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  • What is a Nation? What is a State? Exploring Minority Rights and their Limits

    (April 9-10, City College of Santa Barbara, “Tribes, Sects, Cultures, & Sovereign States: Group/Minority Rights or Individual Rights, of Both?”)

    I welcome this opportunity to participate in a conference devoted to what has become one of the two most tormented arenas of political violence in the world today. The two arenas are significantly interrelated. Our focus during these two days on the dynamics of various forms of fragmentation internal to the sovereign state, can be understood as a fundamental challenge to the normative program of establishing an effective human rights regime applicable to all persons. The resulting tension is generating multiple crises of identity, authority, and loyalty that can often not be resolved peacefully. Of course, the second arena of challenge is associated with issues posed by 9/11 and the American recourse to a “Great Terror War” as an inevitable response, the chief characteristics of which is to define “terror” to encompass all anti-state political violence and to include a strategy of regime change to promote the project of global domination under the anti-terrorist banner.

    The Iraq War dramatically highlights the interaction between domestic fragmentation in the aftermath of authoritarian rule with the political impossibilities of imposed democracy as the solution for nation and state in Iraq as a member of international society. With deep irony, the American project of regime change in Iraq has turned a previously Draconian Iraqi state into a scene of multiple terrorism, associated with religious extremism, national resistance, and the state terrorism of the occupiers. The most likely futures for Iraq under these circumstances are the resumption in some form of Sunni authoritarianism, the outbreak of civil war, the emergence of a Shi’ia Islamic Republic, or a prolonged and bloody American occupation that is likely to exert unpredictable shocks here in the United States, making the tumult of the Vietnam Era seem mild by comparison. In other words, this conference is addressing issues that are already shaking the foundations of world order in a manner that I would argue are more profound than anything that has happened for several hundred years (with the possible exception of the advent of nuclear weaponry). We lack an appropriate political language to understand and a political leadership with the capacity for creative and constructive response. We confront a dire set of circumstances in Iraq that do not contain credible positive options for a favorable end game at present.

    But even before this lethal brew arising out of 9/11 and its misguided plunge into a cycle of perpetual warfare, the issues associated with the conference were made highly relevant by several prominent developments in the 1990s: the ending of the cold war, which gave rise to a new surge of nationalism that had been previously largely concealed within the sinews of authoritarian states. This was especially the case in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. In the Soviet instance, the collapse of Soviet control over its internal empire of republics containing a variety of minority peoples was essentially unopposed, but political violence erupted at the next lower level of political organization, and persists in a variety of settings, including Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere in Central Asia. In the Yugoslav instance, the tension between a normative order premised on the territorial unity of the state and an emergent set of normative claims associated with the application of the right of self-determination in non-colonial settings produced a series of severe ethnic wars during the 1990s with extensive killing fields, mixed outcomes, persisting turmoil.

    The normative debate surrounding Kosovo discloses some of the larger issues at stake, as well as suggesting the elusiveness of solutions dependent on outside intervention and subsequent occupation under international auspices. In this instance, under the combined authority of the NATO KFOR peacekeeping presence and the United Nations post-conflict administrative control over political and economic reconstruction of a Kosovo, producing a continuously tense condition of de facto independence. It will be recalled that back in 1999 the justification for the Kosovo War, conducted without any proper prior authorization by the UNSC, was the protection of the Albanian majority population from oppressive Serbian domination, which included a variety of allegation of serious human rights abuses, and the expectation that far worse was in the offing, designed at the very least to induce coercively a proportion of the Albanian population to flee the country.

    There were many ambiguities associated with this NATO undertaking, especially the irony of embracing the KLA, which in the subsequent Bush/Sharon period would qualify without doubt as a “terrorist organization.” But there were other disturbing aspects of recourse to war in Kosovo: deep suspicions that the US Government was not interested in achieving a diplomatic solution, indications of mixed motives in Washington, including finding a role for NATO in the period after the cold war, and assurances that the US would stay involved in European affairs. Beyond this, the conduct of the Kosovo War by its reliance on high-altitude bombing, the extension of the target list to include civilian targets in Belgrade, the provocative bombing of the Chinese Embassy, the use of depleted uranium ordinance, the absence of any combat casualties on the NATO side were among the elements that cast a long dark shadow across the humanitarian pretensions of the operation.

