By Jack A. Smith
The enemy that constituted the focus of all US military, spying, propaganda and diplomatic for nearly half a century has performed the geopolitical equivalent of drinking hemlock. "By the grace of God", as President George Bush put it, "America won the Cold War".
Yet the White House, the Pentagon, the intelligence bureaucracies and the State Department are racing to develop new plans, to reorganise their policies — and to maintain high war budgets. What has been revealed so far suggests that the Bush administration may be on its way to a second Cold War, with adversary or adversaries to be found among its present allies, the other capitalist countries.
World politics may well be in transition from the superpower rivalry between US capitalism and Soviet communism to a new rivalry between US capitalism and the still emerging superpowers of Germany and Japan.
The rules of superpower conduct,however, will differ in important particulars. The rivalry will be conducted, at least for now, more in the economic and political spheres than in the military, but with the United States' superior military force backing up its declining economic clout.
The leak to the New York Times of 70 pages of heretofore secret internal documents detailing the Pentagon's explosive post-Cold War military priorities provides telling evidence of US intentions. The CIA's New World Order plans are to be made known some time this month, but their outline is fairly clear already.
7 types of war
The Pentagon documents reveal that, even in the absence of any military force remotely approximating the power of the former USSR, the US military is preparing for seven different types of warfare, some local, contained and conventional, some global and nuclear. Those preparations require that cuts in defence spending be kept at a minimum.
The first three war scenarios are clearly absurd: a second Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; an attack by North Korea on South Korea; and both of the above simultaneously. The fourth scenario is a beaut: Russia attacks Lithuania from the south, through Poland, with support from neighbouring Belarus (the former Byelorussian Republic). The fifth and sixth are fairly conventional, the kind
of wars Bush could undertake to boost his popularity: a coup in Panama that might deprive the United State of the Panama Canal; a coup in the Philippines jeopardising the 5000 resident UScitizens. (Remember the "threatened" US medical students in Grenada?)
But scenario seven is the guts of the Pentagon program. It is a game plan as old as the Cold War, despite entirely changed international circumstances. It calls for the capability of fighting one or two brush wars while at the same time waging and winning an all-out nuclear superpower war against one or more countries that "adopt an adversarial security strategy and develop a military capability to threaten US interests through global military competition".
The Pentagon documents specify that the last situation could come about in less than 10 years, and the Times interpreted that to mean that the target of such an attack "appears to be ... a resurgent Russia". But the US ability to fight a massive nuclear war seems to be as much a warning to Washington's existing capitalist rivals as it is to a former adversary in Moscow.
Vanishing 'peace dividend'
The Times reported that the documents had been leaked "by an official who wished to call attention to what he considered vigorous attempts within the military establishment to invent a menu of alarming war scenarios that can be used by the Pentagon to prevent further reductions in forces or cancellations of new weapons systems from defence contractors". The Pentagon is said to be basing its military budget requests for 1994-99 on the seven possible wars, the upshot of which could be a Pentagon budget as high at the end of this decade as it was at the beginning of the first Cold War.
But for the moment, under political pressure to declare a "peace dividend", the Bush administration is planning to cut the $300 billion annual Pentagon budget by a total of $50 billion over a six-year period; Bush said he was willing to go "this deep and no deeper" in the reductions. If this were carried through to 1995, the war budget would be reduced by then from 1992's $307 billion to $282.9 billion. After that, it is likely the Pentagon's seven-war strategy will take over and push spending up again.
Anticipating a possible political issue in Bush's virtual elimination of the "dividend", Democrats are calling for between $100 billion and $200 billion in total cuts over a five- or six-year period. To the left of the Democrats, administration opponents argue that the military budget can easily be cut in half by eliminating the cost of defending Europe from the
no-longer-existing Soviet "threat" and by cutting back on expensive weapons programs that are unnecessary in today's world. That would amount to a saving of $150 billion a year, or nearly $1 trillion over six years — enough to finance many pressing social and infrastructural needs.
Star Wars
But the Bush administration does not appear to be planning to meet those needs. Many of the cutbacks are for show, consisting largely of reductions in several superfluous weapons programs, including the B-2 Stealth bomber, the Seawolf submarine, the MX "Peacekeeper" missile and the Midgetman missile. The budget request for the Strategic Defence Initiative — known as "Star Wars" — will actually be increased by $1.3 billion to $5.4 billion in the 1993 projections.
Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin appear headed toward agreements that will sharply reduce the number of strategic (long range) missiles and warheads in their respective arsenals. Yeltsin is willing to reduce to 2500 warheads and ultimately down to zero, but the United States is only willing to consider reducing its warheads by half (to 4500, which would still be sufficient to destroy all life on Earth many times over). For Bush, a reduction to a few thousand is as far as the United States will go because he evidently sees a future use for them.
What that use might be becomes more apparent when the Pentagon documents are put next to the plans of the CIA and other intelligence agencies like the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office.
For over 40 years, the so-called intelligence community has concentrated virtually all its attention on the containment and defeat of communism — an operation now costing well over $30 billion a year. Without the "Evil Empire" to occupy its attention, what will the CIA and its cohorts in surveillance do to occupy their time?
In fact, the US intelligence gatherers may actually have more to do after the Cold War than they did during it. The entire former Soviet Union will still be kept under continual watch. Surveillance will continue to play a major role in Washington's drive to halt nuclear proliferation in the Third World.
In addition, the Defence Department's seven war scenarios will require continued — and perhaps increased — surveillance of the Pentagon planners' possible war zones. And the United States will now be watching for any potentially "threatening" military developments (especially technological breakthroughs) by its ostensible allies.
CIA industrial spies?
But the key element of Washington's post-Cold War intelligence plans involves intracapitalist spying — in other words, spying on our allies, not around military issues, but around economic and industrial projects.
Few observers doubt that high-tech design secrets and financial and trading plans of other capitalist countries will be a major object of Washington's intelligence agencies in the near future, despite recent statement by CIA director Robert Gates. He claims, "There is a lot of concern about doing industrial espionage [against other capitalist economies] and I frankly don't think that US intelligence should be engaged in that". At most, he continued, the CIA will increase its watch over its allies to make certain they are not taking unfair advantage in trade and industrial matters.
The rationale for greatly increasing intracapitalist spying was spelled out by Stansfield Turner — who served as CIA director under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981 — in the Fall 1991 issue of Foreign Affairs.
Writing shortly before the USSR dissolved, Turner said, "The most obvious impact of the new world order is that, except for Soviet nuclear weaponry, the pre-eminent threat to national security now lies in the economic sphere ... We must then redefine 'national security' by assigning economic strength greater prominence. This means we will need better economic intelligence. The United States does not want to be surprised by such worldwide developments as technological breakthroughs, new mercantilist strategies, sudden shortages of raw materials or unfair or illegal economic practices ... If economic strength should now be recognised as a vital component of national security, parallel with military power, why should America be concerned about stealing and employing economic secrets?"
The Cold War may be over, but it looks as if another one is starting. "The world is still a dangerous place", noted Bush during his State of the Union speech, defending his high military budget even after the dissolution of the USSR. "Only the dead have seen the end of conflict."
[From the US Guardian.]