Peace Dividend

Unless Americans are committed to a long and expensive process of nation building, it makes no sense to have a huge military footprint in Afghanistan. Since al-Qaida is no longer in Afghanistan but in Pakistan, the Arabian Peninsula and sub-Saharan Africa there's no national security rationale for wasting thousands of lives and $120 billion every year in that God-forsaken land. Our nation needs a smart, cost-effective counter-terrorism strategy that begins with a highly mobile anti-terrorist strike force of less than 20,000 based in Afghanistan.

I was a guest at a recent high school reunion for members of my sister's class of 1961 and, in conversations with some of the men, noted that each had served in the military. They had either been drafted or they had enlisted to avoid the Army. One had gone into the Navy, eventually becoming a SEAL; another had become an Air Force pilot. They spoke of the draft as a fact of life - something no Americans have experienced for nearly 40 years now. These were Cold War warriors - high school graduates in the year of the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and the year barbed wire and machine gun nests went up at the border of East and West Germany.

Of course, they were just joking. Or maybe the wine was talking. But two men having dinner in a Baltimore restaurant were distinctly heard to say that what this nation needs is another war. Ha, ha, ha!One of the men was a retired military officer, the other an official with a major defense contractor. Kindred spirits they were, bemoaning the stagnant economy in the post-Cold War world, and eventually arriving at their solution: Another war to pump up America's tired industrial muscles.But no civilized person would drink to that, would he?

Unless Americans are committed to a long and expensive process of nation building, it makes no sense to have a huge military footprint in Afghanistan. Since al-Qaida is no longer in Afghanistan but in Pakistan, the Arabian Peninsula and sub-Saharan Africa there's no national security rationale for wasting thousands of lives and $120 billion every year in that God-forsaken land. Our nation needs a smart, cost-effective counter-terrorism strategy that begins with a highly mobile anti-terrorist strike force of less than 20,000 based in Afghanistan.

How is it that President Bush can step boldly forward to announce elimination of vast stores of the nuclear arsenal while at the same time warning there will be no savings from the move? Why shouldn't we expect some serious savings? Does this man have any domestic priorities? I must be missing something here."In the near-term, some of these steps might even cost money," Bush said Friday night in his address to the nation.Let that be a warning. It's not a given that there will be a peace dividend from the new peace.

WHEN THE Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 -- symbolizing the end of the Cold War -- economists almost immediately began speaking of a "peace dividend" accompanying any scaling down of the U.S. military. The hope for a big peace payoff seemed to make sense. The United States wouldn't have to spend the billions it takes to design, develop and deploy every new weapons system conceived: jet fighters and bombers, hunter-killer submarines or new tanks. Nor would the U.S. have to keep all its military bases; some could close, others could downsize.

An article in Tuesday's Business section incorrectly reported the type of building that Martin Marietta Corp.was closing at its Glen Burnie operations. In fact, the building being closed is an office building.Martin Marietta Corp., one of the nation's largest defense contractors, announced yesterday that it has embarked on a "peace dividend strategy" designed to meet the challenges of shrinking Pentagon budgets.Martin's three-part strategy is outlined by Norman R. Augustine, the company's chairman and chief executive, and A. Thomas Young, president, in their joint message to shareholders in the annual report being mailed this week.

Pleas to spend the so-called "peace dividend" from reduce military spending to cure America's domestic ills such as poverty, homelessness and illiteracy rang through St. Francis of Assisi Church Roman Catholic Church on Harford RoadAbout 400 people attended the Baltimore Development Commission's fourth annual conference.In a vote using pennies as "tax dollars" and ballots, education and housing needs received overwhelming support.Military spending, meanwhile, was held to a minimum despite the success in the Persian Gulf war, said Sister Katherine Corr, director of Jobs With Peace, which organized the meeting.

Martin Marietta Corp., one of the nation's largest defense contractors, announced yesterday that it has embarked on a "peace dividend strategy" designed to meet the challenges of shrinking Pentagon budgets.Martin's three-part strategy is outlined by Norman R. Augustine, the company's chairman and chief executive, and A. Thomas Young, president, in their joint message to shareholders in the annual report being mailed this week.The strategy "reinforces the corporation's vital role in national defense while expanding its non-defense business base and enhancing shareholder value," Mr. Augustine says.

Liz Scott doesn't leave the house without a Save Our Cities/Save Our Children button. Her office is plastered with posters about the march in Washington this coming Saturday.She slips flyers about it into business correspondence. She includes a reminder to "be there" on the telephone answering machines at work and at home.And don't think Ms. Scott is pushing this event only to the network of neighborhood groups she serves as executive director of the Coalition of Peninsula Organizations in South Baltimore.