    Since the end of the active hostilities, there have been a series of difficulties, but most relevant for our purposes, has been a pattern of what has been called “reverse ethnic cleansing” in which the new category of victims have become the remnants of the Serb minority that continues to live in Kosovo, and were ethnically identified with the former perpetrators. The persistence of de facto independence for Kosovo also seems to violate an earlier UN pledge that its engagement with Kosovo would not challenge the sovereign unity of Serbia, which had been the lead republic in the former federated state of Yugoslavia. Kosovo is an example of third-order self-determination claims, considering movements against alien or colonial rule as first-order claims, independence for the autonomous units in a federal state as second-order claims, and positing sovereignty claims by indigenous peoples as fourth-order claims. Although it is dangerous to be dogmatic, and not sensitive to context, third-order self-determination claims seem to be fraught with difficulties, especially if the proposed independent territorial community includes an important minority that is ethnically or religiously associated with the former sovereign state.

    The conceptual issue can be understood as follows: when does ‘a minority’ qualify as ‘a nation’ or ‘a people’ (the language used to designate the holder of the right of self-determination in international law) and when should ‘a nation’ be entitled to form ‘a state’ even at the cost of fragmenting a former state? And there is the related issue posed relating to humanitarian intervention or, as the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, phrased it, an exercise of “The Responsibility to Protect” by the organized international community, that is, the United Nations? Kosovo illuminates the dilemmas

    associated with this theme of nationhood verse statehood as the basis of political community. If a minority feels beleaguered and discriminated against, and does not succumb to assimilation, it will often tend to form a defensive nationalism as a mode of cultural survival. This is especially true if the minority is geographically distinct, speaks a separate language, adheres to a different religion, and has sufficient numbers to consider itself capable of becoming a viable independent political entity. Under these circumstances, the unity of the state is likely to be drawn into question, and the dominant elites will be inclined to tighten their control over such a restive minority, which in turn radicalizes still further separatist tendencies. As a result, quite often armed struggles occur, which can produce prolonged political violence with much suffering and bloodshed. Looking around the world at places such as Sudan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Colombia, parts of Indonesia, to mention a few of the more prominent instances, it is obvious that this tension between national consciousness and state unity is one of the great divisive forces active in the world with no happy ending in sight.

    Whether the engagement of the international community is a plus or minus depends on the circumstances. There seems to be little doubt that from an Albanian perspective, the NATO intervention was welcome, ending the Serb oppressive rule, attracting back almost all of the hundreds of thousands of Albania refugees who had fled the country, producing a UN presence that created space in Kosovo for a potential economic recovery and the possible construction of a political democracy. To date, these hopes have not been realized. Further, even if the record in Kosovo after the intervention had been more encouraging we need to pose a decisive question from the perspective of shaping global policy: did the Kosovo War produce a precedent that can give rise, with adjustments for circumstances, to a principled framework that would operate in other roughly comparable settings?

    This past week was the tenth anniversary of the terrible genocide that took as many as 800,000 mainly Tutsi lives in Rwanda while an authorized UN protective presence stood by paralyzed and unaugmented, despite strong advance warnings of what was being contemplated by the Hutu rulers. It is well-documented that the great champions of humanitarian intervention earlier in the Balkans and more recently in Iraq, Great Britain and the United States, used the full extent of their political leverage to inhibit a UN protective role in Rwanda as the genocidal pattern started to unfold back in 1994. In this respect, the Rwandan case stands out as the clearest case where there existed an international responsibility to protect, a duty to respond to imminent humanitarian emergencies, if at all possible, on the basis of a proper mandate from the UN Security Council. As a practical matter, to avoid the Kosovo dilemma, it would be a beneficial reform in such situations in the future, if the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council, would formally, or at least informally, waive their right of veto in circumstances of humanitarian emergency. Of course, there is an inevitable gray area. Opponents of the Kosovo intervention argue to this day that no such humanitarian emergency existed at the time, that the allegations of atrocity were partially fabricated, and that diplomatic options had not been tried with due diligence by the US Government, which evidence shows was hell bent on war.

    It is also important to mention the case of Somalia, where a humanitarian undertaking, with UN backing, was quickly terminated in 1993 when a firefight in Mogadishu cost 18 American lives. In that instance, the American-led peacekeepers had initially been welcomed by the people of the country when it appeared that the UN mission was to bring food and medicine to a suffering population in what was then described as “a failed state.” Failed or not, when the Clinton presidency expanded the original mission undertaken two years earlier by Bush, Sr. to include state-building, which meant choosing political leaders. The unresolved struggle for power in Somalia among the ethnic factions that suddenly felt marginalized and threatened quickly morphed into a frenzy of opposition against the international presence recast as “intruders.” At the time, American officials tried to invalidate this opposition by calling the resistance to the US-led presence as the work of corrupt and greedy “war lords,” which seemed a way of denying the people of Somalia first-order self-determination in the face of chaotic circumstances. Interestingly, in the setting of Iraq we seek increasingly to invalidate the growing resistance by describing its partisans as “remnants of the Baathist regime,” “dead-enders,” “thugs and criminals,” and whatever other delegitimizing labels our leaders can conjure up to justify the persistence of an occupation that is more and more deeply resented by all sectors of Iraqi society, with the possible exception of the Kurds.

