Washington: The Joy of Crisis

Through the late winter and into the spring, there was in Washington a striking difference of opinion about how the Administration had handled the crises in Afghanistan and Iran. Outside the White House, the National Security Council, and the upper reaches of the State Department, the earlier approbation for President Carter’s legendary patience and perseverance had given way to irritation over the missed steps, the signals changed and changed again, the crash of rhetorical cymbals that so often led to nothing. Where were the serious measures to begin coping with energy imports? What about the Administration’s placid acceptance of the UN commission of inquiry’s visit to Iran? Did the Administration expect anyone to believe the outrageous story about the “mistake” that led Ambassador Donald McHenry to vote for an anti-Israel resolution at the UN?

After these questions, the most perplexing one was, why was everyone smiling at the White House? It was hard to avoid the impression that those close to the President were well pleased with the job they had done. This reflected not merely the political benefits, perhaps short-lived, of crisis management, nor the taste for excitement that often makes the world’s disasters Washington’s joys. (“Why else are you in government than to chase the fire engine?” said a member of the White House staff. “This is the biggest fire engine of all.”) Rather, the strange satisfaction in the White House seemed to indicate that, at last, they felt they had mastered the game, stepped ahead of events, grown into pros.

Several staff members mentioned how smoothly a body called the Special Coordination Committee, or SCC, had done its work. The SCC is a group of top-level officials or their representatives—the vice president, the head of the CIA, the secretaries of State and Defense and whatever other department may be involved in a particular decision—that has been meeting with Zbigniew Brzezinski each morning at nine in the Situation Room of the White House. The SCC had been used for earlier crises in the administration—the overthrow of the shah, unrest in Uganda. But it began daily meetings when the hostages were seized in November and it was running on all cylinders by the time of the Soviet invasion two months later. NSC staff members worked late into the night or arrived before dawn to read the latest cable traffic and prepare a checklist for Brzezinski’s agenda. “Zbig goes right down that list, one, two, three,” says an associate. “And things get done. The decisions are made crisply, with no idle chitchat. The issues are in to the President within an hour, and he makes the necessary decisions quickly.”

As evidence that the gears do indeed turn smoothly, members of the Administration point to a series of maneuvers that, they as much as say, no one thought they could execute: beating the Iranians to the punch by cutting off oil imports, freezing their assets in U.S. banks, and managing the transition from tough guy to soft guy on Iran when the invasion of Afghanistan made it appear that pushing too hard on Iran might lead to Soviet troops marching through a crumbling nation. The effort to free the hostages had not yet borne fruit, but staff members called it “the most intense diplomatic effort in American history.” Many officials expressed pride in the careful formulation of the “action” portion of the President’s State of the Union address— that any attack on the Persian Gulf would be regarded as an attack on the “vital interests” of the United States. Initial suggestions for that phrase ranged from vague “toast talk,” as one official put it, about the desirability of territorial integrity to blunt language about “drawing a line” in the soil of Southwest Asia. The final product, according to representatives of both the “liberal” and “conservative” sides of Administration foreign policy, conveyed adequate firmness while avoiding excessive specificity.

“The macho business has gone out the window,” said another participant. “I’m a lot prouder of all this than of the way people acted during the Cuban missile crisis, where a whole lot of options were just kicked around. All the options are considered here, but in a very sober, careful way.”

“In a way, this is the first time we’ve been blooded, dealing with life-anddeath issues,” said one of Brzezinski’s associates. A member of the White House staff said, “I have the feeling that everyone here has grown up, matured . . . Those who have survived are professionals.”

To many in the Administration, the symbol of this change was the sudden prominence of Lloyd Cutler, the White House counsel. Cutler left his law firm to join the Administration last summer, successor to the hapless Robert Lipshutz. Like Clark Clifford, he epitomized the talents of insiders’ Washington—the very talents Carter had chosen to forgo in his first two years. Before formally joining the White House staff, Cutler began coordinating the effort to pass the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. That led him into last fall’s excitement over the Soviet troops in Cuba, and later to the center of the action in the Iran and Afghanistan negotiations. “Cutler knows simply everybody in the government,” said an associate. “Most of the people in the White House don’t know anybody. It’s a big edge.”

