South Africa: okay, now what?

South Africa: Okay, Now What?

ON SOUTH AFRICA, about the only thing left to say is that the congressmen and senators who voted for sanctions lack strategic vision. Their votes were political freebies: You do not get politically penalized if you vote for sanctions; you might be penalized by blacks and liberals if you voted against them.

South Africa is an anthropologist's delight. A modern, white population sits atop a larger black, Third World population, with a substantial Asiatic minority thrown in. If the demagogues in Congress who voted for sanctions have a plausible idea of what would happen after the whites were toppled, we have not heard about it. Were they really voting for turning the country over to the ANC? They were not saying. The President's veto of sanctions was admirable, a breath of fresh air.

Everyone knows that South Africa is important because of its geography and natural resources. But the regime is also backing Jonas Savimbi and UNITA in their struggle in Communist-run Angola. There are many harsher regimes in the world than South Africa's, many of them on the African continent. The vote for sanctions by an overwhelming margin was not the finest hour for representative government.

COPYRIGHT 1986 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning