A Time of Trials for Foreign Policy

By KURT ANDERSEN

The Beirut bombing instantly tests Reagan's new NSC adviser

The President could not have had a more appropriate adviser at his side as the National Security Council met Sunday to assess the impact of the attack on the Marines in Lebanon. Robert ("Bud") McFarlane, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, knew the scene of the carnage ultimately. For three months he had shuttled around the Middle East as the President's special envoy, trying to make sense of the region's complex web of rivalries and hatreds. No problem had preoccupied him as much as Lebanon; he had played a key role in arranging the latest ceasefire.

But McFarlane was at the White House on Sunday not just for his fresh Middle East expertise. By coincidence, he had been named six days earlier to replace William Clark as Reagan's National Security Adviser, potentially the second most powerful job in the White House. Just the week the President's dispatch of Clark to the Interior Department had utterly rattled Washington. In naming McFarlane to be his principal in-house foreign policy adviser, however, the President followed a predictable course. Standing by as Reagan sang his praises ("a treasure of experience and talent"), McFarlane then stepped toward the TV lights to solicit reporters' questions, some-thing his predecessor never dared to do. He said, characteristically, that as National Security Adviser he would be an information "coordinator" rather than a policy "advocate."

McFarlane took charge right away.

At 8 on the morning after his appointment, McFarlane was at a meeting of the senior White House staff -- for all of Clark's team-player reputation, he attended the staff conferences desultorily --then whisked into the Oval Office to give the President his regular defense-and-diplomacy briefing. That afternoon, he moderated an hourlong National Security Council meeting on Middle East policy.

The impression was one of smooth ness, earnest professionalism, clarity of purpose. Would that U.S. foreign policy were nearly so confident and focused. In fact, the politicking that led to McFarlane's appointment made it clear that the officials who shape foreign policy are divided by chronic personal and ideological disputes. Those rifts have reappeared, diverting the principals' energies at a particularly volatile, complicated moment for U.S. interests abroad. Lebanon is threatening to explode again in the wake of the devastating attack on U.S. Marines. Combat is also intensifying in Central America, drawing the U.S. more deeply into local conflicts. A coup in Grenada by the radical left resulted in a U.S. fleet's being moved toward that Caribbean island last week, to be ready to protect U.S. citizens there. All the while, relations with the Soviet Union remain edgy: the moment of truth in arms control is only weeks away, with the Soviets threatening to retaliate in kind when NATO begins deploying medium-range missiles, and to walk out of arms negotiations. A quarter of the NATO cruise missiles are to be based in Sicily, and after Reagan's two-hour White House talk last week with Italy's Socialist Prime Minister, Bettino Craxi, both men said they remained committed to installing the first missiles before Christmas.

Obviously, the Administration needs some precise, sophisticated policy teamwork right away. During the two days that the National Security Adviser job was nominally open, however, the Administration's main foreign policy players were more a fractious group of political competitors than a team. United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick was led to believe that she had a shot at becoming National Security Adviser, and wound up feeling terribly ill used, even double-crossed (see following story). If she had got the critical appointment, TIME has learned, Secretary of State George Shultz would have been inclined to quit, and he made sure the White House knew it.

The triumph of the White House "pragmatists" in getting the NSC post for McFarlane rather than Kirkpatrick staggered the Republican right. Edwin Feulner, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, gave up all hope of pushing policy rightward. Said he: "This is the ball game." Yet there are innings left, and it must be remembered that the teams on the Reagan Administration field, after all, are the Conservatives and the Ultra-Conservatives. McFarlane is no dove. The career military man wrote the exceptionally hard-line defense planks of the 1980 G.O.P. party platform.

Moreover, the President and his aides were trying to counter the suspicion that they plan shifts in foreign policy, which under Reagan has lurched right and left, forward and back. The upcoming campaign should redouble the Administration's desire for quiet continuity. At his press conference last week, the first since July, Reagan was asked mainly about foreign policy. "We're going to keep on doing what we have been doing," he said to a question about Lebanon. He seemed even more bent on staying the course, tricky as it is, in Central America. Said a Reagan aide: "The basic policies are set."

