Blame Sharing

Reagan accuses Congress ft I f there is to be blame, it properly rests I here in this office and with this President." So said Ronald Reagan last December, in accepting responsibility for the terrorist car-bomb attack on U.S. Marine headquarters in Lebanon that claimed 241 American lives and, ultimately, forced a U.S. withdrawal from Lebanon. Yet last week, on two occasions, the President chose to amend that judgment radically and somewhat petulantly, blaming Congress for the most serious U.S. foreign policy failure of his Administration. Reagan also faulted the Legislative Branch on its performance in other foreign policy issues, including Central America, evidently succumbing to a time-honored tradition of incumbent Presidents during years divisible by four: if something goes wrong, run against Congress.

At his press conference, Reagan declared that legislators "must take a responsibility" for the Lebanon debacle because the "raging" debate on Capitol Hill about the Marines' presence in Beirut "rendered them ineffective." Two days later, in a foreign policy address delivered in Washington, the President broadened that charge. "Once we established bipartisan agreement on our course in Lebanon, the subsequent second-guessing about whether to keep our men there severely undermined our policy," he said. "It hindered the ability of our diplomats to negotiate, encouraged more intransigence from the Syrians and prolonged the violence." As for Central America, said Reagan, congressional "wavering" on his requests for military and economic aid to the region "can only encourage the enemies of democracy, who are determined to wear us down."

In its insistence in the post-Viet Nam era on gaining a stronger voice in foreign policy, Reagan argued, Congress has been long on demands and short on follow-through. Said he: "Congress has not yet developed capacities for coherent, responsible action needed to carry out the new foreign policy powers it has taken for itself." But his examples of this failure were curious, to say the least. Congress has significantly raised the level of aid to El Salvador over the past three years; last week the Senate passed a measure providing $62 million in emergency military funds for El Salvador with barely a change in the final White House request. The sole legislative action in the Lebanon episode was to pass a compromise war-powers resolution giving Reagan wide latitude for 18 months.

House Speaker Tip O'Neill, for one, rejected Reagan's blame-sharing gambit on Lebanon out of hand. "The deaths lie on him and the defeat in Lebanon lies on him and him alone," O'Neill said in an unusually bitter riposte. "He acted against the wishes of our top military, and now he is looking for a scapegoat."