    It is not plausible to discuss this range of concerns without a few comments on the Israel/Palestine conflict, whose persistence has for so longer challenged the conscience of humanity. From the perspective of the conceptual concerns of this essay the conflict passed through a series of phases, omitting any discussion of its deeper historical roots that stretch back to biblical times, yet give resonance to conflicting present expectations of the right to the contested land. The present shape of the struggle evolved out of a period following World War I when Palestine was a Mandate of the League of Nations, administered as a unified territory under British administrative control in their role as Mandatory authority. Within the mandate, there lived a Palestinian nation and a rather small Jewish minority, aspiring to become a ‘homeland’ for world Jewry in accordance with the promise given by the Balfour Declaration to the world Zionist movement in 1917. In 1948, amid growing tensions between the two peoples, greatly aggravated by the spillover into Palestine of the wider effects of The Holocaust, the United Nations decreed a partition of Palestine that would have provided two states for the two nations. This plan was repudiated by the Arab governments that launched a war designed to resist Israeli statehood, but leading to an Israeli victory and the expulsion from a large part of the Palestinian territory of its Palestinian residents, producing a huge refugee population. In this period, the Palestinians lived in the area of the West Bank under Jordanian administrative control, in effect, a captive nation, with a residual number of Palestinians living as a minority in Israel.

    Since 1967, the Palestinian nation in the West Bank and Gaza has been living under harsh conditions of a prolonged occupation, agitated by the two intifadas and the Israeli repressive responses. From time to time a “peace process” has been initiated, most notably for seven years during the 1990s, with the aim of producing, or in effect, resurrecting the two-state solution proposed decades earlier by the UN, but now confining the Palestinian state to some 22% of the original mandatory territory, restricting drastically the rights of Palestinian refugees, and sustaining the great majority of Israeli settlements established in occupied Palestine in violation of international humanitarian law. In these circumstances, a two-state solution does not offer the Palestinians a fair solution. The alternative that has been discussed at various points has been the establishment of a single, secular bi-national state covering the entire territory of Palestine as it existed under the mandate. Israel refuses to consider such an outcome, both because it would mean the end of the Zionist conception of a Jewish state, and because it would cede too much authority to the Palestinians, especially in view of their demographic majority.

    The outside role of the United States has been decisive, but not helpful from the perspective of finding a sustainable peace. The US approach, rooted as much in domestic ethnic politics as in grand strategy, has accentuated the disparity in power between the two parties, and has made it seem unnecessary for Israel to base peace on the ‘rights’ of the Palestinians under international law rather than on ‘the facts on the ground’ and their military superiority and diplomatic leverage. The ordeal of this unresolved conflict underscores the dependence of global justice on geopolitical circumstances.
    What stands out from a review of these instances is precisely the primacy of geopolitics, by which is meant the way in which the particular struggle relates to the strategic designs of major political actors. In a unipolar world, geopolitics has become virtually indistinguishable from US foreign policy. Somalia was of marginal or no strategic interest, and the intervention was hence very shallow, and easily reversed in the face of national resistance. Rwanda, even more so, was not viewed as strategically relevant, and against the background of the Somalia experience of a year earlier, all the incentives were to turn aside the humanitarian emergency. Kosovo was, as earlier suggested, a mixed case, with strategic incentives sufficient to provide a realist underpinning to what was proclaimed to be a humanitarian intervention. At the time, a critic such as Noam Chomsky voiced his dissent by repudiating the humanitarian rationale, calling the operation “military humanism,” arguing that if the humanitarian motivations were genuine then the US would have flexed its muscles with respect to the embattled Kurdish minority in Turkey, and elsewhere.

    I think an assessment of this pattern of action and inaction is more complicated than Chomsky would have us believe. I would differ from Chomsky on Kosovo, regarding the factual circumstances in Kosovo that existed in 1999, especially against the background of the Bosnian experience culminating in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, as presenting the international community with a genuine humanitarian emergency. I would further argue, which is admittedly controversial, that the mixed motives associated with American strategic interests in keeping NATO alive and Europe stable, made it more likely that the interventionary undertaking would not be as shallow and fragile as in Somalia and elsewhere in subSaharan Africa, and therefore it had a reasonable prospect of being effective.

