6 OPINION ;F9e 4 Tuesday, October 12, 1982The Michigan Daily "k Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan Sinclair .6 Vol. XCIII, No. 29 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 A PA\CAGE FROM' PRES OENT ?EA~fAN, Editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily's Editorial Board g:_ >,.. F,.. NOW comes of age -y. ;S I. .' I I. -.4 +._ -DE AR. MEACA4ENI - 3EC.ENT MALICIOUS AND IR r0S'N s l LE FKESS R bERT5 4N SCPSU T~v WANTEQ'j OU REMOVED FROM OFFICE. --NOTh 1N CQ CULD aE FuRTHE R FROM THE TRUTH. SAS A FELLOW VV R Lp - LEA1t R IAPPSECIAr- TNE k - STRE55 (oU ARE UNDER \1 7 N~tLP YOU PEAL. f, WITH TN E IT'S BEEN an awful year so far for the National Organization for Women. The Equal Rights Amen- dment, the cornerstone of NOW's political strategy, went down to defeat in June. The proposed Helms amen- dment and several other conservative schemes still threaten to take away a woman's right to abortion and con- traception. The Reagan ad- ministration's attitude toward feminism continues to be neutral at, best, openly hostile at worst. But at its annual convention last week, NOW seemed strangely enough to be in better, shape than ever. In the midst of crippling setbacks and waning public interest, NOW is quietly coming of age as a political organization. NOW's failure with ERA forced the organization to take a good-long look at itself and at its politicalstrategy. NOW went optimistically into battle for ERA almost a decade ago, armed with little more than the fact that passing an amendment on equality was the right thing to do. Being right, however, didn't add up to being successful. NOW underestimated the difficulty of threading a constitutional amendment through the legislative labyrinth of 34 states. NOW- and the ERA-lost a lot of legitimacy in the process. But the defeat forced NOW to reevaluate its role in the future and to put pragmatic and realistic political goals at the top of its list. NOW is set- ting its current sights on gaining political clout. It plans to set up an in- stitute to support feminist of- ficeholders and to train female can- didates. It still hopes to iron out inequities toward women, but it is narrowing its scope-next year, the Social Security program and the in- surance industry have been named as its specific targets. And, most impor- tant, NOW is supporting candidates this year for their political and social stands first, their feminist stands second. NOW's prime goal, its new president said, is to get Democrats back in office in November, not to elect feminist candidates. Its reach may be less sweeping and its platform less idealistic than in its 70s heyday, but NOW can only profit from- its newfound practicality. By learning a political lesson from its failures and by dusting itself off for the future, NOW can ensure that it remains an effective force for social change. 2AN1P H1EAPOVW F OF y/oU1 AMLRIWT. SO ALiREADY? SIUC At C t58"i. T -r N+UAt A ,6 VN .,r 6 C_-) EXTkq SYKCNGTN _ leno' -k- I --, .. Are major powers re..sponsible 6 for Third World Environmental rhetoric A HOUSE committee Sunday released a report that, to no one's surprise, charged that the Reagan administration has been dangerously negligent in enforcing basic environ- mental laws. ;The report surprised no one because those who agree with it say they knew if all along and those who don't agree with it simply cross it off as partisan maneuvering. After all, Reagan sup- porters point out, the committee that wrote the report is controlled by Democrats-congressmen who are becoming increasingly preoccupied with the first Tuesday in November. What is surprising, however, is that the committee's chairman, Michigan Democrat John Dingell, has one of the most deplorable environmental voting records on Capitol Hill. Dingell has a well-deserved reputation as a man who will vote down almost any environ- mental law that the auto industry finds inconvenient. But is this the same John Dingell who Sunday charged that the Republicans are "short-changing the American people" for failing to get tough with industrial polluters? What ( IWO ~iBALA N Dingell says is basically correct; the Environmental Protection Agency's new Republican leaders, have done a miserable job of fighting pollution. They have, as the reports notes, fallen short not only of the Carter ad- ministration's record, but of their own projected goals as well. Of the 723 in- spections of chemical plants the EPA promised to conduct last year, for example, only three have actually been completed. The tragic truth, however, is that although voters can now revel in promises from both Republicans and Democrats that the environment will be protected, once November 3 rolls around much of the rhetoric will be forgotten. The Reagan EPA will go back to doing a remarkably inadequate job and John Dingell will likely retreat to his usual position as blind advocate of "regulatory relief" for the auto industry. The only real hope for the environ- ment is that voters next month will look at the records and not the rhetoric of candidates when deciding who to send to Washington. By Jon ,Stewart War may be hell, as the general said, but the post-World War II record indicates that it's also a helluva habit. What's more, despite the almost total con- finement of war and lesser conflicts to the Third World in the last 35 years, the major powers of the Northern Hemisphere remain by far' the world's most active employers of military forces. The popular perception that the Third World is voraciously slaughtering itself is misguided only insofar as it fails to recognize that the "Great Powers" at the helm of the United Nations are egging it on when not directly participating in it. ACCORDING TO a new book published in London called "War in Peace," some 35 million people have died in 130 military con- flicts in more than 100 countries (all but a handful in the Third World) since the end of World War II. In the vast majority of these conflicts, the four original major powers of the United Nations Security Coun- cil-Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union-have played prominent roles, direct or indirect. One thinks especially of Korea, which claimed more than 2 million lives and in- volved all the great powers