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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 1, 1986)
Page 2/The Battalion/Monday, December 1, 1986 The Battalion (USPS 045 360) Member of Texas Press Association Southwest Journalism Conference The Battalion Editorial Board Cathie Anderson, Editor Kirsten Dietz, Managing Editor Loren Steffy, Opinion Page Editor Frank Smith, City Editor Sue Krenek, News Editor Ken Sury, Sports Editor Editorial Policy The Battalion is a non-profit, self-supporting newspaper oper ated as a community service to Texas A&M and Bryan-College Sta tion. Opinions expressed in The Battalion are those of the editorial board or the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Texas A&M administrators, faculty or the Board of Regents. The Battalion also serves as a laboratory newspaper for students in reporting, editing and photography classes within the Depart ment of Journalism. The Battalion is published Monday through Friday during Texas A&M regular semesters, except for holiday and examination periods. Mail subscriptions are $17.44 per semester, $34.62 per school year ami $36.44 per full year. Advertising rates furnished on re quest. Our address: The Battalion, 216 Reed McDonald Building, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843. Second class postage paid at College Station, TX 77843. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Battalion, 216 Reed McDonald, Texas A&M University, College Station TX 77843. A big Meese-stake The Iran arms deal has become a cancerous foreign policy tumor on the Reagan administration’s Teflon exterior. The latest malig nant act was the naming of Attorney General Edwin Meese III to head the investigation into the arms deal — a measure that’s certain to determine that, in this case, justice is not only blind, it’s deaf and dumb too. Like an onion, the layers of Reagan’s foreign policy have been peeled back, each time revealing a different form of questionable ac tivity. Now the president, busy firing staff members to distance himself from any wrongdoing, has asked his old friend Meese to do a little peeling of his own. Selecting Meese was both strategic and superflu ous. Slicing into Reagan’s foreign policy dealings surely will bring tears to Meese’s eyes. After all, the attorney general has been the president’s friend and crony for more than 20 years. He will be care ful where he cuts and how deeply. The American people deserve answers, not the biased babblings of the president’s right-hand lawyer. Even Reagan confidant Henry Kissinger has stressed the need to “get all the facts out quickly, and punish the wrongdoers.” “I can be loyal to the president and loyal to the country, too,” Meese claims. But when these interests lie in different directions, where Meese’s loyalties lie is no secret. As one who helped set up the early stages of the Iran-Contra pipeline, Meese may wind up in the dual role of prosecutor and defense attorney. Already the attorney general, claiming to have known about wrongdoings since Nov. 22, did not attempt to bar fired National Se curity Council director Oliver North from NSC offices until last Tuesday, possibly giving North a chance to shred vital, incriminating documents. It’s time to turn the arms deal investigation over to a special pros ecutor. For the sake of national well-being, the Reagan administra tion needs to resolve the investigation as quickly as possible. Meese is not the man.fo rescue the administration’s foreign policy, mired in murky bureaucratic coverups. We need an objective sheer to cut through the deception of the foreign policy onion. Tears won’t distort justice’s insight — she’s blind. Eel Meese is not, although he may see no evil. Horns find scapegoat By firing Head Coach Fred Akers, the University of Texas has summed up Vince Lombardi’s maxim: Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. But it’s the university, not Akers, that has everything to lose from the head coach’s dismissal. School rivalries aside, Akers deserved better than to be booted out of his position merely because Texas had its first losing season in 30 years. Athletic Director DeLoss Dodds says Akers was fired be cause the school was seeking “new energy and leadership,” but it’s more likely it was looking for a scapegoat to carry the blame for a los ing season. Winning seasons come and go — sometimes the cycles may be 30 years, sometimes only two or three — but a good coach is a long-term investment. As Texas A&M learned, firing a coach every