    Applying this reasoning to Iraq, we notice, first of all, that there was no current humanitarian emergency, and that the humanitarian rationale was almost entirely a post-hoc effort to divert attention from the false security claims associated with alleged Iraqi possession of illicit stockpiles of WMD. But we further notice that the strategic stakes for the United States in Iraq are huge, and that however formidable the resistance to the American-led occupation has become, it is dismissed as irrelevant to the American engagement. The United States is suffering increasingly heavily casualties, but we have yet to hear a single mainstream voice utter a word in support of a Somalian exit strategy, or even a Vietnam exit strategy based on some sort of negotiated phased withdrawal.

    The aftermath of the Iraq War has brought to the turbulent surface the various tensions that I have been describing and commenting upon. It illustrates the degree to which nationalism under siege from alien sources can produce a strong unifying effect even in the face of deep religious and ethnic cleavages, at least temporarily, among internal groupings that had previously viewed each other as implacable and hostile adversaries. A cartoon in the LA Times by Mike Keefe makes this point rather vividly. The visual parts of the cartoon shows Sunnis and Shiites fighting together against the American occupiers. The caption reads: “Hey, Mission Accomplished..We’ve unified Iraq!” A primary lesson of the Vietnam War, apparently unlearned so far in the Iraq setting, is that whenever a national resistance becomes unified and resolved, it will over time prevail over even a militarily superior and determined intervening great power. Of course, the strategic motives were always suspect in Vietnam, causing leading realists of the day such as Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan to oppose the war from the outset. With respect to Iraq, too, there was a chorus of realist opposition in the period leading up to the Iraq War, but because the strategic consequences are so large, there is a far greater uncertainty at least at this stage as to what to do next. And also, with Vietnam, there was a coherent alternative to the American presence. In Iraq there has been an assumption that any hasty removal of the American presence would lead to a bloody struggle for power that would produce dangerous regional effects.

    In another important respect, the Iraq conflict increasingly illustrates the confusing reality of “nationalism.” If we look at Turkey, we can easily posit the 12 million Kurdish minority as “a captive nation” (especially, the six million or so Kurds living in eastern Anatolia); that is, a nationalism that is suppressed by the state. This reality is somewhat disguised by the misleading juridical claim that the Turkish state confers a Turkish nationalist identity on the entire population regardless of their preferred nationalist and ethnic identity. The great Turkish nation-builder, Kemal Ataturk, insisted in this vein that the Kurds were “mountain Turks,” and should be assimilated into the general population without any deference to autonomy claims or even cultural rights associated with language and traditions. There is thus a tension between nationalist aspirations of minorities and the statist aspirations of Turkish Kemalism. There is some prospect that the current less statist leadership in Turkey, the soft Islamic Ak Party, can revive the Ottoman practices of internal tolerances toward minorities, allowing Kurdish cultural rights to flourish and granting a strong measure of regional autonomy and self-administration in eastern Anatolia where at least half of the Kurdish minority is geographically concentrated.

    But if we now look back at Iraq one last time, we can take some account of the various religious and ethnic factions that supposedly divide the country. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was governed as an authoritarian state that oppressed both its Shi’ia majority and its Kurdish and Turkaman minorities. There was surely a Kurdish nationalist tendency seeking a separate political reality or, at minimum, internal self-determination based on an autonomous status, but these aspirations were opposed not only by Baghdad, but by regional forces threatened by Kurdish independence movements. Nationalism as a psycho-political reality was at odds with juridical nationalism handed down from above at the level of the state. Oddly, at this point, in the face of the American occupation, there is the possibility that juridical nationalism will command the loyalties of the entire Iraqi population, with the probable notable exception of the Kurds, and create in Iraq that previously unimaginable stabilizing fusion between the state and the nation at least for as long as the interventionary presence of the United States remains the defining preoccupation of the Iraqi people and their most influential leaders.

    If this fusion should occur, it will convert the Iraq War from its notorious status of last May of “mission accomplished” to a new tragic circumstance from a Washington perspective of “mission impossible.” Whether and how soon the United States discovers the reservoirs of moral and political imagination to extricate itself from this mission impossible remains to be seen. It may in the end depend on the oppositional prudence of the American citizenry rather than upon their elected representatives, who continue to act as sheep, not as responsible upholder of American interests, custodians of constitutional obligations, and promoters of the public good at home and abroad.

