Blaming the villains, not the victims:

...In words that echo those of the pontiff, the Central American presidents rejected the Reagan administration's policies and stated that reliance on military solutions has for many generations frustrated their "legitimate aspirations for peace and social justice, for liberty and reconciliation...

...Before interests can be defended, with smart missiles or by lesser measures, those interests must first be identified and defined...

...policy for more than a generation...

...Yet the Commission's report steadfastly refuses to enter any coherent discussion of U.S...

...The report says: "Because so many Americans are predisposed to pessimism about our role in the third world, it is worth pointing to one recent example that, against high odds did very well: the saving of democracy in El Salvador...

...while in El Salvador 60,000 civilian deaths and over a million internal and external refugees have resulted from the U.S.-backed war- with no end in sight...

...The true fear of some Commission members is that if peace comes to Central America, the Sandinistas may regain their momentum and actually carry out an independent nonaligned revolution...

...Lacking any hope for a political solution or for an end to suffering, mass movements mobilizing large numbers of angry, unemployed people can be expected to take to the streets...

...Military interventions not only undermine the prestige of the meddling power but turn whole countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into killing fields...

...In all these recommendations, Discriminate Deterrence conveniently ignores the fact that in guerrilla war the line between combatant and noncombatant is vague and ill-defined...

...This is consistent with the pope's unswerving support for the Con-tadora negotiation effort and the Central American Peace Agreement...

...security concerns in Central America has ever held that threats originate from the region itself...

...This encyclical will be remembered, however, for its trenchant criticism of the role of the superpower blocs in the developing world...

...Democracy can begin with revolution...

...We do not-and should not-trust the USSR or Communist China...

...Negotiations designed to remove Cuban and South African troops from Angola and bring independence to Namibia are proceeding with Moscow's encouragement...

...Duarte presented another option...

...Jos6 Napole6n Duarte, for all his virtues, has not...

...In the face of increased human rights abuses by the military, pressures will mount for a negotiated solution...

...With priests, labor union leaders, and campesino organizers regarded as enemies of the state by ARENA, with more of the productive capacity of the country destroyed each month by both sides, the country will polarize and the extreme left, as the alternative to the status quo, will prove the chief beneficiary...

...Whatever the ultimate fate of glasnost and perestroika, it is clear that General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and his new foreign policy team are rethinking and reassessing their country' s relationship with the developing world...

...As if to confirm John Paul II's worst fears, the publication of Sollicitudo was fol-lowed closely by the appearance of Dis-criminate Deterrence...

...From the U.S...

...interests in Central America or anywhere else...

...The real fear reflected in Discriminate Deterrence is not that the Sandinistas will align with the USSR and Cuba...

...Where the security interests of our country are at stake we should not follow the authors of Discriminate Deterrence and place the safety of our country in the hands of surrogates of questionable aims and abilities...

...With the role of mediator denied him by a U.S...

...Sollicitudo recognizes that it is not only inevitable but desirable that an array of new forces will emerge to establish new societies and new governments...

...Indeed, in August 1987, this was precisely what the White House negotiator for Central America, Ambassador Philip Habib, wanted to do...

...Reagan administration officials deny to Congress that their intent is to overthrow the Sandinistas and they justify their refusal to negotiate with Nicaragua on the ground that we cannot trust the Sandinistas...

...With death squads reviving their grisly trade, with military dominance of society reinforced by the quadrupled size of the army and security forces, and with the villages in the five northeastern provinces suffering the most intense aerial bombardment in the history of this hemisphere, it takes a highly particular view of the world to see in all of this a democracy saved...

...Congress for ever increasing military assistance programs...

...Sollicitudo raises the question whether either East or West has the capacity to put an end to policies that have resulted in oppression and exploitation for the poor nations of the earth...

...To make their case for the U.S...

...in these regional conflicts...

...The pope urges the superpowers to turn away from neocolonialism and confrontation that bring about "wars of proxy through the manipulation of local conflicts...

