Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

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  • Time to Wake Up

    Time to Wake Up

    In this season of the 61st anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, it is noteworthy that there are still 27,000 nuclear weapons in the world. These weapons are in the arsenals of nine countries, but over 95 percent of them are in the arsenals of just two countries: the US and Russia. These two countries each actively deploy some 6,000 nuclear weapons and keep about 2,000 on hair-trigger alert.

    The political elites in the US seem to think this is fine, and that they can go on with nuclear business-as-usual for the indefinite future. Not a single member of the US Senate has called for pragmatic steps leading to the abolition of nuclear weapons, including negotiations for nuclear disarmament as required by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    US leaders are living within a bubble of hubris that is manifested in many ways, flagrant examples of which are the pursuit of an illegal war in Iraq, and opposition to joining the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto accords on global warming. Underlying their policies is the attitude that US military and economic power gives them the right to violate international law at will and pursue a unilateral path of force when it suits their fancy. We citizens are being held hostage to their major errors in judgment, which in the Nuclear Age could result in the destruction of the country and much of civilization.

    Rather than working to reduce the nuclear threat, US nuclear policy is promoting nuclear proliferation. A recent example is the proposed US-India nuclear deal, in which the Congress appears prepared to change its own non-proliferation laws in order to sell nuclear materials and technology to a country that never signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and secretly developed nuclear weapons. US leaders must have their heads deeply buried in the sand if they fail to grasp that this will spur an even more intense nuclear arms race on the Indian subcontinent and be viewed as hypocritical by the vast majority of the non-nuclear weapons states that are parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    In the 2006 Hiroshima Peace Declaration, Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba pointed out that the US Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution in June “demanding that all nuclear weapons states, including the Untied States, immediately cease all targeting of cities with nuclear weapons.” Of course, this would be a good beginning, but nuclear weapons have little use other than to target cities or other nuclear weapons. They are, after all, the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

    The World Court found the threat or use of nuclear weapons to be illegal. Most churches have been vocal about their immorality. These weapons detract from security rather than add to it. A recent international commission report on weapons of mass destruction, Weapons of Terror, concluded: “So long as any state has [weapons of mass destruction] – especially nuclear arms – others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain in any state’s arsenal, there is a high risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. Any such use would be catastrophic.”

    Why are we not appalled by the myopia and arrogance of our political leadership for disastrous policies such as those that ignore the obligation in the Non-Proliferation Treaty for good faith negotiations to achieve nuclear disarmament in all its aspects? We should be asking: How do individuals who support these insane policies rise to such high office? We should also be asking: Why do ordinary Americans not care enough about their survival to change their leadership?

    A large part of the answer to the first question is that the system is broken and far too dependent on large cash contributions to buy television ads. Insight into an answer to the second question may be found in the recent Harris Poll (July 21, 2006) that reported that 50 percent of US respondents still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the US invaded that country in March 2003. One opinion analyst, Steven Kull, described such views as “independent of reality.” That is how it is for many Americans and their political leaders in this 61st year of the Nuclear Age. Living with such purposeful ignorance is a recipe for disaster.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a leader in the global effort for a world free of nuclear weapons.

  • Hiroshima Day Peace Declaration

    Radiation, heat, blast and their synergetic effects created a hell on Earth. Sixty-one years later, the number of nations enamored of evil and enslaved by nuclear weapons is increasing. The human family stands at a crossroads. Will all nations be enslaved? Or will all nations be liberated? This choice poses another question. Is it acceptable for cities, and especially the innocent children who live in them, to be targeted by nuclear weapons?

    The answer is crystal clear, and the past sixty-one years have shown us the path to liberation.

    From a hell in which no one could have blamed them for choosing death, the hibakusha set forth toward life and the future. Living with injuries and illnesses eating away at body and mind, they have spoken persistently about their experiences. Refusing to bow before discrimination, slander, and scorn, they have warned continuously that “no one else should ever suffer as we did.” Their voices, picked up by people of conscience the world over, are becoming a powerful mass chorus.

    The keynote is, “The only role for nuclear weapons is to be abolished.” And yet, the world’s political leaders continue to ignore these voices. The International Court of Justice advisory opinion handed down ten years ago, born of the creative action of global civil society, should have been a highly effective tool for enlightening and guiding them toward the truth.

    The Court found that “Sthe threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law,” and went on to declare, “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”

    If the nuclear-weapon states had taken the lead and sought in good faith to fulfill this obligation, nuclear weapons would have been abolished already. Unfortunately, during the past ten years, most nations and most people have failed to confront this obligation head-on. Regretting that we have not done more, the City of Hiroshima, along with Mayors for Peace, whose member cities have increased to 1,403, is launching Phase II of our 2020 Vision Campaign. This phase includes the Good Faith Challenge, a campaign to promote the good-faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament called for in the ICJ advisory opinion, and a Cities Are Not Targets project demanding that nuclear-weapon states stop targeting cities for nuclear attack.

    Nuclear weapons are illegal, immoral weapons designed to obliterate cities. Our goals are to reveal the delusions behind “nuclear deterrence theory” and the “nuclear umbrella,” which hold cities hostage, and to protect, from a legal and moral standpoint, our citizens’ right to life.

    Taking the lead in this effort is the US Conference of Mayors, representing 1,139 American cities. At its national meeting this past June, the USCM adopted a resolution demanding that all nuclear-weapon states, including the United States, immediately cease all targeting of cities with nuclear weapons.

    Cities and citizens of the world have a duty to release the lost sheep from the spell and liberate the world from nuclear weapons. The time has come for all of us to awaken and arise with a will that can penetrate rock and a passion that burns like fire.

    I call on the Japanese government to advocate for the hibakusha and all citizens by conducting a global campaign that will forcefully insist that the nuclear-weapon states “negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament.” To that end, I demand that the government respect the Peace Constitution of which we should be proud. I further request more generous, people-oriented assistance appropriate to the actual situations of the aging hibakusha, including those living overseas and those exposed in “black rain areas.”

    To console the many victims whose names remain unknown, this year for the first time we added the words, “Many Unknown” to the ledger of victims’ names placed in the cenotaph. We humbly pray for the peaceful repose of the souls of all atomic bomb victims and a future of peace and harmony for the human family.

    Tadatoshi Akiba is the mayor of Hiroshima.

  • Towards a Nuclear Free World

    If someone holds a classroom full of children hostage with a machine gun, threatening to kill them unless his demands are met, we consider him a dangerous, crazy terrorist. But if a head of state holds millions of civilians hostage with nuclear weapons, many consider this as perfectly normal. We must end that double standard and recognize nuclear weapons for what they are: instruments of terror.

