COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Issues Lacking, We Get a Dusty KGB Fantasy : Are we to believe that Clinton, a Cold Warrior himself, clinked vodka glasses with Andropov?

Clanking its chains, the skeleton of the Cold War has now creaked from the tomb to confront Bill Clinton with the big question: Were you working for the Russians?

George Bush, picking up the baton from Orange County’s Rep. Bob Dornan, chose CNN’s Larry King show to ask that Clinton tell us what exactly he was up to in Moscow in 1969.

Clinton says he was touring Europe as part of the terms of his Rhodes scholarship and spent a week in the Soviet Union.

Dornan and now the President both admit they have nothing to fuel their suspicions, but insist that Clinton “level” with the American people and provide proof that he wasn’t, then or ever, Moscow’s man, and didn’t spend New Year’s Eve clinking vodka glasses with KGB head Yuri Andropov, getting his secret orders.

All we need now is some retired KGB colonel, hyping his memoirs, to hint that yes, back in 1969 Yuri did have a meeting with Bill Clinton and gave him the agenda: Destroy America from within. Run for President.

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for Clinton as he faces these silly charges. He’s played serious Cold War hardball himself.

Clinton has spent a fair portion of this campaign saying that it’s Bush who was Moscow’s man. He has charged the President with being slow to abandon his ties to Mikhail Gorbachev, and slow to see Boris Yeltsin as the man to support in breaking up the Soviet Union.

And during the primary season, Clinton went to Miami’s Little Havana to issue a savage denunciation of Fidel Castro and announce his support for a congressional bill--Graham-Torricelli--promoted by Cuban exiles and designed to tighten the trade embargo against Cuba.

At that point the Administration wasn’t supporting the bill, rightly reckoning that it flouted trade treaties. But Bush, keen to show he wasn’t Fidel’s man, changed his line. The bill cleared the House last week.

Elsewhere, too, the Cold War is alive and well. Though they may differ about the war, Bush and Clinton are both adamant about maintaining the embargo against Vietnam, thus making it clear that in no way can they be accused, almost two decades after the war came to an end, of being the creatures of Ho Chi Minh’s heirs.

Both Bush and Clinton keep telling us that the Cold War is over. Bush says that he ended it. Clinton says that he knows what to do next. But both rush onto the old, familiar turf at every opportunity.

Of the pair of them, Bush is clearly the more desperate. Everything else is failing. “Family values” bombed; no one even bothered to listen to his economic plan. All he has left is the demonology of Bob Dornan: a great arc of treachery stretching from the Rosenbergs to Bill Clinton.

The American people don’t seem particularly exercised about Clinton’s opposition to the war in Vietnam. Polls are just snapshots taken in poor light, but one conducted by Gallup every four years for the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations shows that over the last 12 years a majority of Americans--71% in 1990--agreed, most of them strongly, with the statement that the war was “more than a mistake; it was fundamentally wrong and immoral.”

Contrast the hubbub about Vietnam and Moscow with the near absence of debate on an issue that legitimately raises questions of loyalty to national interests.

Just before he asked Clinton to level with the American people about his trip, Bush initialed the free trade agreement that his Administration has negotiated with Canada and Mexico. He challenged Clinton to cut the waffle and to support the trade pact without reservation. A few days earlier, Clinton had finally made an explicit statement of support for the agreement. He added that as President he would reserve the right to work with Congress to amend it, which most observers take as flimflam designed to placate labor.

And so, with scarcely a whimper, the trade issue will vanish from campaign debate, with the two major candidates in essential agreement with each other.

Yet the treaty certainly stabs millions of Americans in the back. It will increase unemployment, hasten job flight, degrade environmental standards. On the other side of the border, it will also ultimately increase unemployment as millions of Mexican peasants are forced off the land by large-scale capital-intensive farming on the U.S. model, and by imports of cheap corn from the north. It’s a class issue. Businesses on both sides of the border will profit, and the blue-collar folk will suffer.

Both Bush and Clinton are, as usual, on the side of business. So we have no real debate and Bob Dornan fills the vacuum.