly, this huge upsurge in terrorism occurred immediately after the CIA was de-fanged and demoralized in the wake of sensationalized investigations by Congress. Restoring the ability of the intelligence community to protect us is essential if we are to deal with the problem of terrorism before it gets even further out of hand. But trying to put out the fire after it is blazing is not enough. It is necessary to go to the heart of the problem—those who support terrorism, the major culprit being the Soviet Union.
The Recipe for Revolution
While it has been relentless, the Soviet expansionist push has seldom been reckless. The Soviet leaders are aggressors, but they are cautious aggressors. They make most of their moves slowly and subtly, taking care to disguise them so as not to rouse the “sleeping giant” of the West from its slumber.
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