One indication of Cutler’s ascent is that he has joined the list of possible successors to Cyrus Vance as secretary of state if there is a second Carter term. The other names most frequently heard are Brzezinski, Vance’s deputy Warren Christopher, and Carter’s campaign chairman, Robert Strauss, the other Washington insider Carter has welcomed into the fold. Brzezinski, not lacking in guile, is said to recognize the obstacles to his appointment, and to be plumping instead for Christopher as the ideal man for the job. Christopher is widely regarded as a supurb deputy secretary, but no match for Brzezinski in bureaucratic struggles. It was Christopher, after all, who represented the State Department on the tour of Southwest Asia that was dominated by news photos of Brzezinski at the Khyber Pass, Brzezinski with the Saudi princes, while Christopher stood somewhere among the potted plants.

If Cutler embodied the operational smoothness of which the Administration had grown so proud, Brzezinski represented the conceptual jerkiness that was the cause of most secondguessing in Washington. During the early stages of the Afghanistan crisis, the only person whose stock stood nearly as high as Brzezinski’s was Hodding Carter, the State Department spokesman who on television unflappably dispensed policy. But when Brzezinski stood at the ramparts of the Khyber Pass and glowered in the direction of the Soviet troops, a machine gun in his arm and a tribal knife jammed into his belt, he did little to allay the impression that the Administration was veering from one extreme of policy to another. Gossip inside the White House later added the detail that Brzezinski was prevented from firing the gun only by the timely intervention of his press man.

That one moment summed up what people worried about in the Carter policy. The Washington Post quoted one nameless Administration official who compared Carter’s foreign policy to a car: If you open up the hood, he said, all the parts are moving smoothly, but if you look in the glove compartment, there isn’t any map.

The politician’s instinct for self-preservation spared the Administration much of this sort of criticism on Iran, at least as long as the hostages’ lives appeared to be at stake. Many people said that “Who lost Iran?” would ultimately become a bitter question, but not. until the immediate crisis had calmed down. “These guys know that the situation could change any day,” said an assistant to a Democratic senator. “Their natural caution keeps them from going out on a limb.” Senator Kennedy’s unhappy experiment in questioning the President’s judgment about the shah only reinforced his colleagues in their inclination to be still.

The most specific alternative suggestion on Iran came from George Kennan, former ambassador to Moscow, who told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 27 that we should have recognized the seizure of the hostages as a hostile act and “considered ourselves in a state of war.” Having done so, he said, we could have turned our affairs in Iran—including the welfare of the hostages—over to a third nation, and we could have interned Iranian diplomats in the United States as a wartime move. “That would put us in a position to get off the hook, by exchanging our people for theirs, and also to make decisions about what military action to take,” Kennan said. Kennan mentioned the stresses of his own long months of internment during World War II and said that the hostages had to be rescued soon if their welfare was to be an issue at all: “If we do nothing and let the people sit there for years, I don’t know what worth it will be to save them from what is called death.”

Afghanistan was a different matter, and the substance of the complaint was that the President had no large vision of the issues involved nor any longrange plan about what to do. As Senator George McGovern put it in late February, quoting Matthew Arnold, the President seemed unable to “see things steady and see them whole.”

It should be said that much of the criticism on this point, especially from the press, was shortsighted and unfair. Many commentators screamed for Carter to act when the Soviet troops rolled into Afghanistan, then screamed that he had done too much when he finally made a move.

Still, the President had no one but himself to blame for many of his difficulties. His comment that he had changed his mind about the Soviet Union, his statement that the Afghanistan invasion represented the “greatest threat to peace” since World War II, his less-noticed remark at a press conference that the circumstances of the 1953 coup that brought the shah to power were “ancient history” and presumably of no further interest—all suggested a man without the long view of American foreign policy and tensions between the U.S. and Russia. His assistants joined in with clarifications: “I think his way of saying that he was angry and shocked was to say that he’d changed his mind,” said one senior official. “It shouldn’t be taken too literally.” As for the “greatest threat”—compared to the Berlin crises, the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam—the official said, “Well, I wouldn’t minimize the danger here. The move into Afghanistan involved major Soviet miscalculations on several scores. And their military power is much greater than it was in the other cases.”

But whenever such explanations have to be made, it becomes obvious that the Administration’s message is not clear. His hot-and-cold pronouncements about Afghanistan are the most dramatic illustration of Jimmy Carter’s inability to get across more than one side of an idea at a time. To go back through all of his foreign policy statements is to see the same careful balance of elements in each speech. He says that we must “cooperate” with the Soviet Union wherever possible, in arms control or trade, but that our relation is bound to be basically “competitive”—i.e., hostile. Both elements were contained in his 1977 Notre Dame speech, now remembered as a bit of soft, “one-world” dreaming, and both were there in this year’s “tough” State of the Union address. But the President has succeeded in getting only one note heard at a time, never the full chord.

