Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."

At this very moment here in Washington our elected representatives are trying to decide just how big our military forces should be and what their role will be in the international affairs in the years ahead. This means an examination of all the countries, all the areas of the world to try to decide when, where, who and why we will fight in the future.

As long as this discussion is taking place in Washington, it is a time for the Americans, as individuals, to become involved in that decision. Our program is on that today, "Why We Fight." I think you'll find it very interesting.

NARRATOR: Before World War II, we had a relatively small military establishment. The War Department, when called upon, carried out the necessary actions to mobilize a war effort. Going to war was a major decision in those days.

But following World War II, the ideological fever of the Cold War pushed us to construct a huge, permanent military establishment, The Soviet Union was identified as the primary threat to our existence.

Col. HARRY SUMMERS: It was generally felt throughout the West that we were locked in this enormous struggle with godless communism.

NARRATOR: Colonel Harry Summers is a veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars and a renowned military scholar.

Col. SUMMERS: The lines were very clearly drawn between the East and West, so that, you know -- We may look back at it now and sort of scoff at it, but at the time, this had enormous appeal because most people looked at it and saw that that was the objective truth.

NARRATOR: Anti-communism became an end-all justification for pouring ever-increasing amounts of money into building weapons. The War Department was euphemistically renamed the "Department of Defense," which was followed by the creation of the National Security Council and the CIA. And the Cold War institutionalized the phrase "national security."

President HARRY TRUMAN: "We are fighting in Korea for our own national security and survival."

President DWIGHT EISENHOWER: "...national security."

President RICHARD NIXON: "...national security..."

President RONALD REAGAN: "...our national security."

Secretary of Defense CASPAR WEINBERGER: "...national security..."

General COLIN POWELL, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff: "...national security."

President GEORGE BUSH: "...national security..."

Secretary of Defense LES ASPIN: "...national security..."

President BILL CLINTON: "...national security and military interests of the country."

NARRATOR: In almost ever foreign policy speech since then, we have heard the term invoked. But what does it actually mean?

RICHARD BARNET: "National security" is largely an empty term exactly because every government invokes it as a justifica-tion for whatever it wants to do.

NARRATOR: Richard Barnet is a noted historian and co-founder of the Institute for Policy Studies. He has written on the origins of conflict in both Roots of War and The Rockets' Red Glare.

Mr. BARNET: The basic notion of national security is what a few policy wonks and military people decided was important for the national interest. It was never debated.

NARRATOR: During the Cold War, we fought for a variety of reasons: to overthrow an existing government, to prop up a pro-US regime, to protect American-owned property abroad, or simply because we had the power to do so. Often we provided the arms and training to foreigners so that they could fight for us by proxy. But whatever the specifics of each use of force, they were all part of the same deadly game: to thwart the Soviet Union and communism in every corner of the earth.

That game is over now. The collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in a new era, an era in which the United States has no enemies. So why do we continue to maintain a large military establishment, poised to intervene around the world?

MICHAEL WESSELLS: The United States has a long-standing belief in its moral integrity. We see ourselves as the bastion of freedom in the world.

NARRATOR: Michael Wessells is a highly respected spokesman for Psychologists for Social Responsibility. He specializes in the psychology of armed conflicts.

Mr. WESSELLS: We believe that we have no desire to grab land of other people or to take over others' territory. And, as a result, we're inclined to see any military intervention under- taken by the United States as benignly motivated, as designed to protect freedom and democracy, as having no ulterior motives.

NARRATOR: Certainly there are still times when military actions can be justified: to safeguard the United States and its territories; to rescue American citizens; to conduct peacekeeping operations, when invited by all the parties involved; and to assure the delivery of humanitarian relief, if the mission is strictly defined. But these missions certainly don't require the huge, permanent military infrastructure that we have left over from the Cold War.

In the past, we have sent in the troops for a great many more reasons than these. To truly understand why we fight, we need to look at who we are.

Col. SUMMERS: I think there are three fundamental character traits in the American people that really influence foreign and military policy, and that's idealism, pragmatism, and non-interventionism. Idealism tends to propel us into involvement, and we've seen that recently in the question of Somalia. On the other hand pragmatism tends to pull us back from it, because the people say 'what's in it for us.' And generally speaking, over our history, we have been a non-interventionist nation. Although when I lecture at the Inter-American Defense College, the Latin American officers think that's the funniest thing they've ever heard.

NARRATOR: The frontier spirit that helped develop this country constitutes an ongoing part of our national identity. Westward expansion was fueled by the notion that we were divinely appointed to expand our territory through righteous conquest.