    In summary, I would like to offer several briefly stated conclusions:

    (1) It is important to acknowledge that the national aspirations of abused minorities (or in some instances of majorities) will not be realized by the benefits of juridical nationalism conferred on all citizens by the legal fiat of the territorial government;

    (2) The emergence of human rights as a focus of international concern poses a subversive challenge to the territorial supremacy of sovereign states;

    (3) The option of humanitarian intervention on behalf of abused minorities is unlikely to be effectively undertaken in the absence of accompanying strategic interests, and should be endorsed by the United Nations and world public opinion only in extreme cases;

    (4) The main justification for such protective international action should be premised on a condition of a current humanitarian emergency, which is not established by a record of past abuses, even if severe, or by the present fact of dictatorial rule;

    (5) In the absence of such a humanitarian emergency, interventions that claim humanitarian goals are likely to clash with nationalist goals, even those at the level of the state, and provoke nationalist resistance;

    (6) Nationalist resistance, especially if unified and coherently led, is not susceptible to military defeat, although the resisters and the civilian population may endure huge casualties and prolonged suffering;

    (7) The future of democracy and the promotion of individual and collective human rights should depend on the internal political processes of sovereign states, encouraged by educational ‘intervention’ in support of the values of human dignity for the foreseeable future;

    (8) Adherence to the norm of non-intervention, including by regional international institutions and the United Nations, seems desirable outside of the exceptional circumstances of a humanitarian emergency.

  • The Iraq War and the Future of International Law

    (From The American Society of International Law’s 98th Annual Meeting, Mapping New Boundaries: Shifting Norms in International Law. March 31-April 3, 2004)

    The timing of this panel, a year after the initiation of the Iraq War, is not too soon to assess, if tentatively, the impact of this globally controversial war upon international law. My assessment is organized around five questions that deserve responses at this point:

    –Should the Iraq War be treated as a defining moment for international law?

    –Should the refusal to endorse the Iraq War be regarded as a triumphant moment for the United Nations, especially the Security Council?

    –Can the Iraq War be interpreted as an illegal, but legitimate war of choice?

    –Should the legal norm of nonintervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states be abandoned?

    –Does the Iraq War provide an occasion for incorporating new norms of international law governing the use of force?

    My response to each of these questions is a resounding ‘no,’ and the remainder of this brief presentation will give the essential reasoning behind the answer.

    I. Should the Iraq War be treated as a defining moment for international law? No.

    There is some temptation to contend that the Iraq War was a defining moment for international law and for the authority of the United Nations. It could be argued, of course, that the Iraq War vindicates non-defensive wars of choice, and that UN opposition has made, as President Bush warned in his speech to the General Assembly of September 12, 2002, the organization “irrelevant.” But such a temptation is easily resisted.

    Recourse to war against Iraq in March 2003 on the facts and allegations that existed at the time is regarded around the world as so flagrantly at odds with international law and the UN Charter as generally understood to have little or no weight as a legal precedent. It is better understood as a prominent instance of a violation of the core obligation of the UN Charter, as embodied in Article 2(4), and as such qualifies as a potential Crime Against Peace in the Nuremberg sense. It provides an occasion to reaffirm the fundamentally sound idea embodied in international law that force can only legally be used under conditions of palpable defensive necessity (or possibly on the basis of an explicit mandate from the Security Council). Note that defensive necessity is broader than “self-defense,” and does take realistic account of the post-9/11 world that could validate preemptive uses of force against under exceptional conditions of demonstrated threat. The Afghanistan War might qualify under such legal reasoning as a valid claim of defensive necessity. It is worth noting that several of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq War as a matter of strategic and moral necessity, such as the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the influential American neoconservative, Richard Perle, have acknowledged that respect for international law was unwarranted to the extent that it would have precluded the Iraq War. In effect, the most articulate advocates of the Iraq War concede, either implicitly or explicitly, either its “illegality” or that if “regime change” of this sort was precluded then it was “bad law.” It is notable in this regard that the Bush administration made only the most minimal effort to provide a legal rationale for the Iraq War, and based its public justifications on a confusing mixture of security and humanitarian rationales. And as for the irrelevance of the UN, the difficulties of the occupation have led increasingly even the Bush administration to seek UN help in bringing stability to Iraq.

    Shifting ground, I would argue that if the Iraq War would have turned out to be successful as a political project, it might well have been a defining moment for American foreign policy and the character of world order. It could become a precedent for American unilateralism within the context of recourse to war and for regime-changing interventions. If this pattern were to be established it would have produced what might be called a geopolitical norm, that is, a use of power in a predictable pattern to achieve specified goals. The main feature of such a norm would be a repudiation of the authority of international law and the UN Charter by state practice that violates a consensus that joins the views of the majority of states and world public opinion.

    At present, the U.S. Government seems to be claiming the role of being the legislative agency for the creation of geopolitical norms, reinforced by ad hoc coalitions of the willing, in at least two areas impinging on the legal norms governing the use of force: (1) intervention in sovereign states to achieve regime change; (2) selective coercive pressure to promote counter-proliferation goals beyond the mandate of the non-proliferation treaty regime. To the extent that these geopolitical norms are acted upon it represents a fundamental shift from world order based on the principles of territorial sovereignty to a world order based on hegemonic edict. Such a world is best denominated as an imperial world order, and would likely be challenged by statist and non-statist forms of armed resistance.

