‘Too Many Contras’

If your editorial writers and those of Pravda were to change places, few would notice the difference. A case in point is your editorial (July 8), “Too Many Contras.” It perversely distorts reality as any propaganda churned out in Moscow.

As foreign policy consultant to Lew Lehrman’s Citizens for America, I was the actual organizer of the “conclave of anti-communist guerrillas” held last month in Liberated Angola to which your editorial referred.

This historic meeting, which I attended, formed an alliance--the Democratic International--between people fighting for their freedom from Soviet imperialism in six Soviet colonies on three continents; the contras in Nicaragua, UNITA in Angola, the Moujahedeen in Afghanistan, and resistance groups in Cambodia, Laos and Mozambique. (I just returned a few days ago from rebel-held territory in Mozambique where the guerrillas’ leader Afonso Dhlakama told me how excited he was over the potential of this new alliance).

These freedom fighters represent the most significant geopolitical development of our times: that just as the Third World rejected Western imperialism in the 1950s and ‘60s, so it is rejecting Soviet imperialism in the 1980s. The emergence of armed democratic insurgencies throughout the Soviet Empire signifies the end of the expansion of Soviet imperialism and the start of its contraction. For the first successful overthrow of a Soviet puppet regime--and this will happen within the next 18 months in either Mozambique, Angola or Nicaragua--will precipitate a “reverse domino effect,” a toppling of Soviet dominoes.

For some bizarre reason, this thrilling prospect--and the courage President Reagan has shown in assisting it--frightens and angers your editorial writers. They blind themselves to the fact that what inspires hundreds of thousands of men and women around the world to take up arms against Marxist fascism and Soviet tyranny are our American ideals of free-market democracy and individual liberty. Instead, with petulant imbecility, they think it is all some kind of CIA plot.

As Jonas Savimbi, leader of 50,000 UNITA guerrillas in Angola, told me: “It is the Third World that has to give the West the courage to oppose the Soviet Union and stand up for its ideals, not the other way around--to provide a cure for what Solzhenitsyn calls “the Western disease.” No, the problem is not too many contras. The problem is too many squishy liberals on your editorial staff.

JACK WHEELER

Malibu