...This compulsion to deploy sophisticated weapons against rebel forces, armed only with rudimentary weapons, can also be seen as one more manifestation of what some would call racism and others the persistent inability of affluent, aging, white America to come to grips in any rational or human way with the poor, young, nonwhite peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America...

...If Discriminate Deterrence pays scant attention to the collapse of our efforts to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, it brims with enthusiasm for the Reagan policy in El Salvador...

...This task will be made easier when it is understood that the threat to the security of most developing countries comes not from external sources but from the internal conflicts caused by the need to construct more just societies in which authority functions within the law...

...The one indisputable result of the $3 billion the Reagan administration has thrown at the Salva-doran problem has been the emergence of the ,most tenacious, resilient, and resourceful guerrilla movement ever seen in the Western Hemisphere...

...These modest proposals demonstrate traditional policymakers' fixations with sophisticated weaponry to cope with the stresses and strains inevitable in a world where the structures of domination and dependence constantly generate new social conflicts...

...The pope finds the USSR and the U.S...

...It assumes, without advancing any evidence, that revolutions in poor countries are driven by Soviet aggression and recommends that the U.S...

...John Paul II finds that military responses to security concerns work"to the detriment of the autonomy, freedom of decision, and even the territorial integrity of the weaker nations.'' He condemns the manipulation of underdeveloped nations by the superpowers, and states that in Latin America "liberation" is the fundamental category and first principle of action...

...If history is any guide, the Salvadoran right wing will respond to this challenge by gunning down unarmed demonstrators...

...BLAMING THE VILLAINS, NOT THE VICTIMS roberte white JOHN PAUL II & THE SUPERPOWERS The Soviet Union and the United States share a persistent tendency to look for and find trouble in the developing world...

...Yet this lack of trust does not justify refusal to work out mutually advantageous agreements...

...Discriminate Deterrence makes no attempt to analyze causes of Central America revolutions nor does it try to make the case that the Soviets are interested in gaining a strategic foothold in Central America...

...To the contrary, the authors appear to have structured their thesis so as to justify never-ending interventions in the affairs of other nations...

...The Kissinger Commission report of 1982 said, "Indigenous reform movements, even indigenous revolutions, are not themselves a security concern of the U.S...

...Not only do the campesinos suspect that the military commanders know how they vote, they also know with a metaphysical certitude that their lives will never improve through the casting of a ballot...

...The presidents joined with the revolutionary leader of Nicaragua to insist that an end to assistance to all insurgent forces was indispensable...

...Many poor Salvadorans will vote for this neofas-cist movement not out of sympathy with its program but because the first lesson any campesino learns in this lawless land is "identify with the man with the gun...

...The artless cynicism that would place high-tech weapons in the hands of military-dominated governments is matched by the recommendation that we also provide these rulers with advanced information-processing systems able "to store, sort, retrieve, and collate enormous amounts of data about the insurgent or terrorist organizations and individual saboteurs and terrorists...

...Or, as George Kennan once said in reference to our preoccupation with nuclear war, "a state of mind explicable only by some inability to face the normal hazards and vicissitudes of the human predicament...

...prepare for a wider range of threats...

...Duarte was able to thread his way over, under, and around many obstacles...

...He succeeded in opening up political space for opposition forces and increased freedeom of the press, but he was never able to overcome the Reagan administration's refusal to back any negotiation that agreed to what it calls "power sharing.'' Instead of compromise, Duarte was able to offer only worthless guarantees of safety from death-squad retaliation should the rebels lay down their arms and enter political life...

...They also agreed not to permit their territory to be used for destabilizing actions against their neighbors...

...The Reagan hard-liners, however, refused to approve Habib's mission to Nicaragua because they knew that Habib would return with an agreement that would remove Cuban troops from Nicaragua and a pledge that that government would never again permit foreign troops on its soil...