    On July 8, 1996, the World Court declared the threat or use of nuclear weapons contrary to international law and unanimously called on all states to conduct negotiations leading to complete nuclear disarmament.

    Treaties have been concluded to ban biological and chemical weapons. Why has an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons eluded us for so long? If Hitler had used nuclear weapons and lost the war, they would have been outlawed as cruel and inhuman long ago.

    But because they were first used by the victorious side in a war considered just, they have enjoyed an undeserved aura of legitimacy. Over the last fifty years, many flawed arguments have been put forward intended to justify the policy of nuclear deterrence.

    It has been asserted, for example, that nuclear weapons have helped prevent war. Yet the five declared nuclear powers have been involved in eight times as many wars on average since 1945 as the non-nuclear countries. Some credit nuclear weapons with having prevented nuclear war, which is preposterous: without nuclear weapons, there could not possibly be any nuclear war. At the peak, the US and Soviet nuclear arsenals had a destructive power nearly 10,000 times all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or, as President Carter said in his farewell address, one World War II every second for a slow afternoon.

    It is conceivable that the threat of nuclear retaliation may help deter a deliberate attack, but not every war begins that way.

    When tensions are high, events may escalate out of a small incident, and it is sometimes hard to say who did what first.

    Relying on the threat of mutual destruction to deter war is as if we sought to prevent traffic accidents by packing our car with dynamite, putting a trip wire around it and telling everyone, “Don’t hit my car, or it will explode and kill you!” (and me too, of course). This should deter others from hitting me intentionally, but the slightest accidental collision would be fatal.

    On numerous occasions, we came close to a nuclear catastrophe, due to misinformation, misunderstandings, or computer errors.

    During the Cuban missile crisis, the United States was ready to retaliate against the Soviet Union if Castro had shot down American observation planes, convinced that he did so on Soviet orders. That could easily have escalated out of control. In fact, Khrushchev had ordered Castro to stop shooting at American planes, but Castro ignored his orders. Fortunately, no plane was hit.

    As long as the nuclear powers insist on the right to keep their arsenals, some other countries will be tempted to acquire nuclear weapons, too. Once terrorists get hold of nuclear weapons, they may not shrink from using them. Unless we eliminate nuclear weapons, it is only a question of time until they are used, whether deliberately or by accident. We are playing Russian roulette with our future.

    Despite decades of government propaganda, US and British polls have found repeatedly that up to 85 percent of voters are in favor of eliminating all nuclear weapons. We must tell the leaders of the nuclear nations that we reject our role as involuntary nuclear hostages. The abolition of nuclear weapons requires a popular movement, in the same way as the abolition of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid came about only after sustained public pressure.

    Some grant we might be better off if nuclear weapons had never been invented, but argue that now that we know how to make them, we cannot disinvent them, and therefore have to live with them as long as civilization exists. It is true that we cannot disinvent nuclear weapons, but nobody has disinvented cannibalism either, we simply abhor it. Can’t we learn to abhor equally the thought of incinerating entire cities with nuclear weapons

     

    Dietrich Fischer is Academic Director of the European University Center for Peace Studies in Stadtschlaining, Austria (www.epu.ac.at) and Co-Director of TRANSCEND (www.transcend.org), a peace and development network.

  • The Hiroshima Myth

    Every year during the first two weeks of August the mass news media and many politicians at the national level trot out the “patriotic” political myth that the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan in August of 1945 caused them to surrender, and thereby saved the lives of anywhere from five hundred thousand to one million American soldiers, who did not have to invade the islands. Opinion polls over the last fifty years show that American citizens overwhelmingly (between 80 and 90%) believe this false history which, of course, makes them feel better about killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians (mostly women and children) and saving American lives to accomplish the ending of the war.

    The best book, in my opinion, to explode this myth is The Decision to Use the Bomb by Gar Alperovitz, because it not only explains the real reasons the bombs were dropped, but also gives a detailed history of how and why the myth was created that this slaughter of innocent civilians was justified, and therefore morally acceptable. The essential problem starts with President Franklin Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional surrender, which was reluctantly adopted by Churchill and Stalin, and which President Truman decided to adopt when he succeeded Roosevelt in April of 1945. Hanson Baldwin was the principal writer for The New York Times who covered World War II and he wrote an important book immediately after the war entitled Great Mistakes of the War. Baldwin concludes that the unconditional surrender policy “. . . was perhaps the biggest political mistake of the war . . . . Unconditional surrender was an open invitation to unconditional resistance; it discouraged opposition to Hitler, probably lengthened the war, costs us lives, and helped to lead to the present aborted peace.”

    The stark fact is that the Japanese leaders, both military and civilian, including the Emperor, were willing to surrender in May of 1945 if the Emperor could remain in place and not be subjected to a war crimes trial after the war. This fact became known to President Truman as early as May of 1945. The Japanese monarchy was one of the oldest in all of history dating back to 660 B.C. The Japanese religion added the belief that all the Emperors were the direct descendants of the sun goddess, Amaterasu. The reigning Emperor Hirohito was the 124th in the direct line of descent. After the bombs were dropped on August 6 and 9 of 1945, and their surrender soon thereafter, the Japanese were allowed to keep their Emperor on the throne and he was not subjected to any war crimes trial. The Emperor, Hirohito, came on the throne in 1926 and continued in his position until his death in 1989. Since President Truman, in effect, accepted the conditional surrender offered by the Japanese as early as May of 1945, the question is posed, “Why then were the bombs dropped?”

    The author Alperovitz gives us the answer in great detail which can only be summarized here, but he states, “We have noted a series of Japanese peace feelers in Switzerland which OSS Chief William Donovan reported to Truman in May and June [1945]. These suggested, even at this point, that the U.S. demand for unconditional surrender might well be the only serious obstacle to peace. At the center of the explorations, as we also saw, was Allen Dulles, chief of OSS operations in Switzerland (and subsequently Director of the CIA). In his 1966 book The Secret Surrender, Dulles recalled that ‘On July 20, 1945, under instructions from Washington, I went to the Potsdam Conference and reported there to Secretary [of War] Stimson on what I had learned from Tokyo – they desired to surrender if they could retain the Emperor and their constitution as a basis for maintaining discipline and order in Japan after the devastating news of surrender became known to the Japanese people.’” It is documented by Alperovitz that Stimson reported this directly to Truman. Alperovitz further points out in detail the documentary proof that every top presidential civilian and military advisor, with the exception of James Byrnes, along with Prime Minister Churchill and his top British military leadership, urged Truman to revise the unconditional surrender policy so as to allow the Japanese to surrender and keep their Emperor. All this advice was given to Truman prior to the Potsdam Proclamation which occurred on July 26, 1945. This proclamation made a final demand upon Japan to surrender unconditionally or suffer drastic consequences.

