Editorials
Any leaders out there? "God bless our country...and now back to war." Thus George Bush pronounced a benediction over the war games he observed in California last month. He might have also...
...Forty-five percent of total research and development in this country is directed at military-related projects, in contrast to Japan's 1 percent...
...But subsequent post-election events are likely to send credit-seekers running for cover...
...As with the problem of sexual irresponsibility, there is no classroom solution to the drug epidemic in the inner cities...
...Restructuring defense policy requires a reexamination of our present conventional forces' forward-defense policy (which rings the Soviet Union with half a million U.S...
...As confidence increases through mutual reductions, enhanced verification, and diminished superpower tensions, the possibility of continuing a nuclear build-down will grow...
...For Gorbachev, that apparently means a large reduction in military expenditures: Soviet military spending fell by 8.2 percent last year and will be cut a further 14 percent in the next two years...
...Getting addicts into such programs is only half the battle...
...With on-site inspection and enhanced satellite photography now part of the surveillance equation, it was time to mothball the SR-71...
...The great danger is that in repaying that debt (and more covertly, redressing grievances against the Sandinistas), the Bush administration will further entangle the United States in a culture and a politics that-for better or worse-differ from our own, that we will persevere in trying to impose our agenda on a country whose national interest is not identical with our own...
...The plane was so fast its pilot could watch the sun set, pull up the throttle, and watch it set again...
...It seems more like the kind of balance you get when the tubby kid jumps off the seesaw...
...Bennett's proposed 1991 budget of $10.6 billion is $4.3 billion more than the government spent in Reagan's last year...
...The complete identity of the Nicaraguan government with the Sandinista party is quickly showing itself a source of friction over jobs and property-and over Nicaragua's general political and economic direction...
...Failure rates are high even at the best centers...
...an increase of 20 percent for SDI...
...He might have also said, "Onward...
...But it is time to find a way to make treatment programs politically palatable...
...Conversion is needed, but it is not only a theoretical possibility...
...That might even give law enforcement the kind of practical support it needs...
...And treatment programs can work for others...
...Bush: it will take leadership...
...Will they govern...
...the USSR intends to remove ten thousand tanks from Eastern Europe this year...
...So is redefining our security goals in a new world...
...last year we spent $9.3 billion for military aid to the developing world but only $5.9 billion for actual development aid...
...And now the Nicaraguan people have "voted the rascals out...
...Those most vulnerable see the deadly consequences of drugs all around them every day...
...If treatment is too politically contaminated a word, let's change it...
...That said, the larger direction and the tone of administration policy need to be questioned...
...They are not ill-informed...
...It takes planning and will...
...in the spirit of his new defense budget...
...troops stationed abroad), a scaling back of our nuclear arsenal, and a major transfer of manpower and expenditures from military purposes-including research grants-to domestic human and economic needs...
...I know children...," Bennett said before the Senate Judiciary Committee in early February...
...I believe that balance has been achieved...
...Chamorro's victory between two Republican administrations and a succession of Democratic Congresses-the former presumably for supporting the contras...
...Call them discipline programs or castigation regimens...
...And yes-leadership...
...As the crack epidemic and concomitant gang violence intensify, the administration continues to emphasize law enforcement over less glamorous alternatives: social policy, drug education, or treatment programs...
...Lawrence J. Korb, assistant defense secretary in the first Reagan term, goes even further...
...Bennett has rejected the notion of "treatment on demand," calling it naive and wasteful...
...Dimitri Yazov, Soviet defense minister, has called for a 50 percent reduction in Soviet troops...
...Since much of our manufacturing capacity was designed for defense production, such a change requires leadership...
...In the self-congratulatory spirit adopted in Washington immediately following the election, Mark Shields and David Gergen in their weekly commentary on PBS generously divvied up credit for Mrs...
...The readiness of large numbers of Nicaraguans to vote for UNO, the good offices of Jimmy Carter and a phalanx of election observers in certifying a fair election, and the graceful concession speech of Daniel Ortega boded well for a peaceful transition...
...Funding for antidrug programs has gone up since Bush took over from an indifferent President Reagan...
...Violeta Chamorro and UNO, a fourteen-party opposition coalition, won the Nicaraguan elections on February 25...
...they have to stay there...
...But that is where the political warfare gets messy...
