March 24, 1976

U.S. Foreign Policy Sit Down, Sell Out

If you think we had a stupid Vietnam policy, try, our African policy.

If you can call appeasement a policy.

The crazies in Congress who demanded we pull back in Angola - so the Soviet and Cuban communists could wipe out the pro-American forces - now propose an even more incredible sell out.

Mozambique has declared a "state of war" with white-led Rhodesia.  In ecstasy, our assistant secretary of state for African affairs announced Mozambique can count on U.S. aid to help cover the economic losses incurred by shutting its borders to one of the two remaining bastions of western civilization in Africa.

In addition, says William Schaufele, the U.S. is prepared to aid the regimes of Zambia and Tanzania despite some of their anti-American votes in the United Nations.

He told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he is "in touch" with nationalist groups in southern Africa who are seeking to over throw the Union of South Africa also.

Senator Richard Clark (D-Iowa), chairman of the African Affairs sub-committee, called the decision to aid Mozambique "one of the most significant actions we have taken in recent years."

CIA, eat your heart out.

Lest any one think he didn't really mean it, Clark asserted on the TV program "Meet the Press" that he welcomed the "destruction" of Rhodesia by nationalist forces.  He shrugged off the Cuban communists lining up on the Angolan border.

He might as well have sent the communists an engraved invitation to invade and massacre Rhodesian whites.  He has certainly made it clear we will do nothing to stop it.

Clark's statements are the most irresponsible, demagogic, inflammatory that have been uttered in this country in 40 years of preposterous rhetoric.

Asked to explain why he decried U.S. intervention in Angola while approving it by communists in Rhodesia, Clark said, "We should go into only those wars we can win."

Chicken liver.

The United States can win any war it WANTS to win.  What Clark is saying with his mealy mouth semantics is that he wants us to support anti-western "nationalists" and win with them while surrendering our friends one by one.

We should fight wars for principles, not good scores.

The sad truth is that Americans don't have the stomach to fight for liberty.  Better Red than dead.  We are so afraid of the communists, and the unpleasantness they create, that we throw them our ideological children to postpone the inevitable show down.

When we got tough after World War II we slowed the Red Tide of totalitarian government.  Then the fuzsy-wuzzy liberals gradually wore down our will.

We sold out Free China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia.  We looked the other way while democratic government withered in India, Cuba, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia.  We smile indulgently while communists strengthen their grip on Italy, France, Portugal, England, Argentina, Philippines, Syria, and a dozen African tribe-nations.

Our civilization based on liberty, individuality, and self-government has been pushed to the wall.  The wolves of communism are at our heels, and we have no more offspring to sacrifice.

The type of government developed over 900 years of struggle by Great Britain and 200 years of refinement in the United States is shrinking, not growing.

How soon are we to become history's misfit?

America is fast becoming the gutless wonder of the world.

We want to "sit down and talk" while Russia flies in rockets and Cuba ships in ten thousand trigger-happy soldiers.

While we castigated the CIA for trying to save Angola from subversion, the communists took the field with guns and bayonets.  In the end - which, mercifully, came fast - we found that hot air was no match for hot bullets.

This great mania we have for sitting down when we have a problem perplexes me.  Where did we pick up the silly notion that to sit down and talk was enlightened and effective?  It is the symbol of our malaise.

It's time we stood up, shut our mouth, and spit in the eye of our detractors.

And the place to start is in Africa.

Author: Lindsey Williams