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University Daily Kansan
Opinion
Tuesday, March 25, 1986
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Well, President Reagan has delivered as promised' and even sooner than expected.
Thumbing his nose
The Reagan administration Saturday delivered an official thumbed nose to the Soviet Union, a 20- to 150-kiloton raspberry in the face of a self-imposed Soviet nuclear test ban.
The United States exploded a nuclear bomb at the Nevada Test Site on Saturday despite repeated requests from the Soviet Union to join its seven-month-old unilateral test ban. The test took place only a week after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev announced the Soviets would continue their moratorium as long as the United States didn't carry out any tests.
The U.S. test not only flout the Soviet offer; it bellows the protests and outrage of members of Congress.
It seems that the Reagan administration has so much invested in the continuing expansion of the military buildup that it refuses to take any steps toward peace that might jeopardize that expansion. It refuses to even acknowledge the cries of outrage, from among its own ranks, against its insatiable appetite for more arms.
The Reagan administration displayed a suspicious and obtuse attitude when it refused to consider the test ban. Saturday's detonation simply displayed obstinacy.
Reagan says nuclear tests will continue to be necessary as long as the United States relies on offensive weapons to keep the peace. Now that we have them, we better make sure we get to use them — if only for tests.
A tenuous victory
The scores mounted on both sides — first one in the lead, then the other, neither side gaining more than 12 points on the other. Tension ran high. No, it wasn't the NCAA basketball championship. It was Thursday's contra aid vote, televised for all to see on Cable News Network.
In the final tally, Congress voted down aid to the contrast in a close call that could have gone either way. For those of us who see military aid to the Nicaraguan rebels as a futile gesture that could lead inextricably into direct U.S. involvement, the victory was sweet, but in all likelihood, fleeting.
Leaders in both parties agree a majority of Congress supports military aid for the rebels in some form, and it seems quite likely that compromise legislation eventually will be passed. This would include military aid. It also would provide for delays to encourage negotiations with the Sandinistas.
The defeat of Reagan's contra-aid bill was more significant as a personal defeat for the president and his tactics than it was as a defeat for contra aid. He pulled out all the stops on this effort, building an unmatched sales campaign.
If Congress votes for a compromise aid package in the next few weeks, it will be in the hope that this will encourage the Sandinistas to sit down and talk. Given the history of their relationship with the United States, that doesn't seem very likely.
But realistically, there is no evidence that $100 million will tip the balance in favor of the contras. They have never held an inch of Nicaraguan territory and have little popular support within Nicaragua.
As House Speaker Tip O'Neill said in the final moments of the debate, the vote bore a grave resemblance to the Tonkin resolution that ultimately drew us into the mire that was Vietnam.
Time for re-evaluation
The National Collegiate Athletic Association is a prime example of bureaucracy run amuck.
But the NCAA needs to set some priorities. For an organization that supposedly is concerned primarily with drug
Interesting interpretations of NCAA rules and the power the organization holds come down almost daily, touching nearly every aspect of collegiate athletics.
Most recently, the NCAA bullied a local club owner into changing his version of the Jayhawk Shuffie to comply with NCAA rules that overlap existing laws concerning the use of a person's name or likeness for profit.
Mike Kirsch, co-owner of Gammons, did a noble thing by changing his song to take out the names of KU basketball players. Kirsch, rightly, did not want to put the players' eligibility in question during their stellar season.
use by athletes, recruiting violations and outright cheating in college athletics, the NCAA has handed down some fairly inconsequential, and sometimes misguided, rulings.
The Jayhawk Shuffle is one example. Another beauty came when the NCAA decided an All-America guard should be suspended for one game after posing for a calendar for charity.
But at the same time, an athlete with a drug conviction and two drunken driving convictions can play in the regional semifinals of the NCAA Championship Tournament.
Some regulation of college athletics is necessary, and the NCAA fulfilled that purpose for a while. But some of its latest actions stand as strong cases for paring down the organization and for re-establishing its goals and direction.
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Congress should be closed. not its librarv
Some years ago a friend came to Washington to do research for a book.
It was a good book, but no best seller. It had nothing in it about cats or thin thighs or becoming a real estate millionaire. It was about a newspaperman who covered Washington just before and during the Civil War — a small, interesting slice of American history.
