Amendment would put US on war footing

By Dara MacNeil

These are good times to be an armchair warlord in Washington. While US forces in the Gulf flex their muscles, the men who foment conflict are busy acclimatising US public opinion to the notion of direct military action against Cuba.

Earlier this month, as US legislators discussed the 1998 Defence Budget, Senator Robert Graham of Florida succeeded in inserting an amendment which effectively begins the process of legitimising a US invasion of Cuba.

Specifically, the Graham amendment charges the US Secretary of Defence with the responsibility for: carrying out an assessment of Cuba's military power, and providing an evaluation of ``threats to the National Security of the United States posed by Fidel Castro and the Government of Cuba.''

The Graham amendment demands that the report be completed no later than 30 March 1998. It is to be submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee and House Committee for National Security.

The amendment has been passed by both houses of Congress. It now awaits the signature of President Clinton before it becomes law. If Clinton accedes, the anti-Cuban hawks in the US establishment will at last have at their disposal the means whereby Cuba can, officially, be declared a threat to the National Security of the United States.

However, Senator Robert Graham's incendiary legislation does not stop there. Indeed, as it develops, it careers off into a stratospheric fantasyland that even spooks like Ollie North might just find unsettling. Might.

Thus, it demands that the Secretary of Defence report to the US Congress on ``what contingency plans have been drawn up, and the resources available to defend US territory from potential hostilities from Cuba.''

Read that again: ``to defend US territory from potential hostilities from Cuba.'' It is straight out of Alice in Wonderland.

It's the oldest trick in the book. Before you knock something down, you must first build it up.

For decades, as US military planners dedicated themselves to the cause of the Cold War, their colleagues in disinformation poured forth a stream of propaganda. Soviet invasions were supposedly imminent, their agents at work everywhere to undermine freedom.

Concomitantly, the US was perpetually playing a game of catch-up with the militarised Soviet state. John F Kennedy largely owed his electoral success in 1960 to his successful exploitation of the ``missile gap'', the supposed fact that the Soviet Union held far more warheads than the US, and generally enjoyed a military advantage over the forces of the Free World.

As we know now, Kennedy's myth proved as fallacious as any ad campaign dreamed up by Madison Avenue executives. Yes, there was a missile gap: but it was the Soviet Union that perpetually lagged well behind the US in the Cold War arms race.

Without the propaganda and the misinformation, without the dread sense of threat they successfully engendered, the general public might have been a little less eager to see their tax money donated to the military-industrial complex, throughout the western world. Indeed, they may even have become a little Bolshie and demanded that their governments stop spending on arms, and divert the money towards the broader well-being of society.

As it was, the Soviet Union finally imploded for a variety of reasons, one of those being that they could no longer afford to participate in the apparently limitless arms spree fuelled by the Cold War.

With the Graham amendment, the United States is poised to replace the Soviet enemy of old with Cuba, albeit on a more limited scale.

Should Clinton sign this measure into law, the anti-Cuban hawks will at last have the pretext for war that they have always desired.

If it seems slightly ludicrous that a relatively poor, small island with a population of just 11 million could somehow constitute a serious military threat to the US, then cast your mind back to the even more ludicrous invasion of Grenada, in 1983. Having deemed Grenada to constitute just such a risk, the US dispatched a force of some 6000 men. Their task? To conquer an island of barely 90,000 people, whose only understanding of the word strategic derived from their country's important role in the global spice trade.

But the invading forces obviously covered themselves in glory. Why else would the 6000-strong force have shared some 9000 medals and battle honours between them?

Crucially, the Graham amendment provides the pro-invasion hawks with the means to begin softening up and acclimatising US public opinion to just such an adventure in Cuba. Thus, if it is signed into law, we will be informed ad nauseam between here and 30 March 1998, that the US Secretary of State himself is both evaluating the military threat from Cuba, and examining US preparedness for the arrival of Cuban armoured divisions on the streets of New York.

Those scare tactics have worked in the past and, if left unchecked, will work again. And once the `scare' is implanted in the public psyche it becomes easier, more acceptable to suggest that, well, wouldn't it just be better if the US struck at Cuba first?

The Graham amendment, again if passed, would also effectively force Cuba onto a war footing. After all, Cuba has experience of an attempted US invasion, in 1961. Indeed, when the Grenada invasion fleet was spotted steaming south in 1983, many in Cuba believed that the US had finally come to take revenge for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The country prepared for war and plans were even drawn up to pass out spare weaponry to willing visitors and tourists then on the island.

On a war footing, Cuba would be forced to divert its scarce resources towards defence. And that's the pernicious beauty of the Graham amendment.

As documented repeatedly over the years - most recently by the eminent American Association for World Health - Cuba has for some years been diverting its resources away from defence spending, in order to maintain a health and education system under attack from the US blockade.

Once forced to reverse this order of priorities - by way of a very explicit threat of violence - the gains of the Revolution would disappear and Cuba would collapse internally. That at least appears to be the hope of Senator Robert Graham and his Miami accomplices.

Lastly, the importance of the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, in the south of Cuba, cannot be underestimated. Ceded to the US in perpetuity in 1903, the 117 square mile naval base is the largest in the region. Technically, it is US ``territory.'' Thus, any threat to the base would be deemed to constitute a threat to the ``national security'' of the US. This vague terminology is precisely what fills the Graham amendment.

Knowing full well that Cuba has no intention of invading the US, the framers of this odious measure have been careful to keep their options open. What chance then of a manufactured `incident' on the `border' between Cuba and Guantanamo Bay, being held to constitute a threat to US ``territory'', or its ``national security.''?

And that of course would provide the necessary pretext for invasion.