losing sea son or two perpetuates the string of losing seasons. Ironically, whoever UT selects to inject this “new energy and leadership” probably will have to endure several more losing seasons before a winning team can be built. Akers’ 73.5 percent winning record at UT will be attractive to other schools seeking coaches. We only hope he can find more toler ant pastures than the fair-weather fields of UT. Instead of adhering to the f amous words of Vince Lombardi, UT should have heeded a different maxim: Don’t fix what ain’t broken. i ( 3OOD LJORKy MEN! iVs ftooirr T1M& Eyonr , TMosr CHAIRS fUGrtT- lyn^uaM Opinion Real trouble is closer ties with arms deal to the Contras For more than six years President Reagan has held the American public in the palm of his hand. Dur ing that time, he has tried to return the country to a period of normal ity, void of the tur moil of the 1960s, the embarrass- Craig Renfro ment of Vietnam and the presidential atrocities of Watergate. But recent turns of events have proved that Reagan is nothing more than a lot of hot rhetoric backed by little fuel. First off, Reagan approved of the controversial arms sales to Iran — a country that backs terrorism. This is something that Reagan said he would never do, yet he defied his own policy. Now it has been learned that some of the money from the Iranian arms sales has been diverted to the U.S.-backed Ni caraguan Contra rebels. This is a move that Reagan says he knew nothing about. But initially Reagan said he knew nothing about the Iranian arms situa tion, either. How long will it be before he confesses that he knew something about this? Probably in chapter 10 of his memoirs, “How I Started the Nicara guan War.” In true Watergate fashion Reagan fired National Security Council director Lt. Col. Oliver North and received the resignation of Vice Adm. John Poin dexter, the president’s deputy assistant for national security affairs. This is nothing more than a desper ate attempt by Reagan to take some of the heat off of him and make it look like those two men had total control of Cen tral American policy. Surely Reagan doesn’t expect the American public to buy this. But then again he might be cause we have believed him for so long. U.S. funding of Contra activities was banned in 1984, and was illegal this year until Oct. 1, when Congress approved % 100 million of aid to the Contras. 1 low- ever, during that time North operated more than one clandestine operation to the Contras. North has been linked to the Contra air-supply operation based at El Salva dor’s Ilopango military airport. This came to light on Oct. 5 when an Ameri can-manned plane was shot down over Nicaragua and the lone survivor, Eu gene Hasenfus, claimed the arms supply operation was run by the CIA. But for Reagan to claim no knowl edge of North’s activities doesn’t fly in the face of reason. Indeed Reagan should have been aware, because if he wasn’t, that in itself is a confession of a huge black hole in the execution of our foreign policy. But things also aren’t so bright in Washington after it was reported that North destroyed documents implicating others in the Contra-funding scheme. Reagan has ordered White House staff members to preserve all records and co operate fully with official inquiries. le This really sounds like Waters ^ and raises the question of just ho* does Reagan know and when dii^ know it. We probabb will haw: |ei : until the tapes are released—that™™ the piesident doesn’t decide to them first. ' 5 Hp 1 Despite the attention being t«'j ov ,, on the diversion <>l funds to the(V ee ( tras, a major concern will behowaD&oin ocrat-< ontrolled Congress investiwean the entire spectacle. Bed Whatever the outcome of the ding investigation, the vital issueB 5, mains that the Contras secretly backed by the United States. Reagan been less than <. .mdid with ihcAinrfVfs public. He has talked about thevai efforts <>l the Contra freedomftglii but he has s.ud nothing about ouril jL help to the rebels. In fact, he has del I vehemently knowledge of any covcit Ia lions. 1^ In a not-so-secret move, ConirH bels are being trained by the CUB H( U.S. Air Force base near Fort WalBcial: Fla. Whether Reagan and his adi Bdii n ation are f ound guilty of any tvwB^ 5 doings may prove to be irrelevant if K.