Commentary'New Climate' Hasn't Frozen Soviet Military MachineDoug Macgregor

As the dates for the Washington summit meeting draw near, the American public has been treated to a ceaseless barrage of confusing commentary on the meaning of Mikhail S. Gorbachevs glasnost, including exhortations from some Western observers to reward the Soviet reformist spirit with economic cooperation and support.

Central to their argument is the claim that Gorbachev, glasnost and Soviet economic reform are inherently good for the West because they will lead to a reduced Soviet military threat. There is, however, no evidence that restructuring the Soviet economy or broadening citizen participation in exclusively local affaire will constrain the Soviet state in its long-term effort to dominate the Eurasian continent. Meanwhile, in the name of openness, the American mind is being closed to the reality of Soviet politics.

Military power has always been the Soviet states primary claim to international prestige, and it is within the Soviet military that Gorbachevs rein-vigorating influence may ultimately have its greatest effect. Consider Gorbachevs elevation this year of Army Gen. Dimitri T. Yazov to the top position in the Soviet military Establishment.

The appointment of the relatively unknown Yazov to be the minister oi defense surprised virtually everyone in the Western world. He projects the image of a leader in the Gorbachev mold. He brings energy, integrity and in

telligence to the Soviet armed forces in a manner that has not been seen since the 1920s. Unlike most of his predecessors, the younger Yazov avoids ideological harangues in favor of practical emphasis on tightening military discipline, developing new training techniques and fighting corruption in the ranks of the officer corps. He stresses intellect, modern technology and military history in the education of officers, and he exalts the dynamic, thinking man as the model of the modern Soviet military professional. This approach appeals to many Western observers who are taken with the Gorbachev style.

But none of Yazovs rhetoric suggests that an era of resource stringency will cause the type of organizational contraction that reduced the size of the siaviet Unions conventional forces in the 1950s. In fact, the Soviet states investment in military-force development continues at a dizzying pace; new weapons are reaching the field more rapidly than at any time in recent Soviet history. Moreover, if Yazov succeeds in his drive to reform the Soviet armed forces, the West will face a more, not less, potent Soviet military threat.

Then there is Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, who was removed from the Soviet general staff in 1984 for insisting that global war with the United States could fought without the widespread use of nuclear weapons. Ogarkov appears to have been resurrectd, and the new political thinking in Moscow has not discouraged him from pressing ahead with a new offensive military doctrine and strategy for the 1990s that emphasize theaterwide, high-tech conventional military operations against the West.

Ogarkov has been given operational control of the Warsaw Pacts most important concentration of forces: the Western Theater of Military Operations,

which includes the western Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. He has been working to develop his Central European command into a cohesive and responsive offensive-force structure under Soviet control that can rapidly mobilize and attack the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Western analysts should be careful not to underestimate the extent to which Ogarkovs innovative strategy conforms to Gorbachevs broader commitment to reinvigorate the Soviet state.

Frankly, a tremendous amount of ink hast>een wasted on speculation about the possible future effect of Gorbachevs proposals for limited reform, which may yet be scrapped by a party apparatus that abhors change in any form. In the meantime, Gorbachevs reform-oriented approach appears to be rein-vigorating Soviet military strength, but it has done nothing to change the traditional objectives of Soviet power and influence

Despite Gorbachevs pronouncements, it is clear that there will te no reduced emphasis on Soviet military power. If there are any reductions in the size of the Soviet armed forces, these reductions will doubtlessly be followed, as in the past, by structural changes to increase the striking power of the Soviet military. The hasty embrace in the West of a new Gorbachev climate actually raises the risk that a more robust Soviet economy, buttressed by Western credits and technology, will provide the basis for even greater Soviet military strength. Those who expect Soviet military power to be buried in the wake of glasnost are in for a rude awakening.

Maj. Doug Macgregor is an associate professor of social sciences at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point.