except France; of Indochina, which involved all the great powers but Britain; of France's bloody colonial wars in Africa, which claimed several million, and of the ongoing slaughter between Arabs and Israelis, armed to the teeth with American and Russian weapons. Indeed, one of the most notable facts about military conflict in this era of "peace" is that peace really has reigned among the major powers. None of the world's mightiest military nations, all of which are nuclear powers, has crossed swords with any other member of the club, with the minor exception of the 1969 border skirmishes between the Soviet Union and China. They have made their own worlds safe through arms agreements so as to shadow box in the Third World, where, as far as the major powers are concerned, war not only is acceptable but almost the norm. THIS LEAVES the Western anti-nuclear weapons movement in a slightly em- barrassing position: It not only fails to grap- ple with the real wars of the Third World, but it ignores as well the conventional weapons, which, in fact, have been used to kill people every single day since the armistice was signed in 1945. The argument that these Third World wars-which, taken together, really represent a third World War-are mostly the product of nation-building among backward and bloodthirsty societies simply doesn't wash. At least it doesn't explain why the four great powers, sworn to uphold the principles pf peaceful resolution of conflict at the United Nations, have engaged in as many as 71 direct military interventions outside their own bor- ders in the postwar period, all but four of which have been in the Third World. A recent study by Professors Herbert Tillema and John Van Wingen of the Univer- sity of Missouri and the University of Southern Mississippi, respectively, concludes with an understatement: "It is obvious that the world's major governments have not con- sistently behaved in strict accordance with contemporary international law." THEY NOTE that Britain leads the list of postwar great power military adventurists with a total of 36 foreign military interven- tions, up to and not including the Falklands War. France follows with 18; the United States with 10, not including U.S. troops in El Salvador and Honduras, and the Soviet Union with seven. The 71 identified great power in- terventions since 1946 involve only those in which regular troops actually conducted military operations inside a foreign territorv. This limited definition rules out some of the more notable interventions, such as the U.S. Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba (irregular troops); the Britiah occupation of Northern Ireland (;,:)t strictly a foreign territory); the U.S. overthrow ofthe Iranian government in 1953 and the Chilean government in 1973 (CIA operations), or the Soviet crushing of Solidarity in Poland (achieved without actual Russian troops). Further, these uses of military force by the four major Security Council members cannot be dismissed as simply, or even mainly, cases of reluctant decolonization, though this factor did account in the early postwar years for many of the interventions. More than half of the direct military expeditions were directed against fully independent sovereign nations; and more than one-third of the interventions were in countries where the invading power had no treaty obligation or prior military presence. OF COURSE, even under strict inter- pretations of United Nations law on the use of military force, some instances of intervention fall within the realm of legality, such as hot 9. wars? pursuit, self-defense, and retaliation fore illegal acts. But United Nations law appears to have had little impact on when or where the 6 presumed guarantors of the U.N. law have used military force. Six out of the great power interventions against independent states in the postwar era were illegal by the strictest definition of United Nations law. Half of America's uses of military force have been illegal. The British, ironically, have proven themselves to be both the quickest to the draw (responsible for fully'. half of all great power interventions) and the most law-abiding (84 percent legal under U.N. law). France, the second most active of0 the great military powes, is the premiere outlaw; 83 percent of French interventions in' the last 20 years have been flat-out illegal. In-, deed, only 20 percent of the post-1968 great power interventions have been conducted un- der circumstances which do not call for U.N. sanctions against the invader. Thanks to the Security Council veto procedure, no sanctions. ever have been levied. It may be fairly charged that statistics such as these tell more the lie than the truth. But the lie, if there is one, is that on the conser- vative side; it hides the full extent of great. power militarism. It hides the fact that the. great powers, along with Israel, Germany, and other Western allies, have nurtured the world's appetite for war by making the production and sale of weapons the world's. leading cash commodity, surpassing food..- Arms sales to the Third World, where the Fir, st and Second worlds fight.atheir wars, have nearly tripled in the last decade. The statistics also hide another vital fact of great power warfare in the postwar period: Those in the Big Four do not tread on' one another's toes. Of the 71 postwar interver tions identified by Tillema and Van Winger, not a single one involved a territory in which two or more members of the club could legitimately claim to have clear military in- terests. In other words, the threat of any two great powers having to actually confront one another at the end of a nuclear gun barrel has been sufficient to restrict them to their own Third World "turf." They will not allow them- selves to fight one another, except by Third World proxy. For this last fact, those in the great power states may count their blessings. Those in the Third World count their dead. Stewart wrote this article for Pacific News Service. Wasserman THS P5L CT 41 K; TOT~ OIL, EXEuTiV- 5Y ;, XiSTlN& COtAAN\6 INSTEAD OF C-XPLDRIN& FOR NEW TMT~ %5SRN a Tm COMB~ING -HE STOCK F2EEPRT5 LOKIN FOR dCAt THEY 'THINK REAL EASY AL ~iTIN'j l PINT 2 '~S~279Y 0-._ J4 it ii ''~YflS~~") ~ ~ p-rw.T.. ~ tVW6fl$Wt'~*' 0