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Show Flap Will U.S.-Liby- an Hurt The Salt Lai Tr, bunt Thural.iv January 1)86 10 All More Than the Combatants Special F eaures fvnd.ra'f In h.i old age Otto von ( MHO Eg,,pt B. smart k f.rst chancellor of the German empire remarked that be feared a great Flu come out of some ropean tear would damned foolish thing in the Balkans Today there are rrur.v in the power centers of Europe and 'he M.ddte Flast who fear that a major war is Lkely to erupt from the military posturing of the United States and - Libya s Col Moar.mar Khadafy Thtr fear .a not about a clash between the Am ncan superpower and a nation of only 3 million, but the consequent es of such a cla h Some diplomats and intelligence ana fTu.i and was scheduled to come r. re tr.., week to ta.k to tgv ptiun President Husm Mubarak Israeli Prime M. no ter Sr. mum leu lers in Lund m Pt res das talked to Brin-and to Ft. chart Murphy me US State purtment , troubleshooter fur the area Dip lumars are uncertain how much this dh means but they dll emphasize that there at least a glimmer of compromise on the horizon Peace or a semblance of it it is believed would eventually politically disarm terror-i- s .s move the region toward tranqmhtv and lead to an improvement of relations with the I mted States and its allies in Europe The other, gloomier side of the picture is the conviction that men like Khadafy and Arafat are bound to terrorism because their standings in the Arab world and their support from the Soviet Union are based on it There is a great deal of evidence that nothing the United States has done or said in e the terrorist attacks in Rome and V len-r.last month has reduced terrorist training programs or recruitment Some experts on the subject argue that American military threats and past exam'v in ples of U S military failure particul rs Lebanon, have helped the and the ? terrorist leaders who row feel ,hny F tie to fear from the Ir.ited bt-'save denunciation ty Washington Mn o.ernmer m p .n tr.is d." f 6 n r .cet extear tr a 'h- tne wo. ercise will have uttle or no effect on terror-lf :uu d Tut J ft r . cut is not ivAw.aiy 5 the only or e.er. tne main element m M d lie East terrorism There is strong feeling that much of me sjppori fur ,ut mist rperations comes iron Iran and Svna the former bebelrves that cause t..e Tearun gcvrnm-'-rterm nsm indirectly furthers the cau. .of I lamic fundamentalism, the latter because instability in the Middle East suits the Soviet Union. Syria's armorer and ally. The situation, therefore, has not been improved by the deployment of the 6th Fleet off the Libyan coast. The results, in fact, are largely negative thus far Egypt and the other moderate Arab states are nervous. The peace process is seen as endangered. Terrorism. while quiescent, has not been throttled Jan 31 has been set by the Reagan administration as the date when all Americans must leave Libya Does that mean, anxious diplomats ask. that the United States, having given sufficient warning to American nationals. will feel free to strike after the first of next month It is a question arousing much concern in this area and in NATO . a lysts argue that the conflict could unite the Arab world and provide the Soviet Union with an opportunity to support Libya and thus regain some of its lost prestige in this region The Ru'sians. one source suggested might introduce Arab mercenaries ir.to I ya. arm them from the copious Smti weaponry stocked there, and carry out attacks on the ships of the U 3. 6th Fleti now tert. g off the Libyan coast "There's no shortage of pilots Russian Arab. North Koreans or whatever who for money or ideology would like to tke a crack at the Americans. or.e military analyst said ' Russia, of course, would not be directly involved. but Moscow would provide the mon" ey and the materiel. Others consulted here and in London believe that if the United States does intend to take action against Khadafy's Libya, such action should be patterned on the Israeli air strike against the Palestine Liberation Organization's headquarters m Tunisia last year "The advantage in that." the analyst said, "is that it's a one-shoperation You do it and let them wail It won't last And Kha" dafy may have learned his lesson some repreMany diplomats, including senting NATO nations, are concerned because the present confrontation in North African waters comes at a point when the Middle East peace process has reached a particularly delicate stage PLO chief Yassir Arafat has already consulted with King Hussein of Jordan in Am- ,.