-Caveat Lector- Boston Globe The cult of war By James Carroll, 09/14/99 Former Senator John Danforth, defining the purpose of his Waco investigation, distinguishes between bad judgments and bad actions. Only the latter, he says, are his concern. Danforth's wish to limit the scope of an investigation is welcome, but the distinction seems all too facile. When bad judgment infects a government as powerful as ours, bad actions can be inevitable. Waco is one example, and the disaster unfolding in East Timor is another. A similar failure of judgment in action underlies them both. The government's mistake at Waco transcends, but is related to, the issues of whether ''military style'' flammable tear-gas canisters were fired at the Branch Davidian compound and whether that fact was covered up by the FBI. The profound act of bad judgment that led to those alleged bad actions was the prior decision to militarize government curtailment of the Koresh commune in the first place. Once a siege was set with the massing of fatigue-clad agents, on-scene advisers from an elite military commando unit, buzzing helicopters, armed vehicles, and a tank, what should have been a civilian law enforcement operation morphed into an instance of martial law. The initial purpose behind this show of ''overwhelming force,'' to use the phrase made famous by Colin Powell, may have been to intimidate David Koresh, but it was the mind-set of the federal agents that seems to have been most powerfully influenced by the staging of the siege. They stopped thinking like civilian law officers, whose purpose is to maintain order with a minimal use of force, and began thinking like soldiers who, once in combat, do whatever it takes to win. Once the martial drumbeat began, negotiators' efforts at persuasion had to seem untrustworthy to the besieged and all too soft to the besiegers. Soldiers know, perhaps better than police, that the law of critical mass applies to the mustering of arms: Once an overwhelming force is fully deployed, it carries its own momentum to be used, whether wisely or not. By the time Janet Reno was presented with the decision of whether to attack the Davidians, the pressures to do so were probably irresistible. As Colin Powell would be the first to say, don't set a siege unless you want a battle. A democratic society necessarily distinguishes between police and military functions precisely because in conditions of war, regard for civil liberties is an inevitable first casualty. Another is the principle of accountability to those outside the body of war makers. The Waco case, with the FBI behaving like an army at war both during the siege and in subsequent investigations, seems to have involved both abuses. When law enforcement becomes defined as war, as in the war on drugs; when police departments assemble arsenals appropriate to heavy combat; when traditional blue uniforms are commonly traded in for fatigues and jack-boots; when cops become commandos, an ultimate and prior bad judgment can lead increasingly to the bad action of government violence. The militarization of law enforcement, from federal to local levels, has infected this country like a virus. Waco is not the disease but a symptom. Even more disastrous has been the militarization of American foreign policy, and the most egregious example of this has long been Indonesia. During the Cold War, US policy makers turned a blind eye to the diabolical character of the Suharto regime and instead armed it to the teeth for strategic but also economic reasons. For more than a generation, the American arms industry made a fortune off Suharto. When his army seized East Timor in 1975, launching a war in which a third of its population died, we ignored it for the sake of our larger purposes - stopping Communism and fueling the arms race. But by the time we stopped Communism, the momentum of militarization continued, both in Jakarta, where, though Suharto fell, the army did not, and in Washington, where the Pentagon continued to favor the warlords. ''Pentagon reluctant to isolate Indonesia'' read a Globe headline a few days ago. Even this week, Defense Department officials opposed the military aid cutoff ordered by President Clinton, a belated but proper effort to influence events in East Timor. Now the ''bad actions'' of Indonesia's criminal military are on display for all to see, but they flow from a prior act of American bad judgment, the creation and on-going support of an Indonesian military whose overwhelming force has been directed only at domestic opposition or the illegally occupied East Timorese. The monster at large in East Timor this week was born in the United States. America must wake up to what it has become. We replaced our Cold War mortal enemy with ourselves. We are enthralled with the ethos of weaponry at every level in our culture. We define power through gunsights - children do it on city streets, but so do the occupants of paneled rooms in Washington. There is no moral difference between profiteers who trade in cheap handguns and those who sell high-tech gunships in the developing world. In Waco the American cult of war collided with a cult of false religion, and innocents died. In East Timor, the cult of war reveals itself at its most extreme, and innocents die, in part and again, because of us. At home and across the world, history cries out to the United States of America to change. James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. 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