    Another startling fact about the military connection to the dropping of the bomb is the lack of knowledge on the part of General MacArthur about the existence of the bomb and whether it was to be dropped. Alperovitz states “MacArthur knew nothing about advance planning for the atomic bomb’s use until almost the last minute. Nor was he personally in the chain of command in this connection; the order came straight from Washington. Indeed, the War Department waited until five days before the bombing of Hiroshima even to notify MacArthur – the commanding general of the U.S. Army Forces in the Pacific – of the existence of the atomic bomb.” Alperovitz makes it very clear that the main person Truman was listening to while he ignored all of this civilian and military advice, was James Byrnes, the man who virtually controlled Truman at the beginning of his administration. Byrnes was one of the most experienced political figures in Washington, having served for over thirty years in both the House and the Senate. He had also served as a United States Supreme Court Justice, and at the request of President Roosevelt, he resigned that position and accepted the role in the Roosevelt administration of managing the domestic economy. Byrnes went to the Yalta Conference with Roosevelt and then was given the responsibility to get Congress and the American people to accept the agreements made at Yalta.

    When Truman became a senator in 1935, Byrnes immediately became his friend and mentor and remained close to Truman until Truman became president. Truman never forgot this and immediately called on Byrnes to be his number-two man in the new administration. Byrnes had expected to be named the vice presidential candidate to replace Wallace and had been disappointed when Truman had been named, yet he and Truman remained very close. Byrnes had also been very close to Roosevelt, while Truman was kept in the dark by Roosevelt most of the time he served as vice president. Truman asked Byrnes immediately, in April, to become his Secretary of State but they delayed the official appointment until July 3, 1945, so as not to offend the incumbent. Byrnes had also accepted a position on the interim committee which had control over the policy regarding the atom bomb, and therefore, in April, 1945 became Truman’s main foreign policy advisor, and especially the advisor on the use of the atomic bomb. It was Byrnes who encouraged Truman to postpone the Potsdam Conference and his meeting with Stalin until they could know, at the conference, if the atomic bomb was successfully tested. While at the Potsdam Conference the experiments proved successful and Truman advised Stalin that a new massively destructive weapon was now available to America, which Byrnes hoped would make Stalin back off from any excessive demands or activity in the post-war period.

    Truman secretly gave the orders on July 25, 1945 that the bombs would be dropped in August while he was to be in route back to America. On July 26, he issued the Potsdam Proclamation, or ultimatum, to Japan to surrender, leaving in place the unconditional surrender policy, thereby causing both Truman and Byrnes to believe that the terms would not be accepted by Japan.

    The conclusion drawn unmistakably from the evidence presented, is that Byrnes is the man who convinced Truman to keep the unconditional surrender policy and not accept Japan’s surrender so that the bombs could actually be dropped thereby demonstrating to the Russians that America had a new forceful leader in place, a “new sheriff in Dodge” who, unlike Roosevelt, was going to be tough with the Russians on foreign policy and that the Russians needed to “back off” during what would become known as the “Cold War.” A secondary reason was that Congress would now be told about why they had made the secret appropriation to a Manhattan Project and the huge expenditure would be justified by showing that not only did the bombs work but that they would bring the war to an end, make the Russians back off and enable America to become the most powerful military force in the world.

    If the surrender by the Japanese had been accepted between May and the end of July of 1945 and the Emperor had been left in place, as in fact he was after the bombing, this would have kept Russia out of the war. Russia agreed at Yalta to come into the Japanese war three months after Germany surrendered. In fact, Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945 and Russia announced on August 8, (exactly three months thereafter) that it was abandoning its neutrality policy with Japan and entering the war. Russia’s entry into the war for six days allowed them to gain tremendous power and influence in China, Korea, and other key areas of Asia. The Japanese were deathly afraid of Communism and if the Potsdam Proclamation had indicated that America would accept the conditional surrender allowing the Emperor to remain in place and informed the Japanese that Russia would enter the war if they did not surrender, then this would surely have assured a quick Japanese surrender.

    The second question that Alperovitz answers in the last half of the book is how and why the Hiroshima myth was created. The story of the myth begins with the person of James B. Conant, the President of Harvard University, who was a prominent scientist, having initially made his mark as a chemist working on poison gas during World War I. During World War II, he was chairman of the National Defense Research Committee from the summer of 1941 until the end of the war and he was one of the central figures overseeing the Manhattan Project. Conant became concerned about his future academic career, as well as his positions in private industry, because various people began to speak out concerning why the bombs were dropped. On September 9, 1945, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, was publically quoted extensively as stating that the atomic bomb was used because the scientists had a “toy and they wanted to try it out . . . .” He further stated, “The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment . . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it.” Albert Einstein, one of the world’s foremost scientists, who was also an important person connected with the development of the atomic bomb, responded and his words were headlined in The New York Times “Einstein Deplores Use of Atom Bomb.” The story reported that Einstein stated that “A great majority of scientists were opposed to the sudden employment of the atom bomb.” In Einstein’s judgment, the dropping of the bomb was a political – diplomatic decision rather than a military or scientific decision.

    Probably the person closest to Truman, from the military standpoint, was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Leahy, and there was much talk that he also deplored the use of the bomb and had strongly advised Truman not to use it, but advised rather to revise the unconditional surrender policy so that the Japanese could surrender and keep the Emperor. Leahy’s views were later reported by Hanson Baldwin in an interview that Leahy “thought the business of recognizing the continuation of the Emperor was a detail which should have been solved easily.” Leahy’s secretary, Dorothy Ringquist, reported that Leahy told her on the day the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, “Dorothy, we will regret this day. The United States will suffer, for war is not to be waged on women and children.” Another important naval voice, the commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, Ernest J. King, stated that the naval blockade and prior bombing of Japan in March of 1945, had rendered the Japanese helpless and that the use of the atomic bomb was both unnecessary and immoral. Also, the opinion of Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was reported to have said in a press conference on September 22, 1945, that “The Admiral took the opportunity of adding his voice to those insisting that Japan had been defeated before the atomic bombing and Russia’s entry into the war.” In a subsequent speech at the Washington Monument on October 5, 1945, Admiral Nimitz stated “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war.” It was learned also that on or about July 20, 1945, General Eisenhower had urged Truman, in a personal visit, not to use the atomic bomb. Eisenhower’s assessment was “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing . . . to use the atomic bomb, to kill and terrorize civilians, without even attempting [negotiations], was a double crime.” Eisenhower also stated that it wasn’t necessary for Truman to “succumb” to Byrnes.