    II. Should the refusal to endorse the Iraq War by the United Nations, especially the Security Council, be viewed as a triumphant moment? No.

    Many opponents of the Iraq War have praised the UNSC for remaining steadfast in the face of formidable U.S. pressure to provide a formal mandate for the initiation of a regime-changing war against Iraq. I agree that the Security Council deserves some credit for this result, but I would argue that it did only about 25% of the job entrusted to it by the UN Charter. If the American-led claims against Iraq were evaluated from the perspective of international law or by reference to the war prevention goals of the Charter, then the UN performance was still 75% or so deficient.

    There are several dimensions of this deficiency: (1) The UN imposed on Iraq a punitive peace via SC Res. 687 (3 April 1991) comparable in the setting of the Gulf War to the discredited Versailles approach to Germany after World War I; (2) The UN lent its authority to twelve plus years of punitive sanctions against Iraq (1991-2001) despite evidence of indiscriminate, severe harm to the Iraqi civilian population; (3) The UN did not censure the United States or the United Kingdom for repeated threats and uses of force that intruded upon the sovereign rights of Iraq in this same period; (4) SC Res. 1441 (8 Nov 2002) adopted the main premises of the American geopolitical norms relating to counter-proliferation and regime change, seemingly suggesting that if Washington had been more patient the endorsement of recourse to war would likely have been forthcoming.

    In the background of the UN role with respect to the Iraq War are some important issues of an admittedly hypothetical character. Suppose that the UNSC had authorized the Iraq War, would that make it ‘legal’? Is the UN legally entitled to endorse what would be otherwise considered to be a war of aggression without such an endorsement? Who is authorized to make such a determination if there is no judicial review of Security Council decisions, as seems to be the implication of the World Court judgment in Lockerbie? It seems reasonable that only the General Assembly has some sort of residual responsibility to assess whether the Security Council has acted beyond the constitutional limits imposed by the UN Charter, but it lacks the power of decision, and its judgment would be only an expression of opinion.

    III. Can the Iraq War be interpreted as an illegal, but legitimate war of choice? No.

    In my view, as suggested, the illegality of recourse to war against Iraq in 2003 was clear. It was also clear before and after the war that there was no reasonable basis for invoking the “illegal, but legitimate” formula developed by the Independent International Commission for Kosovo to deal with an exceptional circumstance of humanitarian emergency. With respect to Iraq, the worst humanitarian abuses were associated with the campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s, and against the Kurds and Shi’ia in southern Iraq immediately following the Gulf War in 1991. Perhaps, a case for humanitarian intervention could have been credibly made in these earlier settings. But the Kosovo exception was bases on the imminence of danger associated with the feared ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population, made credible by Serb behavior in Bosnia just a few years earlier and by the rising tide of atrocities in Kosovo in the months preceding recourse to war under the NATO umbrella, but without a Security Council mandate.

    Given the failure to find weapons of mass destruction of any variety in Iraq and considering the intense resistance to the occupation, there is also no way to maintain convincing that either a condition of defensive necessity or humanitarian emergency existed in Iraq as of 2003. If there was such an emergency it was not attributable to the Baghdad regime, however dictatorial its record, but as a result of UN sanctions and numerous uses of force against Iraq.

    IV. Should the legal norm of nonintervention in internal affairs of sovereign states be abandoned? No.

    The Iraq War along with other experience with interventionary diplomacy suggests that respect for the norm of nonintervention, along with accompanying respect for territorial sovereignty, continues to represent a prudent guideline for statecraft. If the US Government had adhered to such a guideline over the course of the last several decades it would have avoided its two worst foreign policy disasters: The Vietnam War and the Iraq War. Additionally, if it had refrained from regime-changing covert interventions in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), it might have avoided the Iranian Revolution and the years of atrocity and brutality in Guatemala.

    The Iraq War confirms the wisdom of avoiding interventionary diplomacy unless genuine conditions of defensive necessity or humanitarian emergency exist, and even then caution is appropriate. As the Iraqi resistance confirms, interventionary wars are primarily ‘political’ phenomena, not ‘military,’ and are decided by the play of nationalist, ethnic, and religious passions. It is best to await the dynamics of self-determination to achieve transformative changes in dictatorial states. The experience with Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and South Africa is both instructive and encouraging.

    IV. Does the Iraq War suggest the need for adapting international law to the new conditions of international conflict in the aftermath of 9/11? No.

