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Joining the Jackals—Again? | The Weekly Standard

The Arab nations were split; the United States was, in effect, allied with the largest of them, Egypt, and in the cause of peace in the Middle East. The Soviet Union, though it might declare that “thugs in Afghanistan” were “tormenting schoolchildren” for the profit of Zionists, had established itself beyond all question as a brutal conqueror of Third World peoples and as an anti-Semitic regime of near demented proportions. The moment to fragment or silence the opposition was at hand. Faced with this assault on the UN Charter, on peace, on decency—and, not so incidentally, on the President of the United States—what did our people do? They took the other side. To persons whose deepest conviction was that Third World nations were hostile to the United States because of our own neocolonial behavior; whose strong disposition was to believe that the Soviet Union in almost all instances supported the true liberationist forces in the former colonial world while the United States, on the wrong side of history, backed brutal but doomed dictatorships—the events from 1977 to 1980 could make no sense. Confused, and after a point not altogether straightforward, the strategy of our diplomats in New York, backed up in the Department of State, started to undergo a subtle and disastrous transformation. They had begun with the proposition that if the United States put itself on the “right” side of history, we would find the nations of the world, most of which of course were “new,” coming over to our side in turn. Unaccountably, however, they were still not on our side. To the contrary, some were actively seeking to undo the greatest diplomatic achievement the administration had to its credit, and none—not one—was objecting to or trying to impede such efforts. Evidently, then, we must still be on the wrong side. Reasoning thus, our diplomats prepared themselves to vote for the Security Council Resolution of March 1, 1980 and (though this was certainly not their intention) to help bring down the administration they served.