    James Conant came to the conclusion that some important person in the administration must go public to show that the dropping of the bombs was a military necessity, thereby saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, so he approached Harvey Bundy and his son, McGeorge Bundy. It was agreed by them that the most important person to create this myth was Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. It was decided that Stimson would write a long article to be widely circulated in a prominent national magazine. This article was revised repeatedly by McGeorge Bundy and Conant before it was published in Harper’s magazine in February of 1947. The long article became the subject of a front-page article and editorial in The New York Times and in the editorial it was stated “There can be no doubt that the president and Mr. Stimson are right when they mention that the bomb caused the Japanese to surrender.” Later, in 1959, President Truman specifically endorsed this conclusion, including the idea that it saved the lives of a million American soldiers. This myth has been renewed annually by the news media and various political leaders ever since.

    It is very pertinent that, in the memoirs of Henry Stimson entitled On Active Service in Peace and War, he states, “Unfortunately, I have lived long enough to know that history is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.”

    To bring this matter more into focus from the human tragedy standpoint, I recommend the reading of a book entitled Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6, September 30, 1945, by Michiko Hachiya. He was a survivor of Hiroshima and kept a daily diary about the women, children and old men that he treated on a daily basis in the hospital. The doctor was badly injured himself but recovered enough to help others and his account of the personal tragedies of innocent civilians who were either badly burned or died as a result of the bombing puts the moral issue into a clear perspective for all of us to consider.

    Now that we live in the nuclear age and there are enough nuclear weapons spread around the world to destroy civilization, we need to face the fact that America is the only country to have used this awful weapon and that it was unnecessary to have done so. If Americans would come to recognize the truth, rather than the myth, it might cause such a moral revolt that we would take the lead throughout the world in realizing that wars in the future may well become nuclear, and therefore all wars must be avoided at almost any cost. Hopefully, our knowledge of science has not outrun our ability to exercise prudent and humane moral and political judgment to the extent that we are destined for extermination.

     

    John V. Denson is the editor of two books, The Costs of War and Reassessing the Presidency. In the latter work, he has chapters especially relevant for today, on how Lincoln and FDR lied us into war.

    First Published in Lew Rockwell

  • Hiroshima Day Message

    Hiroshima Day Message

    Dear Friends,

    As I write, wars are raging in Lebanon and in Iraq. Innocent people are being injured and killed. The war machines of powerful nations are demonstrating yet again that both munitions and life are expendable on the altar of war. The leaders, of course, are far from the fronts where the battles are being fought.

    These wars are being waged in the 61st year of the Nuclear Age, an age in which our technologies have become capable of destroying humankind and most forms of life on our planet. We should never lose sight of the fact that nuclear weapons are always available to be used by those who possess them.

    Nuclear weapons are illegal and immoral weapons. They are also anti-democratic, anti-human, anti-life and anti-environment. These weapons reflect a pronounced form of cowardice, being long-distance killing devices that threaten indiscriminate mass murder of civilians and combatants, men and women, infants and the elderly.

    There can be no honor in producing, possessing, testing, threatening or using nuclear weapons. Those who take part in nuclear weapons programs, and gain livelihood from them, are worse than war profiteers, risking the destruction of humanity for personal gain.

    We are challenged as never before in human history. Our responsibility as citizens of Earth in the beginning of the 21st century is to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity and to end war as a social institution. Unfortunately, we are far from those twin goals so critical to the future of life on earth.

    The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the ambassadors and prophets of the Nuclear Age. They have seen atomic destruction at close hand. Their testimonies are sober reflections on the unleashed power of the atom. They speak out so that their past will not become our future.

    But their testimony is not enough. We must act as though the very future of humanity depended upon our success in eliminating nuclear weapons and war. The stakes are very high and the prospects dim, but with courage and persistence we may succeed. And it is that flicker of hope in a dark time that should inspire us to summon the courage to change the world.

     

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a leader in the global effort for a world free of nuclear weapons.
  • Global Hiroshima

    Global Hiroshima

    Hiroshima was destroyed by a single atomic weapon, giving rise to the Nuclear Age, an era characterized by humankind living precariously with weapons capable of destroying the human species. Should the incredible dangers of nuclear weapons not have been immediately apparent from the destruction of Hiroshima and, three days later, of Nagasaki, throughout the Nuclear Age there have been repeated warnings of their unprecedented capacity for destruction. These warnings have come from scientists, military leaders, religious leaders and, occasionally, political leaders. Mostly, these warnings have fallen on deaf ears.

    Sixty-one years after the destruction of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and 15 years after the ending of the Cold War, there are still some 27,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Over 95 percent of these are in the arsenals of the US and Russia, with some 4,000 of these kept on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired in moments. In addition, seven other countries now possess nuclear weapons: UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. All of the nuclear weapons states continue to improve and test missile delivery systems for their nuclear warheads.

    Throughout the Nuclear Age there have been accidents, miscalculations and near inadvertent nuclear wars. The closest we may have come to nuclear war was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, tense days in which decision makers in the US and USSR struggled to find a way through the crisis without an escalation into nuclear exchange. In the 44 years since that crisis, despite other close calls, humankind collectively has relaxed and let down its guard against the dangers these weapons pose to all.

    It has been widely accepted that nuclear weapons are illegal and immoral because they are weapons of mass murder that do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Ten years ago, the International Court of Justice concluded that there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects. Progress toward this goal has not been reassuring. No such negotiations are currently in progress. Most political leaders in the US are more concerned with the reliability of nuclear weapons than with finding a way to eliminate them.

    To safely navigate the shoals of the Nuclear Age, three key elements are needed: leadership, a plan, and political will. Only one country currently has the capacity to provide this leadership and that is the US. A spark of hope that such leadership might exist briefly flared during the Reagan presidency when Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev came close to an agreement on nuclear disarmament at their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. Their good intentions faltered on the divisive issue of missile defenses. Since then, no high-ranking American political leader, including members of the Senate, has spoken out for a world free of nuclear weapons. President Bush’s leadership on the issue of nuclear disarmament has been non-existent and, in fact, has set up obstacles to achieving this goal.

    The years pass with the threat of nuclear Armageddon hanging over us, and we wait, seemingly in vain, for political leaders to emerge who are willing to make the abolition of nuclear weapons a high priority on the political agenda. We continue to wait for political leaders who will challenge the nuclear double standards, which assume that some countries can maintain nuclear weapons in perpetuity while other countries must be forever content to forego these weapons.

