Preventive Diplomacy (Page 3)

A preventive strategy must also involve stopping the spread of deadly weaponry, from M-16 rifles to F-16 fighters to weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, the US policy of arming virtually every dictator and thug who claims to be a friend has fueled the "boomerang effect"--putting US weaponry in the hands of US adversaries in Panama, Iraq, Somalia and Haiti. The $6 billion in arms that went to the Afghan rebels under the Reagan Doctrine has been used to arm and train everyone from the World Trade Center bombers to the network of Osama bin Laden, which has been implicated in the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The energy and funds now devoted to grabbing a bigger share of the global arms market for US firms should be redirected toward stopping the flow of conventional weaponry to dictators and human rights abusers. High on the list should be a Code of Conduct on arms transfers, as embodied in legislation that Cynthia McKinney and Dana Rohrabacher are promoting in the House of Representatives. The European Union has already adopted its own voluntary Code of Conduct on arms sales, and Oscar Arias has recruited eighteen Nobel Peace Prize winners to press for a Global Code of Conduct at the UN.

Moreover, the Clinton/Gore Administration should reverse its opposition to the most important arms-limitation treaty of the post-cold war era, the Oslo accord banning the production, use and export of antipersonnel landmines. Supporting the landmine treaty would put the United States in a stronger position to pursue stronger international restrictions on other kinds of armaments. The Administration should likewise embrace the nascent campaign to restrict the flow of small arms--the hand grenades, assault rifles, shoulder-fired missiles and other light armaments that have become the weapons of choice on the world's most brutal killing fields. In mid-May at the Hague Appeal for Peace--an international peace conference sponsored by a broad coalition of peace, human rights and humanitarian organizations--a campaign to slow the spread of small arms will be launched by the International Action Network on Small Arms.

The deadliest weapons of all are still nuclear weapons, and far more needs to be done to insure that these instruments of destruction are never used again. The unwillingness of the Clinton Administration to press for deep reductions in nuclear weapons has given nascent nuclear powers like India and Pakistan a rationale for developing their own programs. Instead, the United States should be leading the way toward elimination. Ex-military men like Gen. George Lee Butler, the former head of the Strategic Air Command, have concluded that nuclear weapons serve no useful military purpose. To make any serious progress on this front, the Clinton Administration will have to move swiftly to repair our badly damaged relations with Russia, which are at their lowest point since the cold war. The expansion of NATO and the recent decision to move forward with a national missile defense system has undermined pro-Western political figures in Russia and has united Russia's fractious political class.

Finally, for those of us who like to plan way ahead, the Institute for Defense & Disarmament Studies has joined with the World Order Models Project, the Union of Concerned Scientists and several other organizations to promote a long-term project called Global Action to Prevent War. The project proposes a series of four linked treaties to be phased in over a twenty- to forty-year period with the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, radically reducing conventional arms production and sales, and establishing regional and international mechanisms for conflict prevention and peacekeeping that would be internationally financed and universally recognized. Skeptics have questioned the feasibility of pursuing such an ambitious proposal at a time when disarmament advocates can't even convince Congress to cut back on programs that are demonstrably unworkable (like the Star Wars missile defense scheme), but Global Action to Prevent War has one obvious strength: It provides a vision of long-term peace and security that can respond to the dire worst-case scenarios that the Pentagon and the weapons industry have been using to pump up military spending and fuel regional arms races.

Taken together, these initiatives would provide the United States with other tools for dealing with future conflicts like those in Rwanda and Kosovo besides sitting on our hands in the face of ethnic slaughter or dropping bombs on the parties to a civil war. The alternative--sticking with the mix of ad hoc militarism and episodic airstrikes that fostered the current fiasco in Kosovo--has already proven itself to be disastrously ineffective.

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