    From the argument made above, the simple conclusion here is that the Iraq War is an occasion for reaffirming the continuing viability and validity of the legal prohibition on non-defensive uses of force that is contained in the Charter. At the same time, the grave threats posed by the sort of mega-terrorist attacks of 9/11 do justify stretching the right of self-defense to validate uses of force, as necessary, to remove threats associated with non-state actors in the event that the territorial government is unable or unwilling to address the situation decisively and with due urgency. The Afghanistan War, with qualifications, arguably fits within such an expanded conception of self-defense.

  • We Need You

    We Need You

    The Foundation’s overarching goal is to help create a world free of nuclear weapons. In a rational world, this should not be a difficult task. A persuasive case can be made that a nuclear war could destroy civilization and possibly put an end to the human species and most forms of life. At a minimum, the use of these weapons could obliterate cities, including our own. We know what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a result of two small nuclear weapons. Today’s weapons have on average eight times the explosive power of those used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    But, of course, this is not a rational world. It is a world in which fear, denial and irrationality hold high office. It is a world in which international law is trampled on and strategies of “might makes right” are employed far too frequently by national leaders. In our world, many leaders cling to old views of power, failing to realize that in the Nuclear Age, as Einstein pointed out, “everything has changed save our modes of thinking.”

    At a recent Foundation event, a woman asked, “Can an organization like the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation make a difference on the issue of eliminating nuclear weapons?” This is an important question. The honest answer is that it is a tough struggle, one in which there are no guarantees of success. In many respects, fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons is an act of faith rooted in a strong belief in a resilient human spirit.

    It is clear that the dangers of the Nuclear Age have not diminished, despite the end of the Cold War. It remains a dangerous world in which the ultimate expression of anger and frustration, a nuclear 9/11 or 3/11, must be prevented. The best way to prevent such an occurrence is to assure that nuclear weapons and materials do not proliferate any further than they already have. The best way assure this is to dramatically reduce the number of these weapons with the goal of their elimination, and to apply international safeguards to both nuclear weapons and materials.

    Achieving a nuclear weapons-free world is a colossal task,one that too many people consider unattainable and therefore not worth the effort. In fact, it is the consequences of not undertaking this effort that makes it so essential. The risks posed by nuclear weapons are far too great to leave to chance or to politicians or generals. They demand a response from the people; they demand our involvement.

    The work of the Foundation is perhaps even more necessary today than it was at
    the height of the Cold War. It is to bring critical issues related to nuclear dangers
    to people everywhere, and to provide quality information, analysis and ideas
    for advocacy. This is the work we engage in daily and the work we have engaged in
    for more than 20 years. Our only chance of success is to work with others to build a movement big enough to impact governments. To do this, we need your active support
    and involvement.

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation seeks to be a voice of reason at a critical juncture in human history. This election year we are launching a campaign to Chart a New
    Course in US Nuclear Policy. We need your help. Please add your voice, and help us to extend the Foundation’s reach and its ability to achieve a more rational and caring world, one that we can be proud to pass on to the next generation.

  • The American Disaster in Iraq

    After the bloodiest week in the American occupation of Iraq, the same tired slogans about “seeing it through” and “staying the course” are about all that our leaders seem able to say. Such a paucity of moral and political imagination does not serve well the citizens of this country or of the world, and seems a recipe for a surefire descent further into the political inferno that Iraq is daily becoming. It is fine to wonder aloud whether 9/11 could have prevented by due diligence at the White House, but it is no excuse for not focusing on the least disastrous endgame for Iraq. Let us recall, as the Pentagon Papers demonstrated, that it took American leaders a decade of bloodshed to acknowledge in public the failure that they privately had come to recognize the Vietnam War to have been. It may be up to the American citizenry to shorten the learning cycle this time around, with so much more at stake.

    The steady descent into an American-led foreign policy whirlpool allows us to consider the worst features of the Bush approach to the challenges of world order.

    First of all, unilateralism with respect to waging war in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and international law, underscored by the American president’s arrogant assertion in the 2004 State of the Union Address: “America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.”

    Secondly, the mission impossible associated with imposing democracy on a sovereign state by force of arms in defiance of national aspirations. This undertaking is being daily exposed as a recipe for policy failure in Iraq, a country beset by internal religious, ethnic, regional conflicts and a political tradition with zero receptivity to American-style democracy.

    Thirdly, the imperial claim that America embodies the only model for political and economic success. As expressed in the important White House document of September 2002, National Security Strategy of the USA: “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom– a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.” All other political arrangements are illegitimate in the eyes of Washington, and it is some pathological version of this model that remains the blueprint for Iraq despite the overwhelming evidence that the Iraqis want to decide their future by themselves, and do not accept either prescriptions for their future whether issued as decrees by the occupiers or by their designated Iraqi representatives on the Iraqi Interim Governing Council.

