How to make war with backs to the enemy

Press, 4 August 1983, Page 19

How to make war with backs to the enemy

By

RUSSELL BAKER

New York “Times”

The modern American style about war is to back into it. Say you get a President who is out of touch with the times, and he comes by the office and says: “By George, I want to go to war,” you know right away you’ve got a hopelessly out-of-date old-timer on your hands.

Nowadays, no President wants to go to war. Modern Presidents want to be dragged into war whining and grinding their teeth. For this reason, they no longer ask Congress to declare war. Suppose the greenhorn who drops in for advice says: “I want to go to war so bad I’m thinking of asking Congress for a declaration.” You’d probably want to humour him a bit to get him cooled down, so you might ask: “What’s so grim that you want to declare war about it?”

Well, he might say the safety of the nation is threatened by a Marxist government in the lower latitudes, and if something isn’t done about it soon we will be at the mercy of the world’s nastiest tyrants. This is a very sound reason for going to war. In fact, if the safety of the nation is threatened by an alien tyranny any President who didn’t go to war would probably be derelict in his duty and maybe ought to be impeached. The easy, old-fashioned way would be to declare war, clean out the troublemakers, and install a new set of rules whose idea of

decent government coincides with ours. This is obviously what President Reagan ought to do in Central America right now, providing he isn’t spoofing us about Nicaragua and El Salvador being the front wave of a Red tide threatening to inundate the Americas.

Why doesn’t the President do this? Probably because the people he consulted about going to war told him exactly what I would have told him if he’d come in for advice. I would have said: “Mr President, declaring war went out with Franklin Roosevelt, the two-pants suit, and the $550 Ford VB. The way you get into a war nowadays is the way encyclopedia salesmen used to get into the house so they could spread their samples out on the parlour floor. You start by putting your foot in the door, and keeping it there, and smiling and saying you’ve come to do that household a favour.”

Reagan, a Depression man who might have become an encyclopedia salesman himself if he hadn’t been so photogenic, would understand that. Unlike the encyclopedia salesman’s, though, the President’s favour isn’t a treasure trove of knowledge for the country in trouble, but a small sum of money. He goes to the faction resisting

the Marxists and distributes a little money to help the cause. At this point, ’the operation develops like one of those multibillion-dollar Pentagon programmes that start out as nickel-and-dime purchases and end up bleeding the Treasury white.

Naturally, the small sum of money doesn’t help much against the Marxists, and the President has to send more money. Presidents usually find that this money is squandered or shipped to European bank accounts by the people to whom they send it. So, like the Pentagon nursing a new bomber from birth to delivery by starting with a $5OO appropriation for rubber bands and ending with a $lO billion appropriation for flying juggernauts, he explains that the money already spent will be wasted unless more money is spent. So he sends more money and throws in some food and medical supplies. A few guns. Some bombs. A couple of helicopters. Naturally, it’s not enough. Somehow a lot of the guns wind up in Marxist hands. The people he is supporting, like everybody who suddenly discovers he has a pipeline into the United States Treasury, explain that they need

more quickly or all will be lost. The President sends some doctors, then a few advisers, then more advisers. They are not to gee involved in combat, though. The President emphasises this. He is not marching Americans off to war. He is fighting to preserve the peace. By this time his requests for money and armaments have begun to interest Congress. Some congressmen complain. The President turns up the emotional heat. Those who oppose him want to weaken America in its struggle for peace, he says. The media, sensing a story that can be reported as a prizefight, awaken. Hawks and doves stir from their roosts. The air crackles with hard feeling. In the revival of antique quarrels — who lost China? Who lost Cuba? — the newspaper reader can detect the taste of tired blood. The President demands support for peace, and his opponents resist to preserve the peace. But the President stands for a national commitment — who can say how or when it was made? — and not to support him will make America look like a pitiful helpless giant. At this stage there is hardly any way a President can avoid war, even if he wants to. He has finagled himself into war on the sly and on the cheap, and if he can’t get himself out quickly, as Lyndon Johnson discovered, he will soon be out of work.