Because of Barbara Ward's unflinching effort to uphold the highest values of Western civilization she has, in the eyes of many, become a conscience-keeper of the West. Her anxious call over three decades about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer has echoed widely. Although the call has fallen mostly on deaf ears in key policymaking circles, that detracts neither from its nobility nor from its validity.

A comparison of conditions in Iran in the last years of Pahlavi control and in the first year of the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic government illustrates nothing better than the difficulties inherent in governing a developing nation as diverse as Iran despite a leader's good intentions. A review of State Department reports on human rights in Iran for 1977 and 1978, in conjunction with the observations of private groups monitoring basic rights, indicates that the country was then in a period of transition. In response to international and domestic pressure the shah's extremely authoritarian administration had initiated the first series of measures aimed at ultimately liberalizing the nation's political climate. Ironically, these very reforms aided the shah's opposition in mounting the challenge that drove him from power in January, 1979.

For the past four years right-wing and left-wing organizations in the United States have been aware of a new foreign policy establishment known as the Trilateral Commission. This group, founded by David Rockefeller, is comprised largely of corporate executives from Western Europe, Japan, and the U.S. Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Cyrus Vance, as well as seventeen other members and former members of the Carter administration, belonged to this group before they took office. Key political figures in the governments of Japan and Western Europe also belong, as do John Anderson, George Bush, and Henry Kissinger.

International politics is looking increasingly like what Alice found when she stepped through the lookingglass, a chessboard of oddly assorted flamingos and dodo birds being moved about as pawns; of Red Bishops shouting "Off with his head!",- of walruses who weep false tears as they gobble up oysters; of Cheshire Cats with all-knowing smiles and nothing to say.

The strident first-round offensive in the Carter administration's human rights crusade is over. In retrospect the first phase of the human rights movement had a noble purpose, yet failed to capture and hold the high ground of national policy and public support. It failed as national policy because it did not comprehend the fundamental relationship between human rights, prosperity, international trade, and investment. Public support declined because asymmetric, therefore hypocritical, publicity of human rights violations concentrated on minor blemishes on the record of U.S. business abroad while ignoring more terrible disfigurements of human rights.

For a full generation the world, like Gaul, has been divided into three parts, the rich, the poor, and the Communists. Scholars and bureaucrats have devised these economic categories, calling them the developed world, the Communist countries, and the less developed countries (LDCs). In the last few years, however, these classifications have been bursting at the seams of their logic. Even the man in the street is beginning to wonder why such nations as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil are still "poor" LDCs and thus eligible for various aid programs. Visual evidence of their burgeoning wealth is available on TV and in the popular press. Yet the list of developed countries remains the same. It seems no one ever gets promoted.