By George Gedda. Mr. Gedda, a correspondent with the Associated Press in Washington, is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio and the Associated Press Radio Network. He has visited Cuba 20 times and, most recently, traveled to Latin America with President Bush in December.

Almost unnoticed during the confrontation in the Persian Gulf was the effort by Congress to strip away one of those Cold War legacies that produced many a memorable hawk-dove clash during the previous decade. After a five-year run, the Reagan Doctrine appears headed for oblivion. President Bush is doing his best to keep the cause alive, albeit under changed circumstances, but in vote after vote last fall, Congress left the clear impression that they do not believe it makes sense to lavish aid on anti-Communist groups when there is nothing left of the Soviet bloc.

The public record about the activities carried out under the Reagan Doctrine--which supports rebel groups against leftist governments--is fairly skimpy. One reason is that U.S. funding for the rebel groups, with the exception of the Nicaraguan Contras, has been carried out covertly. The administration has made its wishes known to the congressional intelligence committees, which generally have gone along with the administration's funding requests. That changed, however, this past fall with the passage of the Senate Intelligence Authorization Bill. None of these groups escaped unscathed. All continue to receive U.S. assistance, but not on the scale or under the conditions the administration wanted.

Battle-scarred proxies

Even though the Cold War is widely proclaimed to have been relegated to history's dustbin, the leftovers can still be found in the wretched battlefields of Afghanistan, Angola, and Cambodia. Nicaragua was such a battlefield until recently.

In each country, rival armies fight on, using superpower weaponry. Now that civility has become a hallmark of the Moscow-Washington connection, the struggles spawned by their prior hostility seem to carry less weight than before. In geostrategic terms, does it really matter whether Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA allies in Angola prevail over Jose Eduardo Santos and his MPLA cohorts? If the United States was troubled by Soviet penetration of southern Africa beforehand, is it rational for Washington to continue propping up UNITA, when the Soviets have given up on expansionism?

The administration agrees that the Soviets have become almost irrelevant. The focus now, it says, should be on devising a way to achieve a peaceful settlement in those countries. Only through continued U.S. aid will the leftist governments opposed by the U.S.-backed insurgents have the incentive to negotiate peace. Peter Rodman, a former National Security Council aide, says U.S. support should continue. "Our strategy ought to be to complete the process," Rodman says. "Don't leave them [the rebel groups] in the lurch. The next phase is political accommodation. It makes no sense to penalize our side."

Representative Henry Hyde (R-IL) believes Congress is too eager to shelve the Reagan Doctrine. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev may have won the Nobel Peace Prize, Hyde says, "but he is still pouring $650 million into Angola, and Soviet advisers are still very active there." (Recent official estimates indicate that Soviet military aid to Angola dropped from about $1.4 billion in 1988 to between $400 and $500 million in 1990.) In the same vein, the administration also points out that despite the Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, completed in February 1989, there has been no letup in Soviet aid for the Afghan regime--an estimated $250 million a month since then, according to official U.S. estimates. Because of the continued Soviet military role, the Bush Administration has continued to seek funding for the Afghan Mujahedeen.

But Representative Dante Fascell (D-FL), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, says it is logical for the United States to begin loosening its ties to the anti-Communist insurgencies. "The Soviets have cut back on funding of their `clients' around the world, and we are responding accordingly," he says. "The Soviets are out of Afghanistan, the Contras won in Nicaragua, and peace talks are in progress in Angola." Fascell might also have pointed out that there have been major strides toward a peace settlement in Cambodia. Under the plan, approved by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council last November, the United Nations would administer Cambodia during an interim period leading to free elections. It also calls for a ceasefire and the disarming of all parties to the conflict.

The bill containing funding for the "freedom fighters" in the remaining Reagan Doctrine countries, approved last fall by the Congress:

-- Would halt, among other restrictions, $60 million in U.S. aid to Angola's UNITA rebels, if the leftist government agrees to a free election within a reasonable timetable, and the Soviets halt weapons shipments to the Angola armed forces. The two sides have had several rounds of peace talks in Portugal, and some are optimistic a settlement is within reach. One sign of the more conciliatory mood was an unprecedented meeting in Washington in December between former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and Savimbi, the UNITA leader.

-- Suspends a $13 million covert aid program to anti-Communist rebels in Cambodia, a move that resulted partly from congressional concern that some of the money may have been reaching the infamous Khmer Rouge rebels. The covert aid program has been replaced by a humanitarian program. Sensing widespread hostility to his policy, Secretary of State James A. Baker III has been disassociating the United States from the rebel coalition and encouraging a larger Vietnamese role in the negotiating process. In effect, with the Soviets no longer considered a menace in Southeast Asia, Baker sees Vietnam as less of an evil than the Khmer Rouge.

-- Cuts back aid to the Afghan resistance to $250 million, $50 million less than the administration had requested. Moscow and Washington have been trying without much success to promote a settlement. They have differing opinions as to the proper role for Afghan President Najibullah in a transition process.

Bush vetoed the legislation because of provisions that he said put excessive restrictions on the administration's ability to carry out covert operations. But through a bit of budgetary sleight-of-hand, the administration, over some congressional objections, has found a backroom agreement that will keep money flowing to the rebel groups.

