Superpower that refuses to 'do windows'

By William Pfaff

PARIS: A phrase current among hawks in the Washington policy community is that "superpowers don't do windows." Lesser powers can bother themselves with the mundane housekeeping tasks of the world, such as persuading the Macedonian Slavs and Albanians not to murder one another. But superpowers have more important things to do.

The question that follows is what, exactly, do superpowers do?

The United States doesn't "do" Macedonia. The small U.S. troop commitment now in that country provides logistical support to NATO units in Kosovo. It would be allowed to cooperate with any NATO force sent to Macedonia to accept the hand-over of the Albanian invaders' weapons. But, but according to Secretary of State Colin Powell, that's all the United States would do.

An unidentified U.S. official says that to do anything more in Macedonia would mean "breaching a new political threshold" -- meaning, one supposes, a threshold in U.S. domestic politics.

The Europeans will have to handle Macedonia. They have already "done windows" in Bosnia and Kosovo and are accustomed to the menial peacekeeping or peacemaking tasks the Pentagon doesn't "do."

The Bush administration made plain during the presidential campaign that it doesn't want to do the Balkans. It wants to get American forces out of Kosovo and Bosnia, since -- as Madeleine Albright once said (the superpower mentality is bipartisan) -- the 82nd Airborne Division isn't for escorting kiddies to school.

That raises a related question of what the 82nd is for, since except for the first Bush administration's embarrassing invasion of Panama in 1989, to capture the former CIA stipendiary Manuel Noriega, the 82nd hasn't made a combat jump since the end of World War II.

There is confusion over what U.S. military forces as a whole are for. The strategic review Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered when he assumed office is to be completed this summer, and Washington rumor says that the individual branches of service have been successful enough in their resistance to change that not much may come out of it.

Rumsfeld told the Senate on June 21 that "new and daunting threats we did not expect" could find the U.S. "unprepared" unless U.S. strategy changes. However, as he described the threats, there was nothing new. His basic threat has been the staple of Pentagon briefings since the end of the Cold War: terrorists and rogue nations and their possible use of weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld cited large increases in the numbers of states with biological, nuclear and missile programs, without specifying who or where.

Joseph Cirincione, head of the Carnegie Endowment's Non- Proliferation Project, told the Senate just the opposite in February. He said that since the end of the Cold War there has been a vast decrease in the number of such programs and of missiles capable of striking the United States.

"The number of countries trying or threatening to develop long-range ballistic missiles has not changed greatly in 15 years," he said. "The nations now attempting to perfect long- range missiles are also smaller, poorer and less technologically advanced than were the nations with missile programs 15 years ago."

Only six states have medium-range missiles with a range greater than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles), and among them, only North Korea and Iran are on hostile terms with the United States. (The others are Israel, Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan.)

For North Korea to develop its existing Taepodong-1 missile into one capable of reaching the United States, it would have to make a difficult engineering shift from steel bodies to low- weight, high-strength alloys and produce a miniaturized warhead sturdy enough to survive on the tip of the missile. That North Korea's "primitive" program could master these techniques is a highly speculative and worst-case scenario.

Such skepticism is widely shared in the technical arms-control community and is the reason why the Bush program for missile defense is regarded as ideologically driven, rather than a rational response to a real threat. The CIA officer chiefly responsible for a much-cited 1999 National Intelligence Estimate of the missile threat, Robert Walpole, has himself argued that "non-missile delivery means are less costly and more reliable and accurate (than missiles)."

If there is a threat to the United States from mass- destruction weapons, it is not a missile threat so long as ships, airplanes and U-Drive-It trucks are available.

So what does national missile defense "do?"

All of this inspires serious concern about whether those responsible for America's armed forces know what they are doing. They don't want to "do windows." They want a rush program to stop a missile threat widely held to be improbable, if it exists at all. They do want to put weapons in space so as to dominate it and everybody else. One is inclined to think that the only thing they really would like to do is fight Mars. Now that would suit a superpower!

But is the American voter interested?

-- The Korea Herald/Asia News Network