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A fierce confirmation battle started in the Democrat-controlled Senate last week when President Bush officially nominated Otto J. Reich as assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs.
Reich, who fled Cuba with his parents in 1960, previously served in the Reagan State Department and as ambassador to Venezuela.
His Democratic opponents, obviously trying to re-fight a battle they lost 15 years ago, have criticized him for his efforts in opposing the spread of Soviet-backed communism in Latin America during the closing days of the Cold War.
Recalling that Reich’s job in the State Department was to generate public support for anti-communist freedom fighters in Central America, for example, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said that Reich’s nomination “raises a number of questions” because he “may have been the genesis of acts of propaganda … which reflect a kind of carelessness about the truth.” (Translation: Reich opposed the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and supported the Contras.)
Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., was cagier, saying he is “deeply concerned with Mr. Reich’s ability to maintain bipartisan support and trust for U.S. policy with regard to Colombia and other important hemispheric issues.”
Kerry and Dodd, both members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have put a “hold” on Reich’s nomination.
Reich’s opponents take the battle so seriously that they have even launched a “Stop Otto Reich” website. It is sponsored by a variety of left-wing foreign policy groups, including the Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for International Policy.
Even Fidel Castro has entered the fray, denouncing Reich as “sordid” and a “fascist.”
“He violated laws and showed total lack of ethics,” Castro said during a recent two-hour speech to the InterParliamentary Union meeting in Havana.
A onetime Reagan administration colleague of Reich told Human Events, “They are all against Otto in part because he’s a Cuban-American who is anti-Castro and also because his views on Central America in the 1980s are galling to them.”
Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said, “It isn’t so much Otto Reich that the left wants to punish, but the entire Reagan policy of fighting communism in the hemisphere, which has been vindicated by history, and those who made it. In a sense, the upcoming hearings will be a case of a generation on trial.”
Reich, a U.S. Army veteran, worked for the city of Miami and as an associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies before joining the Reagan administration in 1981. Following a stint as assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, he headed the now-defunct Office of Public Diplomacy in the State Department from 1983-86.
Reich’s chief assignment in that office was to promote the U.S. policy of supporting the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua against the Castro- and Soviet-backed Sandinista dictatorship. Much of the work of that office was denounced by liberals as “propaganda,” although no one suggested it was illegal or substantially different from a congressman’s generating favorable “letters to the editor” or suggesting positive news stories to friendly reporters.
The 1987 report on Iran-Contra released by a Democrat-controlled joint Senate-House committee called the activities of the Office of Public Diplomacy “public relations lobbying at taxpayers’ expense.” The report cited a finding by the General Accounting Office that the office had engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda.” Although it identified Reich as head of the office, neither the congressional report nor the GAO study accused him of any lawbreaking. In 1986, with Iran-Contra beginning to become a major news story, Reich was confirmed as ambassador to Venezuela.
As the left gears up for combat in the coming Reich fight, friends and admirers of the former Reagan administration official are lining up behind the nominee. Florida Republican Representatives Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, themselves Cuban-Americans, have issued strong statements in favor of Reich. Ros-Lehtinen denounced “Democrat liberal hacks [who] might have an ax to grind from the old Contra war and because of his strong position in favor of the U.S. embargo on Castro.”
Florida’s Democratic Sen. Bob Graham has also weighed in on Reich’s behalf and is “very supportive of the Reich nomination,” according to spokeswoman Caren Benjamin.
“As a supporter of the Nicaraguan Contras and a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, Otto Reich has the credentials to implement President Bush’s policy in Latin America, where terrible difficulties abound for America, especially in Columbia and Venezuela,” wrote Ralph J. Galliano, editor of the U.S. Cuba Policy Report. “Recent events show that the post-Castro era is dawning. Reich, a Cuban-American, is capable of carrying out a policy of democracy and free markets on the communist-run island that the left finds distasteful.”
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