Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: Americans Search for a New Foreign Policy.

Michael Klare is perplexed. He sees the United States pursuing a bizarre national-security policy, and he wants to find out why. In Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, Klare takes on the official justifications for Cold War levels of spending and military might in a post-Cold War world. With devastating logic and clear writing, he tears to shreds the arguments that the Pentagon, State Department, and National Security Council use when they prepare their plans for arming one-and-a-half million troops, and spending $260 billion a year on the military.

There's only one problem with Klare's book: it's nearly irrelevant. That's a sad commentary not on the book, but on the way arms-making corporations have seized control of the political process in Washington.

Since the end of the Cold War, ideas no longer matter in determining the broad outlines of national-security policy. There is no battle of ideas to win, only a brawl to divvy up the juiciest slices of pork left in the federal government, which are contracts under the military budget and approvals for foreign-arms sales. Klare, who teaches peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College, can't be faulted for not knowing this, since he doesn't work inside the Beltway, where those of us who do have to live this absurd reality every day.

Klare's thesis is that to maintain their size and funding, the military services and the National Security Council collude to exaggerate threats, which are then used to plan an overblown military force. Specifically, he argues that faced with the loss of the Soviet enemy, the military services fashioned a "bottom-up review" based on the dubious assumption that the United States should be ready to fight two simultaneous wars against "rogue nations" such as North Korea and Iran. Klare then shows how the Pentagon and the National Security Council demonized these "rogues." While these nations are certainly aggressive, have amassed substantial forces, and are trying to acquire nuclear weapons, they are in one or more of these characteristics no different from a number of our "friends," such as Pakistan, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia.

Widespread acceptance of the overblown threat, argues Klare, is the reason that the Administration and Congress have been unable to cut the armed forces and pursue the far-wiser strategies of international demilitarization and development that he proposes in the last chapter of the book. Klare shoots the fish in this barrel, showing how we could easily manage the post-Soviet threat with far-smaller, less expensive forces, in hopes that his words will lead to such cuts.

But nobody in Washington really listens to the testimony of admirals and generals on how their proposed budget is designed to meet certain threats, and certainly nobody bothers to take seriously an arcane debate about whether we need to be ready to fight one, or one-and-a-half, or two wars at a time because none of this matters. What matters is the political livelihood of Presidential candidates and members of Congress from "defense-dependent" states that receive more than $7 million during each election cycle from PACs controlled by the giant military contractors in the Aerospace Industries Association.

Take the week in which I wrote this review, the week of May 22, when Congress took two steps that Klare would correctly find harmful to our national security. On a 57-42 nearly party-line vote, the Senate passed its budget resolution, which over five years will cut non-military programs by 12 percent while holding military spending constant. And on a 262-157 vote in which 28 percent of Democrats joined 93 percent of Republicans, the House defeated an amendment by Democratic Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia that would have set up a code of conduct barring weapons and training to the military forces of undemocratic governments.

Why did the Senate vote to keep military spending at Cold War levels a decade after the demise of the Soviet Union? Why did the House vote to sell weapons to precisely the kinds of countries most likely to use them against our troops in future peacekeeping missions? Most assuredly, the answers have little to do with military strategy, and much to do with money.

Military spending stays high to accommodate, among other weapons programs, a growing budget for "Stars Wars" anti-missile programs. But spending billions preparing to shoot down ballistic missiles won't make us safer. The ease with which terrorists wheeled tons of explosives to the federal building in Oklahoma City makes it obvious that the only way to defend America from far-smaller nuclear bombs is for the United States to give up its nuclear weapons under a tough international regime of inspection and sanctions that keeps everyone from keeping or developing them. Yet the size of the Star Wars budget - nearly $4 billion in annual contracts - prevents the Clinton Administration from advocating disarmament. No conspiracy; just reality.

And consider the first major arms sale the Clinton Administration approved on its way to record arms transfers to undemocratic governments in its first year, the sale of 250 M-1A2 tanks to Kuwait in January 1993. The Army supported the sale, even though there was more military risk than benefit in having the tiny Kuwait army holding tanks more advanced than the M-1A1s our troops use. Kuwait can't possibly deploy these tanks properly, and would surely lose them as quickly to an Iraqi invasion as it lost its French tanks in 1990. But the Army believed, probably correctly, that if it didn't agree to the export, liberal Democratic Senators from the tank-producing states of Ohio and Michigan would force it to use its limited procurement budget to buy the tanks itself.

While Klare is wrong to think that the battle of ideas counts for much, he certainly wins that battle. I have only two minor quarrels with his analysis. First, Klare implies that the military services are disingenuous in creating the scenarios needed to justify their budgets. That is unfair. The correct answer to the military question of how much (money, troops, ammunition, artillery, air cover, prepatory bombing) do you need is always, "More!" More makes you stronger and lets you win battles with less cost in the lives of your troops, so saying you need more is a virtual duty for any commander or planner with a conscience. That's why we have the President and Congress, and not military personnel, decide the level of military spending.

Second, Klare is in a weak position to pooh-pooh today's threats as not justifying a force as big "as that needed to defeat the Soviet Union," since during the 1980s he also pooh-poohed the Soviet threat to Europe, arguing that our forces there were wildly inflated to meet that threat. While a Warsaw Pact attack on NATO in the 1980s would have been madness, the size of the forces arrayed to threaten that madness did not permit the United States the luxury of taking Klare's advice. His analysis then certainly makes it harder for strategists to take his advice seriously now.

Since I think that Klare's battle of ideas won't have much impact at present, how about a battle of images instead?

Companies like McDonnell Douglas push through arms sales to dictators not with cogent analyses of regional forces, but rather with videos of shuttered shops and workers in unemployment lines. Peace advocates need to level the playing field by juxtaposing charts of corporate profits and campaign contributions with images of American soldiers killed and maimed by American-supplied weapons in Panama, Iraq, and Somalia, and of innocent civilians and their economies torn to pieces by U.S.-supplied land mines in Angola, Afghanistan, and other superpower playgrounds of the 1980s.

If we can force a stalemate in the battle of images, then maybe national-security policy can return to the realm of ideas, and books like Klare's can get the attention, and have the impact, they deserve.

Caleb Rossiter directs the Project on Demilitarization and Democracy, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group. During the 1980's he was deputy director of the Congressional Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus.