Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani Page B

troops in exchange for a guarantee of U.S. economic interests in Angola—was agreed to during Kissinger’s January 21-24 meeting with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. Gulf Oil Cabinda began operations on February 21, and the U.S. diamond-mining monopoly, CFB, continued exploitation without threat of nationalization. In the years that followed, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, would remind his audiences that Moscow may have made inroads into the Angolan state apparatus, but the Angolan economy remained very much in the Western orbit.
    On February 10, 1976, the U.S. Congress passed the Clark Amendment, prohibiting any covert aid to any side in the Angolan civil war. The next month, on March 31, the UN Security Council branded South Africa the aggressor and demanded that it compensate Angola for war damages. The vote was 9-0, with the United States, France, Britain, Italy, and Japan abstaining. The die was cast. South Africa was both bruised by the Cubans in combat and cold-shouldered by the West precisely in the hour of its need. “Angola may well be regarded as South Africa’s Bay of Pigs,” a retired South African general lamented the day South African troops withdrew from Angola. “Next to us they have been the most discredited in Angola,” Kissinger told Ford. The events in Angola were to have a far-reaching impact on both sides of the Atlantic. It brought hope to children in the streets of Soweto, who burst on the political scene with a remarkable uprising only a few months after South African troops were disgraced in Angola, and it also lent courage and reason to those in the U.S. Congress determined to curb the excesses of the Cold War.
    The Clark Amendment
    The Angolan fiasco reinforced the lessons of Vietnam, but those lessons provoked contradictory interpretations by the executive branch and by Congress, each asserting a different influence on post-Vietnam U.S. foreign policy. The Vietnam experience led to a determined executive search for regional proxies, particularly in parts of the world considered strategic to the conduct of the Cold War. It also reinforced popular distrust of a free hand for the executive branch in foreign affairs. Public resistance to Vietnam-type overseas involvement was echoed in Congress with the election of a host of antiwar legislators and led to a number of changes: the draft was abolished; the Pentagon’s budget for special operations was cut; the CIA’s paramilitary capabilities were reduced and its activities subjected to congressional oversight; and the president was required by the War Powers Act to seek congressional approval before any extended commitment of U.S. troops overseas. “The lesson of Vietnam is that we must throw off the cumbersome mantle of world policeman,” said Senator Edward Kennedy, summing up the antiwar mood in Congress. The clearest expression of this surge in antiwar sentiment was the amendment of the Freedom of Information Act and the passage of the Clark Amendment.
    The two years and three months between the passage of the 1973 War Powers Act and the 1976 Clark Amendment (and the Tunney Amendment that preceded it) marked the high point of the antiwar movement that swept the United States. The War Powers Act was the first brake on growing executive power, an institutional legacy of the Cold War; it fortified Congress’s constitutional role on issues related to war making and treaty making. The Tunney Amendment was attached to the Department of Defenseappropriations bill that the U.S. Senate passed on December 20, 1975: it terminated covert assistance to anti-Communist forces in Angola, but only for that fiscal year. Before the fiscal year ended, however, Congress had passed the Clark Amendment, which extended the ban and made it permanent and categorical:
That, notwithstanding any other provision of law, no security assistance may be furnished, and no assistance may be furnished for military or paramilitary