A recent New York Times/CBS public opinion poll (printed on the front page as though it were important news) is a good example of how phony news is manufactured. The poll claimed that “despite months of controversy over U.S. policies on Central America, most of the American public does not know which side the Reagan Administration supports in either El Salvador or Nicaragua.”
The Times pompously advised its readers that this survey of 1,365 adults nationwide has only a 3 percent margin of error. However, that’s only the margin of error on the question that was asked. The big error was in the wording of the question.
Instead of asking if the Reagan Administration backs the government or the anti-government forces, the survey question should have been, “Which side does the Reagan Administration back in El Salvador and Nicaragua — the Communist or the anti-Communist?” The big majority of American people would have had no trouble giving the accurate answer.
The issue in Latin America is not whether one faction or another is in control in various little countries, but whether the Kremlin-Castro axis will get another base in the Western Hemisphere. Ronald Reagan and the American people understand that issue rather well, even if the New York Times pollsters don’t.
Henry Kissinger has bounced back from the damage inflicted on his reputation by Seymour Hersh’s book into the chairmanship of a commission to advise the President about Latin America. Unfortunately, Kissinger seems to have an inferiority complex when he deals with the Communists, and they usually get the better of him.
In 1960, Kissinger fell hook, line and sinker for the phony “missile gap,” John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign slogan. Kissinger wrote in his 1961 book: “It is generally admitted that from 1961 until at least the end of 1964, the Soviet Union will possess more missiles than the United States…. The missile gap in the period of 1961-1965 is now unavoidable. … It may mean that we could lose if the Soviet Union struck first. In that case, we would be fortunate if we escaped a surprise attack.”
By 1970, Kissinger had discovered the truth about that time period. He wrote: “In as late as 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet Union had around 40 ICBMs. We had over 1,000 bombers and over 200 missiles that could reach the Soviet Union. … In short, our strategic superiority was overwhelming.” Richard Nixon put the ratio of our 1962 strategic superiority over the Soviets as 8-to-1.
A comparison of these two Kissinger writings reveals how he imagined the threat of a Soviet strategic force substantially more powerful than ours, how he thought this non-existent Soviet missile force had such a margin of superiority over us that they had a first-strike capability against us, and how he believed the Kremlin dictators had the will to use this missile force so that we would be “fortunate” if they did not surprise-attack us.
Kissinger’s 1961 vision of the United States “losing” to the Soviets was a kind of sick defeatism. There never was any factual basis for this fear; there was every possible reason for absolute confidence that, in a confrontation, the Soviets would lose; and that is exactly what did happen in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
Kissinger’s tour de force was the SALT I agreements which he negotiated and got Nixon to sign in 1972. Under SALT I, the United States accepted inferiority at the ratio of 3-to-2 in Soviet-U.S. missiles and submarines.
Kissinger’s rationalization for this inferiority was this: “As a result of decisions made in the 1960s, and not reversible within the timeframe of the projected agreement, there would be a numerical gap against us in the two categories of land-based and sea-based missile systems whether or not there was an agreement. …. Therefore, any time over the next five years we were confronting a numerical margin that was growing, and a margin, moreover, that we could do nothing to reverse in that five-year period.”
Kissinger lives in a make-believe world in which the Soviet Union (which can’t even feed itself) is ten feet tall. He thinks that the United States (which has a Gross National Product twice that of the U.S.S.R’s) is a pitiful helpless giant who can’t catch up.
If Kissinger carries his surrender syndrome to his Latin America task, the Communists will soon take El Salvador and start the falling dominoes in the Western Hemisphere. One can only hope Kissinger has learned something in recent years from the rejection of SALT II and from Ronald Reagan’s defeat of Jimmy Carter.