Mr. BARNET: We fought several wars explicitly for expan-sionist purposes. One was the Mexican War of 1846. Another was the Spanish-American War.

NARRATOR: While the expansionist tendencies of early America led to the growth of the country, in the process they destroyed the Native American cultures that were here before us. This same spirit has often led us into war abroad.

Mr. WESSELLS: American society is very much steeped in the frontier spirit and in individuality, and these kinds of values tend to color our thinking about security, both by citizens and by policy leaders. Americans have very much a pragmatic, can-do attitude and this is reflected in its use of technology and in its quest for technological solutions to problems that are multi-dimensional and that are certainly highly political and non-technological in character.

NARRATOR: Most of America's armed conflicts have taken place "over there." When we "go to war," we usually have the luxury of knowing it will be on somebody else's soil. But the oceans that provide us with geographic security have also kept us from having routine contact with other countries, contact that might well contribute to understanding.

Mr. WESSELLS: Isolation has the psychological effect of separating us and isolating us from other cultures of the world.

NARRATOR: Perhaps we don't search for enemies, but we see them everywhere. Often military actions are justified as the pursuit of a single villain, a bad guy who is perceived to be the root of the problem: Castro. The Ayatollah. Qaddafi. Noriega. Saddam Hussein. Aideed, in Somalia.

Mr. WESSELLS: Nationally our thinking about security has been influenced by our fears of "the other."

From War Department film, "Who's the Enemy Now" (1942):

"In the Middle Ages, a plague of slavery descended on the world. Out of the wilds of Mongolia came a mighty army of fierce horsemen, led by Genghis Khan. Burning, looting, pillaging, the barbarian horde swept across Asia and Eastern Europe."

NARRATOR: World War II: The Nazis seek to conquer Europe. The Japanese launch a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. America goes to war in a struggle for the very survival of freedom, a war in which the differences between the good guys and the bad guys were easy to portray.

Col. SUMMERS: The stakes were enormous. The survival of the nation was at stake. So that given that value, we would pay enormous costs in pursuit of it.

NARRATOR: Iwo Jima -- D-Day -- Hiroshima -- and Nagasaki. All-out war leads to unconditional surrender. But was World War II, cynically dubbed "The Good War," really a good model by which to measure other conflicts?

Col. SUMMERS: We were able to declare a total war, a total commitment, unconditional surrender, which in retrospect, was an aberration in the history of warfare. We have to go back to the Punic wars to find that kind of a total commitment. But unfortu-nately, the American people have sort of adopted World War II as the paradigm of war, when in reality most wars in the history of mankind have been limited wars for limited objectives.

NARRATOR: Four-hundred thousand Americans lost their lives in the Second World War, but for millions of others, it was a period of unrivalled meaning, commitment and camaraderie. The moral clarity of that war provided a defining experience for a whole generation. The war was even credited with pulling us out of the Great Depression. While the rest of the world lay in ruins, America emerged from it stronger than before, the world's sole superpower.

But even as the embers of World War II were cooling, we were finding a new enemy in the Soviet Union, our former ally against the Nazis.

Mr. WESSELLS: The United States has a strong tendency to see the world in black-white terms and this is closely linked to the historic experience following World War II, when, in fact, there was a bipolar world. It became very easy to divide the world into communism and democracy, into the forces of good and evil.

ALBERT EINSTEIN (23 May 1946): "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking."

NARRATOR: Just three years after Einstein uttered these words, the Soviet Union developed its own bomb. The power of nuclear weapons to destroy civilization forced us to reconsider the notion of all-out warfare. In the age of nuclear weapons, all-out war came to mean total and quite literal annihilation, and the threat of nuclear war became a double-edged sword. The Cold War was at fever pitch and anti-communism was the cry.

Senator JOSEPH McCARTHY (1949): "One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many."

NARRATOR: Less than five years after the devastation of World War II, Korea became the first hot battleground of the Cold War. Determined to fight the spread of communism, the United states sent millions of troops to defend a little-known country halfway around the world.

Col. SUMMERS: As President Truman said at the time, it appeared that monolithic world communism was going to use overt force of arms to expand their empire, and Korea was the place where it began.

NARRATOR: Bogged down in a bloody land war and frustrated by the limited objectives of the new era of containment, General Douglas MacArthur tried to apply the "total victory" model that had worked just five years earlier. He urged an all-out offensive into China and the use of nuclear weapons. President Truman relieved him of duty. The weapons of war had become so destruc-tive that all-out war was equivalent to suicide. After 137,000 Americans were killed or wounded in combat, the Korean War ended in stalemate.

But this didn't keep us from soon getting entangled in another Asian war in the name of anti-communism: Vietnam.

