Speak Firmly, Carry a Little Stick

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Lacking leverage, the Administration pursues caution and calm

"At this point, the question is how you do nothing, not whether you do anything."

That wry comment from a Reagan Administration official summed up all too well the initial U.S. response to the imposition of martial law in Poland. Secretary of State Alexander Haig admitted that the Administration was "surprised" by the crackdown. Other officials insisted that he referred only to the timing rather than the fact of the move. Nonetheless, Washington had apparently focused its planning on the contingency that has not yet happened. The U.S. and its European allies long ago had agreed to invoke stern diplomatic and economic sanctions if Poland were invaded by the Soviet army. But there was no comparable list of actions to take in response to a crackdown by Polish authorities on the Solidarity movement. Reason: U.S. officials had concluded that nothing they might do would have any practical effect.

Hampered initially by a maddening lack of reliable information as to exactly what was happening inside Poland, and worried lest too strident a reaction might yet give the Soviets an excuse for an outright takeover, Washington decided from the start that its responses would indeed be primarily words. Through the early days, Haig and other officials confined themselves to restrained expressions of "concern" and cautiously voiced hopes that the martial law crackdown would only be "a temporary retrogression, not a change in the overall historic trend toward reform" in Poland. As one top diplomat explained: "We want to tread the fine line between taking positions that would incite violence and bloodshed and perhaps [Soviet] intervention on the one hand, and avoid positions which would acquiesce in the repression of Polish reform on the other."

As news from Poland indicated that the military regime was successfully breaking resistance, critics across the political spectrum accused the Administration of looking the other way while freedom was being smashed in Poland. From the right, outraged New York Times Columnist William Safire charged the Administration with "helpless tut-tutting" and said Reagan and his aides had been guilty of "moral paralysis." From the left, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts denounced "some who say we cannot take a firm stand on Poland because that will offend the Soviets."

The White House, at minimum, had to make clear its anger, and Ronald Reagan assigned himself the task of sharpening the rhetoric. After telephoning Polish-born Pope John Paul II to voice his concern and conferring with Vatican Secretary of State Agostino Cardinal Casaroli the President opened his sixth news conference Thursday with a strongly worded statement. He condemned "the increasing use of force against an unarmed population" and said "coercion and violation ol human rights on a massive scale ... is in gross violation of the Helsinki pact [signed in 1975] to which Poland is a signatory.' He pinned the blame on the U.S.S.R.: "I would be naive to think this could happen without the full knowledge and the sup port of the Soviet Union--and we're no naive." The President, however, turned aside four separate questions on just what the U.S. might do. "The area of initiatives and options," he said, was something "I just don't feel that I can discuss." The President had good reason for not discoursing on U.S. options: in the view of most of his aides, there is little the U.S. can do.

The two steps that the Administration did take were largely symbolic. It restricted the movements of diplomats at the Polish embassy in Washington and the consulates in New York City and Chicago to those cities; Soviet diplomats are the only others who are not free to roam throughout the country. The move was in retaliation for the ringing of the U.S. embassy in Warsaw and consulates in Cracow and Poznan by Polish police.

More important, Washington held up $100 million in emergency food aid to Poland, only three days after President Reagan had tentatively approved the shipments. Before the imposition of martial law, the State Department had argued passionately that the assistance was necessary to prevent riots and bloodshed that might have been sparked by food shortages in Poland this winter. Polish Ambassador to the U.S. Romuald Spasowski vainly pleaded last week for the food to be released. Said the ambassador: "It is essential for the Polish people to receive this help. It is very, very bad there."

American officials were unmoved. Food aid was almost the only lever they had to pull--and there were reports that General Wojciech Jaruzelski was using food as a political weapon, hoarding it in government stockpiles and suddenly releasing it to stores to give the impression that the military takeover was bringing benefits to the Polish people. Washington will let food shipments from private charitable organizations go through, but Reagan indicated little hope that the U.S. will approve the rest of the $740 million in official food aid that Poland has requested for next year. Said the President at his news conference: "Certainly it will be impossible for us to continue trying to help Poland solve its economic problems while martial law is imposed on the people of Poland."

What else might the U.S. do? On one thing, the President and his aides were agreed: there will be no military response, even to an outright Soviet invasion. Said a senior Reagan adviser flatly: "There is no military option." He went on to list other possible steps: "We could cut off economic assistance altogether, we could restrict travel and passports to Poland, we could ban exports to Poland and/or the Soviet Union, and we could try to arrange an economic boycott of the Soviets with our allies."

The trouble is that all of these steps are likely to prove ineffective. The European allies may not cooperate unless the Soviet Union intervenes directly, and unilateral U.S. pressure on Poland will not weigh heavily against the Soviet demand that Jaruzelski smash Solidarity or else. In fact, sanctions might provoke exactly the Soviet intervention that the U.S. wants above all to avert.

The huge and politically influential Polish American community (there are an estimated 12 million Americans of Polish descent) appears to believe that any U.S. sanctions should be imposed against the Soviet Union rather than Poland. At rallies across the country and demonstrations in front of the Polish consulates in New York and Chicago, ethnic Poles sang Polish hymns, burned Soviet flags and shouted denunciations of Jaruzelski as a "traitor" and "Russian spy." After a mass rally at Daley Center in Chicago, attended by Illinois Governor James Thompson and Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, Alderman Roman Pucinski said: "We're punishing the wrong people. We should be cutting out wheat to Russia."

If the Soviet Union ever does invade Poland, the U.S. and its allies agreed as long ago as December 1980 on what would be done. The list of sanctions, officially secret, is known to include a rupture of most diplomatic relations, an embargo on trade and possibly a suspension of U.S.-Soviet arms reduction talks.

In its first week of truly global crisis, the Administration prided itself on keeping calm and presenting a unified front: for a change, there were no conflicting statements, no hasty "clarifications." Vice President George Bush played an unusually important role. He headed a Special Situation Group composed of the Secretaries of State and Defense, CIA Director William Casey, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General David C. Jones, Acting National Security Adviser James Nance, and the White House troika of Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese, Chief of Staff James Baker and Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver.

In effect, the SSG was Bush's old crisis-management team, renamed by Reagan to avoid the use of the word crisis. The group coordinated intelligence reports flowing in from Poland and, under Bush's direction, decided on a low-key approach. The National Security Council staff apparently functioned effectively without its furloughed leader, Richard Allen. Some White House aides went so far as to say privately that the staff was actually doing better under Allen's deputy and interim successor Nance, who took a generally hard anti-Soviet line in SSG discussions.

For all the complaints against the Administration's passive stance, caution and calm were clearly the right responses to a situation that the U.S. could not change, at least for now. But while American leverage, unhappily, was limited, the Administration has yet to prove that it knows how to use effectively what clout it has.

--By George J. Church.

With reporting by Douglas Brew, Johanna McGeary

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