Itching for a fight: Washington prepares for war against the 'rogues.'(Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea)

• Author: Klare, Michael

Washington prepares for war against the `rogues'

When the U.S. military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, was blown up in June, Secretary of Defense William Perry declared that the United States would find and punish the bombers. "If the sponsor of this act was another nation, we will take appropriate action against that nation," he said.

The State Department followed suit, providing the names of several countries that might be responsible, including Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

It just so happens that these are four of the five "rogue" states that Washington has been demonizing since the twilight of the Cold War, the fifth being North Korea. Because of their pursuit of nuclear or chemical weapons, these states are said to constitute a threat every bit as potent as that posed by the former Soviet Union, and to require, in turn, a U.S. military response not unlike that mounted against the Warsaw Pact.

"Contrary to the hopes of many and predictions of some, the end of the Cold War did not bring an end to international conflict," Perry told Congress in March. "The most daunting threats to our national security that we faced during the Cold War have gone away, but they have been replaced by new dangers" (emphasis in the original). Foremost among these, he testified, "are nuclear weapons in the hands of rogue nations." Maintaining a capacity to contain, deter, and fight such states, he added, is the "guiding principle" behind U.S. military policy in the post-Cold War era.

In discussing these states, Pentagon officials seek every opportunity to equate them with the former Soviet bloc. "While the Cold War is over," Perry said in April, "the missile threat has not gone away. Indeed, another missile threat is emerging. It is the threat of missile technology in the hands of rogue nations hostile to the United States." The fact that the U.S.S.R. once deployed some 1,450 intercontinental ballistic missiles, while the nominal rogues possess not a single ICBM, does not seem to matter.

However distorted, the comparison between today's "rogue-state" threat and the long-familiar Soviet threat has obvious attractions to the Department of Defense: So long as the "rogues" can be made to appear as threatening as the former Soviet Union, Congress can be persuaded to maintain U.S. military spending at near-Cold War levels.

To this end, the national-security establishment has worked tirelessly to propagate the image of a world filled with renegades, madly...