...Zbigniew Brzezinski has discussed his interpretations of the Commission's work in a speech to the National War College...

...support for brutal, military-dominated governments has been a more demonstrable fact...

...As one country's absolute security can represent another's absolute insecurity, the challenge for our new president is to harmonize the security requirements of the U.S...

...wishes to protect its security in Central America then we must fashion policies that will gradually transform potential enemies into friends...

...The Commission does recognize that "conflicts in the world...

...Without the barest reference to existing treaty obligations that forbid such interference, the study recommends categorically that our government should support selected anti-Communist insurgencies "where important U.S...

...The appearance of two major documents with radically different interpretations of the proper relations between the superpowers and developing world serves to define the issues...

...Regular elections have been held in El Salvador for more than a half-century while the lot of the poor has steadily worsened...

...To insure that our sponsorship of proxy wars meets with more success in the future, the report puts forward as a routine recommendation the chilling proposal that, in order to maximize the technological advantages of the United States, "we should use our most sophisticated weapons" in third-world conflicts, including the employment of "smart missiles...

...In his recent encyclical, Sollicitudo rei socialis, Pope John Paul II says that poor countries have become victims of superpower confrontation, the result: proxy wars, the arms race, and neglect of the immense problems of human development...

...have had and will have an adverse cumulative effect...on American credibility among allies and friends...

...John Paul II states unequivocally that "war and military preparations are the major enemy of the integral development of peoples...

...Yet the pope does not exclude the possibility that both systems can, with new attitudes, play a positive role in the developing world, and he sees some signs of hope, particularly in the successful peace-keeping efforts of international organizations...

...This has meant the establishment of veneer democracies where the armed forces, with U.S...

...The Sandinistas, for all their faults, have created a nation...

...that can apply force in a discriminate fashion and avoid collateral damage to civilians...

...The tragic prediction for El Salvador is a continued military stalemate with the revolutionaries increasing their capacity to paralyze the economy...

...as an activist counter-revolutionary power, the Commission defies all rules of logic...

...Management of U.S...

...national security policy...

...to negotiate a separate agreement with Nicaragua which would satisfy our legitimate national security objectives...

...demands the subordination of Central America's social priorities to our supposed national security requirements...

...The jobless rate of over 50 percent is a direct result of the decapi-talization of the country as the rich export into foreign banks every dollar of hard currency they can find...

...At their hands, speculation becomes supposition, supposition conjecture, and conjecture the basis for finding threats to our security...

...By then any illusion of a quick military victory had gone and U.S...

...It will of course be news to Salvadorans that they live in a democracy...

...If the Reagan administration believes it can hold the USSR accountable it can hardly argue that we cannot demand strict compliance from a poverty-stricken nation of three million practically on our doorstep...

...foreign policy establishment comes a major report, Discriminate Deterrence, the product of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, an official, blue ribbon commission charged by President Reagan to rethink U.S...

...The report's authors move from instinct to accusation to judgment with the facility common to those who have already arrived at the cure regardless of the nature of the disease...

...If the U.S...

...Sollicitudo judges harshly both liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism, singling out for special condemnation, "the all-consuming desire for profit" and the "thirst for power...at any price...

...Yet domestic leaders of other countries have an equivalent obligation to ensure the safety and security of their citizens...

...No serious analysis of U.S...

...The report advocates the building of a counterinsurgency capacity through "security assistance at a higher level and with fewer legislative restrictions to inhibit its effectiveness...

...Although a combat role for our armed forces in regional conflicts is ruled out other than "for the most exceptional cases," such as Grenada, the report urges our policymakers to take "low intensity conflict much more seriously.'' Low intensity conflict is defined as "insurgencies, organized terrorism, paramilitary crime, sabotage, and other forms of violence in a shadow area between peace and open warfare involving large units...

...In its analysis and recommendations, Sollicitudo directly challenges the Reagan policy toward Central America...