, Disl North America Syndicate Inc

Kennedy May Be Hurt By ImageHugh Macgill

President Reagan has offered the Senate an armistice in the war over the vacancy created by the resignation of Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. with his nomination of Judge Anthony M. Kennedy.

Many senators will greet his nomination with relief. Kennedy is the nominee who least offends the most. He is not anyones favorite, though, and that may hurt him.

Two Senate factions will welcome the Kennedy nomination. Pragmatic Republicans and conservative Democrats will be glad to have a plain vanilla conservative they can vote for without enraging their black and female constituents.

But ideological Democrats on the left will oppose anyone the Reagan administration sends forward. And ideological Republicans on the right feel betrayed again because Kennedy is not the firebreather they have been waiting for.

The nomination of Robert H. Bork was a political miscalculation from the start. A lame-duck president sent a controversial nomination to a

Senate controlled by the opposition party. Bork was nominated because of his judicial philosophy, spelled out in two decades of provocative writings on and off the bench. The Senate rejected him on exactly the same grounds.

Borks judicial opinions alone spelled out a vision of the relation of the individual to the state and of the judiciary to the Constitution that fair-minded senators could conclude has no place on the Supreme Court. Rejection on those grounds is not a lynching, and it has nothing to do with special interests. It has everything to do with the Senates exercising its constitutional duty to decide whether it will consent to the appointment of a person nominated by the president for the Supreme Court.

That is the principal teaching of the Bork nomination as it bears on Kennedys confirmation.

When the president hires a cook, he need not consult the Senate at all.

When he selects a Cabinet officer, the Senates consent, though required, is alm(Kt invariably given because the president must have wide discretion in choosing the subordinates for

whose conduct he is politically accountable.

. Judicial nominations are another matter. The justices are politically accountable to no one. The questions put to them in confirmation hearings about their vision, their values and their ideas of the Constitution are the last they ever will have to answer on those subjects.

Thp administration probably w ishes Kennedy could follow the example of Sherman Minton, a Truman nominee, who refused to appear before the committee at all, saying the Senate could take him or leave him on his paper record. But Minton was a senator himself, and could get away with it.

The next and standard move for nominees is to decline to respond to a specific question on the ground that it might arise in a case to be decided.

If the scope of the hearings cannot be confined narrowly to questions of integrity and intelligence alone, and if the nominee will come off badly if he appears uncooperative, then cant the hearings be hurried along?

Here the Ginsburg effect comes into play. If the Republicans complain about the slow pace of proceedings in the Senate, that will only remind

everyone of the way background checks on Douglas H. Ginsburg were bungled by the administration.

Further, there is no more urgency involved. The Democrats wanted to kill off Bork, then Ginsburg, but to do so slowly, to prevent Reagan from nominating another candidate. He will not get a fourth chance, so it matters little how long the hearings take this time.

Kennedy can expect inquiry into his life as a lawyer, probes for possible ethical problems on or off the bench, club memberships and conflicts of interest.

The right will press him on his 1980 opinion upholding the Navys discharge of homosexual sailors in which he found that Supreme Court precedents on privacy (code word for abortion) did not apply.

He indicated those precedents might limit the power of government to punish private homosexual conduct outside the military. The right will want assurances that he really does not tike the privacy decisions at alt.

Hugh C. Macgill is associate dean for academic affairs and a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law.

Sizing Up Gorbachev And The SovietsCody Shearer

WASHINGTON - Now that Mikhail Gorbachev has portrayed himself on American television as a good of boy who wouldnt threaten Uncle Sams interests, the American public may want to take a more serious look at Russias top dog. Is Mikhail Gorbachev for real?

A new book by Gorbachev has recently arrived at local bookstores, courtesy of Harper & How, and its worth serious examination. Gorbachevs observations in Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World amounts to more than a dull collection of Politiburo speeches.