SOLDIER in VIETNAM (1968): "Not knowing where they are, that's the worst. Ride around, they run into sewers, in the gutters, anywhere. Could be anywhere. Just hope you can stay alive from day to day. I just want to go back home and go to school. That's about it. The whole think stinks, really."

Col. SUMMERS: In retrospect, we had no hard national interests in Southeast Asia.

NARRATOR: More than triple the total bomb tonnage of World War II was exploded on Vietnam. But despite this destructive application of military force, the war ended with American withdrawal.

Col. SUMMERS: The American people found that very, very dissatisfying and very distasteful because what they wanted was World War II, an unambiguous war with a clearcut victory. But that was never in the cards in either Korea or Vietnam because the primary adversary in both wars was not the war at hand but the Soviet Union. The first focus had to be on the Soviet Union because they had the power to destroy us within minutes.

NARRATOR: The American failure in Vietnam shattered a consensus that American military intervention was a viable option in the Third World. We were diagnosed as having a chronic case of the "Vietnam Syndrome," meaning a reluctance to use military force abroad.

Everyone wanted to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam, but no one could agree on what they were. Some felt that the mistake was that our military forces were not permitted to achieve total victory. Others argued the war was a mistake from the beginning and that the lesson to be learned was that we should avoid becom-ing entangled in future wars that were unjust and unwinnable.

Mr. WESSELLS: We intervened militarily, failing to realize that the nature of the conflict was one that could not be settled

easily by military means and that, in fact, the conflict was not so much about communism versus democracy. From the standpoint of the Vietnamese people, it was a struggle for national liberation.

NARRATOR: American military actions since Vietnam, whatever their explicit justifications, have always had the implicit goal of trying to rid ourselves of the specter of the Vietnam Syndrome.

Mr. BARNET: The Vietnam Syndrome concerns the administra-tion because it appears to be a constraint on the use of American power. If you can't fight because public opinion won't let you, what's the good of all this military hardware? It's a good question.

INTERVIEWER: When do you think we should go to war?

WOMAN on the Street: Never. But if we have to do it to protect our country and our children, then we have to.

WOMAN on the Street: I hope never. I mean, I just think war is horrible.

MAN on the Street: I can see no reason for it anymore.

WOMAN on the Street: We should never go to war.

WOMAN on the Street: As a last resort.

MAN on the Street: When they're coming over Nantucket, or if they're coming over Catalina Island, then I'll think about it.

NARRATOR: The consent of the governed is what makes democracies work, but public opinion can also be manipulated for political ends. In attempting to rally public support for military action presidents have often resorted to what Richard Barnet calls "official truth."

Mr. BARNET: "Official truth" is the spin that political leaders put on complex reality to explain it to a public that knows very little about what's, in fact, going on in order to enlist support for official policy.

NARRATOR: If the reasons for war are less than honorable, presidents often feel the need to sell military actions to the public with a moral appeal. Let's look at a case study: The war with Iraq in 1991.

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 put American access to Middle East oil at risk, which was clearly a primary reason for US military action. But the notion of "blood for oil" did not have a moral appeal, so the Bush administration tried selling the war as "a stand against naked aggression" and the defense of Kuwait's national sovereignty.

Mr. BARNET: To the extent people knew anything about it, a small, essentially feudal fiefdom run by a family was not parti-cularly appealing as a place to take a stand for democracy.

NARRATOR: So, how did the president reshape the "official truth" to enlist the support of the public?

Mr. BARNET: The administration shifted gear again and found the issue that was truly a salient one for American public opinion, and that was nuclear weapons, that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons.

NARRATOR: The president also resorted to the time-tested technique of demonizing the opponent, repeatedly comparing Saddam to Hitler.

President BUSH (20 August 1990): "Half a century ago, the world had the chance to stop a ruthless aggressor and missed it. And I pledge to you we will not make that mistake again."

Mr. WESSELLS: It made it so that the American people were much more susceptible to additional propaganda, such as the notion that Saddam could only be resisted by military force. Because, after all, Hitler could not be resisted by anything but military force.

NARRATOR: Traditionally, Americans have shown overwhelming support for military actions when they start. Presidential popu-larity gets a boost, at least at first. But if the war drags on, the losses are seen an unacceptable, and if Americans fail to see a genuine danger, support wanes.

Col. SUMMERS: With television, radio, newspapers, I think it's pretty hard to pull the wool over the American people's eyes, although presidents have certainly tried to do that. But I think it's dangerous. Because when it becomes obvious that they've been misled, then the resentment really causes enormous backlash.