It isn't often that the U.S. Conference of Mayors expresses its collective opinion on an issue of foreign policy. The last time the group did so was in 1971, when it called on the president and Congress to end the war in Vietnam. So it was significant that the nation's mayors, meeting in Baltimore over the weekend, voted overwhelming on Monday to urge President Obama to do the same in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the aim of redirecting the billions of dollars we are spending on those wars toward addressing the pressing problems facing America's cities today.

WASHINGTON -- With Saddam Hussein toppled, President Bush is soon likely to have a rare chance to capitalize on a postwar surge in popularity to advance his domestic agenda and achieve long-held goals at home. Though the war is not over, Bush's success in swiftly ousting the Iraqi president's regime could make him a force to be reckoned with in Washington in coming months. He will try to score victories on such issues as tax cuts, education and health-care initiatives, and the confirmation of conservative judicial nominees.

THE WAR in Afghanistan reaches cold fingers into American crevices. At City Hall, Councilman Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr. lifts the telephone and hears constituents worry: How vulnerable is Baltimore's drinking water? At Boys' Latin School, where Mitchell teaches history, he hears his students worry: Will there be a draft? He steps outside City Hall, where homeless people gather, and has his own worry: What will happen to these lost and vagrant souls as the nation's resources are increasingly diverted to war?

ON THE FIRST day of class, Dr. Nancy S. Grasmick climbed aboard a school bus and sat next to a second-grader from Cecil Elementary School, near North and Greenmount avenues. The little boy read every street sign and billboard they passed. A bright young fellow, Grasmick declared yesterday in the first happy blush of a new academic year. Now, if everybody gets very lucky, the governor of Maryland will show he is just as smart as this second-grader. It could happen. And then, if we really want to defy the odds, maybe we could expect the same from Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

WHEN THE Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 -- symbolizing the end of the Cold War -- economists almost immediately began speaking of a "peace dividend" accompanying any scaling down of the U.S. military. The hope for a big peace payoff seemed to make sense. The United States wouldn't have to spend the billions it takes to design, develop and deploy every new weapons system conceived: jet fighters and bombers, hunter-killer submarines or new tanks. Nor would the U.S. have to keep all its military bases; some could close, others could downsize.

Jerusalem. -- Booming, not bombing, is the big story in Israel. The economy of the small and brainy pseudo-Western country surrounded by enemies has taken off with the signing of successive peace agreements in the centuries-old civil war between Jews and Palestinians.To most of the world, Israel was an outlaw nation as long as it militarily occupied the villages and cities of Palestinians in Gaza, in East Jerusalem and in the lands on the West Bank of the Jordan River.But with all the risks and bombings of the current peace process, the documents signed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization have also brought new investors into Israel from everywhere in the world, particularly Asia, and opened new markets for Israel's exports.

WASHINGTON -- Hoping to sway the growing national debate on how to spend the so-called "peace dividend," a liberal coalition launched a two-year campaign of television ads, sermons and town meetings to urge that defense savings be used for struggling domestic programs, not for tax cuts and deficit reduction.To help support their position, the Campaign for New Priorities, spearheaded by labor unions and women's groups and endorsed by Boston's Democratic Mayor Raymond L. Flynn, also released a poll yesterday showing "a stunning change" in Americans' thinking on military spending.

Augusta, Ga. -- A sobering way to view the hoped-for "peace dividend" from the winding down of the Cold War is to follow Atomic Road 19 miles south from here to the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site, where plutonium and tritium, the feedstocks for the mightiest nuclear arsenal ever assembled, have been produced for nearly half a century.In one area of the vast reservation on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River sit rows of partially-buried steel tanks, 51 in all, placed there as "temporary" storage for the residues from decades of bomb-making.

WASHINGTON -- Lost in the debate about the nation's dwindling defense budget is this little mentioned fact: The United States will spend more on its military next year than it did in 1980, at the height of the Cold War.You remember 1980, when the aging Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev ordered 30,000 troops into neighboring Afghanistan, when thousands of Warsaw Pact tanks were poised to invade Western Europe and the Berlin Wall stood guarded by shoot-to-kill East...

LOSE Boris Yeltsin, lose the peace dividend.From Richard Nixon on down, commentators treat the prospect of higher defense spending as the clinching argument for increasing Western aid to Russia. Secretary of State Warren Christopher made the same case Monday in his speech before '' the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.Yet the pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later choice they and others pose less hard-boiled analysis than wishful thinking and it reflects a failure to imagine the immense problems that will flow from the failure of Russian democracy.