Apart from the political damage this does the President, the one-note approach improves the climate for a development foreseen by many inside and outside the Administration: a wave of housecleaning on ideological grounds. The “liberals” in the State Department and the National Security Council — those who emphasized better relations with the Third World, the importance of arms control, the cause of human rights—do not for a minute think that their policy has been discredited by Afghanistan. “What could be a more fundamental violation of human rights than the subjugation of one country by another?” one asked. “The Soviet Union is the negation of everything liberals stand for.” Nonetheless, the foreign policy “conservatives”—those outside the Administration who have opposed SALT, urged more military spending, and viewed Soviet motives with suspicion—think that the liberal world-view is precisely what has been discredited; and that if the President is trying to enjoy the political value of a tougher policy, he must demonstrate the sincerity of his conversion by changing his disciples. From the beginning of the administration, the Henry Jackson-Daniel Patrick Moynihan side of the party (the “conservatives”) noted with alarm that not one of their boys was on the Carter team. All the critics of the Vietnam War, all the assistants to Senators McGovern and Church, were there in the State Department and the NSC, but none from the other side. Now they hear Carter saying he has turned their way—and as proof, they want new faces. In February, Moynihan wrote in the New Republic that the test will be whether “people whose past judgments comport with the administration’s new policies will appear in the ranks of the administration, with the clear implication that the new positions are to be sustained.”

The test of who should appear in the ranks and who should be expelled is shaping up as a measure of purity of thought. Because there is so little disagreement about the proper response to Afghanistan—that it is an act of aggression whose gravity the Soviet Union must be made to understand— the difference between “liberals” and “conservatives” now turns on their reading of the Soviets’ minds. Specifically, a “liberal” these days is one who is agnostic about Soviet intentions and concentrates on their actions; a “conservative” is one who will lay his hand upon the good book and affirm that the Soviet Union is an imperialistic, aggressive, militaristic (those are the code words) power. Senator Kennedy summed up the liberal side when he was asked in Iowa, “What do you think Soviet intentions are in the [Indian] subcontinent and in the Middle East?" Kennedy replied, according to Morton Kondracke of the New Republic, “I don’t know what the intention of the Soviet Union is, but what we have to do is take a policy, irrespective of their intentions, that they will respect.” Kondracke himself summed up the other view, concluding that Kennedy’s professed ignorance about Soviet intentions was not good enough: “The Soviet Union is an imperialistic, militaristic power, which has used detente as a screen behind which to advance its interests by stealth, subversion, and proxy aggression. . . . Until he answers [the ‘intentions’] question, until he shows he understands the Soviet threat and has measures to meet it, [Kennedy] has not demonstrated he is prepared to lead America in the 1980s. Unfortunately, neither has Jimmy Carter.”

The potential cost of this debate is best illustrated by the case of Marshall Shulman, Secretary Vance’s senior adviser on Soviet affairs, a gentlemanly professor from Columbia who is rarely without his green plastic eyeshade as he works in his seventh-floor office at the State Department. To the liberals, Shulman is an object of both affection and veneration. He is a scholar of Soviet history, whose years of experience leave him unsurprised by events such as the invasion of Afghanistan. He has several times been denied entry visas to the Soviet Union because of his unprogressive views. But because he became identified in the popular mind with the effort to pass the SALT treaty and to proceed on the assumption that the Soviet government, like others, has complicated motives, Shulman was the first official “discredited” by the Administration’s rhetorical swing to the right. “How long can Marshall stay?” was the question his friends asked themselves sadly, and his enemies with glee.

In January, U.S. News & World Report published a handy set of mug shots of the other most likely targets of such attacks. In addition to Shulman and several officials who have already left the government (among them Andrew Young and Paul Warnke, the former SALT negotiator), they included three assistant secretaries of state—Richard Holbrooke, Patricia Derian, and Richard Moose—and the head of the policy-planning staff at State, Anthony Lake.

“All have one thing in common,” said U.S. News for the conservative camp. “The administration has been forced to reverse or alter radically many of the policies these officials advocated three years ago.”