...Sollicitudo and Discriminate Deterrence represent fundamentally irreconcilable views of the world...

...objectives might be served and U.S...

...security interests are indeed at risk, let us freely accept the responsibility for defending them with our own resources, rather than laying that burden on the bizarre mix of patriots, pawns, and mercenaries the Reagan administration pretentiously calls "freedom fighters...

...He then asks a provocative question: "In what way and to what extent are these two systems capable of change and modernization so as to favor or promote a true and integral development of peoples and nations in modern society...

...policy to the moribund forces that have traditionally controlled Central America through violence and repression...

...For the Salvadoran military and the Nicaraguan contras there are few who qualify as noncom-batants...

...The report was authorized by the Defense Department and the National Security Council...

...Included among the Commission's membership are two former National Security Advisers, Henry A. Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski...

...toleration, decide who can and cannot participate in the political and social dynamics of the country...

...each guilty in its own way of "a tendency toward imperialism," a conclusion fiercely attacked by conservative critics...

...This obvious reference to Honduras and the contra war against the Sandinistas contains no analysis of the conditions under which the U.S...

...with the security objectives of other countries...

...Rather the report simply proceeds with its far-reaching recommendations on the unproved and unsustainable assumption that all rebellions are fatally infected with a Marxist-Leninist lesion and that the root of all revolutions can ultimately be traced to the same source of the expansionary Soviet Communist state...

...John Paul II makes this point when he urges the replacement of corrupt, dictatorial, and authoritarian forms of government with democratic and participatory political institutions that can transform mutual distrust into collaboration...

...he did refer to the employment of smart missiles equipped with tactical nuclear weapons aimed at "discriminating targets in areas other than Europe...

...The members of the Commission know that both the USSR and Cuba have offered to cut out arms shipments to Nicaragua provided the U.S...

...Guided by the same ideology that inspires Discriminate Deterrence, President Reagan has described the Central American Peace Treaty as "fatally flawed...

...If, as expected, the ARENA party wins the presidency in March 1989, it will take only a short time-perhaps a year- to demonstrate to the Salvadoran people that this reactionary party stands for nothing but officially sanctioned violence and repression...

...In 1989, the extreme, right-wing ARENA party of Roberto D'Aubuisson is heavily favored to win the elections and the presidency...

...The report's authors must also be aware that President Daniel Ortega has repeatedly pledged not to permit foreign bases, troops, or weapons on Nicaraguan territory...

...The pope finds each superpower guilty of manipulating poor nations in an effort to guarantee its own security and to gain advantage over the rival bloc...

...had the key to turn a failing policy into a success...

...According to the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, the U.S...

...Standard security doctrine holds that the strife and turmoil which accompany rebellion give the USSR the opening to assist pro-Communist governments to power and these regimes, it is argued, will lend their country to the USSR for its strategic objectives...

...appears increasingly committed to militarism as the primary tool for advancing its interests in Asia, Africa, and Latin America...

...Co-chairmen of the Commission are Fred Ikle, a former undersecretary of defense, and Albert Wohlstetter, an expert on nuclear strategy...

...John Paul II states the problem this way not because he sees a "moral equivalency" between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism as conservative critics have charged...

...Our goal must always be to achieve treaties which serve the interests of both parties and then hold the other signatory power accountable for any violations...

...is more than equal to the task of deterring it...

...Put these factors together and what confronts us is not'' success," but a mounting failure of major proportions...

...They agreed on a formula to advance democracy in all their countries...

...In rural areas, the army and security forces hold the power of life and death...

...The report also leaves out of its calculus the profoundly divisive effects on our own society of any policy which attempts to crush third-world rebellions with sophisticated weaponry...

...The recommendations of Discriminate Deterrence would tie U.S...

...policymakers inside the same flawed interpretation of the original containment policy which has afflicted U.S...

...Brzezinski did not say under what circumstances "societal damage" should be our "desire...