Ragged remains

Congress' eagerness to give the administration less than it wanted in each case may have been influenced by the lesson of Nicaragua. In February 1988, Congress put an end once and for all to military aid to the Contra rebels--and the eventual outcome caught everyone by surprise. Precisely two years after Congress axed the Contras, Nicaragua's voters axed the Sandinistas, achieving at the ballot box what years of Reagan Doctrine aid could not do. Supporters of Contra aid insist that the Sandinistas never would have agreed to free and fair elections, were it not for the threat posed to the regime by the insurgency. The Sandinistas pledged a fair election process in August 1987, precisely eight months after a $100 million allocation for the rebels began flowing. It was the last military aid the Contras ever received and, as it turned out, the last one they needed.

An additional remnant of the Cold War is the continuing struggle in El Salvador, where, instead of backing an anti-Communist insurgency, the United States has been supporting a conservative government against a Cuban-backed rebel movement. As such, El Salvador is not a Reagan Doctrine country, but the policy there might be described as a first cousin of that doctrine. The rationale for U.S. involvement there was the same as it was elsewhere: stop the Soviets.

To some, that argument has been wearing thin lately, particularly since the Soviets have been calling for a negotiated settlement in the 10-year-old conflict in El Salvador. But countering administration insistence on continued full backing for the Salvadoran government, the Congress slashed an $85 million military aid proposal in half and threatened to cancel the program altogether if the Salvadoran government refuses to negotiate in good faith a peace settlement with the FMLN rebels. The Salvadoran government squandered much of its good will by leaving the impression that it had little interest in bringing to justice the killers of six Jesuit priests in November 1989.

As many as 50,000 civilians have been the victims of politically motivated killings carried out by either the Salvadoran military/security forces or by death squads linked to the military. Some in Congress think it appalling that the United States be identified with such brutality. The administration, of course, sees its Salvador policy not so much as supporting the Salvadoran government but rather as opposing an FMLN takeover. The fear is that the brutality of the government would seem tame next to the FMLN's if the latter ever obtained power.

In January, President Bush decided to reinstate to the Salvadoran military the $42.5 million that Congress had cut last fall. The legislation gave Bush that authority in the event the FMLN stepped up military activities and targeted non-combatants, and the president clearly believed the rebels had exceeded those limits.

Backing the rebels

The Reagan Doctrine put a new twist on decades of U.S. opposition to Communist insurgent movements. During the 1960s and 1970s, virtually the only guerrilla fighters were those operating in non-Communist countries, and the United States consistently opposed these movements, supporting the established governments, which were often rightist military dictatorships. Reagan delighted conservatives when he instead decided to support "freedom fighters" opposed to leftist governments, starting with Nicaragua in 1981. (Some of his aides thought he had gone too far when he called the Nicaraguan Contras "the moral equivalents of the founding fathers." That phrase was slipped into a Reagan speech, unbeknownst to the State Department, by the top aide for Latin America at the National Security Council, Constantine Menges. State was outraged, sensing that the phrasing was excessive.)

Reagan appears to have stumbled into the doctrine that bears his name. The doctrine was never enunciated in any Reagan speech. References to it appear to trace back to the period in 1986 when aid to the Contra rebels reached a zenith and covert funding for the UNITA insurgents began. (Aid to the Afghan rebels dates back to the Carter years.)

Conservatives liked the overall policy of supporting anti-Communist rebels, because it constituted an American answer to the Brezhnev Doctrine, which, in effect, asserted that once a country had become Communist, there was no turning back. Burton Yale Pines, a vice president of the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, believes the Reagan Doctrine was misguided to begin with, because some of the groups receiving U.S. support were actually undemocratic, having sprung from authoritarian traditions. Beyond that, he says the Reagan Administration consistently oversold the dangers to the United States of leftist rule, and it also involved Washington in regions where no vital U.S. interests were at stake.

Defenders of the policy reply that the Reagan Doctrine raised the costs to the Soviets of maintaining their empire and hastened the Soviet decision to curtail its overseas ambitions.

One major plus resulting form the demise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua is that it has given a shot in the arm to U.S. relations with the rest of Latin America. The Latins were never enthusiastic about U.S. support for the Contras, and the Reagan Administration efforts to win them over were almost uniformly futile. The Latins are delighted that when American emissaries come to talk to them now, the subject matter consists of trade expansion and debt relief instead of the need to support the Contras. President Bush's December visit to South America focused on economic issues, and it was probably one of the most successful journeys to Latin America ever undertaken by an American president. One reason was the relative absence of divisive political issues, such as the Contras.

Human costs

How will history judge the Reagan Doctrine? Were these U.S. interventions based on legal, political, and strategic considerations? Did the Reagan Doctrine contribute to Soviet retrenchment, or would that have happened without it?

It will take time before history passes judgment on these questions, but on one point there is little room for debate: the human cost in the countries where the Reagan Doctrine has been applied has been very great. A recently released book published by the Overseas Development Council and titled After the Wars puts the combined death toll from the wars in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, and Cambodia at 1.16 million. More than 6.7 million have been forced to flee to other countries. The principal author of the book, Anthony Lake, says all these conflicts have indigenous roots, but that the superpowers have done much to expand and intensify them by injecting ideological and strategic considerations.

The tragedy now is that the fighting goes on even though the ideological rationale, so far as the superpowers are concerned, has long since disappeared. The main objective should be to end these conflicts as quickly as possible, and Congress should be encouraged to continue its policy of pushing the administration as far in that direction as possible.