-- - -- rec-ji'e- ; '. a The Public Forum Tribune Readers Opinions a person who is far more distinguished, So Much for Fair Plav and honest than Jim McMahon, namem cowardly Congress has consigned fair play to the shredder. Democrats and Republicans alike have descended to a squalid level by enacting the bill which, in the name of toughness, kicks federal retirees below the belt. Our august lawmakers. Utahns among them, ran amok Dec. 11. Only last August they adopted the Fiscal '86 budget resolution. which guaranteed to give the civil service retirement COLA equity with Social Security. anything else would be patently unfair our Utah congressman told us. However, last month both parties nullified that decision and revoked the civil service retirees COLA Our Utah congressmen expressed their concurrence. They obviously believe they have less to fear politically from 22.604 federal retirees than from 148.873 Social Security participants residing in Utah. It is also no small thing for politicians to weaken or destroy the faith of constituents in the promises of our government especially among those most wounded by their action namely, elderly couples, aging widows and troubled civil service and military retirees who. after devoted service to their government, were given this unforgivable Christmas shaft. BESS T. JENSEN A Syracuse Forum Rules Public Forum letters must be submitted exclusively to The Tribune and bear writers full name, signature and address. Names must be printed on political letters but may be withheld for good reason on others. Writers are limited to one letter every 10 days. Preference will be given to short, typewritten (double spaced) letters permitting use of the writer s true name. All letters are subject to condensation. Mail to the Public Forum, The Salt Lake Tribune, P.O. Box 867, Salt Lake City. Utah 84110. No Ticker Tape, Please broadcast an interOn Jan. 15. KSL-Tview with the father of Jim McMahon, the Chicago Bears quarterback. Mr. McMahon suggested the state of Utah declare a Jim McMahon Day and stage a ticker tape parade. While we recognize and appreciate the talent of McMahon the younger, and while we recognize the justifiable pride of McMahon the elder in his son. we have been unable to find anyone who would consider Jim McMahon a favorite son of our state or even representative of any of its citizenry, save a few hundred of our more obnoxious local fans. Jim McMahon's antics in college, where he "willingly" accepted the university stan- dards as well as the university educational opportunities, and his antics of late, which have been so amply reported by the media, are distasteful at best. Why should we honor someone whose greatest moment in his association with BYU was when he left? We suggest that this state honor, instead. I classy ly. Billy Martin, formerly (four times) of the New York Yankees. FRED T. WUNDERLI FRED T. WUNDERLI. Ill MELVIN G. SANDERS DENNIS WHICKER Coalition of Avid BYU and UTAH Fans Report Child Abuse The Utah Senate is considering a proposal to restrict the scope of the Child Abuse Reporting Act which requires individuals who have knowledge of child abuse to report it to appropriate state agencies. Violation of the act is considered a Class B misdemeanor Senate Bill 86. which proposes to exempt clergy and attorneys from provisions of the act. should be rejected for several reasons. We in Utah are concerned about the rising incidence of child abuse, especially sexual abuse. It is imperative those who have knowledge of a crime report it. When the crime involves a child, not reporting abuse to the authorities often results in repeated abuse. It also creates difficulties in treating a child-abus- e perpetrator because they don't have to take full responsibility for breaking the law Concealing offenders and protecting them from the legal consequences of brutalizing a child flies in the face of all we are trying to do to protect children. Utah has invested considerable resources in the prevention of child abuse and the protection of it's victims. Why send the wrong message to child abusers now? TINA HARMAN Tasteless Ignorance This nation has a philosophy of freedom, justice, equality of opportunity and the sacredness of the human personality as one of its highest goals. While the nation's actions have fallen short of this goal, it has never turned its back on that philosophy. The sacrifices of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. brought us another step along the way He believed in democracy for all of America. including white Americans and Utahns He gave his life for that cause. The comment that "celebrating Martin Luther King s birthday in Utah is like celebrating Brigham Young's birthday in New York" was a pointless, tasteless remark It was born of the kind of ignorance of which Brigham Young would be ashamed, and of which this nation would be rid, should Martin Luther King's dream become a reality. BETTYE and JIM GILLESPIE Ogden NAACP U.S. Turns Its Back on Angolan Friend News Arrer-cSyndicate the leaJ-- r of LNITA. the first of the guerrilla rebellions tnai nave in recent years heer turning the tables on Soviet imperialism in the Third World, Jonas Savimbi ought A- - to be hav ng an easy tirre of it with the' Rea- rd i uTUfuotf dUoft " ir.ciat ng what has come Af'o; a i, to be knowr as the heagan Doctrine, the esiden has said that the United States must noi break faith with those who are to defy r sk ing their lives on every continent " If anyone aggression qualifies under that doctrine, it is Savimbi For more than a decade now. and with no help at all from the United