In fact, in some places it is quite personal. Gorbachev includes a letter sent to him from a Catholic in Lithuania, which said: Every Sunday I am in church from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., praying for you an your family. He also recalls reminding Margaret Thatcher that the Soviet Union opposed fascism from 1933 onwards and provided arms to rebels in Spain in 1936. Like all world leaders, he is obsessed with the idea of bringing some order out of the present absurdities of the nuclear arms race. He is a realist but by no means any bleeding heart peace activist.

There is no question that Gorbachev is a dyed-in-the-wool Leninist who jiossesses that rare quality of talking straight from the heart. We are far rom regarding our approach as the only correct one, he writes. We have no universal solutions, but we are prepar to co-operate sincerely and honestly with the United States and other countries in seeking answers to all problems, even the most difficult ones.

The freshness in Gorbachev is that he seems to be willing to acknowledge

Soviet weaknesses. Assessing the stagnation of Soviet society, he reveals how deep his nations economic and industrial problems really are.

Our rockets can find Hallys Comet and fly to Venus with amazing accuracy, but side by side with these scientific and technological triumphs is an obvious lack of efficiency in using scientific achievements for economic needs, and many Soviet household appliances are of poor quality, he says.

As Mr. Gorbachev and Mr, Reagan sit down to talk, they both find themselves governing nations that are nowhere as dominant worldwide as they were 15 years ago. Other economic and military powers challenge American and Soviet bipolar supremacy today.

In the interim, the American people may want to hear Mr. Gorbachev out, all the time being conscious that he may not last. One cannot read the record of the plenary meeting of the Moscow Central Party Committee concerning Boris Yeltsin without realizing how fragile perc^troika/glasnost really is. Even Mr. Gorbachev acknowledges this in his book: "Certainly, the leadership has also had some difference of opinion about how stagnation should be overcome and how things should be handled in the future. There is nothing surprising about this... we are unanimous in our belief that perestroika is indispensable and indeed inevitable and that we have no other option.

The Soviet Union is about to embark on a crash overhaul of its decrepit public health service, to involve also a sharp increase in private medical practice, according to a policy document apjmved last week by the Communist Party Central Committee. The plan is toe most damning, official acknowledgment of how far the health service, once held up as amoi^ the greatest acnievements of the socialist state, now falls short of its own lofty standards.

(c) tW7 Nwtli AmerlcH Syndicate, Ik. '

Insecure RebelsRichard Boudreaux

MANAGUA, Nicaragua - Having fought its way to the peace table, Nicaraguas rebel movement appears stronger militarily but more vulnerable politically than at any other moment in its sisear war.

The leaders of an insurgency that gained the initiative in battle are now being thrust on the defensive in cease-fire negotiations that could end its vital U.S. military aid without shaking Sandinista contnrf of the government.

We are better equi{H)ed for war than ever, but now there are rougher waters to navigate, Pec&o Joaquin Chamorro, an exiled leader of the Nicaraguan Resistance, said in an interview in Costa Rica.

The peace agreement among Nicaragua and other Central American nations is stacked against the guerrillas these governments are fighting. It calls for cease-fires and an end of outside aid to armed rebels in exchange for dmnocratic guarantees within existing constitutional orders.

Since signing the Aug. 7 accord, President Daniel Ortega has seemed intent on taking just KNigh steps toward compliance to satisfy tte U.S. Congress. As a result, the White House has put off asking Cmigress for min^ Contra aid this time fw $270 million at least until January.

In a sign of the confidence among Sandinista leaders that the aid may be doomed, Vice President Sergio Ramirez said recently that the Reagan administration is no longer the center of decisions about what happens in Central America.

The fate of the $270 million, and the insurgency itself, will hang on the outcome of indirect cease-fire talks that could start as early as this week.

Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the mediator, received a truce proposal from the government Nov. 13 and one from the Nicaraguan Resistance late Wednesday. He is expected to announce the first steps of the negotiations Monday.