    We wait for political leaders who will advance a viable plan for the phased elimination of nuclear weapons. Civil society has been able to devise a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention, a draft treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons, so certainly government leaders should be able to do so as well.

    After 61 years of the Nuclear Age, it seems clear that the political leaders needed to achieve a nuclear weapons-free world are unlikely to emerge from existing political systems and structures. These leaders will emerge only if ordinary people demand such leadership. The leaders will have to be led by the people toward assuring a future free of nuclear threat. Absent a sustained surge of political pressure from below, humanity will continue to drift toward increased nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and, finally, nuclear annihilation. The choice remains ours: a future free of nuclear threat or a global Hiroshima. The stakes could not be higher.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a leader in the global effort for a world free of nuclear weapons.

  • Perspective on the 2006 Israel-Lebanon Conflict

    The first casualty of war is the truth. For this reason it is important to provide some clarity regarding the latest Middle East conflict. The short version is Iran’s August 22nd deadline for a uranium enrichment response is expected to disappoint the US and Israel. As a result, the conflict we now see is to cut off what Israel perceives are the two arms of Iran (i.e., Hamas and Hezbollah).

    While the book American Hiroshima elaborates in detail why this is happening, it is important to revisit what has happened since July 12th. In addition, I must note that war is rarely started by a single event. The seeds for war are often the product of many events that precede the actual use of military aircraft, tanks and ships. The BBC has an excelent timeline of events leading up to this conflict.

    A key fact in determining what is going on is to look at is the number of civilians killed and held in prison by each side. Israel’s position that a single soldier being held captive by the Palestinians, or two soldiers being held by Hezbollah is an act of war cannot be taken seriously when Israel is simultaneously holding thousands of captured Palestinians. The mainstream media conveniently fails to mention this point. The cross-border dimension of the kidnapping may also be distorted by the mainstream media as from what I can tell Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev (the Israeli soldiers) were captured near Ayta al-Sha’b which is actually in Lebanon. When we remember that the first casualty of war is the truth and this war is about something far more than soldiers being kidnapped, then we should not be surprised by the distortions of the truth to create war propaganda. History is also helpful and in 1998 Amnesty International wrote “By Israel’s own admission, Lebanese detainees are being held as bargaining chips; they are not detained for their own actions but in exchange for Israeli soldiers missing in action or killed in Lebanon. Most have now spent 10 years in secret and isolated detention.”

    Another source of sanity during war is the United Nations. Regardless of what individuals may think about the UN, this organization has an impressive track record of correctly identifying who has started a war and when a war is violating international law. The US is unfortunately on the wrong side of this litmus test with respect to invading Iraq and Israel is on the wrong side with respect to invading Lebanon (see the comments by UN official Jan Egeland in the article Israel Breaks Humanitarian Law).

    In brief, what has happened is Hezbollah initiated Operation Truthful Promise on July 12, 2006. This was not an act of war but a plan to capture Israeli soldiers to swap them for three Lebanese held by Israel. Israel used the event to launch Operation Just Reward, which was interestingly renamed Operation Change of Direction. My sense is the Israeli and US leadership renamed the operation when they concluded the July 12 events provided the cover story to go after Hamas, Hezbollah and produce an incident to justify war with Iran. The bombing attacks then starting on July 13 and hundreds of civilians have been killed. July 13 is the formal beginning point for the start of the war. Israel also invaded Lebanon soon after the air attack began although Israel reports the invasion started on July 23 (which is more likely the date the US and British Special Forces became actively involved in joint operations with Israeli Special Forces). In any event, Israel desired an event to use as an excuse to attack both Hamas and Hezbollah and so far the American people are still fooled by the mass media.

    Stepping back, why is this happening? The reason is the leadership in Israel and the United States see Hamas and Hezbollah as the two arms of Iran (which is without question the case for Hezbollah). Before launching an attack on Iran’s population of 68+ million people, a clean up operation of Hamas and Hezbollah is is seen as necessary to minimize “near enemy” attacks. At a minimum Israel and the US neo-cons seek to overthrow the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine, degrade Hezbollah, and accelerate the timetable for war with Iran. On July 16 a senior US official reported in the Washington Post that “eight cabinet ministers or 30 percent of the government is in jail, another 30 percent is hiding, and the other 30 percent is doing very little.” This means the first objective of the invasion has essentially been accomplished. You may be wondering about Syria and yes Syria is a factor. However, Iran is the bigger concern for Israel. Iran has the potential to join Israel as a nuclear power in the Middle East and statements from Iran’s defense minister indicate they are already a nuclear military power or at a minimum very close to being one.

    Hezbollah responded to the invasion with artillery rocket bombardments in Israel. For the record, Hezbollah had previously launched rockets and in the past Israel quickly responded with attacks from aircraft launched guided missiles. Iran is widely believed to be Hezbollah’s rocket supplier. The international community previously deemed this response by Israel as appropriate. It may be helpful to remember that Israel, even without the United States, is a military powerhouse and even a combined Hamas-Hezbollah force is a gnat without the means to threaten Israel’s national security. So now we see the Israeli Air Force and Israeli Sea Corps forces pounding away at Lebanon. Iran’s President is on record that if the invasion crosses Syria’s border, Iran will conclude that they are next and immediately join the fight. The US is pretending to have Condoleeza Rice work for a peace agreement after her initial statement rejecting an immediate ceasefire did not play well internationally. No matter what she says, the fact is the United States is sending the bombs that are being used to kill civilians in Lebanon. A few days ago I thought how hypocritical President Bush is as I read the front page story about a Canadian family in Lebanon that was killed by an Israel air strike. To drive the point home, it is hypocritical to supply the bombs for free and simultaneously position yourself as a neutral peacemaker.

    What is next? The case made in American Hiroshima strongly suggests that you will see incidents to justify an attack on Iran. Since Iran has declared Syria as a trigger point, the Israeli and US leadership may decide to focus on incidents to justify attacking Syria. President Bush will need to complete face-to-face meetings with key leaders in the region so that Saudi Arabia and other Arab leaders do not interrupt the oil flow. Behind the scenes, the security efforts for all US nuclear power facilities are being increased. Unfortunately, unlike Iraq, Iran has been known to possess a weapons of mass destruction capability for over a decade. The mainstream media is conveniently forgetting to mention this so that many Americans will continue to be asleep as the violence in the Middle East escalates.