...gives important attention to what it calls "the United States posture in regional conflicts throughout the world...

...Sollicitudo reinforces many of the teachings of previous papal documents on the need for peace through global justice...

...Nor does the report contain any warning that our sponsorship of proxy wars can fail and thereby create, as in the case of Nicaragua, the impression that a small, weak nation has faced down and defeated the U.S...

...Pressures from the Soviets have resulted in Vietnam's moving to end the occupation of Kampuchea...

...The report does not shrink from an active role for the U.S...

...ambassador to El Salvador during the Carter administration, is president of the International Center for Development Policy in Washington, D.C...

...A close reading of the encyclical leads to quite a different interpretation...

...A transitional phase is required while the new government abolishes the hated features of the old dictatorship and experiments with the new unaccustomed role of consolidating and institutionalizing power...

...faces "protracted war" in Asia, Africa, and Latin America...

...Soviet imperialism throughout the world has been a fact...

...On several fronts, the USSR has earned the re-evaluation implicit in the pages of Sollicitudo...

...The authors dis-miss perestroika and glasnost as unlikely to change the Soviet Union's "antagonistic stance...

...The former National Security Adviser said, "In the 1970s, nuclear weapons were still fundamentally systems for the infliction of mass destruction," but today "these weapons are susceptible to being used for highly discriminatory military missions with relatively little, if that is your desire, collateral societal damage...

...the struggle in Angola has decimated the population and nearly destroyed one of the few prosperous economies of Africa...

...Discriminate Deterrence would imprison U.S...

...That result is, after all, the logical consequence of the proxy war we wage against Nicaragua and our refusal to negotiate...

...In practical terms this means collaborating with ruthless military leaders, such as Roberto d'Aubuisson of El Salvador and his murderous counterparts in other countries, by giving them the capacity to classify human rights activists, church leaders, and university teachers as "individual saboteurs and terrorists...

...Commission members do not acknowledge that in the eyes of the world our credibility has been damaged, not because these conflicts exist, but because of our ill-conceived and ineffectual intervention in them...

...Soviet troops are pulling out of Afghanistan...

...military advisors spoke cautiously of "five more years" before the guerrillas would be defeated...

...Should Nicaragua demonstrate its capacity to carry out a revolution independent of Soviet and Cuban support then the Commission's thesis that third-world conflicts automatically threaten our interests disappears...

...With the 1984 election of Jose Napoleon Duarte, the U.S...

...involvement in low intensity conflict should be carried out, the report says, by the CIA and primarily through covert action, thereby enabling our government to "maintain official silence" because '' neighboring countries that provide access to our bases for the freedom fighters often prefer that the U. S. government role not be officially acknowledged...

...He has gone against the express wishes of the five Central American presidents by attempting to continue aid to the contras and by discouraging peace negotiations in El Salvador...

...It is but one more hypocrisy to disguise an obsession for dominance restored as a democratic crusade...

...the invasion of Afghanistan and the search for military solutions to the upheavals in Central America are but two recent examples...

...Whatever threat a revolutionary state may be able to direct our way, the armed might of the U.S...

...A threat can never be more powerful than its ability to evade or survive retaliation...

...With few exceptions, most officers support the ARENA party and its program to control El Salvador through a concentration of power in the military and economic elites...

...The repression will serve only to lose the government both internal and external support...

...policy that demanded military victory, Duarte had no presidential role, and his Christian Democratic party, lacking any political program and sensing impending defeat, fell prey to wholesale corruption...

...These revolutionaries have not only survived, they have retained their control over substantial territory and extended their political cadres into every province of the country...

...In Central America, however, U.S...

...rooted in seventy years of Soviet and 400 years of Tsarist history...

...support might favorably affect the outcome...

...The policy of the Reagan administration turned Duarte from a leader, with a constituency that included 90 percent of the Salvadoran people who wanted a negotiated end to the war, into a hapless figure whose chief role turned out to be as lobbyist with the U.S...

