Opinion 4 Page 6 Wednesday, August 11, 1982 The Michigan Daily The Michigan Daily Vol. XCII, No. 59-S Ninety-two Years of Editorial Freedom Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan Nuclear poker THE DEFEAT OF the proposal for a nuclear freeze by the House of Representatives was hardly a surprise. The real surprise of last week's vote was that it was so close. The op- position won by a scant 204 to 202 margin. What those 202 votes represent is growing discontent, both within the Congress and among voters throughout the country, with President Reagan's feeble attempts at reducing the threat of nuclear war. The other segment still clings to President Reagan's hardline stand with the Soviets. As former Secretary of State Alexander Haig recently stated, however, the United States need not pursue a strictly confrontational relationship with the Soviet Union. Americans may have little in common with the Russians, but at least the two groups have a overh- welming interest in reducing the threat of nuclear war. The president has insisted that he opposes the nuclear arms race as much as anti-nuclear ac- tivists, but has a different, more effective way to stop it. In light of that assertion, should the nation abandon the nuclear freeze movement and jump on the president's bandwagon? Cer- tainly not, for two reasons. First, the president's proposals for reducing nuclear weapons are unworkable. In the nuclear poker game, he has asked the Soviet Union to throw out its strongest suit, while the United States only throws out its weakest. The rest is supposed to be negotiated later, but in the meantime the United States keeps all the big chips. The Soviets, of course, have declined to play by these rules. Secondly, while the game is being played at the negotiating table, both nations can continue on a perilous course of building more weapons. And if past agreements are any indication of the future, the game will end up as a draw, just as the situation stands now. That is why the nuclear freeze option is so attractive and has received the endorsement of 199 city councils, 10 state legislatures, and 202 Congress members. A freeze would stop the arms race right where it is, providing that such an agreement is verifiable. And in spite of the president's asser- tion's, most independent analysts rate U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals as being roughly equal. What the nation need snow are congressional leaders who see through Reagan's rhetoric. While the president's plan for reducing nuclear weapons stands dead in the water, the nuclear freeze movement is the only game in town that can move the world out from under an ominous nuclear cloud. Warring bynumbers By Anthony Astrachan One child torn apart by a cluster bomb is a tragedy. Ten families with some members killed, some wounded, some; homeless, barely surviving in a. war that none of them chose, is a nightmare. Thousands of civilian casualties is a disaster. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon has produced a disaster. The vic- tims are insulted by the numbers game played by both sides in a war fought almost as much on the propaganda field as on the military field. Worse, the victims are betrayed and dehumanized. THE propagandists try to stir' the guilt and anger of the Western world, particularly the United States, hoping that public opinion will either force or. prevent a change in the U.S. policy of sup-. porting Israel. One is struck by the same acrid odor as' in the propaganda battle over the Biafran struggle for in- dependence from Nigeria. Nigeria blockaded Biafra, and from 1968 to 1970 the two sides disputed how many Biafrans would die of starvation. The Biafran numbers stirred many Americans to demand changes in U.S. policy, which favored Nigeria. The policy did not change. When the war ended in Nigerian victory, the number of deaths turned out to be con- siderably less than the Biafrans had claimed and considerably more than the Nigerians had ad- mitted. As a reporter in Nigeria and Biafra I felt the same anger that rises today as I observe Lebanon from a distance. The propagan- dista on both sides are equally oh- scene in pretending there is some moral difference between the deaths of 600 people (the latest Israeli estimate of civilians killed) and the deaths of 14,000 (the estimate of Arab lobbyist James Zogby in Washington). Both figures add up to disaster. BUT AMERICANS must share responsibility with the propagan- dists for this kind of obscenity. Americans are fascinated by numbers, and sometimes at- tribute a morality to them that is hard to understand. Perhaps it's a byproduct of being a democracy, with a constant need to count and attribute rightness or brightness to the majority of the moment. Perhaps it's an outgrowth of an old belief, probably also related to majoritarian democracy, that bigger is better, or at least more significant. Perhaps it's a notion that facts are more important than dogma-and what could be more of a fact than a number? Some statistics turn out to be less a measure of reality than a way of avoiding it. Frances Fit- zgerald noted that for many American military officers in Saigon in 1966 the Viet Cong body count was a way to "transcend doubts about the identity of the dead and the ambiguities of the words 'war' and 'winning.' " In the United States the incredibility of the body count became a weapon of the anti-war movement. Our unhappiness over the Lebanon figures, our willingness to believe the worst, is a way of expressing dismay over Israeli policy and the Reagan ad- ministration's basic support for it. You don't have to be an Arab to recognize what has happened in Lebanon. If one is a Jew or an American who believes that Israeli survival is necessary to keep the world fit to live in (I am both), one can still proclaim Lebanon a disaster. We scream because it's our side, our outpost of democracy, our survivor of the original Holocaust, that is killing civilians and lying about the figures. WE WOULD do better to separate morality and emotion from statistics. Attempts at ac- curacy are important for rational efforts to relieve suffering and for the recording of a history truthful enough to help both sides live together. Neither goal seems a high priority in the Middle East. Some Israeli officials admit that the figures exclude Palestinians. (The Israelis often talk as though all Palestinians, including women and children, are "terrorists" rather than civilians, which stirs further echoes of U.S. statistics about the Viet Cong.) Foreign correspon- dents have reported that the original Lebanese government figures of 10,000 dead and 600,000 homeless, accepted at first by the Red Cross, were gross exaggerations. The Red Cross relieved its Beirut chief, Fran- cesco Noseda, of his post after he used those figures; it later came down to 200,000 homeless. The Israeli figure for the homeless, which nobody believes, is 20,000. But 20,000 or 200,000, it's a lot of housing to find. That's what we- should keep in mind. You can't builda home with statistics. Astrachan wrote this article for the Pacific News Service. 4 4 Sinclair UNDERITHIS NEW CONTITUTIAMENDW~MENT ThP~orlt'JtrA 'P)GET WRH HUTE'yFwiCm S AILL 13k AtAi6ST- .- y- - / it- 1 t "-V