Mideast Trip Is Grounded by Cynicism

This is just the sort of thing that drives voters mad. Here is Congress on the fiscal warpath, cutting off aid to welfare moms, carving into school lunches and threatening to leave Big Bird and Barney with nary a federal dime, all in the name of whittling down a $176-billion deficit.

Then a Republican senator announces a 12-day springtime tour of the Middle East, including stops at Egyptian ruins, a stay at the fabulous Cataract Hotel in Aswan and time to rest up at a Red Sea resort, all of it at taxpayer expense, spouses included.

Among the Californians signing up for the ride were Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her husband, Richard Blum--who, to their everlasting credit, vowed to pay their own way--and Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and his wife, Janis, who did not.

The senator orchestrating the tour--Hank Brown, Republican from Colorado and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that oversees Mideast affairs--asserts that it is anything but a frivolous excursion. He says members of the delegation will work like little drones and that their very presence will “send an important signal to the region of the depth of congressional support for the success of the Middle East peace process.”

But a detailed account of the trip that was scheduled to leave Saturday on a military transport plane leads one to wonder if this crowd couldn’t have made do with less than the following: depart Edwards Air Force Base for enticing Morocco, followed by a three-day stop in Israel (where long and grueling business days were planned), then onto Egypt for a stay at the Cataract in Aswan, (described by one travel guide as a “superior first-class complex . . . on a hill overlooking the Nile.”) After tours of the Abu Simbel ruins, it’s down to Cairo to take in the museum before heading off to a relaxing Red Sea resort. Then off to the ancient city of Petra in Jordan, finally winding up in Damascus, Syria, with an optional side trip to the Golan Heights.

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Washington Post columnist Al Kamen got wind of the itinerary and went on a warpath of his own, summing up this “taxpayer-paid jaunt” as “minimal business, lots of great shopping, spectacular sightseeing and fine accommodations.” A couple of days later, the whole thing was scaled back to include fewer lawmakers and fewer stops, ostensibly because the military plane broke.

But the whispered reason was that too many people had signed up, many of them not even on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and the whole thing began to look unseemly lavish. As some taxpayer activists observed, in this day of telecommunications, it’s hard to justify a bunch of lawmakers hopping on a plane for Marrakesh, much less arm-in-arm with their better half.

Feinstein, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, has never visited an Arab country and could clearly benefit from a firsthand look at the region. Indeed, she spent much of Monday chatting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Washington about Mideast peace and the nuclear proliferation treaty. Anyway, she makes a habit of paying her own way. But all is now moot because she decided Thursday night to forget the whole thing.

Waxman is a prominent supporter of the Jewish state and founder of a program that brings Israeli and Arab scientists together to work out common problems between warring sides. So he was probably a good candidate. But Mrs. Waxman too? (Their daughter happens to live in Israel. Hmmmm.)

“If they didn’t allow spouses, nobody would go,” explained Waxman’s press secretary, Phil Schiliro. “(Congress has) been on this brutal schedule for 100 days, five days a week, often until 10 p.m. Many members, on the weekends, have to fly back to their districts. You get a recess and you want to learn more about what’s going on overseas. If you believe in family values, you are going to be inclined to want to go with your spouse.”

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Even the angriest watchdog groups acknowledge that the nation benefits by sending its lawmakers abroad. In this case, meetings were planned with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and possibly Syrian President Hafez Assad, central figures in the Mideast peace process. They might have examined the status of U.S. assistance programs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza.

But the body politic will be forever skeptical of such ventures, mostly because Congress has a large public image problem and is still paying for past sins.

“The public cynicism about Congress has been fueled by things like middle-of-the-night pay raises, scandalous pensions and abuse of free mailing privileges,” said Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union in Washington. “Just about anything else Congress does gets examined under a harsher light.”

And lately, Congress is awfully sensitive about how it looks to voters who made hay at the polls last November and will doubtlessly do so again in 1996 if some people don’t shape up, pronto.

Then again, maybe the airplane really did break.