COLUMN RIGHT/ MORTON M. KONDRACKE : A Reagan Fan Heats Up the Clinton Camp : Joshua Muravchik, a hawk on communism, may get State’s human-rights portfolio.

The Cold War is over, even within the Democratic Party, but one of its last bloody skirmishes is being fought over the job of assistant secretary of state for human rights in the Clinton Administration. The conflict will force Bill Clinton to choose whether and how to reward neoconservative Reagan Democrats who supported his campaign.

The neocon candidate for the human-rights job is Joshua Muravchik, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who spent the Cold War years writing books and articles excoriating liberals and leftists who opposed U.S. intervention against communism. Muravchik has made peace with some former foes now in the Clinton camp, but others on the left are conducting a slashing campaign against him. They include the editors of the Nation magazine and, more important, key figures in the traditional human-rights groups, such as Human Rights Watch and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. Aryeh Neier, director of Human Rights Watch, told David Twersky of the Jewish newspaper the Forward that Muravchik is a “second-rate polemicist” lacking the “high moral stature” required for the job.

While Muravchik surely has been a polemicist, history has generally borne out his argument that the conflict between democracy and communism was a struggle of good versus evil, and that the right side won. Among his detractors, the Nation often was an apologist for communist regimes and resistance movements; Neier often found the United States and U.S.-backed regimes as guilty of human-rights abuses as communist regimes.

On the most divisive issue splitting Democrats in recent years, Central America, Muravchik favored aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and the government of El Salvador while his foes militantly opposed aid to both. In free elections, the people of both Nicaragua and El Salvador voted in pro-U.S. regimes, vindicating the fundamental neocon position.

In the Clinton camp, the wounds of the Cold War have largely healed. But, in opposing Muravchik, Neier has opened up a potential Clinton Administration foreign-policy dispute, by attacking the neocon idea that advancing political democracy--as opposed to individual human rights--should be a key purpose of American foreign policy.

Muravchik wrote a book, “The Uncertain Crusade,” criticizing the tendency of Jimmy Carter’s Administration--and liberals in general--to undermine pro-U.S. regimes with human-rights pressure and to allow anti-American dictators to come to power (as in Iran and Nicaragua) without placing similar pressure on communist regimes. During the Reagan era, Muravchik and other neocons supported the Republican alternative to human rights--democracy-building--which Neier now asserts has led to “bloodshed, xenophobia and anti-Semitism” in parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Clinton clearly has come down on the neocon side of this dispute, stating in his major foreign-policy speech of the campaign, on Oct. 1 in Milwaukee, that democracy-building is “at . . . the center of my vision for our country.” Muravchik helped draft that speech, along with fellow neocon Penn Kemble of Freedom House and Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute. Kemble, now Clinton’s transition director for the U.S. Information Agency, is close to former Carter Administration officials Sandy Berger and Tony Lake, Clinton’s top foreign-policy coordinators during the campaign. The Nation has attacked Kemble, too.

With the Cold War over, Muravchik and the Carterites have come to agree with the obvious proposition that both democracy-building and promotion of individual rights should be priorities for the United States.

In a new introduction to “The Uncertain Crusade,” in fact, Muravchik gives Carter credit for paving the way toward adopting an idealistic foreign policy, which Reagan followed up on.

Muravchik now has it right in perceiving that the next great intellectual struggle over foreign policy will come between “idealists” who believe that America should intervene in places like Yugoslavia and Somalia, and “realists” who want to avoid trouble and tend to America’s domestic business.

In a compelling article in the November issue of Commentary, Muravchik make the case for aid to Bosnia and for “idealism,” arguing that “the only hope for world order lies in American assertiveness.” On crucial issue after crucial issue, Muravchik has been right over the years. He ought to get some job in the Clinton Administration--if not the human-rights post, then a better one.