NARRATOR: However, extensive media coverage is no guarantee of a well-informed citizenry. Since Vietnam, the Pentagon has sought to impose tight controls on TV coverage of combat, recog-nizing the power of television to shape public opinion.

President LYNDON JOHNSON (1965): "And I am continuing and I am increasing the search for every possible path to peace."

NARRATOR: The government's "official truth" on Vietnam was directly contradicted by the images on the evening news. For this reasons, Vietnam was called the first "television war." It was depicted as a war of the human body: body bags, body counts, My Lai. The horror of war had a human face.

SANFORD UNGAR: Military people in the field and at the Pentagon have been more cautious since Vietnam.

NARRATOR: Sanford Ungar is the dean of the School of Communications at American University and an expert on the role of media in society.

Mr. UNGAR: They don't want the camera crews to be able to be out there in the midst of the engagements the way they often were in Vietnam. Remember, it's actually kind of interesting, because in Vietnam, for the most part, that was still on film. It had to go and be edited, generally in Hong Kong or someplace else, and it really only reached the American public a day or two, or maybe even three or four later.

Now that everything's on video, you could have some very immediate images sent back of actual battles. And we haven't really had that, nothing that would compare to what there was from Vietnam. And I think that the military is more cautious about granting access, about letting people in, because I think they are understandably nervous about how it might look. War might not look so glamorous if it's covered on the spot like that.

NARRATOR: In subsequent conflicts -- Grenada, Panama, and Iraq -- the Pentagon instituted controls over the media's access to the battlefield. It tried to depersonalize the conflict in order to mobilize public support for US military actions.

Mr. BARNET: It's the personalization of the victim that creates doubts about war. It was that searing picture of the child running down the street burning with napalm. It was the coldblooded execution of the prisoner that everybody from that era remembers. A war in which all of this is removed is hygienic, and sterile, and it's almost as if it's not real.

NARRATOR: Today, war has become something of a spectator sport. The war in Iraq even had a glitzy title: "Desert Storm."

Clearly, television images do play a role in shaping public opinion regarding foreign policy. Depending on how they are controlled and presented, TV images can either rally public support for military action or it can help turn public sentiment against it.

Mr. WESSELLS: These images can help set the agenda, they can help create images which stir our desire to fight. Or, they can show carnage and damage, as, for example, in the images coming from Bosnia-Herzegovina, indicating that perhaps war is a very nasty and devastating affair and that intervention is not a good idea.

NARRATOR: Today, the world bears little resemblance to the bipolar divisions of the Cold War era. The Soviet Union is a memory and the United States once again finds itself in a priv-ileged position of power. Yet we continue to pay for a large military, ready to go to war anywhere, anytime. Many feel that the time has come to remodel our military posture in keeping with this reordered world.

JONATHAN CLARKE: Bureaucratic structures, of course, are very much still in place from the Cold War.

NARRATOR: Jonathan Clarke, a retired British diplomat and widely published foreign policy expert, points out the institu-tional resistance to change.

Mr. CLARKE: You've got a huge defense establishment. You've got a very large CIA. You've got a very large National Security Council. All these people naturally see themselves as having an important function, an important role to play in national life. And until they can be persuaded that the time has come for them to take honorable retirement, it is going to be very difficult to change the assumptions that we've inherited.

NARRATOR: Today's main foreign problems, ethnic conflicts and civil wars, often have their roots in economic and political issues which defy military solutions.

Mr. CLARKE: All these problems really have to be addressed in a much more subtle and long-term way, with a great of knowledge of the situation on the ground. And I think that parachuting-in troops, however crack, however first class they are, is not going to solve this problem. In fact, it may even make it worse.

NARRATOR: Now that the Cold War era has passed, the ideological reasons that drove us to fight then have vanished.

WOMAN on the Street: I spent 15 months in Vietnam. And, my son is six years old and I hope and pray he never has to go to war and that it'll never get to the point where he will have to go.

NARRATOR: Yet the new era before us is teaming with oppor-tunities to fight again. Already politicians are pointing to new trouble spots and potential foes. By being skeptical of "new enemies" and reexamining our military needs, the American people can help prevent the misguided use of force in the future.

Admiral LaROCQUE: Well, as we look back at the history of this great nation, it is obvious that we have fought often and in various parts of the world for a variety of reasons. It is perhaps too much to say that Americans like war, but I regret to say that, in my opinion, we have become all too comfortable with waging war. If we continue in this direction, I think the costs will outweigh the benefits. Now that we are in a time of peace, perhaps we Americans can try to kick this habit of going to war and find other ways to solve problems involving other countries.

Until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.

[End of broadcast.]