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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JULY 19, 1985
PAGE 11
military power to back it up. For example, when President Carter
ruled out the use of force at the outset of the Iranian hostage
crisis, he weakened the effectiveness of diplomacy to resolve it.
The pathetic failures of the League of Nations and the United
Nations to play a significant role in keeping peace or ending
wars is striking proof of the impotence of diplomacy without
power.
There is too much of a tendency to see all Third World conflicts
as part of the larger conflict between East and West. While the
Soviet Union profits from most of them, it is not responsible for
all the conflicts in the world. As one observer has pointed out,
their policy is to trouble the waters and then fish in them••.•
It is an· illusion, however, that if the Soviet Union does not
play a role in a Third World conflict our interests are not
threatened. The Soviets do not have to fight to win. Whether
they fight or not, wherever� lose, they win. Mr. Khomeini's
revolution in Iran had nothing to do with communism or the Soviet
Union, but that does not mean that the Soviets did not benefit
from it. When the shah of Iran was driven from power, the United
States lost its strongest ally in the Mideast. Had he remained
in power the war between Iran and Iraq and even the invasion of
Afghanistan by the Soviet Union might never have taken place.••.
Instability is the Soviet Union's most powerful ally in the Third
World War.
The Soviet -leader·
s scan the globe for potential
trouble spots, places where people are groping for a better way
or suffering through episodes of unrest, and then find ways to
make those bad situations worse. While the Soviet Union is not
behind all violent revolutions, when they are�' it is°"first
!!! line to pick .!:!P the pieces••••
A •••mistake many Americans made in the last years of the Vietnam
War was failing to see that in Third World conflicts our choice
is usually not between our allies and someone better, but between
our allies and something far worse. Liberals today frequently
call for the United States to break its ties with right-wing dic
tators. Otherwise, they wrongly claim, we will be guilty of sup
porting the world's most flagrant violators of human rights.
By any measure, the most repressive governments are those of the
Communists. The record is clear. Cubans are worse off under
Castro than they were under Mr. Batista.
The Vietnamese are
worse off under the Communist Le Duan than under Mr. Thieu. Cam
bodians were worse off under Pol Pot than they were under Lon
Nol. When the non�Communist regimes were in power, the United
States could at least exert some pressure to increase adherence
to human rights in those countries. Now it can do nothing. We
must never take� course of action that results in� government
that permits some freedom falling to� that permits�-
If
there is one profound lesson to be learned from the aftermath of
the Vietnam war, that is it.
The latest troublespot that could boil over into a real crisis is Sudan, a
strategically located African state bordering on eight other nations.