...Discriminate Deterrence not only fails adequately to describe our interests in Central America, it contains no discussion whatever of what courses of action are open to the U.S...

...In diplomacy only amateurs speak of trust when dealing with adversaries...

...The Commission sees the battleground with the USSR shifting south, to "turbulence in the third world...

...If U.S...

...But if we continue the reckless misuse of power advocated by Discriminate Deterrence then we will make permanent enemies of potential allies, progressively alienate our democratic friends in Western Europe and Latin America, and betray the values of Western civilization urged on us by John Paul's important and timely encyclical.s by John Paul's important and timely encyclical...

...At that point a second Salvadoran revolution will begin to take shape...

...interests and allies in the third world," and on this subject the document has some breathtaking things to say...

...The Reagan doctrine, as advanced by the authors of Discriminate Deterrence, would appear to assert the right to overthrow any government regardless of that government's willingness to satisfy our national security requirements...

...Yet revolution will almost never move directly into democracy...

...He was the one leader of El Salvador with the talent, will, and moral authority to bridge the gap between the center and the left and to bring a negotiated end to the war...

...He has indicated a readiness to negotiate verifiable reductions in their military forces and to ban offensive weapons...

...There are certainly sufficient clues in the report to indicate that the authors have Central America very much in mind when they recommend the use of these precision-guided missiles "to influence military outcomes in regional wars...

...The pope may be concerned because just as the USSR appears ready to play a more constructive role in reducing superpower involvement in regional conflicts, the U.S...

...As currently practiced, the security of the U.S...

...should low intensity conflict, covert action, and smart missiles fail to crush the revolutionary impulse...

...In countries such as El Salvador, the fundamental duty of the state to protect the basic human rights of the citizen has been stood on its head and law-abiding citizens may be tortured, disappeared, and killed at the whim of the security forces and their death squads, which enjoy absolute immunity from legal sanction...

...Only a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for any serious political commentator, let alone this anti-Communist pope, to equate the two systems and, in effect, to question which was the more supple, innovative, and responsive...

...Who benefits from this compulsion to see outside conspiracies in authentic rebellion, this refusal to understand revolution on its own terms...

...As Carlos Fuentes has pointed out, "Democracy never entered Washington's calculations during the seventy years that it dominated Nicaraguan politics, between the fall of Santos Zelaya in 1909 and the fall of Anastasio Somoza in 1979...

...Hundreds of thousands dead and five million homeless form the legacy of the war in Afghanistan...

...To the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy our intervention in third-world struggles is a necessary response to Soviet-inspired revolution and is of such towering importance that "American efforts to influence military outcomes in regional wars will call for the use of our most sophisticated weaponry, even though this could compromise its effectiveness in a U.S.-Soviet war...

...Discriminate Deterrence shows no understanding whatever that ferment in poor countries begins with the legitimate search for some countervailing power that will give the people minimal security against the military and economic elites that control their countries, often with our backing...

...Before a nation can become democratic it must first become independent-the national identity of a people is a necessary precondition for democracy...

...It is no service to the laudable cause of democracy to insist that revolutionary societies immediately create democratic governments...

...should assist anti-Communist forces, no discussion of contra involvement in crimes related to narcotics trafficking, firearms, and misuse of public funds...

...By that time, of course, the government will be weakened, the left will be strengthened, and cries will be heard from both San Salvador and Washington for dramatic action to save the country from communism...

...Although the army has increased its effectiveness, time works against the government because the economy is in ruins...

...Other than recognizing that a strategic war with the USSR is now unlikely, the report breaks little new ground except for its recommendations on how to "help protect U.S...

...Once the leaders of Central America rejected the contra presence and signed the treaty, it only made sense for the U.S...

...will abide by the provisions of the Central American Peace Agreement and cease aid to the contras...

...The report analyzes the changing security environment over the next twenty years and ROBERT E. WHITE, U.S...