...FIGHTING THE DRUG 'WAR' Drug use in the United States has been declining for several years...
...Currently, 9 million Americans are employed in defense, including 27 percent of our scientists and engineers...
...But that takes leadership...
...the latter for criticizing them...
...Some redistribution of the proposed funding is needed...
...To the extent that present military spending contributes to a level of national indebtedness that weakens our general well-being and security, cutting it radically is a necessity...
...Last month, the Air Force retired its twenty or so top-secret Blackbird spy planes...
...But the sun has now apparently set for the Blackbird, as it must soon for massive defense budgets...
...it foreshadows strident resistance to relinquishing control of the army and state security...
...Not one had been shot down in thirty years of duty...
...These tense weeks of transition may call forth a spirit of compromise and tolerance in which a just and democratic Nicaragua can flourish...
...Our nuclear policy will have to change...
...The verdict was in...
...In either case, CBS decided Rooney had been purged of sin and hurried him back on air March 4. CBS News president David W. Burke, who suspended Rooney, put it this way: "I am concerned that the balance between the needs of a news organization to maintain its reputation for fairness and objectivity, free of any inference of bias, and the ability of commentators to speak without undue constraint be maintained...
...THE HEAT IS ON Out of the frying pan into the frying pan...
...Without bloodshed...
...The Blackbird needed as many as six refueling planes on long missions, and the $400 million spent each year on the twenty-plane fleet could maintain nearly ninety fighter jets...
...Many who are asking for help aren't getting it...
...That strategy must be rooted in the administration's foreign policy and national security goals...
...I do not agree with Senator Kennedy's statement that you can inoculate children against drug abuse by education," he added...
...Mantis-shaped and a technological marvel, the SR-71 was capable of outrunning anything shot at it, of flying coast to coast in little over an hour, and of photographing a license plate accurately from fifteen miles up...
...Though Daniel Ortega went to congratulate the victor, the more ambivalent response of Tomas Borge, interior minister, and Humberto Ortega, defense minister, points to potential hand-to-hand combat in the duchies and fief-doms of the bureaucracy...
...The value of such an open-ended policy can be debated...
...On the contrary, the resources now spent on strategic weapons maintenance and development will be needed to dismantle outmoded and outlawed weapons, and to clean up domestic nuclear waste...
...Experts agree education, law enforcement, and treatment must be the three axes of any serious antidrug policy...
...And I would say,'You're right.'" Bennett has a penchant for simplifying issues without really clarifying them...
...The Sandinistas' literacy campaigns and universal education, public health efforts, and redistribution of land and resources were aimed at redressing those injustices and in the early years of the revolution they enjoyed widespread international support...
...Few dispute the need to meet the terror inflicted on drug-infested neighborhoods with a resolute police presence as well as an expansion of the overwhelmed judicial system...
...It is something they must achieve for themselves...
...Only presidential initiative can spearhead a cohesive military strategy (Congress only follows: in the last decade it approved $2.2 trillion of the $2.3 trillion the administration requested for defense...
...ET CETERA The Tale of the Rumes When we last checked in with Andy he had been banished from the tube for three months by CBS, docked $200,000 in pay, and asked to expunge any hint of bias from his otherwise notoriously chaste mind...
...The upcoming START treaty calls for dismantling one-third of our strategic weapons...
...Or was it just the appearance of "America's Funniest Home Videos...
...Too bad that Costa Rica's Oscar Arias got left out...
...we are simultaneously negotiating significant nuclear reductions with the USSR...
...In a narrow sense he is right about the limited reach of education...
...can cut defense spending in general by one-third in the next ten years...
...By definition, we cannot impose democracy in Nicaragua...
...These facilities have produced 138,000 jobs in place of 93,000...
...the lead time for warning of a Soviet invasion of Central Europe has jumped from two weeks to several months...
...In fact, the president's words to Congress last year when submitting his revised defense budget still seem to hold: "I don't expect this to invent a new strategy for a new world...
...Politically, treatment apparently sounds too much like a reward to attract broad support...
...I think that statement is refuted every day of the week...
...And the head of the CIA has testified that even if Gorbachev were ousted, "there is little chance that Soviet hegemony could be restored to Eastern Europe...
...Drug dealers must be taken off the street...