In the Middle East, of course, the basic policies are supporting Israel, nurturing a tenuous Lebanese reconciliation and checking the ambitions of Soviet-armed Syria. The last two goals directly involve the presence of the 1,600 Marines on "peacekeeping" duty around Beirut International Airport.

Yet it is in the Middle East that the U.S.'s goals may be most realistic and its approach most flexible. Indeed, the NSC meeting on McFarlane's first full day on the job was part of an overall review of the Administration's Middle East policy, "a mind-stretching set of discussions," in the words of one White House aide. "There were no decisions," said another. "There weren't even options on the table."

But options, none attractive, are under discussion. Even before Sunday's carnage in Beirut, there were indications that Reagan may soon permit the Marines to leave their bunkers to root out the snipers firing on them. More generally, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and others are urging some conciliation toward Syria, while a group in the State Department wants Israeli troops back on the Lebanese front lines. What happens if Iran, in its war against Iraq, carries out its threat to block the Strait of Hormuz, the oil shipping lane to the Persian Gulf? The West, Reagan said last week, would not allow it.

And on another part of the Middle East chessboard, the Administration was forging ahead with its $220 million plan to equip two Jordanian army brigades as a "mobile strike force," despite Israeli and congressional complaints. Indeed, last week it was disclosed that U.S. Special Forces have been secretly training the strike force since 1981. One motive for the military largesse is to lure Jordan into the Middle East peace process.

That process is a fitful one. The scheduled "national reconciliation" talks between the Lebanese government and factional leaders, set to begin last Thursday at the Beirut airport, were canceled, then tentatively rescheduled for this week in Geneva -- a considerably more secure site, as Sunday's bombings grimly confirmed. The four-week-old truce in Lebanon seemed to be ever more fragile, as each army and armed gang used the respite to rebuild spent arsenals. Last week the Administration was becoming convinced that Syria has decided its best bet for preserving its leverage over the country is to wait for Marine casualties to mount and the U.S. to pull out. "The Syrians are dragging their feet," Reagan said at his midweek press conference. "If they're doing it with the idea of wearing me down, they're going to be dis appointed." He had idea, of course, just how much U.S. patience would be tested in the days.

ahead.

In Central America at least, U.S. troops are not taking casualties. But the proximity of El Salvador and Nicaragua and the assertiveness of U.S.

actions there make the stakes stakes high. There is no pretense of neutral peace keeping, and domestic op position to policy in the isthmus is specific persistent. "I believe there is a sharp difference between what the Administration is doing in Lebanon and what it is trying to do in Nicaragua," pronounced House Speaker Tip O'Neill. "In Lebanon, it is supporting a government. In Nicaragua, it is trying to overthrow one. The United States should not be engaged militarily in trying to overthrow other governments."

A majority of his colleagues evidently agree. Last week the House, voting 227 to 194, passed an amendment to the intelligence bill that would prohibit further funding of the disparate terrorist groups fighting against Nicaragua's Marxist-led Sandinista government. The Administration wanted $50 million for the several small armies based in border areas of Honduras and Costa Rica. In a letter to O'Neill, Secretary Shultz pleaded for continued funding, arguing that regular attacks by the U.S.-backed contra guerrillas in Nicaragua provide essential pressure on the Sandinistas to cut back their support of Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador.

The contras admit they seek the overthrow of the Sandinistas, but the Reagan Administration still claims that the CIA aid is intended only to distract the Nicaraguans from aiding the Salvadoran insurgents. The amendment passed by the House last week provides $50 million strictly for such arms interdiction by "friendly" Central American countries.

There is some muted opposition within the Administration to underwriting the ultimately uncontrollable contra forces. Assistant Secretary of State Langhorne A. Motley, who just returned from talks with the Sandinista leaders, said that aiding the contras "may be counterproductive." But Reagan defended the "covert" military aid last week. "I do believe in the right of a country," Reagan said, "when it believes that its interests are best served, to practice covert activity." Critics find that principle ironic, if not hypocritical, since it would mean that Nicaragua has a national right to continue its covert aid to rebels in El Salvador.