In one sense, the talks themselves represent a victory for the Contras, a tacit recognition of their legitimacy. This was won in a yearlong campaign by about 10,000 guerrillas who infiltrated throughout central Nicaragua from base camps in Honduras, kept pressure on the 85,0(X)-man Sandinista army and punished the economy.

Though they failed to seize and hold a major town, the Contras offset the governments superior manpower and mobility in two ways. They set up pockets of peasant support that enabled them to move freely in much of the countryside. And, with newly acquired portable Redeye missiles, they shot down at least a dozen Soviet-made helicopters operated by the Sandinistas, forcing the army to curtail air support for its counterinsurgency battalions.

In the coming cease-fire talks, the Sandinistas will seek what those battalions failed to accomplish to corral the Contras. Their 11-point proposal would have the rebels move into three government-controlled truce zones and surrender their weapons by Jan, 5 in order to be eligiclo for amnesty.

The rebel cease-fire proposal calls for freezing the two armies current positions for a year. It would condition rebel disarmament upon Sandinista compliance with all terms of the regional peace treaty.

Whether or not they get their way on these points, the Contras start from a disadvantage. After fighting since 1981 to overthrow the Sandinistas, they now find that

the best they can hope for under the peace accord is freedom to take part in politics, access to an uncensored press and a promise of fair elections.

The Contras lack a political alliance inside the country. 'Their sympathizers are fragmented in more than a dozen parties and groups that spend much of their energy fighting each other. 'The return of such politically ambitious rebel figures as Adolfo Calero and Eden Pastora could just as easily compound those divisions as heal them.

Though the war and its severe economic hardships have made the Sandinistas unpopular, Ort^a is so encouraged by the bickering among his foes that he offered last week to hold national elections earlier than 1990, when they are scheduled.

If the cease-fire talks reach an impasse, the Contras military gains of the past year will mean lit ih the way of leverage as long as the prospects for con-tlnuied U.S. aid remain uncertain.

We are fragile because we depend so much on the United States, said Alfonso Robek), a Cimtra leader in Costa Rka. Time is against us. We have cMily enough munitions for a few more months. Our pipeline is drying out.

Without U.S. aid, Sandinista officials say, the insurgency would disappear. Rebel leaders contend that some troops could survive inside the country and spoil hopes for peace and economic recovery. But this would not be enough, they admit, to force government concessions.

For the Contras to stand a better chance of new military aid. Cardinal Obando would have to pin full blame on the Sandinistas for stalling or blocking a ceasefire agreement, and his judgment would have to be seconded by President Oscar Arias Sanchez of C(ta Rica, the Nobel Prize-winning author of the peace accord.

While both men are adversaries of the Sandinistas, each has a personal stake in achieving peace and would be inclined to give the talks more time before calling them a failure. Arias has proposed punishing any intransigence by Managua with economic sanctions rather than military force.

The Contras plan to focus their lobbying on the four Central American presidents who will meet with Ortega in January to judge compliance with the accord.

So far. Nicaragua has balked at two major steps of the agreement - granting amnesty to political prisoners and lifting a state of emergency until other nations stop aiding the rebels. Despite a requirement of unfettered press freedom, Ortega has refused to let an opposition group run a television station.

But he has made concessions urged on him by visiting U.S. congressmen, notably allowing the opposition newspaper La Prensa to reopen and agreeing to the indirect talks with Contra leaders, liObbying directly against Contra aid, Ortega went to Washington to announce his cease fire proiKisal He consulted House Sjx'aker Jim Wright, who was shown the plan in advance. In doing so, Ortega portrayed himself as a statesman interested in peace and optm to compromise.

The (ontras countered by trying to send two exiled leaders to Managua last Tuesday to make their truce proposal. In barring the trip, Ortega ooked inflexible.

But the incident also underlined the relx*l leaders weakness in the propaganda war. After a day of open confusion about how to react, they finally coaxed the papal envoy to Costa Rica to interrupt his vacation and fly their truce offer to Managua.