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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, AUGUST 19, 1983
PAGE 14
Washington's sabre-rattling was heard across Africa.
Quickly,
the administration offered Chad $25 million in arms and equip
ment.... Washington dispatched two AWACS surveillance planes to
neighboring Sudan.... And finally, it ordered the Dwight D.
Eisenhower to the Gulf of Sidra, which Libya claims as its
territorial waters, provoking a Libyan threat to sink the
aircraft carrier.
But Col. Qadhafi called the president's bluff. For two days, SO
Libyan planes pummeled Faya-Largeau, the major city in northern
Chad, in what a Western diplomat called "an awesome display of
modern warfare." On the same day that Faya-Largeau fell, effec
tively delivering half the country to advancing Libyan troops,
Mr. Reagan declared Chad to be France's concern. Yes, he told
reporters, Libya was guilty of empire-building, but no, he added,
Washington wouldn't send troops to stop it.
The U.S. has been wary of assuming the policeman's role in
Africa, and with good reason.... But in abandoning Chad only
weeks after springing so quickly and publicly to its defense, the
U.S. certainly planted new doubts about its dependability in
Africa.
More Talk About German Reunification
The issue of German reunification is a constant, if usually back-burner
factor, of West German foreign policy. Occasionally it heats up for any one
of a number of reasons, usually political.
The most recent eruption
occurred in July, when West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl made an unusually
strong pitch for reunification while a guest of Soviet President Yuri
Andropov.
In the August 19 issue of NATIONAL REVIEW, John McLaughlin
analyzes this on-again-off-again issue:
Congress has adjourned, the President is on vacation, the bureau
cracy snoozes.... What holds the interest of the diplomats, and
the few stray academics hereabouts, is Helmut Kohl's reckless
eyeball-to-eyeball face-off with Yuri Andropov, inside the
Kremlin, on the occasion of Herr Kohl's early July summit there.
What the newly-elected chancellor did was to call for the reuni
fication of Germany, thereby rushing in where angels Brandt and
Schmidt for years had feared to tread.
The scene was the more audacious when one recalls that the Soviet
Union, of all nations, is the most terrified� the prospect of�
single Germany.
Kohl uttered the unspeakable, moreover, at a
time when the Soviets are fearful that Poland may be wrested from
the Warsaw Pact orbit and from the Council for Mutual Economic
Assistance (Comecon), General Jaruzelski having gotten on well
with the Pope, and the Poles having been reinspirited by him. If
Poland becomes a quasi-buffer, the Soviets would be without un
trammeled access to East Germany. So, it is not only that the
chancellor says it right to Mr. Andropov's face, but also that he
says it at a time when the Soviets are already worried about the
potential loss of Poland.
This is all very iffy, of course, and the State Department thinks
the likelihood of German reunification is nonexistent. "Nothing