Reagan's African Rambo

Last July, in the midst of the TWA hijacking crisis, Congress was seized by a fit of Rambo-mania. Across the political spectrum, from liberal Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.) to New Right hero Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), our elected representatives entered a desperate competition to see who could get toughest in supporting a bewildering array of Third World "anti-communist" guerrilla organizations. As part of that frenzy of legislative machismo, the Clark Amendment, which explicitly prohibited U.S. intervention in Angola, was repealed.

In February this new cult of the Cold War guerrilla reached its apex when Angolan Jonas Savimbi, the African Rambo of right-wing dreams, came to Washington. Savimbi, assisted by a high-priced Washington public relations firm, took the capital by storm with a lobbying and media blitz aimed at winning material aid for his war against the Angolan government and a place in American hearts and minds.

By the time Savimbi left town he had won a clear U.S. commitment to enter the war in Angola on the side of his UNITA organization. That commitment was made explicit and underscored by President Reagan in his State of the Union speech.

This won't be America's first venture into the Angolan bush. In 1975, when Angola finally won its independence from Portugal, there was a period of civil war among the three organizations that had fought the Portuguese. At that time the CIA entered the war on behalf of Savimbi's UNITA forces, supplying funding, combat advisers, and mercenaries. But when the covert war in Angola became known, it triggered an outraged response from a public still stinging from the Vietnam debacle. Eventually Congress passed the Clark Amendment, named for then-Senator Richard Clark (D-Iowa), which prohibited the U.S. government from lending any form of assistance to any of the Angolan combatants.

When first enacted, the Clark Amendment was considered a great victory for those seeking to carve out a new post-Vietnam foreign policy along non-militarist and anti-interventionist lines. To the right wing, the Clark Amendment became a historical symbol of the dreaded Vietnam syndrome. Both concretely and symbolically, the repeal of the Clark Amendment and the renewal of aid to Savimbi represent the launching of a new age of global interventionism.

In the long run, the results of interventionism in the '80s will probably be the same as they were in the two previous decades. For one thing, our official masterminds still show remarkably bad taste in their choice of Third World surrogates.

Savimbi could at one time have been considered a legitimate "freedom fighter" against Portuguese colonialism. In those days the great anti-communist was sponsored by the Chinese and proudly proclaimed himself a Maoist.

In the decade since he lost Angola's civil war, Savimbi's organization has been kept alive by the apartheid regime in South Africa, which has its own reasons to harass the government of Angola. The South Africans supply UNITA's arms and have even gone into combat alongside UNITA forces.

Savimbi's U.S. allies claim that he is involved with South Africa only because he has to take aid wherever he can get it (an explanation they of course denounce when Nicaragua and the Soviet Union are at issue). But whatever his reasons, Savimbi's collusion with the racists .of Pretoria has earned him a reputation in black Africa as, at best, an erratic opportunist or, at worst, a traitor. Hardly the stuff that nationalist heroes are made of.

CONTEMPORARY INTERVENTIONIST strategies also suffer from the ancient Cold War vision defect in which all Third World conflicts are seen strictly in East-West, communist versus anti-communist patterns. In Angola, the ruling MPLA party proclaims itself Marxist-Leninist. But the Angolans also conduct 50 percent of their foreign trade with the United States and have bent over backward to nurture their profitable relationship with the Gulf Oil company.

The MPLA was aided by Cuba and the Soviet bloc during the civil war period, and currently there are 35,000 Cuban troops in Angola. But the Cubans are there to defend the country against the overwhelming military might of South Africa, which in addition to supplying UNITA, has also invaded Angola repeatedly.

As is usually the case in Third World conflicts, the ongoing war in Angola, and the general web of violence and intrigue throughout Southern Africa, has its roots in the epic, and unfinished, battle of nationalism versus colonialism. Colonialism in this case is represented by the apartheid state in South Africa, and its decades-old illegal occupation of Namibia. For the. last 20 years that occupation has involved a seemingly endless bush war against the Southwest African People's Organization (SWAPO), which operates out of neighboring southern Angola.

South Africa backs Savimbi in Angola partly because, if he were to succeed, Pretoria would prefer to have a friendly government in Angola. Yet even if UNITA's prospects for a military victory are dim, its activities mate Angola pay a fearsome price for supporting SWAPO.

Any sane U.S. approach to the tangle of violence in and around Angola would center first on getting South Africa out of Namibia,.and consequently out of Angola. But in negotiations for Namibian independence, the Reagan administration, in a classic reversal of cause and effect, has adopted South Africa's position that it can't withdraw until the Cubans are out of Angola.

There is every reason to believe that once the South Africans withdraw from Namibia and stop threatening Angola, the Cubans will go home. Then it would be possible for Angola to really begin its era of independence and economic reconstruction.

On the other hand, U.S. intervention in Angola will make a peaceful resolution of the political problems involved impossible. It will also increase the Angolan government's dependence on the Soviet bloc and deepen America's alliance with the hated monster of apartheid. All of that adds up to something very similar to a quagmire.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.