COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Still Destroying in the Name of ‘Peace’ : In Central America, in Africa, the Cold War’s uglier skirmishes haven’t ended.

“They make a desolation and they call it peace.” This was the terse description of the Roman Empire by a Scottish chieftain called Calgacus, addressing his troops before the battle of Graupian Hill in 84 A.D. The Romans duly defeated Calgacus, slaughtering--as Tacitus, nephew of the victorious general Agricola, put it--”till their arms were tired.”

Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. These days no one is as brutally frank as Calcagus in that phrase about desolation, recorded by Tacitus. Winning the Cold War means never having to say you’re sorry.

Sorry for what?

Start with Central America. Right now there’s much glowing, though somewhat tentative, language about the peace process and reconciliation in El Salvador. The butcheries of the 1980s, at least for the time being, are just a memory.

But had it not been for the determination of Jimmy Carter and subsequently of the Reagan Administration to beat back the Salvadoran reform movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, those horrors need never have occurred. El Mozote and all those other sites of carnage would not now be remembered as the Salvadoran equivalents of Graupian Hill.

South across Honduras from El Salvador is Nicaragua, most recently the ransom victim of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), holding up $100 million in aid because he believes Sandinismo has been insufficiently extirpated.

In the late 1970s, like El Salvador, Nicaragua had the possibility of evolution into a relatively egalitarian, humanely run society, liberated from decades of Somozan tyranny. But, like El Salvador, Nicaragua was incorporated into the cartographic hysteria of the Cold War. Reagan’s men would flourish maps showing the Sandinistas only a few days’ march from Harlingen, Texas. Vital U.S. sea lanes were menaced by--Grenada!

Military attrition and, more important, economic embargo, both sponsored by the United States, closed off the Sandinistas’ options. They finished off Nicaragua, too. These days the country is a wasteland, awaiting billions in assistance that will never come. The best it can hope for is a few export assembly zones and some jobs at 40 cents an hour.

Ubi solitudinem faciunt. They make a desert. Try Africa. These days in Angola, the big question is whether the government can negotiate a truce with Jonas Savimbi and thus spare the country another round of civil war. In the past, Savimbi and his UNITA force were the clients of both the United States and South Africa, which financed and supplied his prolonged challenge to the government MPLA party. Twelve years of this siege left the Angolan economy virtually destroyed.

This fall Angola held elections, monitored by the United Nations. Even after Savimbi went down fairly to defeat at the ballot box, the United States called for a coalition government, which is as though George Bush had, on Nov. 4, suggested coalition rule with Bill Clinton.

But regardless of how power in Angola is to be held, the damage has been done. Like Nicaragua, it’s an economic moonscape, sown with anti-personnel mines and with two generations of traumatized Angolans.

The same bleak saga was replicated in Mozambique, now reeling out of the darkness of a terrifying insurgency by the Renamo movement, also backed by the South Africans and the United States. And in Mozambique, as in Angola, the possibility of economic stability, let alone progress, has been annulled for at least a generation.

In Cambodia today, the Khmer Rouge again throws its shadow across the nation it once terrorized, behaving with increasing arrogance as they flout the U.N. accords. Here is another political and economic desert whose origins can be traced to the U.S. onslaughts of the Vietnam-War era.

Pondering these narratives of destruction, one can distinguish two themes.

In the struggle against the aspirations of these Third World nations it was always the intention of the United States and its allies “to make a desert,” as Tacitus would have put it. Political liberties will be eroded amid the constraints, and under the excuse, of a state of siege. Defy us, as the United States said to the Vietnamese, and we will destroy you, if not militarily then economically.

Second theme: The war isn’t over. Senator Helms is still denying Nicaragua that $100 million. The Bush Administration backed Savimbi through the election. Cuba now faces a President-elect who, as a candidate, sponsored the ratcheting up of the economic embargo first imposed by John F. Kennedy.

What the United States has always feared from the Third World was the threat of a good example, and that bit of the Cold War will be fought until even the memory of insubordination is eradicated.