LETTERS: AFGHAN LETTER WAS NO JOKE

To the editor:

The subject of my Nov. 6 letter was recent developments in Afghanistan. My thesis was that U.S. foreign policy since World War II was based upon opposition to an ideology, communism, without regard to whether a given act of the Communist bloc -- those nations claiming to be guided by this ideology -- was understandable or beneficial, and that our ideology of reaction led us directly to the imminent takeover of Afghanistan by Taliban.

Steve Mosley, in his Nov. 10 letter, admits that things are pretty bad there but writes it off as "a resurgence of ethnic hatreds and rivalries long suppressed by iron-fisted Soviet rule." Note the us of the word iron-fisted. I can wonder what world Mosley would use, say, to describe whatever action our government would take if this country were troubled by similar "ethnic hatreds and rivalries." Velvet-gloved, perhaps?

It is fortunate for us that we do not share a border with a nation facing a takeover by a movement comparable to the mujahadin or their successors, Taliban. This good fortune permits us to look down our noses and presume to judge the acts of nations in whose shoes we have not walked.

And very inconsistently too, I might add. Israel, for example, has never hesitated to act in her own interest outside her borders. Neither has the United States. A list of U.S. invasions, not to protect us from danger, but merely to prevent U.S. investments from being nationalized, would be a long one. There are also a number of U.S. invasions and projections of power into areas that did not even remotely present a danger to us -- Vietnam immediately springs to mind. My advice to any person who truly feared the prospect of Vietnam, reunited under Ho Chi Minh, as a threat to the United States would have been, "Get a life."

One final thing. Mr. Mosley did not see fit merely to disagree with the conclusions of my letter. He repeatedly resorted to a technique of argumentation very au courant in this country until the 1970s called red-baiting. It goes something like this: "You have the never to express an opinion contrary to my own opinion, which is manifestly patriotic? Then you must be an agent of the Kremlin. Case closed." Such an argument used to be enough to carry the day in every political discourse in this country and kept many an issue, domestic or foreign, from being discussed, fully or otherwise. I do not resent Mr. Mosley's taking refuge in this quaint method, and I would want him to know that his adherence to the old traditions warmed my heart.

Mr. Mosley ends up by pleading with me to tell him that my letter was a joke, in which case he would be relieved. Sorry, Mr. Mosley, if you consider my letter a joke. I did not intend it as such. Of course, the formulators of the foreign policy which you defended and which I attacked probably did not intend it to be a joke either, and look what happened.

DONN S. MILLER

Tamms, Ill.