12.
look for the whip. How can they know all these things? What is the MX? I mean, they're kissing babies half the time. So that it's the
business of competitive pressures. And if they get ten letters on an
issue, they think that's a crisis because they've got this formula,
they multiply that times a hundred, and say, "Well, there must be thousands of people in my district concerned about this." So Reagan is
going to force many of them to get down in the vineyards and do what we should have been doing all along, quit drinking that democratic liquor.
X: Would you briefly comment upon the way in which our information about
developing nations is obtained?
R: It's the thing that happened in coverage of the Zimbabwean war. The war
was covered by the New York Times and Washington Post in Salisbury, and if you didn't come into the hotels to talk to them, you just didn't get
your view into the paper. So they talked to less than one per cent of
the population, and overwhelmingly they got their information from Englishspeaking Zimbabweans. So they never got any sense of what the feeling
was in the country. I think in the American Embassy in Iran, there were
only three, two or three people who spoke Farsi, so they only talked,
essentially, to English-speaking Iranians, and so they never got any sense
of what the people in that country were thinking. And that's the real
problem with American intelligence, even soft intelligence data gathering.
We just don't have any sense what the people are really thinking in these countries. I think the other thing, too, is a lack of cultural sensitivity. I don't know if we understand the Muslim world very well at all.
I don't think we understand the significance or the importance of Jerusalem
to the Arab world. You know, it's difficult to take the blinders off
when you live in a country like this, but some effort has to be made if
we're going to do better.
X: How does TransAfrica stand with regard to promotion of trade between U.S.
and Africa?
R: Well, we' re in support of the African call for a fairer and more equitable
international economic order. You know, since I.M.F. and the World Bank and the rest were put together after World War II, African countries and the developing world in general have had neither the capacity to control the price of what they buy from the west or the price of what they sell.
And so they have really been put in a kind of bind, and now that's been
added to by the spiraling price of oil. I don't think all of this is
the fault of the west. Because the oil-producing countries have not done
the best that they can do either. But we would be in favor of a process that indexes, that helps developing countries adjust to world inflation, thlat helps developing countries make better use of their diminishing raw
materials. Nigeria for instance has about thirty years of oil left,
and that's it. If they haven't done it and don't do it [develop] in the
coming thirty years, they're in serious trouble. And so it's important
for the world to see that as a world concern. But instead of doing that