...It is also short-sighted about domestic security: in the future our national defense will depend more on dealing with deficits, education, environmental protection, energy needs, infrastructure, housing, health care, and drug abuse than with Soviet aggression...
...In the post-cold war era, the Bush administration has yet to redefine policy in these areas...
...And you might say this is not a very romantic view of children, not a very rosy view of children," Bennett said...
...But whatever the controls, greater access to treatment is vital...
...Spare the rod and you spoil the child, continued the headmaster...
...Talk, at least by some in the UNO coalition, of reappropriating houses and lands distributed by the Sandinistas is another potential source of conflict...
...Law enforcement will spend 70 percent of that budget, leaving education and treatment to compete for the rest...
...At the same time: both superpowers are planning large troop reductions in Europe...
...It makes no sense to continue upgrading and enlarging our nuclear capability-as the president now proposes...
...A new world demands new thinking and a significant restructuring: a perestroika-USA...
...Given these realities, what kind of response is that benediction, that budget...
...It calls for a 1.3 percent increase, including expenditures for the mobile MX, the Midgetman, the B-2 bomber, the Lance missile, the Trident first-strike submarine...
...Our putative commander betrays a fatally shortsighted strategy...
...and $18 billion for weapons aimed at the Warsaw Pact, $ 1 billion more than last year...
...The Center for Defense Information believes the U.S...
...Farm and manufacturing co-ops have foundered on economic sanctions and mismanagement, but they represent a way of keeping the economic pie larger and more equal than it was before the overthrow of Somoza in 1979...
...This is a grand mistake, a failure in international leadership, a failure of imagination just when the world is looking for direction both to consolidate recent democratic advances and to short circuit any new division of the world into another set of competitive blocs...
...But, like the administration's rhetoric, the money is disproportionately allocated...
...A recent exchange between William J. Bennett, our drug "czar," and Senator Edward Kennedy illustrates the administration's coy approach...
...he says we can cut it in half in the same ten-year period...
...The United States owes an enormous debt to the people of Nicaragua (including some $16 billion awarded by the World Court for our undeclared contra-wax) as to others in Central America...
...The oligarchic nature of the Nicaraguan economy before then represented an institutionalized form of injustice for the majority of Nicaragua's people...
...But education obviously does work for some, as the decline in drug use demonstrates...
...Even our foreign assistance is skewed...
...Otherwise, the drug problem will only continue to be recycled through the prisons and back onto our city streets...
...Converting a significant segment of our defense-oriented economy to other forms of production will not be easy...
...But his disciplinarian's convictions bring a false dichotomy to the argument...
...It may be that few addicts come by their addiction out of ignorance, but it's certain that few can shed their addiction without help...
...Whether it was weariness with the incumbents or with the war or with economic deprivation, the Nicaraguan people have used the advances and the deprivations of the past decade to transform themselves into a democracy-precarious though it seems at the moment...
...Apparently, this punishment was to stay in effect until Rooney recanted, his accusers relented, or "60 Minutes" ratings declined, whichever came first...
...But expanding treatment opportunities is crucial...
...Admittedly, therapeutic programs are no panacea...
...As some have suggested, drug testing and strict systems of rewards and punishments probably have a role to play in treatment procedures...
...We pray that is so...
...The tilt of manpower and material outlays committed to war preparation is staggering-and debilitating...
...During three ruinously Rooney-less shows, 20 percent of "60 Minutes" viewers wandered off to other stations...
...Mikhail Gorbachev's principle, "reasonable sufficiency" in military preparedness, would be a good rule of thumb for us to pursue...
...Cynics-or is it merely those who know political cynicism when they see it?-say the Bush administration is deftly maneuvering to claim credit for a policy victory without having to fight any hard battles in our cocaine- and crack-devasted inner cities...
...But to accomplish this, leadership will be needed...
...the Defense Department has downgraded the Soviet threat in the Persian Gulf...
...Neglect one and the effort becomes misshapen and self-defeating...
...The Pentagon found in studying 100 military base closings from 1961-1977, that 75 of the bases are now industrial parks, 58 house educational institutions, and 42 are airports...
...He presses all the right political buttons when fulminating against the evils of drugs, and has even said he is not morally opposed to beheading drug dealers or executing bankers who knowingly launder drug money...
Vol. 117 • March 1990 • No. 6