The country would have survived without the book, but it did preserve one bit of our heritage, which was valuable. And it probably never could have been written without the Library of Congress.
My friend, Phil Staudenraus, practically lived in the library that summer. He went there early in the morning and left late at night, tooting a shoebox jammed with research notes.
During the few hours we spent together, he would describe, in terms
United Press International
Arnold Sawislak
Years later, I wrote a magazine article about the library and came to have even more respect for the immeasurable wealth the American people own in those buildings clustered behind the Capitol.
I remember standing in the gallery above the cavernous main reading room watching the scene below — hundreds of people actually reading books — and thinking that as long as this great institution lived, there was hope that we would not become a nation of mindless tube watchers.
Now, sad to say, that scene has been dimmed. The library, under the
gun of the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction law, will be closed Sundays and open only one night a week. Many people who have to work during the usual daylight weekday hours and want to use the library's unmatched resources in their spare time will be out of luck.
The decision to cut back the library's hours has provoked protests, including several sit-ins by people who ordinarily do their research in the evenings.
approaching religious exultation, the wonders of the great stockpile of information available to scholars and ordinary citizens at the library.
Considerable controversy also grew over whether the management of the library really needed to reduce its services to the public to make the required savings. Some say cuts could have been made in other areas, but the operating hours were reduced for public relations effect in the same way a mayor might tell his city council that he would have to fire policemen if it cut his budget.
This all reminded me of a suggestion made in jest some years ago when the government decided to close Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay and a debate followed over the future use of the grim old island prison.
Congress at that time was just starting what now has become the habit of year-round sessions, and someone in the House Press Gallery suggested that problem might be solved by moving Congress to a hotel with a six-month supply of food and water and cutting off boat service.
in the spirit of that proposal, and in mind of who it was that got the country into the mess that produced Gramm-Rudman, perhaps we should let the Library of Congress stay open as long and as late as there are readers to use it and close down the House and Senate to save the money to pay for it.
Phil Staudenraus might have liked that.
Sandinistas get boost from House vote
After the House of Representatives rejected $100 million in aid to the freedom fighters in Nicaragua, champagne bottles popped in Moscow, Havana and Managua. Meanwhile, men, women and children dying in the Central America, fighting for democracy.
Thursday was a dark day fo freedom.
After the vote was taken, Daniel Ortega received everything but a fat sloppy kiss from Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill.
The majority of House members sided with communism, whether it was their intention or not. They proved once again that when courage on a grave issue is needed, they have the backbones of jellyfishes.
What is Congress waiting for? Will it act only after Soviet tanks are attempting to cross the Rio Grande?
They have a clear bias in favor of
There have been several grave misconceptions about the situation in Nicaragua. Most of the media have declined to report the truth.
Sen. Jim Sasser, D-Tenn., says the U.S. should negotiate with the Sandinistas. The good senator forgets that Western democracies found out in Munich in 1938 that appeasement with totalitarian regimes doesn't work.
Victor Goodpasture Staff columnist
the communists. For example, they refuse to acknowledge that the communists in Nicaragua are training and arming terrorists in El Salvador despite evidence to support this.
Even if there was no such evidence, it is extremely naive to think that the communists are not expanding their revolution to neighboring democracies. This expansion is the keystone to their philosophy. Yet liberals like Sasser and those in the media remain blind to the fact that the Soviet Union's intention is to engulf the Western Hemisphere in, as Reagan put it, "a sea of Red."
If additional clarification on this is needed, take a look at Eastern Europe (the Berlin Wall). Afghanistan, Cuba, the Soviet Union (Stalin's purges where tens of millions were slaughtered), Southeast Asia (the massacre of millions in Cambodia) and current-day Ethiopia (where millions have starved to death at the hands of the Communist government).
Human rights abuses in Nicaragua are intolerable. The communists are
terrorizing the church and minorities. One such minority is the Miskito Indians. The March 1, 1982 issue of Time Magazine revealed that 42 Miskito villages had been firebombed, 49 churches destroyed, 35 villagers from Leimus were buried and hundreds of Indians were imprisoned or had disappeared at the hands of the security forces.
And this happened four years ago. Now the situation is even worse.
The human rights abuses go on and, on yet, liberals think Ortega is starting a democracy there. Some actually think that the elections held there were fair. Will this ridiculousness ever cease?