    What should caring and loving people in Israel, the US, and the Arab world do? To start, the current “solutions” of more killing will only guarantee that an American and global Hiroshima will someday happen. Violence produces more violence and only love can break the cycle of destruction. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Israel, and the US fail to see this reality and the fact that nuclear weapons will do more to empower the weak than protect the strong. Israel should therefore immediately deal with its neighbors in a humane and respectful manner. Hamas and Hezbollah should immediately stop attacking Israel as this only leads to more suffering for everyone. Military action should stop and full prisoner exchanges should begin. A two-state solution is possible and fundamentalists committed to violence can be policed by the forces for peace when acts of kindness are initiated and reinforced. Israel can exist in peace, but the path that US and Israeli leaders have taken is leading to the horrific events.

    Upon reviewing the history of violence, you can better understand why Jewish citizens and many more people around the world have protested against the war Israel started on July 13. So what do we in the US specifically do now? To start, we have a special responsibility because the US government is in charge of any expansion of the current violence. In February 2005, the Israeli Cabinet agreed not to attack Iran without a “green light” from the US. This means we can pressure our government not to expand the war to Syria or Iran with letters, phone calls, and direct action. The US Congress has officially supported Israel’s illegal invasion with SR 534 on July 19th and HR 921 on July 20th.

    We could use an angel of reason and perhaps one will appear. We have confronted dark times like 1962 in the past and managed to step back from the abyss. May peace return to the Middle East but let’s not rely only on prayers and participate in direct action. Please send the Internet address for this information to your friends and family. When contemplating what you will do to stop the killing, please remember that silence is permission.

     

    Dave Dionisi is responsible for National Awareness for Freedom From War. He is a long-time supporter and an advocate for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Dave is the author of American Hiroshima, a book about how to prevent the next 9/11 attack in the United States.

  • The Empire Leaves Beirut to Burn

    In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus — headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman fleet — was struck by a massive earthquake. Then, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors, ancestors of the present-day Lebanese, walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed in front of them.

    That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami returned to kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople as compensation to every family left alive.

    Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered everyone in the city. In World War I, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine; the Turkish army had commandeered all the grain, and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of sticklike children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.

    An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she “passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found. Everywhere women could be seen seeking eatable weeds among the grass along the roads … ”

    How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I’ve watched this place die and rise from the grave and die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked like Irish lace.

    I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.

    They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-colored skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis — in some of their cruelest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside — tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties — 240 in all of Lebanon at the start of last week — with Israel’s 24 dead, as if the figures are the same.

    And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel’s “disproportionate” response to the capture of its soldiers by Hezbollah.

    I walked through the deserted city center of Beirut last week and it reminded more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly colored that it blinded its own people. This part of the city — once a Dresden of ruins — was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered a mile away last year.

    The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance is being vandalized by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last U.N. investigator to look for clues.

    At the empty Etoile restaurant — where Hariri once dined with Jacques Chirac — I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the facade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon’s democracy. So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French mandate, and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock Arabian doorways bejeweled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few meters away.

    Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. “Ah, Robert, come over here,” he roared and turned to Chirac like a cat that was about to eat a canary. “I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn’t rebuild Beirut!”

    Now it is being unbuilt. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked several times by the Israelis, its glistening halls and shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri’s wonderful transnational highway viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. This small jewel of a restaurant in the center of Beirut has been spared. So far.

    It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been leveled and “rubble-ized” and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shiite Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hezbollah, another of those “centers of world terror” that the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God’s leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man; and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics; and many of Hezbollah’s top military planners — including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers 10 days ago.

    But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pinpoint accuracy — a doubtful notion in any case, but that’s not the issue — what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?

    In a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well-known and prominent Hezbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes. “We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or … ” And he counts these awful statistics off on the fingers of his left hand. “Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis — much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions.”

    I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillea and white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.

    As for the huddled masses from the bombed-out southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. How empires fall.

    Across the Mediterranean, two helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke toward the U.S. embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.

    Across them all has spread a dark gray smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.

    The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon’s greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:

    My people died of hunger, and he who

    Did not perish from starvation was

    Butchered with the sword;

    They perished from hunger

    In a land rich with milk and honey.

    They died because the vipers and

    Sons of vipers spat out poison into

    The space where the Holy Cedars and

    The roses and the jasmine breathe

    Their fragrance.

    And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an aircraft came streaking out of the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the army’s logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar Chim who have been mending power and water lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.

    I knew one of them. “Hello, Robert. Be quick because I think the Israelis will bomb again, but we’ll show you everything we can.” And they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the wreckage, standing around to protect me.

    A few hours later, the Israelis did come back, as the men of the small logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked after me amid the fires of Kfar Chim.

    And why? Be sure — the Israelis know what they are hitting. That’s why they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend electricity lines? Then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those men had to be liquidated.

    Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pajamas, her eyes — beneath long, soft hair — closed, turned away from the camera. She had been another “terrorist” target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.

    I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1,700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel’s proxy Christian militia allies in 1982 while Israeli troops, as they later testified to Israel’s own court of inquiry, watched the killings. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.

    Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver, Abed, a week before last, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive here for 30 years.

    I am back on the seacoast when my mobile phone rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine novel about the Palestinians. “Robert, please take care,” she says. “I am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis.” I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.

    Then, on my balcony — a glance to check the location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the sea-smog — I find older clippings. This is from an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was a great Ottoman city. “Beyrouth” was the dateline. “Anarchy is now the order of the day, our properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to find protection in more peaceable countries.”

    On my dining-room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Christian Maronites from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for their evacuation. Outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that drifts 20 miles out to sea.

    Fairouz, the most popular Lebanese singer, was to perform at this year’s Baalbek festival, cancelled like all Lebanon’s festivals. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:

    To Beirut — peace to Beirut with all my heart

    And kisses — to the sea and clouds,

    To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor’s face.

    From the soul of her people she makes wine,

    From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.

    So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire

     

    Robert Fisk, who writes for The Independent of Britain, has lived in Beirut 30 years.

    Originally printed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

  • Appeal for Support for Lt. Ehren Watada

    Fellow Americans, ladies of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, I am honored by your invitation and I salute you for being a compelling voice regionally, nationally and internationally. I am awed by the fact that your time honored organization, which emerged out of the chaos of World War I, remains dynamic and relevant in the everchanging political, social, economic landscape. In an effort to extend the reach, you have taken on the formidable issues of our day, one being the illegality of the war and occupation of Iraq. Since the administration’s pre-emptive war in March 2003, the death toll among the “coalition of the willing” and the Iraqi people mounts daily and still there is no end in sight. You have called for “.a comprehensive and rapid plan for troop withdrawal (to) include the closure of all US military bases, support of a peace process in the post-occupation transition, payment of reparations to Iraq, and return of Iraqi control over its oil.”

