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On Peace and Our Responsibility: The Challenge of the '90s

By Barry Romo

Barry Romo, National Coordinator

With the ending of the Cold War comes the beginning of the Drug War. With the closing of military bases at home comes the expansion of the military.

In fact one new naval base in Italy alone will cost more than all the savings from the domestic base closings.

Gorbachev talks and acts to ensure peace. He brings troops home, cuts troops abroad, allows elections and hostile governments right on his own border.

Bush and the U.S. on the other hand are expanding U.S. presence. A cut in Germany, an expansion in Italy, a cut in Korea, expansion into Peru, continual pressures in the Philippines and Honduras, support for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the death squads and Arena Government in El Salvador, continued subversion of Cuba and Nicaragua and an invasion of Panama.

The peace dividend is nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of the news media and some leftists who think that the U.S. government will change its fundamental existence without a fight. A gigantic, bloody brawl at that.

The U.S. government hasn't been spending all that money on stealth bombers, submarines, atomic bombs, and canons and on and on because the Soviet Union forces us to.

As long as I've been alive we used the weapons of destruction not on the USSR, but on Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Lebanon, Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Nicaraguan and so on!

Our struggle didn't stop with the coming down on the Berlin wall or the Soviet troop pull out in Afghanistan. It has gotten harder.

Sure, its easier now because red baiting doesn't have the bite it had ten years ago. And democracy and independence (via western Europe) are great. But people in the Third World countries used to get aid, financial, political and military from the U.S.S.R. that they won't get now.

North vs. South

The struggle has shifted from East vs West to North vs South—from superpower confrontation and contention to straight rich vs poor, industrialized vs developing world. Imperialism isn't dead. It's expanding. It's growing. And its centered right here in the good old U.S.A.

We have a struggle on our hands—one that means we have to confront reality and cast aside illusion. We have to continue to build the movement against intervention by controlling political power, education and building international political ties.

The movement around Central America had many victories. Among them, cutting off all aid to the contras while the Senate was controlled by the Republicans. This people's victory forced the crime that became the Iran/Contragate scandal involving the highest levels of the Reagan administration. Reagan and the boys were on the run and they knew it.

But we did not follow up on our victory. People-to-people became the slogan and medical aid, trucks and trips became primary. Tons of money was raised and tones of thousands of people visited Central America.

Yet we could not stop aid to the contras today. Not only that, but we also could not even keep a human rights provision on aid to the death squad government in El Salvador.

Stop Low Intensity War

Our primary job, our duty, is to stop the U.S. government and its strategy of Low Intensity War. While aid is good we cannot hope to match the damage done in lives and money by our government to its international victims.

During the Vietnam War we did very little people-to-people aid yet we stopped the war. More aid to Vietnam would have been good but the primary thing—limiting our own government by making support for the war politically costly, undermining the military and building broad support—was key. And it's key now.

The American people have to know their enemies and friends. They have to understand the difference between the contras and the Sandinstas, Chamarro and Ortega. That means more than flying someone else's flag. That means education, not sloganeering.

We've all confronted our boss at work about better working conditions, attended PTA meetings about school curriculum, or attended city council meetings about school curriculum, or attended city council meetings about poor service to the neighborhood.

On one level we understand that we have to confront that local situation while working toward that strike, change in school board or end to a municipal administration.

On a national level we have to demand an end to intervention, that "our" representative listen and act according to our wishes while we work for a change in the whole damn system.