For evidence of these lunacies, note the following public speech by Sandinista defense minister Humberto Ortega, brother of the dictator, given in August of 1981: "Without Sandinism we cannot Marxist-Leninist, and Sandinism without Marxism-Leninist cannot be revolutionary. That is why they are indissoluble united, and that is why our doctrine is Marxism-Leninian."
The communists also provide a safe haven in Nicaragua for Libyan, Palestine Liberation Organization subversive groups, among other subversive groups.
The United States has a moral
obligation to aid the freedom fighters, most of whom are peasant farmers.
Columnist William Hawkins points out that we were helped more than 200 years ago in our struggle for independence. He says that the Americans received aid from France, Spain and Holland. It was a French naval squadron that blocked Lord Cornwallis' escape at Yorktown.
President Reagan has never been so right in his efforts to aid the freedom fighters. His efforts must be applauded and follow those of a president 25 years ago.
Hawkins notes that without "foreign intervention' the United States might never have won its independence."
President John Kennedy said then,
"Let all our neighbors know that we shall join them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house."
A question must be asked: Will the United States have the courage to oppose the cancer of communism, especially in this hemisphere?
One thing is clear — the Soviet cancer in Nicaragua is not benign, but is continually spreading, soon to be out of control.
Reagan must not back down on communism
The past two weeks were drenched with debate. The controversy about aid to the Nicaraguan contrasts inspired several conservatives to question America's patriotism. They described the issue as softness toward communist growth vs. a tough stance.
The paradigm seemed too extreme for several non-supporters of aid to the anti-communist rebels, and many retaliated by declaring fear of Cold War rhetoric and a revival of McCarthyism.
Mccarthy had the spirit of an ancient witch hunter, going so far as to call Truman and Eisenhower communists.
The Cold War was an era of great internal mistrust and fear of Soviet invasion, nuclear war and com-
munity collapse. It can be reported and can be avoided.
At the same time, however, the president must retain his firm stand against communist growth. Even if the majority were completely oblivious of the dangers inherent in Soviet expansionism, for the president it would be a chief obstacle for a
Evan Walter
Staff columnist
It seems paradoxical, but experts have warned about weakness in dealing with the unfriendly and untrustworthy Soviet Union.
peaceful foreign policy.
Weakness the Soviets will exploit, as they have in the past. Strength they will respect, as they have in the past.
A summit scheduled for later this year can serve to keep level heads. Peace, however, won't come from sentimental displays, but from straightforwardness.
Summits won't change the interests of the United States and the Soviet Union. They won't make the Soviet Union understand U.S. ideologies or vice versa.
The superpowers have opposing viewpoints and ideologies. The dif-
one goal; survival.
ferences are complex and tremendous. Both nations, however, share one goal: survival.
U. S. naivete argues that peace can only be achieved by nuclear disarmament and an end to U.S. research on the Strategic Defense Initiative and to U.S. support of freedom fighters.
Each of these terms has been advocated by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a self-proclaimed patron of peace, yet he has never hinted at concessions from his country. The U.S. must not surrender to his interests.
One of the most realistic outlooks on peace came from Richard Nixon in an article in the fall 1985 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.
Gorbachev knows Reagan and the United States want peace. He must also be shown that Reagan is strong. Only then will the Soviet Union be ready for serious negotiations.
The former president wrote: "Anyone who reaches the top in the Soviet hierarchy is bound to be a dedicated communist and a strong, ruthless leader who supports the Soviet foreign policy of extending
Soviet domination into the non-
communist world."
So, the United States must not be deceived by Gorbachev's "peace-loving" make-up but instead know his substance, as a man closer to former Soviet leaders than to liberal pacifists.
Nixon continued: "An agreement reducing arms but not linked to restraints on political conduct would not contribute to peace.
"There is no question that the Soviets will do all that is allowed under an arms control agreement and will stretch it to the outer limits and indeed will cheat if they can get away with it.
"We cannot expect the Soviets to cease being communists dedicated to expanding communist influence and domination in the world. But we must make it clear to the Soviets that military adventurism will destroy the chances for better relations."
The United States must make clear what it won't stand for. Reagan must be firm on his stand that he will not tolerate further communist growth.