Nevertheless, the G.O.P.-controlled Senate is expected to approve funds for the contras in its intelligence budget bill, after which the House and Senate will try to reach an agreement in conference committee. But any compromise will be unusually difficult, because the issue seems an all-or-nothing question; simply reducing the funds would dissatisfy everyone. Adolfo Calero, the new, CIA-sponsored head of the 10,000-man Nicaraguan Democratic Force (F.D.N.), was in Washington last week lobbying for more contra money, but said haughtily that a congressional cutoff would not matter: he claimed that covert U.S. aid, somehow "laundered," would continue regardless.

The contras in the bush are apparently now operating under more CIA coordination than ever. In an interview with TIME in Managua last week, Roberto

Amador Narvaez, the deputy commander of the F.D.N. air force who was captured three weeks ago, claimed that a middle-aged former Green Beret runs the contra air operations from Honduras. During the past two weeks, with explicit CIA encouragement, the guerrillas made their most spectacular attacks so far, destroying three important oil-port facilities and at least 3.4 million gallons of vital fuel. Last week in the mountain town of Pantasma, an attacking force of 250 F.D.N. fighters killed 46 police and local militia, and pillaged agricultural cooperatives, sawmills, grocery stores, homes and a bank.

The Sandinistas appear shaken. The coming weeks, before the war grows still bigger and bloodier, may be the optimal time for the U.S. to begin serious negotiations with Nicaragua. Last week, in fact, Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann personally delivered a set of four new, very specific draft agreements to the State Department. Among other proposals, Nicaragua offered to stop supporting Salvadoran guerrillas and to forbid any Cuban or Soviet military bases on its soil. In return, the U.S. would have to end its support of the contra guerrillas and shut down its training facilities in Honduras and El Salvador. The U.S. scorned the proposals, but officials privately sounded hopeful.

In January, the Henry Kissinger-led commission on Central America, which is just back from a one-country-a-day tour of the region, will give its recommendations to the President. The commission's stop in El Salvador may have been the most significant: leaving his talks with the Americans, Roberto d'Aubuisson, the right-wing President of the Constituent Assembly, freely acknowledged that right-wing death squads, now resurgent and responsible for at least 100 killings a week, are often commanded by Salvadoran government soldiers. Back in Washington at week's end,

Kissinger and company met with Calero and with Guillermo Ungo, the political leader of El Salvador's rebel coalition.

The bipartisan Kissinger group, the White House hopes, will pound out a working consensus on Central American policy. But optimism is not rampant. Kis singer said that close up, the situation looked "far graver than most of us had expected." Democratic Representative Michael Barnes traveled with the commission. "I'm very depressed," he said, because events "seem headed almost in exorably toward a regional war."

The Administration's steely Latin policy has primarily been the doing of Clark and Kirkpatrick. Now the clout of both is diminished. No liberal conspiracy has subverted President Reagan, but the Administration's moderates have indeed moved toward control of foreign policymaking. True, Weinberger, an unswerving hawk and Reagan intimate, remains feisty and powerful. But Clark will not be lumbering into the Oval Office every day, instinctively pushing Cap's and Kirkpatrick's schemes. The flow of ideas into the White House under McFarlane, a cool technocrat, will surely be more orderly, and perhaps more balanced.

The conventional wisdom holds that Shultz is the bureaucratic winner. Up to now, he has been reluctant to enter the political fray, seldom advocating tough policy positions within the Administration. He has been a reassuring gray eminence, radiating sobriety and good sense. Now the Secretary of State has no rival stationed at the White House whom he has to outmaneuver. With U.S. entanglements around the world unusually complex and dangerous, it is a good time for George Shultz to step out front -- and maybe even make some waves .

-- By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Douglas Brew and Gregory H. Wierzynski/ Washington

With reporting by Douglas Brew; Gregory H. Wierzynski This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.