States, he has been at war with the communist government installed in Angola in 1975 and still propped up by Cuban troops and Soviet arms Yet whereas the administration, acting in strict accord with the Reagan Doctrine, has begun intensifying its efforts to get military aid to the contras, who are fighting against the communist regime in Nicaragua it remains opposed to military aid for UNIT A. which is doing exactly the same thing in most lertatnly suffer (he usual fate oi all " exquisite policy Where "exquisite policy is hound to t nl in getting the Cubans out however (an mill tary pressures sun eed Savimbi s strategv us he outlines it in an artic le in the current issue of Policy Review is not to defeat the Cubans in some local version of Dien Bien Phu It is. rather, "to d Angola A while back there was a certain amount of overt talk about giving covert aid to UN-ITNow the most the administration is willing to ask for is a congressional resolution of moral support As for the military aid Savimbi has just arrived in Washington to seek, a "senior official announces that "military solutions to the region's problems are not viable, and that a negotiated agreement is the only way to attain peace and stability." Behind this pronouncement, reeking of the sickly age of Jimmy Carter, is a complicated plan involving the withdrawal of the Cubans from Angola in exchange for the withdrawal of South African forces from Namibia n This scheme had the usual fate of all exquisite policy." said Edmund Burke about the steps the British government took to avert a rebellion in the American colonies. The count is not yet fully in on the State Department's strategy for getting the Cubans out of Angola, but it too will al fine-spu- 4I Like Ike Univeral Press Syndicate The time is here when I can admit something that was distinctly unfashionable in the 1960s and '70s that I was a Chicago '50s kid with all that meant in terms of bobby sox. twinkling toes, happy times, "innocence" and "I like Ike." WASHINGTON Even when it became modish to deride my generation and in particular to make fun of Dwight D. Eisenhower, I never really could accept that derision Even before I became politically conscious, it just didn't wash. "golf-plavin- g On the 25th anniversary of Ike's extraordinary "Farewell Address to his nation and to his people, we can see that he far from father figure being the that many portrayed him then was one of statesthe most prophetic and men of our times golf-playin- old-fog- y g As some of us pause to remember that complex speech, unfortunately known mostly for its warning about the inordinate pow er I of the "military-industria- l complex would like to explore some primary elements of what I think Ike was trying to urge upon this nation " Balance and harmony public affairs in national and There was President Eisenhower, remember. the man who more than anyone else won the war in Europe, calling his country to "balance between the private and public economy, balance between cost and hoped-fo- r advantage, balance be years ago One of the interesting features of Savimcareer as a revolutionary nationalist is that he got his training in China under Mao Tse Tung in the 1960s There, he now says, he not only "learned how to fight and win a ' guerrilla war", he also learned how not to run an economy or a nation " His goals, accordingly. are to establish a "democratic and free Angola " Of course, all parties bidding for Ameribi s pi Soviet-supporte- ity of Angolan communists who handed their country over to the Cubans and the Soviets What Savimbi and his people are fighting for now against the new colonial rulers of Angola i' the same independence they were bight-m- g for against the Portuguese and that was stolen from them by the communists 11 raise the costs of the foreign occupation of Angola until the Cubans and the Soviets can no longer bear the burden " This means denying "the colonial forces the revenues that finance their occupation' and inflating as many casualties as possible on Castro s troops A measure of how effective this classical guerrilla strategy has been is the fact that the Cubans and their Soviet officers have recently begun trying to force Savimbi into abandoning it and to fight a conventional war instead Thus the question of whether Savimbi can keep up the pressures now turns on whether he will get the anti-tanand antiaircraft weapons he needs to cope with the new Soviet-Cubaoffensive tactics In quarters other than the State Department. the main objection to Savimbi is he is tainted by association with the Republic of South Africa And indeed. Savimbi does get aid from the Pretoria government. Pretoria helps him because he is helping to contain Soviet expansionism in Africa, and Savimbi accepts because he is in no position to refuse assistance from anyone But to accuse this man and the movement he leads of supporting apartheid is as absurd as it is defamatory These are black Africans who first took arms against Portuguese colonial rule and then saw their fight for national liberation betrayed by a minor k n can sympathy, including