COLUMN LEFT : Scared by Reds, Mugged by Thugs : The bogyman of international communism has nothing on the super-scoundrel.

Manuel Noriega. Moammar Kadafi. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Nicolae Ceaucescu.

What do they have in common? Heads of state who are murderers, fanatics, gangsters.

In one sense, there is nothing new in this. The history of mankind is spattered with criminal despots--from Genghis Khan to all kinds of tinhorn tyrants in the tropics.

But in another sense there is something new, and ominous. Two, perhaps three, generations of Americans have grown up being told by our government that our country was threatened by international communism. That is what national security was all about. In the service of that supreme cause, Presidents of the United States would employ gangsters. John Kennedy had Mafia characters hired to assassinate Fidel Castro. Noriega was on the payroll of the CIA, in the service of our national security. To support so-called freedom fighters against international communism in Nicaragua, our present President, as well as Oliver North (whom President Reagan called a national hero), made deals with Noriega. On one well-photographed occasion, Richard M. Nixon held the hand of Ceaucescu as they were dancing, ring-around-the-rosy, the Romanian hora in the main square of Bucharest.

One of the more disturbing revelations of Ronald Reagan’s view of the world came in 1982. A gang of Argentine admirals and generals invaded the Falkland Islands. When the news arrived at the White House, the President mused in public: “Perhaps the Soviets are behind it.” Jeane Kirkpatrick, greatly admired by Reagan, liked the Argentines. That was in line with her argument that the United States, fighting Soviet communism, should have no compunction about allying itself with non-communist dictators. Eventually Reagan was advised to give some assistance to the British in the Falklands affair, and eventually he gave up his idea of the Soviet Union as the evil empire. But there are worrisome portents here.

Our commentators are still inclined to call the late Ceaucescu a Stalinist. That is very far from the truth. It was because of Ceaucescu’s (rhetorical) independence from the Soviet Union that Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, elected to cosset him. In reality, Ceaucescu was an Eastern despot--as indeed was Mao Zedong, whom Nixon and Kissinger embraced and feted, thinking that they were playing the China card against Moscow--a very shortsighted inclination that our present President shares.

The worst humiliations that the United States has suffered in recent years were not inflicted by communists. They were inflicted by fanatics in Iran, Beirut, Panama. Yet there was a time--the 1950s (which some historians now wrongly declare to have been a halcyon decade)--when many Americans were made to believe that our national security was principally threatened by internal subversion, by domestic agents of international communism. That Red Scare eventually faded; international communism finally revealed itself to have been a mirage. Since the 1950s, the principal threat to the lives of most Americans has been a rising tide of criminality--muggers and robbers and drugged criminals.

It is in the nature of an extreme nationalist to have no reluctance to employ criminal methods for his purposes, just as it is in the nature of criminals to wrap themselves in their national flag. We are still faced with the worldwide phenomenon of despotic nationalism, for it is nationalism that Noriega, Khomeini, Kadafi, Ceaucescu (and, among many others, the Chinese despots and the Argentines) have in common.

We ourselves are not immune to such temptations. There is not only the instance of Col. Oliver L. North; not only the dealings of our Presidents with criminal despots abroad. Among other things there was the alliance of some of our so-called “conservative” Presidents with the most corrupt of our labor unions, the Teamsters. We have seen labor barons and other criminals ever ready to stand up for the flag and, with tears in their eyes, sing the “Star-Spangled Banner” from their prime seats in a stadium before a (perhaps fixed) prizefight or other sporting event.

“Sentimentality,” said Oscar Wilde, “is the bank holiday of cynicism.” “Patriotism,” said Dr. Johnson, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Superpatriotism is the first refuge of super-scoundrels.