STOPPING THE WAR AGAINST THE THIRD WORLD

...Indeed, if we ever do suffer a nuclear war, it will probably occur because of U.S...

...Indeed, I would argue that the 1988 presidential campaign was largely a contest over who would be more forceful in battering down the troublemakers of the Third World when they next dare to challenge American interests...

...This propaganda tactic has been standard operating procedure during the Cold War...

...Until we begin to resist the tendency to view the world's have-nots as America's enemies, we will not be able to stem the revival of interventionism and, with it, the risk of another Vietnamlike quagmire...

...As the leading affluent 'have' power," he wrote in Foreign Affairs, "we may expect to have to fight to protect our national valuables against envious 'have-nots.'" In the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration obscured this change in outlook by dwelling on nuclear-weapons development and the Soviet threat in Europe...

...intervention in Vietnam, echoed the warning...

...The report argues that an "excessive focus" on "apocalyptic showdowns between the United States and the Soviet Union" has led to "tunnel vision among defense planners," diverting them "from trying to deal with many important and far more plausible [conflict] situations...

...But the tempo of that competition has subsided and will, in all likelihood, continue to do so in the future...

...thinking on military policy, cutting across the lines of both political parties...

...Of course, it is easy to submerge the Great Fear—the fear of rebellious Third World peoples—into the Soviet Scare and to portray them as one and the same, calling all Third World unrest a product of communist subversion...

...And because only the United States has the capacity to fight these conflagrations, it will "be expected to use its military force to prevent the total collapse of the world order...

...Of course, we know that much effort is needed to keep the pressure on our leaders so that they will continue on this path...

...Constitution, lying to Congress, breaking our laws, and conducting break-ins of citizen organizations...

...military posture in the Third World...

...You learn to look the other way, to submerge yourself in consumption and self-indulgence and career...

...Even so, we might be tempted to relax our efforts...

...These developments are worrisome enough, for they suggest a strategic realignment of massive proportions with unforeseeable consequences...

...By now, many people have heard the term "low-intensity conflict...

...These impulses are strong, they are growing, and, so far as I can tell, they are not being actively resisted by the American peace movement...

...Such conflicts, the report notes, "are obviously less threatening than any Soviet-American war would be, yet they have had and will have an adverse cumulative effect on U.S...

...No one can measure these things with certainty, of course, but I would argue that the improvement in relations between Washington and Moscow and the resumption of serious arms-control talks has significantly reduced the likelihood of a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers...

...Of particular importance was an influential 1977 Rand Corporation study, Military Implications of a Possible World Order Crisis in the 1980s...

...policymakers' attention from the mounting threat in the Third World...

...And because the U.S.-Soviet arms race is by far the most costly component of the military budget, that is where the cuts have to be made, and are being made...

...And that's just the beginning...

...When the American people fail to react in anger to an Administration that calls its overseas minions the "democratic resistance," when they permit the President to call torturers the "moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers," we should not be surprised or outraged to find our leaders subverting the U.S...

...The primacy of LIC began to emerge in the 1970s, among military strategists who attempted to assess the "lessons" of Vietnam...

...Advocating a Third World orientation would have been considered heretical by most American policymakers only five years ago, but now it is becoming the conventional wisdom...

...military exercises and deployments in Third World conflict areas, especially the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean...

...How do you convert a tank gunner or an artilleryman or a bomber pilot...

...Rather, it will be submerged in rhetoric about international terrorism, the drug trade, Third World disorder, the Islamic upheaval, and illegal immigration...

...The first step obviously must be to examine these trends, and to make a commitment to engage them head on...

...So far, so good...

...In focusing on this threat, we have generated a number of terrifying images that have haunted our dreams and clouded our visions of the future—leading those of us in the movement to devote many of our evenings and weekends to the struggle to prevent a nuclear catastrophe...

...This view represents the core of elite U.S...

...Is this inevitable...

...I'm not sure that I have the answer...

...One way to get at this problem is through economic conversion, which would provide incentives for industry and labor to switch from military to peacetime production...

...If we look around us we can, I think, see many signs of this Great Fear...

...That will work-so long as we are talking about engineers and welders and machine-tool operators...

...Most American leaders now acknowledge that we must diminish our investment in military spending to be able to devote additional resources to economic renewal...