communists, describe their objectives in just such terms Ho Chi Minh actually paraphrased our Declaration of Independence in drafting his own declaration of independence for Vietnam. F'idel Castro at first called himself a Jeffersonian Democrat, the Sandmistas promised free elections and other democratic institutions in Nicaragua Yet the very people who are always so eager to take those promises at face value when they come from communists now scoff at an like Sav imbi in spite of the fact that, by contrast with communists everywhere, he has done nothing to forfeit his claim to good faith when he speaks of democracy and freedom At a minimum, then. Savimbi deserves the benefit of the doubt even from liberals or at least those liberals who still think the United States has an interest in the fight against Soviet imperialism But from the Reagan administration. Savimbi deserves more than the benefit of the doubt, and certainly more than empty expressions of pious support. That the administration opposes giving him military aid violates the president's stated determination not to "break faith with those who are riskaging their lives to defy gression. It is also nothing less than a moral and political disgrace Soviet-supporte- Now More Than Ever tween the clearly necessary and the com" fortably desirable Ike warned us against pressure groups Poor prophetic Ike how he would have waged another war these days against the PACs and insidious, democracy-contortin- g special-intereethnic and pressure groups, which now in effect run. corrupt and fragment our society Moderation, caution and the necessity of choices. This speech, when you read it over, is grand in a simple, straightforward manner What comes through repeatedly is Ike s unand. in particuderstanding of the world lar. his understanding of the emerging limits of American power in that world st Of the Soviet communist challenge, he wrote presciently "Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration To meet it successfully, there is called for. not so much the emotional and transitory-sacrificeof crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prowith liberty longed and complex struggle the stake " Honor and service At the end of the speech, as he left the presidency in the lengthening shadow;, of his rich life, Ike did not boast of what he had done Instead, he thanked the American ' people for the many opportunities you have for public service in war and me given " peace Cautious activism, in which a man chose his battles wisely, fought them strategically and was sure he could win For Ike was a true activist particularly as opposed to Ronald Reagan, who is basically not an activist at all. It was Ike, remember. who began government-supporteracial integration when he sent the troops to Little Rock. Ike who stood up to the pressures and lobbies by blocking the Suez invasion. Ike who exited honorably from Korea Balance, not extremes: the responsibility of making choices, not mouthing absolutes. d honor, not celebrity, actions chosen to win' Those, to me. were the qualities of Dw ight D Eisenhower, and those constitute his lasting national legacy What. then, brought us to an era where. I am sorry to say. our political leaders in the main are too often the antithesis of all those values Political power moved westward, away from the ingrown but at least coherent Eastern establishment, and it fragmented Television became the new arbiter of power, and the exigencies of imagery supplanted Ike's reality of action, while penalties for error became largely non existent on a national level kids spurned the capital creation of their fathers, spurning the idea of risk for country (or for almost anything) as well Religion withered and with it. for the most part, the idea of the honor of service to country Because he was a true man of action. Ike' was a man of confidence and a master of the measured response. Somehow he brilliantly anticipated one factor in the equation of our times, that in the latter part of the 20th ccn turv. the United States would no longer be isolated and protected from the vagaries of countries had history that other always known He saw that we. too. would have to make imperfect choices, hut he also saw that we could revel in our democracy and in our honor if we were willing to make those choices On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his watershed speech. Ike was honored here with a big formal dinner by the Business Executives for National Security Edu- cation Fund, a group of business and political leaders They deserve credit tor reminding the nation of the kind of man we had then and the kind of statesmen we need now more than ever Upper-nuddle-du- d Bottom of the Barrel The Salt Lake County Commission is gloating that they have scraped the bottom of the barrel to come up with a 2 percent raise for themselves and other county workers To do this they must lay off 5U workers I wonder how those who are laid off feel about while lining the pockets of their they flounder trying to find work. Shame on the elected officials. MAX E JENSON k d ( |
