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Date Posted: 13:08:41 02/20/02 Wed
Author: Weird_Enigma
Author Host/IP: 172.168.58.99
Subject: It's perilous to divide world into Good, Evil

From the Charlotte Observer Wed, Feb. 20, 2002

It's perilous to divide world into Good, Evil

JACK PERRY
Special to The Observer

There is stark danger in the belief that we Americans represent Good while our adversaries represent Evil.

There is harm in the proposition that all foreign policy challenges can be reduced to a "war against terrorism."

There is peril in shouting to the world that we see an "axis of evil" in Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and to assert our right to remove their rulers from power.

There is folly in the claim that America has every right to "weapons of mass destruction" but others do not -- and that we have the entire right to say who has the right and who does not.

Since the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, we Americans have had a huge preponderance of power in the world. We were sorely wounded by the awful attacks of Sept. 11, and in retaliation we have demonstrated that power. Now we are coming ever closer to saying, "America is entitled to decide the fate of nations. We need not accept counsel from the United Nations or NATO or our partners or anybody else. After all, we stand for Good, those we disagree with stand for Evil."

Sir Herbert Butterfield, then professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, wrote in The New York Times on Jan. 3, 1973: "Many of us have been brought up on a kind of history which sees the human drama throughout the ages as a straight contest between right and wrong. ... It is easy for us to fall into imagining that life and the course of history are spoiled only by the activity of the extraordinarily wicked."

In foreign policy, President George W. Bush seems determined to use the national upsurge of wounded patriotism after Sept. 11 to push for a hard-line agenda, curiously harking back to Ronald Reagan's first term rather than to his father's presidency. A symbol and a symptom of this is the division of the world into Good and Evil, far too simple a scheme for the real world. Anyone who has thought seriously about foreign policy sees the impossibility of declaring Good or Evil such places as India or Pakistan, China or Russia, Israel or Palestine. Or the United States.

What is wrong with saying, after Sept. 11, that the only thing that matters in world affairs is the war of the good guys against terrorism? Much the same thing that was wrong in saying during the Cold War that all foreign policy could be summed up in "Us vs. Communism." Both are simplistic. Both are half-truths. No matter how popular the label, no matter how much we ache from Sept. 11, to reduce our foreign policy to the phrase "war on terrorism" is misleading and dangerous. It is critically important to define "terrorism" carefully, and we are not doing so. We are making it mean anything we oppose.

This policy is also wrong in asserting that military weapons can solve all problems. The astounding expansion of the Pentagon and CIA budgets -- while shrinking the budget for diplomacy -- is testimony to a belief that weapons can end terrorism. We ignore history: The success of Europe in combating terrorism in the '60s and '70s was owing to hard police work and untiring diplomacy and coordinated efforts among nations, not to increases in European defense budgets.

We used the Taliban regime's support of Osama bin Laden, understandably, to justify topping that odious regime. But what justification will we use for trying to topple Saddam Hussein? Why is his situation (or Iran's or North Korea's) different after Sept. 11? And what foreign policy interest of the United States will it serve to eliminate Saddam or the others? To remove the threat that they will acquire "weapons of mass destruction" that might one day conceivably be aimed against us? But don't most nations have weapons designed for mass destruction? Do we remove any regime that might use weapons against us?

In 1982 I heard former Secretary of State Dean Rusk say to a college student asking why we did not make others do what we wanted: "There are 160 other nations out there -- no one of which salutes and snaps its heels when we speak. Nobody has elected us to be the den mother of the universe. ... It's not for us to tell people in Africa and Latin America and everywhere else how they should jump through hoops."

We used to think in Washington that reducing the danger of weapons of mass destruction depended on the diplomacy of arms control, and we worked hard in that direction. Now we seem to be asserting the right to disarm nations who have those same "weapons of mass destruction" that we ourselves have in great abundance.

There is great peril in using the justifiable hurt of Sept. 11 to create a "war on terrorism" that must prove grossly inadequate to address the great foreign policy challenges now before the world. It is time not for simple formulas but for complexity of thought and design in creating a wise foreign policy. I fear we are on a devious and delusive path, and popular applause for patriotism does not make it wise.

Jack

Perry


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Jack Perry, a retired career diplomat who was ambassador to Bulgaria, is former director of the Dean Rusk Program in International Studies at Davidson College. Write him at P.O. Box 1183, Davidson NC 28036.

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