The other general line of attack has been the “empty scabbard” theory— that the President lacked the military means to back up his threats. Apart from speeches by Senator Kennedy, no criticism has irritated the Administration more than this. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown erupted at a congressional hearing in January, telling his inquisitors that the “unwarranted” bad-mouthing of American power was undermining our security. “Perhaps we are also to blame for not making crystal clear what we can do today in the Persian Gulf,” said Randy Jayne, associate director in charge of defense in the Office of Management and Budget. “We’ve had two or three carriers on station there; even with two, that would mean 160 or 170 combat aircraft within reach. The Soviet Union has two aircraft carriers, period. The aircraft on those carriers consist of some helicopters and small, 1950s-style vertical takeoff airplanes. They don’t carry any fighter or attack planes. Recently we moved 1800 Marines—exactly one percent of the full 180,000 U.S. Marine Corps, whose mobility is unparalleled in the world. The Russians have about 25,000 naval infantry, who are ‘mobile’ only in the sense that you can get them off the ship on gangplanks. The Soviet Union has a fundamental advantage in nearness, but if they want to move on the Persian Gulf, they have to come across some absolutely terrible territory, through one vulnerable choke point after another.” Other officials pointed out that the U.S. could have 1000 troops on the spot in one day, a few thousand more the next day, and 25,000 armed and fully equipped American troops on the scene sixteen days after conflict began.

But while attempting to rebut the appearance of total helplessness, Administration officials joined the general rush to fill the scabbard with more. The military budget, presented in January, totaled nearly $160 billion, 5.4 percent more than the year before. It featured the Rapid Deployment Forces, which had been in the works for several years but had new allure for contingencies such as those in the Persian Gulf. The proposals for these forces—which involve “prepositioning” Marine supplies in ships stationed near trouble zones, and building an enormous new transport plane known as CX—opened up the question that has moved to the center of all recent defense debates: What is the proper balance between complicated, expensive, sometimes unreliable equipment and simpler, cheaper, more numerous supplies? Senators Sam Nunn (D. Ga.) and Gary Hart (D. Colo.) joined to question the worth of the CX, which would cost more than any existing plane ($6 billion for a fleet of 130 or more), would take at least five years to go into service, and would be capable of carrying only one of the ponderous new XM-1 battle tanks.

The Administration was also working on a way to expand mobility more quickly and for less money, although this received less attention than bigticket procurement items. The plan would involve buying or leasing some vessels that have been idled by the sluggish U.S. shipping industry, and subsidizing civilian airlines to put bigger cargo doors on their planes and to strengthen the floor ribs, on the understanding that the planes would be turned over to military service when needed.

Such steps are unusual for their inventiveness and their immediate payoff; the normal defense rhetoric through January and much of February referred to building more of whatever was on the drawing boards, no matter how relevant to the need to increase the readiness of our conventional forces. “You keep hearing, ‘If only we’d built the B-l bomber, if only we’d speeded up the MX, if only we’d tripled defense spending, things would be great now,’ ” said an assistant to a Democratic senator in mid-January. “I don’t know what difference any of that would have made in Afghanistan, unless we were willing to take far greater risks than the situation warrants.” The B-I bomber, which has almost no conceivable application to the Afghanistan situation, is one of many complex weapons that seemed due for a comeback try.

In the first few weeks of big-budget talk, it was like Christmas at the Pentagon. Politicians said that defense spending should rise, not by 3 or 5 percent on top of inflation, but by 10 or 15. Congressional committees summoned the chiefs of the military services and asked for lists of all the projects they really thought they needed, but that budget officials had hacked off. “It’s like something out of Karl Marx,” said one Pentagon analyst, holding such a request in one hand and, in the other, a Business Week article on the new boom in defense stocks.

“The common view is that defense spending is going through the roof,” said an Administration budget analyst. “But when the new fiscal year begins on October 1, I bet you’re going to see something that looks very much like what Congress has done in the last two or three years. Last year the Congress took about four billion out of our budget—mainly operations, maintenance, readiness—and put in about three billion, mainly hardware. So the net was minus one billion. Maybe this year the net will be even, or plus a billion or two. But when the congressmen are back among the public this summer, hearing about all the economic problems, and looking at the federal deficit, they’re going to wonder how that extra $5 billion or $10 billion for new projects is going to fit. The answer is it won’t.”

That was one of the few predictions made with certainty in this volatile time.

-JAMES FALLOWS