■ There’s no hiding place. Democratic doves are getting it on all sides, from Sen. Phil Gramm’s comment, “If Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis [had been] elected President, the Berlin Wall would still be standing, and Saddam Hussein would be in Saudi Arabia,” to Mississippi GOP chairman Clarke Reed’s exuberant response to Democratic congressional leadership’s stance against Gulf War: “Politically it’s gangbusters. This is the only thing that could give President Bush coattails.” . . . ACU has stirred flames with its just-released rundown of 13 Senate and 17 House votes on SDI funding, 1987 to 1990. It turns out that Sens. Biden, Kennedy, Mitchell, Bradley, Moynihan, among others, voted against all such resolutions (and hence against funding for the Patriot missile), as did two prominent Democratic presidential contenders in the House, Richard Gephardt and Patricia Schroeder of the House Armed Services Committee. (Sen. Sam Nunn had a 54 per cent ACU rating on SDI, and Sen. Albert Gore, the only Democratic presidential contender to vote for Gulf War resolution, a 46 per cent rating.) . . . High Frontier chief, retired Gen. Daniel O. Graham, blames Teddy Kennedy for Israeli Scud casualties through his opposition to funding for Patriot and Israeli Arrow anti-missile systems. … In Connecticut, GOP chairman Richard Foley aims to make trouble for Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, notorious dove and scourge of the Contras, when he comes up for re-election. “He not only voted against Bush on the Persian Gulf,” says Foley, “[he voted] against cruise missiles [the Tomahawk] and the Patriot. These are threshold questions we will raise.” . . . On the campuses, College Republicans staged dozens of successful pro—Gulf War rallies all around the country, bringing out crowds of four thousand at Ohio State U., 3,500 at Mississippi State U., and a thousand or so at Purdue, UCLA, USC, and U. of Texas at Austin. … At Harvard, students Adam Taxin and Harry Wilson signed up seven hundred members for their Students United for Desert Storm in the first week of its existence. . . . Finally, the war has caused rift between the Redgrave sisters. When Vanessa told a rally in Barcelona: “We have to unconditionally defend Iraq against American, British, and Israeli aggression,” Lynn dissociated herself from those remarks: “I am with George Bush all the way.”
■ Look for a renewed assault on U.S. intelligence establishment from the Left. In the Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan has taken the lead. His “The End of the Cold War Act” (S-236) would abolish CIA and turn its functions over to the State Department. . . . Director of ACLU’s Washington office, Morton Halperin, charges that “behind every international crisis in the postwar period has been a triggering event of a covert operation.” … In the House, Speaker Tom Foley has raised a furor by assigning Berkeley radical Rep. Ron Dellums to the supersensitive House Intelligence Committee. Larry Cott, editor of NR’s Combat newsletter on the Left in the Sixties, reminds us that in 1984 Dellums told a political gathering that “we should totally dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, nail by nail, brick by brick.” . . . The Congressional Black Caucus, of which Dellums was recently chairman, continues to move left. In the congressional vote endorsing the war once it had started, five members of the Black Caucus—Mervyn Dymally and Maxine Waters (Calif.), Charles Hayes and Gus Savage (Ill.), and Craig Washington (Tex.)—voted no confidence. Another six—Dellums, Cardiss Collins (Ill.), Major Owens and Edolphus Towns (N.Y.), Donald Payne (N.J.), and Henry Gonzalez (Tex.)—voted “present,” withholding their support from President Bush. . . . Ramsey Clark, in Iraq with a peace group, says he saw “more than a thousand homes, offices, apartment houses, and commercial buildings seriously damaged,” and assures us that “none of these damaged civilian buildings showed any evidence whatever of use by the Iraqi military.” There he goes again. After a visit to Hanoi during Vietnam War, Clark reported our POWs were being held in prisons with “rooms better and bigger than the rooms in essentially every prison I have ever visited anywhere.” He was “particularly touched,” he said, by the medical and dental treatment afforded the prisoners.




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