#5
Vremya Novostei
No. 21
[translation from RIA Novosti for personal use only]
RETURN FEAR OF WAR TO THE WORLD
By Vassily VIDENKO, Cand. Sc. (History)

The world no longer fears even a possibility of a nuclear war. As for conventional warfare, even nations from the developed part of civilisation, who have much to lose, do not fear it. Not to mention nations from the underdeveloped part. And this is really alarming.

Unfortunately, this is the result of not so much the disarmament policy or the construction of an international security system as of the end of the once great East-West confrontation and its positive essence - mutual deterrence, which worked throughout the world. In the former world, divided into two zones of influence, the deterrence not only permeated states, governments and other established life-support systems of nations. Actually, their very development - political, social, religious, ethnic and other - was controlled. Otherwise, a global, almost total deterrence would have been fiction. In this sense, billions of dollars were not spent in vain.

Vicious in its antagonistic essence and really dangerous because of the level of military confrontation, the system of international relations nevertheless unfailingly ensured peace in the world for half a century after World War II, maintaining the entire web of the international balance of forces and interests.

Conflicts that arose now and then in the Third World were free of the main "virus" - nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. This purity was guaranteed by the great confrontation and the treaties it produced, above all the basic treaties on ABM defence, strategic offensive armaments, and others.

The breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the U.S.S.R. deprived the world of the usual balance in views as to "whence the threat to peace comes." Perhaps, this is why now it may come from anywhere and, more often, it comes without a warning. Unlike the Cold War years, this threat is not hypothetical but a real one, shown on TV.

The first omen came much earlier than September 11, 2001, ten years before, during Operation Desert Storm. At that time, the world still had the ability to react, although rather mechanically already, by expressing its concern - first in general and then on a concrete occasion: the use of weapons of mass destruction by Americans. The only consolation was that the "desert" hit by the "Storm" was located far from the developed part of civilisation.

Another omen came from much nearer - the Balkans. The revival of an ideology of military arbitrariness by the strong and the rich and of an "international right" to bomb populated areas to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe marked the end of the epoch of deterrence with its salutary fear of war.

In the Third World, void of the superpowers' patronage, perplexity caused by the loss of former ideological beacons began to quickly mutate. The lack of a clearcut political line in underdeveloped countries, especially in the Middle East, has brought to the foreground the religious factor, which is quickly turning into fanaticism.

During the decade of the degradation of the deterrence system, the West believed it was even safer than behind the Iron Curtain, especially as its loss was compensated for by NATO's enlargement and the extension of a new trade and economic "defence line" with outposts of the European Union, the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and other "elite" organisations. However, the West, just as countries of the former U.S.S.R., proved unprepared to counter head-on attacks by militant pseudo-religious fanaticism.

There is an impression that highly developed Christian countries, fearing to hurt the feelings of the ever growing numbers of Moslems, are afraid to raise before Islamic hierarchs issues that would help solve this problem.

Since the world is a single whole, suicide through a terrorist act must be anathematised by all religions that claim to play the role of modern ones, i.e. those that keep up with the general and mandatory humanisation of life in the world. Self-sacrifice cannot be justified by any religious canons if it leads to the death of innocent people. Irrespective of creed, actions by kamikazes and their inspirers, which threaten the lives of other people, are a horrible crime.

The understanding of this thesis and adoption of a universal "code of behaviour" are, most likely, a matter of the distant future. Until it comes, it is probably necessary to maintain people's fear of death and, consequently, fear of war - at least, at a level that will not allow anyone to yawn while watching the TV news about the Middle East conflict approaching the scope of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, or about the confrontation between India and Pakistan "on the nuclear threshold."

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