°! e become any more involved "’id 1 P j j, Contras. When the first wave ofl |L n soldiers hit the ground secret dealt Joses will be forgotten in the name offi dom and democracy — atleastuni have the Pentagon Papers II to just why we became involved. Craig Renfro is a senior journal major and a columnist for The 1 ion. A question of competence here Immediately af ter President Rea gan’s press confer- e n c e , the television screen filled with the faces of the usual commentators. They pronounced their verdicts: The president was in consistent, contra dictory, not credi ble. But, to recast Richard Cohen the title of John Stormer’s controversial 1964 book, “None Dare Call It Treason,” none dared called Reagan incompetent. That, though, is surely what he was. But incompetent is not a word that can be publicly uttered in Washington. For so long the president has been so personally popular that his incompe tence — his weak grasp of the issues and their historical context — has been over looked. With few exceptions, Reagan has instead been accorded all the re spect the people of Oz paid their Wiz ard. If the polls approved, Washington fell into line — mumbling only in pri vate that on more than one occasion the president didn’t know what he was talk ing about. Forget for a moment the manner in which the president answered questions and just take a look at his opening statement. In it, he cited instances in which his administration had acted boldly: Grenada, Lebanon, the Phil ippines and Libya. Lebanon! Wasn’t that the place where 239 Americans were killed when a terrorist drove a bomb-laden truck into the Marine bar racks? Wasn’t Lebanon a debacle and an example of using troops when the ad ministration should have used its head? The president uttered other minor whoppers. He referred to pre-revolu tionary Iran as once a member of the “family of democratic nations” when it was, under the shah, a dictatorship with a ruthless secret police — the infamous Savak. He tackled a question about the plight of the homeless by citing the case of a New York family that was being sheltered in a hotel at a cost of .$37,000 a year. Instead of this being an example of a desperate housing shortage for the poor, the president saw it as yet another welfare scam and an opportunity for private enterprise: “And I wonder why somebody doesn’t build them a house for $37,000.” A house for $37,000 in Manhattan? Who’ll live in it? Minnie Mouse? On Iran, it matters that thepreii iict’s presumes that the United Stale* 1 play a decisive role in the choosinj the Ayatollah’s successorwh whole Iranian initiative — p nothing but a rationalization for tage swap anyway — is, in the"* Henry Kissinger, premature. Iti® 1 that the United States assured Prime Minister Margaret Thatckj My< the proposals made to the SoviJ Reykjavik have been supplanted 1 “priorities,” but that the presideni j d:,!? 18 press conference suggested oil*' And it matters that the prt seemed not to know precisely had offered the Soviets — ortheyl 1 As Sen. Gary Hart pointed out, other presidents would be skewered for such preposterous statements. This presi dent, though, has routinely uttered them with impunity, as if the tongue is not connected to the brain. Only in the inner recesses of the White House is Reagan being compared to Gore Vidal’s version of Abraham Lincoln — a presi dent whose wisdom was appreciated by few of his contemporaries and who, in fact, was widely thought to he a fool. Whether Reagan will turn out to be another Lincoln remains to be seen. In the meantime, facts and truth matter — matter even more than personal popu larity or the salesman’s talent to sell any thing. It matters that a president who talks fiscal restraint has added more to the federal debt than all past presidents combined. It matters that the “risks” he so proudly mentioned were mostly mili tary and that he associates daring with shot and shell — not with thoughtful policy-making. And, finally, it matters tha comes to Israeli complicity in ^ than arms deal, the presidentn denied knowing anything aboui only to issue a clarification 25 n® 1 later. The clarification, though mands its own clarification. Was ing or, even worse, did he forget 1 ’ 1 know in the first place? How cot president not be aware of the mo cial ingredient in the Iran scheme 1 In a voice as rumblinglyoni^ the deep organ notes otT Strauss’ “Thus Spake Zarath* Henry Kissinger suggested a rea 1 zation of the White House staff' 1 amount of personnel shufflingorf approval will address the pn principal problem. That probkn 1 his credibility, consistency or t 31 but his competence. A staff shah probably the best that canbeexf As Kissinger suggested, Reagan all the help he can get. Copyright 1986, Washington Post Writ*