What the US military experts say about PfP

William J. Perry was the US deputy secretary of defence from March 1993 to February 1994, and then Bill Clinton's secretary of defence until his retirement in January 1997. Ashton Carter was assistant US secretary of defence for international security policy from 1993 to 1996. In other words, these two men are key architects of the new world order. They know what is going on at the very highest levels of political and military thinking. What they have to say about the NATO-led Partnership for Peace in a book just published in the US, Preventive Defence, deserves our attention.

According to Bertie Ahern, Partnership for Peace (PfP) has "nothing to do with NATO". Less absurdly, supporters of Irish membership of PfP such as Lieut Gen Gerry McMahon argue that such a move will not affect our "non-aligned" status because we will be committed only to co-operation on those tasks (peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance) which we ourselves specify in our agreement to join. What is ignored in this comforting argument, however, is that PfP is meant to change and evolve. The nature of that evolution is crucial to any serious assessment of where Irish foreign policy is going.

Perry and Carter are the brains behind PfP, and they can be assumed to know what it is about. This is what they have to say in their book: "The objective of a renewed Partnership for Peace should be to make the experience of partnership as close as possible, in practical military terms, to the experience of membership in NATO . . .PfP combined exercises and other military-to-military activities should advance from the partnership's early focus on peacekeeping and humanitarian operations to true combat operations. These are the activities that engage partner military personnel at their professional core."

Peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, in other words, are merely the start of a much larger process. The long-term direction of that process is towards the effective abolition of a distinction between NATO and PfP. The soft, benign tasks of feeding the hungry, rescuing the afflicted and keeping the peace are a prelude to "true combat operations". The real action, the stuff that truly engages "partner military personnel at their professional core" is down the line. And when it comes, NATO will be in charge: "Any military operation requires what the military calls `unity of command', meaning that each level of command responds to one and only one superior, with no possibility of conflicting orders at a dangerous moment."

IT'S important to remember that Perry and Carter are not far-out, hawkish Republicans. They are, on the contrary, on the enlightened, rational, humane wing of the American defence establishment. The vision they put forward is about as benign as the Pentagon gets. And it comes from deep within the western security consensus. When they talk of the need for PfP to "advance" from peacekeeping to combat, they are not voices crying in the wilderness but spokesmen for the elite that will actually determine the medium-term future of international security policy.

And their vision is rooted in a frank analysis of what matters to the last superpower, the US. Perry and Carter divide current conflicts into A, B and C lists, ranked in order of importance. Alist conflicts are ones which threaten the survival of the US, and they accept that there are none of them around in the post-Cold War world. The B list is made up of regional conflicts (such as those with Iraq or North Korea) in which US interests, rather than survival, are at stake. On the C-list are the places where the most appalling barbarism of the 1990s has unfolded: Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Somalia, and so on. They are the issues that really matter to most of us. But they are not the centre of US strategy. Perry and Carter are refreshingly honest about this. They write that "because such C-list issues do not threaten America's vital security interests, dealing with them individually or as classes, peacekeeping, peacemaking, humanitarian operations, operations other than war, and the like cannot make up the core national security strategy of the United States". That core strategy is, rather, centred on the regional conflicts where US economic interests are at stake: "While a look at the newspapers suggests that the United States places a high priority on peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, a look at the defence budget shows the higher priority the US places on these regional wars."

It is this honest American perspective that has been missing from much of the debate on PfP. Yet the most obvious thing about PfP is that it involves an acceptance of American political and military leadership. Joining it is a statement that our essential values and priorities will be determined by the values and priorities of the US.

And as Perry and Carter make clear, American priorities do not and will not centre on peacekeeping and humanitarianism. The big game for them is the regional conflicts where their own interests are at stake. The defence of human rights and the protection of defenceless people in Rwanda, Somalia, Kosovo or wherever else such horrors may arise, is merely a sideshow. The main point of bringing non-aligned nations into PfP through co-operation on peacekeeping and humanitarian operations is to prepare them for the "true combat operations" that will follow.

Now, it may well be that this is where we want to end up. There is a reasonable and forceful case - though not one I agree with - that, since we are effectively within the economic sphere of American interests, we are best served by accepting American political and military leadership and joining NATO. But that is not the case that is being made by the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Government, or the military establishment. Their case, on the contrary, is almost the precise opposite: that PfP is emphatically not a stepping-stone to NATO. Their problem is that no one has told this to the Americans. The proper way to explore all of these issues, of course, is through a structured, reasoned and informed debate leading to a referendum. As Bertie Ahern told the Dail just three years ago, "any attempt to push Partnership for Peace . . . without reference to the people" is "a serious breach of faith and fundamentally undemocratic". Hiding behind the legalism that a referendum is not constitutionally required - who ever suggested that it is? - or suggesting, laughably, that the local and European and local elections will serve as a referendum on PfP, is no substitute for a proper democratic process.

It is, besides, the best way to reinforce paranoia and give credence to conspiracy theories. If the dominant party in Government can completely set aside an undertaking it gave to the electorate to hold a referendum, what reason is there to believe that any future steps towards a closer relationship with NATO will be taken in an open and democratic manner? And if a policy isn't well-founded enough to survive a free vote and an informed debate, why should we believe that those who support it have thought out the consequences? Policies that are dropped on the citizens from a great height have a way of missing their targets and causing unpredicted damage.