...We shouldn't be, for we have succeeded to a great extent in accomplishing our primary goal—to diminish the possibility of a nuclear holocaust...

...Second, we must look into xenophobic and racist dimensions of the American psyche and search for methods to isolate and eradicate them...

...As a strategy, LIC affirms that American forces must be retrained and reconfigured to fight in the underdeveloped Southern Hemisphere against rebellious peasants and Soviet- or Cuban-backed guerrilla armies, instead of in the East, against Warsaw Pact forces...

...I wouldn't fault anyone for this choice: It is enormously difficult to sustain a political commitment year after year when there are so many other pressing concerns in life—family, jobs, earning a living...

...Thus, when U.S...

...What Next for the Peace Movement Stopping the War Against the Third World BY MICHAEL T. KLARE For many years now, the peace movement has been preoccupied with one overwhelming threat: the risk of an Armageddon, an all-out nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that virtually annihilates human society...

...Some of us, in fact, might even be tempted to say, "Our work is done"—the Cold War is over, the arms-control process is back on track, and the risk of Armageddon is greatly diminished...

...With input from Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the U.S...

...But there is a dark side to all of this: Having established a permanent peacetime security establishment to manage the Cold War, we are now saddled with a powerful military-industrial infrastructure that is not about to disband itself voluntarily...

...If America continues to move in the direction I have sketched out, we can only assume that the corrosion and decay of our basic value system will accelerate...

...We talk about nuclear holocaust and military waste while ordinary Americans talk about Qaddafi and Khomeini, about terrorists and drug pushers...

...How do we resist the moral corrosion of our society...

...power-projection" forces and to support a more activist U.S...

...And, inevitably, the poison begins its slow seepage homeward from the torture cells in distant countries to the core institutions of our society...

...What is the cause of this moral poisoning, and why do I fear it now...

...military strategy over the past few years...

...You begin to kill off your own receptivity to pain and suffering...

...This is not the result of a change of heart by American officials, who remain as anticommunist as always...

...intervention in a small war, a low-intensity conflict, that escalates into a big war and drags the two superpowers into an unexpected confrontation leading to the initial use of nuclear weapons...

...For this, we should be grateful, and we should take pride in the role we played in mobilizing public concern over the nuclear peril...

...Low-intensity conflict, or LIC, is both a military strategy and a state of mind...

...In 1985, for instance, Colonel James B. Motley of the Army wrote in Military Review that "the United States should reorient its forces and traditional policies from an almost exclusive concentration on NATO to better influence politico-military outcomes in the resource-rich and strategically located Third World areas...

...could get out of hand in ways comparable to the peasant rebellions that in past centuries engulfed large parts of Europe or Asia, spreading like uncontrollable prairie fires...

...The last time the United States conducted a similar realignment was in the early 1960s under President John F. Kennedy, who made "coun-terinsurgency" the overriding concern of U.S...

...But LIC also represents a reorientation of the military mindset...

...Rather, it is a product of the changing international economic environment...

...This effort has been accompanied, moreover, by stepped-up U.S...

...Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy published a report entitled Discriminate Deterrence which sketches out the new strategy...

...I see it in the prominence accorded to the Pledge of Allegiance issue in the Presidential campaign, in the popular idolization of Oliver North, in the success of "Rambo-type" movies, in the rage for war toys and camouflage gear among American youngsters, in efforts to seal off the U.S...

...Because of President Reagan's virulent Cold War rhetoric and our own worries about nuclear conflict, we have tended to perceive all international conflict issues in East-West terms—in reference, that is, to the military competition between the United States and the Soviet Union...

...leaders speak of the threat posed by terrorism and drug trafficking, they are really expressing fear of "envious have-nots" who seek to confiscate our "national valuables...

...But we will be strengthened in our resolve by the knowledge that our efforts will not only reduce the risk of overseas violence, but will also contribute to the survival of democracy and justice at home...

...access to critical regions, on American credibility among allies and friends, and on American self-confidence...

...The American people support efforts by the U.S...

...The answers lie, in my view, in an analysis of the changes that have taken place in U.S...

...Because of the growing gap between rich and poor, "the North-South conflict...

