One of our favorite Reagan anecdotes is told by Kenneth Adelman about what happened when Secretary of State Haig tried to get President Reagan to agree to the Law of the Sea Treaty. This happened at one of the first meetings of Reagan’s National Security Council, when the hapless Mr. Haig suggested the treaty was, as Mr. Adelman has written, “something we didn’t like but had to accept, since it had emerged over the previous decade through a 150-nation negotiation.” Mr. Haig then lunged into details about the options and sub-options for revising the document.

The president looked puzzled, then finally interrupted. “Uh, Al, isn’t this what the whole thing was all about?” Mr. Adelman recalls Mr. Reagan responding. Mr. Haig asked him what he meant. Related Mr. Adelman: “Well, Mr. Reagan shrugged, wasn’t not going along with something that is ‘really stupid’ just because 150 nations had done so what the whole thing was all about — our running, our winning, our governing?” A stunned Mr. Haig folded up his briefing book and promised to find out how to stop the treaty altogether.

The story comes to mind as President Bush veers off onto the course Mr. Haig sought to press on Reagan — trying to repair a treaty that should never be on the books to start with. The latest maneuvers align the administration with special interests, domestic and international, that are looking to stake out oil, gas, and mineral resources in the seabed. It is resuming what Mr. Haig had the good sense to abandon a quarter of a century ago. The Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate has voted its support and the matter will now have to go to the full senate.

Our own view is that the treaty is an incentive to war. It provides incentives for nations to post “claims” in the arctic seabeds. Canada and Russia already are disputing the sea floor 15,000 feet beneath the North Pole. The treaty could ignite new hot spots, in the arctic and elsewhere. Its 320 articles and nine annexes make it improbable that it will ever be anything more than a collection of security, financial, and administrative booby traps.

Implementation of the treaty would be by the International Seabed Authority, complete with its own legislative, executive and judiciary bodies. It is even worse than the United Nations in that America would have equal vote with countries like Cuba and Zimbabwe and not even have the self-protective mechanism of a veto. To boot, LOST would levy its own production charges, administrative fees and taxes — starting at 1% and eventually rising to 7% of net revenue from extracted resources. The one good thing about the treaty is that it gives an issue to the Republican presidential candidates. Mayor Giuliani, for one, phrased it just right: “I cannot support the creation of yet another unaccountable international bureaucracy that might infringe on American sovereignty.”