    It is within this context that I speak. It is within this context that I ask for your support of my son, Lt. Ehren Watada, the first officer in the US military to refuse participation in the Iraqi war and occupation. In January 2006, he submitted a request for discharge, citing the illegality of the war and the ongoing crimes of occupation. He was not taken seriously. Several months later, he submitted a formal resignation packet and was formally denied. On June 22, 2006, despite overt pressure to comply, he quietly defied the movement order to board the Iraq-bound plane with his Stryker brigade unit.

    How did he arrive at this point, you ask? Through unbiased, rigorous scrutiny of the facts, reported by experts inside and outside the military and the structures of government, Lt. Watada concluded that he could no longer remain silent. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, he swore to uphold the Constitution which includes all international treaties which the present administration chose to ignore. Blind obedience to orders that violated international law, he maintained, would make him party to illegal acts, multiplied many times over in his capacity as an officer.

    Through the inner turmoil of the past year, he realized that, despite being a member of the armed forces, he had not sold his soul. He had not relinquished the inalienable right to choose. Furthermore, he was not a mercenary or a mindless tool of politicians and the military-industrial complex whose sole interest lies in the “spoils of war,” no matter what the cost.

    As an officer in the US Army, conditioned not to think but to follow orders, he found that an act of conscience is a lonely road, traversed only if one is willing to accept the harsh consequences meted out by the military, the media, the manipulated masses who remain in ignorance and the “powers that be.”

    Since his case became part of mainstream media, he has been vilified on one hand and cast as a hero on the other. He maintains that the issue is not about him but about the illegality of the Iraqi war and occupation. He hopes that his action will empower others to take a stand, that it will awaken the consciousness of the American people and impel them to make their voices heard. He believes that the demand for the end to the war, the withdrawal of occupation forces and reparations must be an American agenda and not merely the agenda of anti-war activists, liberals, progressives and left-wing elements.

    On July 5th, the military formally charged Lt. Watada with failure to obey a movement order, contemptuous remarks against the president and behavior unbecoming an officer. Taken together, these offenses are punishable by up to 7 ½ years in a military prison. He awaits the article 32 hearing, slated for Aug. 17, 18 2006. This is a pretrial hearing to determine if there are grounds for a court martial. Whether or not he is given a fair hearing and permitted to submit evidence supporting his refusal to deploy and his first amendment rights remains to be seen.

    As his mother, I initially feared for my son’s safety and his future. The thought of the consequences overwhelmed me. Today, I can truly say that I have taken “the first step in a journey of a thousand miles.” I am lifted by the realization that there is a higher purpose to all that has transpired.

    When he first broke the news to me, I asked him to re-evaluate what he was about to do, to think about the impact of this decision on his career. He later said to me, “Mom, I felt betrayed by your trying to dissuade me. I know you love me and I know where all this comes from but you are asking me to betray myself. When all is said and done, I must be able to look at myself and be content that I followed the dictates of my conscience.” My son hoped for my understanding and reassured me that he loved me but it was clear, whether I approved or not, he would follow through with his decision. He said, ” Mom, whether one person supports me or no one does, I have the duty to do the right thing.” The die is cast. Come what may, he is committed to staying the course. For this, he has my utmost respect. I would expect no less from him.

    In closing, I wish to leave you with the words of William Butler Yeats. His poem, The Second Coming, written after the horrors of World War I during the rise of communism and fascism, forecasted the demise of Western civilization and the menacing advance of an “unknown world about to be born.” Though written during a different period, it is as compelling now as it was then.

    William Butler Yeats: “The Second Coming” (1921)

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre (1) The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
    Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming (2) is at hand; The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi (3) Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries (4) of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

    Despite the cadence of doom, one is left with the choice to accept or reject Yeat’s fatalism. Lt. Watada chose to reject the inevitable. Today, I invite you to stand with him in his hour of protest. For ways you can participate, please visit www.thankyoult.org. Sign the petition to show your support. Familiarize yourself with the issues surrounding his case. Join us on August 16th, National Day of Education. On this day, supporters, nationally and internationally will host teach-ins, forums, house parties, etc. to address the question: “Is the Iraq War illegal?” Click on Resource Toolkit on the website’s main menu for some basic materials to use.

    August 16th is not only a day of education but a day of action as well. Rallies, bannering, vigils, church gatherings are planned. Join an existing group or create one that will make a difference. Begin laying the foundation for mass mobilization during the October court martial. For updates on this action, see www.thankyoult.org.

    The Lieutenant’s pretrial hearing on Aug.17th and 18th, in effect, puts the Iraq War on trial. This is a moment that has the capacity to alter the course of history. To this end, we must stand with Lt. Watada, remain of one mind, unwavering in our resolve. Through a collective will, energized by vision and courage, we will restore the beast to his “stony sleep.”

    Thank you.

    Speech delivered on July 22, 2006 for the Women’s International League for Peace And Freedom at Portland State University.

  • Lurching Toward Regional War in the Middle East

    Israeli moves toward all out war in Gaza and Lebanon seem linked to wider dangers of a regional war with severe global consequences. By interpreting these wider dangers it is not meant to minimize the human suffering and regressive political effects of current carnage in these two long tormented war zones. Looking at this bigger picture is crucial for its own sake, but also helps us understand the immediate crises more fully than if as officially presented by Israel, and unfortunately echoed by many governments around the world.

    Whatever else, this outbreak of major two-front violence is not about Israel’s right to defend it against an enemy that is seriously threatening its territorial integrity or political independence, the only grounds for justifiable war. To treat border incidents, involving a few casualties from rockets and the abduction of a single Israeli soldier by a Gazan militia and two by Hezbollah in south Lebanon, as if it were an occasion of war is a gross distortion of well-accepted international law and state practice. To justify legally a claim of self-defense requires a full-scale armed attack across Israeli borders. If every violent border incident or terrorist provocation were to be so regarded as an act of war, the world would be aflame. If India had responded to the recent Mumbai train explosions that killed some 200 Indian civilians as a Pakistani act of war, the result would have been a devastating regional war, quite possibly fought with nuclear weapons. There are many other flashpoints around the world that might justify police methods in reaction to provocations, and in extreme instances, specific military responses across borders. If such occasions were viewed as acts of war the consistent result would be catastrophe. Recent Hamas/Hezbollah provocations, even if interpreted through a self-serving Israeli lens, were not of a scale or threat that warranted large-scale military actions that are directed at a wide array of targets unrelated to the specific incidents and causing severe damage to civilians and the entire civilian infrastructure of society (water, electricity, roads, bridges).