...While our political system does incorporate some suicidal tendencies, most top leaders of this country have come to understand the basic economic picture spelled out by such analysts as Paul Kennedy of Yale University, whose book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, was an overnight sensation in 1988...

...This article was adapted from a speech he delivered at the national working session, "Moving Beyond the Cold War," held in Denver September 23-September 25...

...And it is this perception, I believe, that will invest our movement with a genuine sense of mission—of moral tightness-—that will enable us to win the support of the American people...

...Kennedy warns that hegemonic systems inevitably decline when their military expenditures exceed the carrying capacity of their economies...

...For these reasons, the Commission calls on Congress to approve a massive build-up of U.S...

...forces and led the United States into the Vietnam war...

...However, the new perspective surfaced again in the mid-1980s, when many younger military officers began to argue that the European-oriented build-up of the early 1980s had diverted U.S...

...This study suggested that "mankind is entering a period of increased social instability and faces the possibility of a breakdown of the global order as a result of a sharpening confrontation between the Third World and the industrial democracies...

...I doubt, however, that many know what it really entails...

...And it seems to me that you cannot preserve democracy and freedom and justice at home when you are fighting to preserve tyranny and exploitation and inequality abroad...

...No, not necessarily, but it surely is much more likely than a nuclear war...

...The Pentagon recognizes the historical roots of this fear, tracing LIC doctrine back to the genocidal Indian Wars of the last century and to the equally genocidal Philippines Insurgency ?f 1898-1901, in which an estimated 600,000 Filipinos were shot or starved to death by American forces...

...It will not, however, be expressed as a war against the have-nots of the Third World...

...But we must be honest with one another and tell the truth as we see it...

...It means, for the most part, fighting to protect entrenched oligarchies against the mass of the population...

...And what I see for our nation in the years ahead is not nuclear Armageddon but something almost as hideous: the slow decay and contamination of our nation's moral foundation, of its basic human decency...

...border to Hispanic immigrants, in the approval given to President Reagan's April 1986 attack on Colonel Muammar Qaddafi's living quarters in Tripoli, and in the glee expressed by many Americans about the shootdown of an Iranian civilian airliner with 300 people aboard...

...And Michael T Klare is the director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies based at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts...

...They produce much of the food and raw materials consumed in the North, and they no longer will settle for dismal poverty...

...In practice, this means the "revitalization" of America's Special Operations Forces, the creation of four new "light infantry divisions" specifically configured for combat in the Third World, a one-third increase in the Navy's amphibious assault forces, a 100 per cent increase in long-range airlift and sealift capabilities, and the creation of two new carrier battle groups and four surface action groups built around refurbished World War II-vintage battleships...

...The total cost of this buildup, which has continued apace throughout the entire Reagan period, far exceeds total spending on "Star Wars" and other exotic nuclear programs...

...What does it mean that our nation is gearing up to make war on the Third World...

...What is happening now, however, is a separation of the two fears into their component elements, with the Great Fear taking precedence over the Soviet Scare...

...This will not, of course, be easy...

...General Maxwell D. Taylor, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and architect of U.S...

...In essence, this outlook holds that the real threat to long-term American security lies not in the East, across the Fulda Gap in East Germany, but in the South, across the Rio Grande, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean...

...But, in any case, the military establishment has come up with its own answer: what is innocuously called "low-intensity conflict," or, in practice, war against the hungry and angry and frustrated peoples of the Third World...

...Now, with the Bush Administration about to take office, many of us are discouraged about our progress in this struggle and disheartened at the state of the peace movement...

...There, in the troubled and disordered regions of the Third World, America faces billions of disadvantaged people who seek a fairer share of the world's wealth...

...But what do you do with people whose profession is systematic slaughter...

...The "more plausible situations" envisioned by the Commission are revolts and regional conflicts in the Third World...

...When you line up with those who rely on assassins and torturers to remain in power, you become part of the horror, even if you don't pull the trigger or switch on the electrodes...

...Unless overtaken by some new crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations—a not impossible (but in my view unlikely) contingency— this outlook will prevail in the 1990s...

...military to realign itself from an anti-Soviet to an anti-Third World force...

...That is the "Great Fear," as John Ger-vasi once called it, and it both predates the Soviet scare and is coming to supersede it...