National Interest

Anne Arundel County is back in the running for a used-car superstore and an auto restoration center to be built by AutoNation USA, the second-hand auto seller launched by Florida billionaire H. Wayne Huizenga, a county official said yesterday.William Badger, director of the county economic development office, said AutoNation has expressed a new desire to build the two facilities in Anne Arundel, provided it receives the necessary permits."They are telling us they want to come, they just need an air quality permit," Badger said.

MENLO PARK, Calif. -- The national return to phonics can be traced to a woman who stumbled into the reading war while attending her grandson's back-to-school night."

PARIS -- The young Harvard political scientist Daniel Goldhagen went to Germany this fall to present in person his argument that the Holocaust could only have happened in Germany.He says that German society was itself, long before Hitler, dominated by an ''eliminationist anti-Semitism,'' and that Hitler merely authorized the Germans to do what they wanted to do, and had long been waiting to do.His book's publication in Germany brought hostile reviews from historians and from scholars specializing in the Nazi murder of the Jews, as has been the case everywhere else it has been published.

Intelligence gathering and covert actions present a particular challenge to democracy. The public's democratic need to know runs into the intelligence community's equally imperative need to conceal.The Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, National Reconnaissance Office and the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence organizations operate almost entirely in secret.Ideally, a republic is a body of citizens who are informed, who think soundly and make up their minds on the issues, and who then elect representatives who will vote appropriately.

Why sending troops to Bosnia is rightOf course the U.S. must send troops to Bosnia.Purported leaders in Congress demand guarantees of safety, ''reasonable'' assurances of success and ask how the peace of Bosnia relates to our national interest.Considering the Republican Congress' narrow-minded and mean-spirited definition of self-interest, it's not surprising that they miss the point: This is bigger than national interest.Going to Bosnia is in our human interest, part of our duty as members of the global community, to help others secure peace and an end to inhumanity.

A war for control of U.S. foreign policy rages in Washington -- and the first casualty could be the Clinton presidency. But the ultimate loser may be America's ability to come to terms with global change and remain the world's most dynamic society.Last month, the House of Representatives passed GOP-sponsored legislation that would reorganize the foreign-affairs bureaucracy, cut overseas aid, limit U.S. involvement in U.N. peacekeeping operations and redirect U.S. policy toward Bosnia and a host of other countries.

Washington. -- The U.S. Information Agency has no particular argument with the overall thrust of your May 30 editorial, ''GOP Foreign Policy Meddling.'' We agree that, on the whole, foreign affairs belong in the president's realm and should not be micromanaged by Congress.However, your view that nothing would be lost by consolidating foreign-affairs agencies into the Department of State reflects a regrettable lack of knowledge about USIA's unique service to the national interest. Through the years an independent USIA has conducted U.S. public diplomacy with notable advantage to our nation.

Paris. -- Every time I have written about the CIA recently I have had a call or visit afterward from some former ambassador or ex-CIA officer with a story to tell.These stories usually concern the CIA's running its own foreign policy out of an embassy in direct or partial contradiction of official U.S. policy. However they include accounts of CIA efforts to destabilize or discredit troublesome U.S. ambassadors, and one accusation, from a retired ambassador, that the CIA stood aside while the Mossad attempted to murder him.I am impressed that so many such people are so angry about this matter.

Washington. -- As the midterm election approached, the idea that Bill Clinton had enjoyed a string of foreign-policy successes spread like autumnal crabgrass. In TV, radio and print media, U.S. policies in Haiti, Iraq and North Korea were cited as examples of Mr. Clinton's ''victories.'' But what victories? It could more accurately be said that in these places the administration seems to have avoided catastrophe.In Haiti the world's strongest industrial and military power managed to land forces in one of the world's smallest, poorest, least-developed countries.

Chicago -- The language being used about our prospective invasion of Haiti is peculiarly hangdog and defeatist. It is a bad thing, we are told, but inevitable. We are being forced into it. We have no choice. All other options have been sealed off.Is this any way to wage a war? We are told we must do what we do not want to do. It is the burden of being a great power. We show our power by a powerlessness to resist this choice.There is little or no talk, here, of our national interest; just of national duty.