Strong Aftershocks

By William R. Doerner

During the two years of Watergate, many foreigners never really understood its near paralyzing grip on U.S. public attention. They assumed that the scandal was nothing much more than politics as usual. Many Europeans, for example, thought Americans were being unsophisticated, moralistic and, above all, naive to force a President to resign over what looked to them like a minor matter. The scandal now rocking Washington--involving as it does seemingly hypocritical diplomacy, arms deals and the secret funding of a guerrilla army--is much more comprehensible to the rest of the world, even if some of its features seem as bizarre in Perugia as they do in Peoria.

The question that dominated foreign ministries in capitals around the world last week, as the Iran-contra scandal continued to explode, was whether it would have the same kind of disabling effect on Ronald Reagan's presidency as Watergate had on Richard Nixon's. That was a matter of great concern to both friends and foes, but particularly to U.S. allies. "There is a basic given within the NATO alliance," said a French official. "This is that we rely on the solidity of the American regime." His unspoken point was that, temporarily at least, this basic stability has come into question.

In most outward respects, Washington was carrying on its foreign affairs in an orderly fashion. U.S. and Soviet negotiators held a special four-day round of arms talks in Geneva aimed at narrowing differences before the next extended bargaining session, scheduled for January. Though Max Kampelman, the chief U.S. negotiator, announced only "limited" progress, he found the Soviets ready to do business as usual. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger traveled to Brussels to attend a meeting of his NATO counterparts and turned up in Paris to defend Reagan's secret dealings with Iran.

The allies proved reluctant to say anything officially about the mounting crisis. At a European Community summit in London last week the twelve leaders agreed to avoid criticizing Washington. In France, an assistant to Premier Jacques Chirac said, "We don't intend to add the least little grain of salt" to the Reagan Administration's wounds. West Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung succinctly summed up the mood of allied capitals by comparing it to "the sound of embarrassed coughing."

Privately, however, Europeans were incredulous at what they considered the sheer naivete of U.S. officials, notably President Reagan. Said a French official: "Everybody knows that Iran is the one country where American public opinion simply would not tolerate compromise." One West European foreign policy official expressed amazement at the sloppiness of the operation's organizers, wondering that "if it was handled this badly, how will they handle other matters?"

The most obvious victim was U.S. diplomatic credibility, especially on the subject of dealing with terrorist regimes. Washington has been critical of some allies for failing to support U.S. measures against state-sponsored terrorism, notably the American bombing raids on Libya last April. In light of Reagan's willingness to trade weapons for Iranian help in securing the release of U.S. hostages, it will be more difficult to ask for cooperation in the future. Editorialized Bonn's General-Anzeiger: "It will take a long time before the leading power in the West can credibly champion the stringency of joint standards for combating terrorism."

Despite the atmosphere of normality in Geneva, there were signs that the Iran-contra affair could indeed affect superpower relations. Coming on top of Reagan's decision to violate the unratified SALT II arms treaty, the scandal has evidently prompted the Kremlin to allow Soviet commentators to attack Reagan personally, something that was avoided in the recent past. Georgi Arbatov, head of the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies, called the scandal "a truly cinematic story out of second-rate Hollywood films, in which Ronald Reagan has been featured for years."

Some U.S. officials fear that the Soviets will seek to exploit Reagan's problems by either driving a harder bargain or refusing to agree to any arms pact for the next two years. These concerns are rarely voiced in Western Europe, which is still in shock over Reagan's willingness at Reykjavik to discuss deep--and possibly even total--cutbacks of U.S. nuclear weapons on the Continent without first consulting NATO allies. Such a move would force them to base their defense primarily on conventional weapons, in which they are considerably outclassed by Warsaw Pact forces.

The delivery of U.S. weapons to Iran upset a variety of equations in the volatile Middle East. For one thing, it violated Washington's professed neutrality in the six-year-old war between Iran, which is not an Arab state, and Iraq, which is. Since the Iraqi cause is supported by most other Arab states, the arming of its enemy was widely viewed as anti-Arab.

Iranian officials initially could barely conceal their glee over the Reagan Administration's discomfort. Speaking to a group of government officials, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini thanked them for causing what he sarcastically called "the great explosion that has occurred in Washington's Black House." More recently, however, Muslim fanatics have criticized government officials for agreeing to deal, however tentatively, with the "Great Satan." Last week a somewhat defensive President Seyed Ali Khamene'i accused the U.S. of using the arms deliveries and the involvement of Israel, officially an enemy of Iran's, in a campaign to "damage [our] reputation and dignity."

The arms shipments were a particularly galling slap in the face for Jordan's King Hussein, whose most recent attempt to buy U.S. weaponry was turned down by the Reagan Administration as politically too risky. Leaders of other moderate Arab states, who live in daily fear of the brand of radical Islamic fundamentalism that Iran is sworn to export, were appalled that Washington would consider giving so much as a bow and arrow to Tehran. Last week, in an interview with the semiofficial Cairo daily Al Ahram, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak predicted that the arms deal will lead to "grave consequences" in the Middle East.

Though Israel served as Washington's pipeline in the Iranian arms shipments, its government came under little criticism domestically for dealing with Iran. The Jewish state has tried for years to maintain good relations with non-Arab nations in the Middle East. But Jerusalem was dismayed at the Administration's allegation that Israel was also involved in the transfer of funds for the contras. Fearful that any association with the contra scheme could undermine Israel's strong support in Congress, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir last week took the unusual step of publicly disputing a high U.S. official and denied that Jerusalem was in any way involved in that part of the operation.

Nowhere was the scandal played as such unabashedly good news as in Nicaragua, whose Marxist-led Sandinista government hoped it would be a major blow to the chances of continued U.S. support of the contra guerrillas. President Daniel Ortega claimed the Sandinistas had known all along that the U.S. was conducting a campaign to keep antigovernment forces supplied in defiance of congressional prohibition. The Sandinistas hope the prohibition, lifted in October after Congress voted to send $100 million in U.S. aid over the next year, will be clamped back on.

Contra leaders fear that could happen, and quickly. Congress must certify that the first installment of the $100 million was properly spent before voting on the second in February. Says a contra official in Central America: "They could cut us off then, if the decks are still running with blood in Washington." U.S. allies in Honduras and El Salvador would be profoundly disappointed by any such move, if only because it would prove that there is no continuity to Washington's policy in the region. At a time when the U.S. is trying to repair its foreign policy, that is hardly the message the Reagan Administration wants to send to Central America, or anywhere else.

With reporting by Reported by John Borrell/Mexico City, B.J. Phillips/Paris