    The exaggerated Israeli response, together with circumstantial evidence, suggests that Israel used the Hamas/Hezbollah incidents as pretexts to pursue a much wider and long-planned security agenda directed at Palestine and Lebanon and, beyond this, as an opportunity for a political restructuring of the entire region in partnership with the United States. In this regard, as George W. Bush’s comments at the St. Petersburg G-8 summit emphasized, the real responsibility for the anti-Israeli incidents should be associated with Syria and Iran given their support of Hamas and Hezbollah. It does require a deep reading of international relations to recall that both right wing Israeli opinion and the neoconservative worldview that has dominated American foreign policy during the Bush presidency advances a vision of world order based upon a comprehensive political restructuring of the Middle East, starting with “regime change” in Iraq.

    What Israel is undertaking is a change of tactics with respect to the pursuit of this regional vision. The initial plan seems to have been based on a decisive military and political victory in Iraq followed by an essentially diplomatic campaign to exert major pressure on other problematic governments in the region, relying on The Greater Middle East Project of “democratization” to do the heavy lifting without further military action. Instead, what has occurred has been failure and frustration in Iraq, which has turned into an American quagmire, but more seriously, a consistent set of electoral outcomes throughout the region that have discredited a political approach to the regional vision embraced by Washington and Tel Aviv with the goal of achieving compliant Arab governments that are passive with respect to Palestinian aspirations and accepting of American hegemony. These geopolitical disappointments began to be revealed in the Iraqi sequence of elections, which even under conditions of the American occupation and a hostile resistance, produced clear victories for Islamic political forces and stinging repudiations of the sort of compliant secularists that Washington backed. Similar outcomes, with less dramatic results, were evident in elections held in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which together with the election of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as President of Iran, apparently sent a clear message that the more democratic the political process, the more likely it was to produce an anti-American, anti-Israeli leadership. The Hamas victory in the January elections in the Palestinian Territories culminated this disillusionment with the democratic path to security, as envisioned by Israel and the United States, for the region.

    But rather than abandon geopolitical ambitions, it appears from recent developments that Israel is testing the waters for all out regional war, either with covert encouragement from the US Government, or at the very least, a green light from Washington to ignite a bonfire. Of course, there are other factors at work. The Israeli leadership, especially its military commanders, never accepted being pushed out of southern Lebanon by Hezbollah, and the politicians appear to hold the Palestinian people responsible for the election of a “terrorist” leadership and, thus, deserving of punishment. Furthermore, the anti-Syrian Lebanese response to the assassination of Hariri on February 14, 2005 was hoped to result in a more robust Lebanese political leadership that would effectively disarm Hezbollah and, thereby, enhance Israeli security. When this did not happen, but rather Hezbollah acquired more potent weaponry, as well as a place in the Lebanese cabinet, it was obvious that the soft Israeli option had failed. Even such a prominent mainstream supporter of Israel as Shlomo Aveneri observes that the real objective of the Israeli attacks on Lebanon is to install a Quisling government in Beirut, which was after all the main objective of the 1982 Sharon-led invasion of the country.

    In relation to the Palestinian conflict, Israel has set for itself a unilateralist course ever since the collapse of the Camp David process in 2000. The Sharon approach, based on Gaza disengagement, the illegal security wall, and the annexation of substantial Palestinian territories to incorporate the main Israeli settlements was always based on moving toward a “solution” without the agreement of the Palestinian leadership. But to move in such a direction in a politically palatable manner required the absence of a Palestinian negotiating partner. First, Arafat was humiliated by direct military attacks on his headquarters and confined as to virtual house arrest; then Abbas was marginalized as too weak to carry weight; and now Hamas has been repudiated as unfit to govern the Palestinians or represent their interests. Against this background, Sharon/Olmert unilateralism appears to be the only option, a worrisome conclusion as it is sure to keep the conflict at boiling point for the indefinite future.

    A further factor is the confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. Here again Israel and the United States are at the forefront of an insistence that Iran not pursue its legal right to possess a complete nuclear fuel cycle under its sovereign control, although subject to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that enriched uranium and plutonium are not diverted for military purposes. Whether this unfolding crisis, abetted by the inflammatory language of Ahmedinejad, is part of a deliberate strategy of regional tension devised by Washington and Tel Aviv cannot be determined at this point. What is clear is the selective enforcement of the nonproliferation regime. Several parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (Germany, Japan) have complete nuclear fuel cycles under national control; India is being assisted in developing its nuclear technology despite its nuclear weapons program and refusal to become a party to the treaty; Israel itself disallows a nuclear weapons option to other states in the region while maintaining and developing its own arsenal of these weapons; and, of course, the United States throws its nuclear weight around, including developing new categories of nuclear weapons (“bunker-busters” and “mini-nukes”) that are apparently being integrated into battle plans for possible future use.

    This adds up to a confusing picture, but with clear threats of a regional war spiraling out of the present situation, given the Israeli/American vision of security, and the degree to which the control of this region is vital for the energy future of the world as well as decisive in the struggle to withstand the challenge of political Islam.

    There are some factors that are working against such a dismal future: the political/military failure in Iraq, the devastating economic effects of engaging Iran in a war, the rising oil prices, and the opposition of European and Arab countries. But can we be reassured at this point? I think not. Israel tends to view its security ambitions in unconditional terms that are oblivious to wider detrimental consequences. The United States leadership remains wedded to its grand strategy of regional restructuring, and is not encountering political opposition at home or even media criticism as a result of either its support of the Israeli offensives in Gaza and Lebanon or of its efforts to widen the arc of conflict by pulling Syria and Iran into the fray. I fear that what we are witnessing is an extremely risky set of moves to shift the joint Israeli/American regional game plan in an overtly military direction. It always had a military centerpiece associated with the Iraq War, but the basic strategy was based on an easy show of force against a weakened Iraq followed by falling political dominoes elsewhere in the Middle East. Neither the UN, world public opinion, nor regional opposition seem likely to halt this slide toward regional war. We can only hope that prudence somehow remains a restraining force, at least in Washington.

    In concluding, it is obvious that there are wider implications for other countries in the region, especially those faced with ethnic conflict and transnational armed struggle. As tempting as it might be to follow Israel’s lead, the prudent course, especially in light of these dangers of regional war, is to be extremely cautious about undertaking cross-border military operations. The Israeli policies have already backfired to a significant extent, strengthening the political stature of Hezbollah with Lebanon and causing Lebanese public opinion to unite around criticism of Israel’s behavior.

     

    Richard Falk is the Board Chair of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and professor emeritus of Princeton University.