    And finally, the obsessive preoccupation with the Middle East as the pivot of the American grand design for world domination. The neocons shaping the Bush presidency view strategic control of the region as vital for their conception of global security, which includes oil, safe havens for American private investment, and a lethal partnership with Israel. This was all made clear in their definitive planning document prepared in the months before George W. Bush came to Washington under the auspices of the Project for a New American Century. It is notable in this latter regard, that Israel’s approach to the Palestinians has inspired the tactics and structure of the American occupation of Iraq, with similar results of deepening indigenous resentments and gradually imposing on an oppressed people the stark choice between abject surrender and violent resistance. Also nightly more in evidence is the American use of tanks, missiles, and bombers against unarmed or lightly armed Iraqi resisters.

    As matters stand, there is no favorable endgame for this war. There is not yet in the American political or media mainstream, including the Kerry presidential bid, even a hint of withdrawal. The consensus in Washington is that the stakes are too large to admit failure, and that any hasty departure from Iraq would trigger a vicious civil war with adverse regional effects. At the same time, the much heralded transfer of sovereignty on June 30 seems like a fig leaf designed to disguise the realities of continuing military occupation, and is unlikely either to mean anything substantive about the exercise of authority in Iraq or to fool a single person in Baghdad. To begin with, how can the US Government transfer what it does not possess? Or put another way, if Iraqi sovereignty is a reality, what are American occupying forces doing in the country against the expressed will of the Iraqi people and their authentic representatives? And how are we to explain the current construction of 14 large military bases for US forces designed to accommodate a permanent military presence in the country? This is a terrain of American dreams, Iraqi nightmares!

    So far, the American political leadership has not faced up to the failure of its Iraq policy, and so is paralyzed, caught in a cycle of escalating violence that recalls Vietnam. Because of the strategic importance of Iraq, many think the better analogy is the French prolonged inability to acknowledge defeat in Algeria. It took all the prestige and patriotic credibility of Charles DeGaulle to extricate France, and even then France came perilously close to self-destructing in the aftermath. We here in the United States need to be asking ourselves and others, with a sense of urgency, what will it take to bring the Iraqi disaster to closure.

    On the broader front, the warnings and opportunities associated with the Madrid train bombings of March 11th are instructive. The Spanish citizenry immediately opted in its general elections three days later for an anti-war opposition party, and responded to their 9/11 with the slogan “No to terrorism! No to war!” If only America had displayed such political wisdom. Although it is late, it is not too late. A change in presidential leadership in November, although unlikely to offer much immediate prospect of change, will create some needed political space for moving in new, more constructive directions, and will at least rid the United States and the world of the current extremist worldviews that have given rise to the tragic ordeal of Iraq.

  • Three Reasons for the University of California to get out of the Nuclear Weapons Business

    Three Reasons for the University of California to get out of the Nuclear Weapons Business

    We’ve all heard about the inspections that took place in Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction and programs to make them.  As we know, none were found in Iraq.

    That would not be the case if the inspectors were to come to the University of California.  They would find that programs to research, design, develop, improve, test, and maintain nuclear weapons have been going on under the auspices of this University for more than 60 years and that they are going on today.  They would find that the University of California provides management and oversight to the nation’s two principal nuclear weapons laboratories: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.  They would find that today these weapons laboratories are engaged in attempting to make new and more usable and reliable nuclear weapons.

    For a fee, the University of California has provided a fig leaf of respectability to the research and development of the most horrendous weapons known to humankind.  It is ironic that our government cannot tolerate the possibility of Iraqi scientists creating such weapons, but at the University of California such a horrid use of science is called “a service to the nation.”

    Two of the weapons developed at Los Alamos were used on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  These were relatively small weapons, and they caused the deaths of over 200,000 persons, mostly innocent civilians, by incineration, blast and radiation.  There are no guarantees that the nuclear weapons being developed today under UC auspices will not be used again.  In fact, the odds are that if we continue as we are, they will be used again, by accident or design.

    There are three important reasons the UC should get out of the nuclear weapons business.  First, the UC is a great University, and no great University should lend its talents to making weapons capable of destroying cities, civilizations and most life on Earth.  The function of a University is to examine the amazing wonders of our world, to collect and categorize knowledge, to expand the knowledge base, and to pass important knowledge from the past on to new generations.  How can a great University allow itself to be co-opted into becoming complicit in creating weapons of mass destruction?  How can the UC Board of Regents justify this as “a service to the nation”?

    Second, there is no moral ground on which nuclear weapons can rest.  These are weapons of mass murder.  They cannot discriminate between combatants and civilians.  They kill indiscriminately – men, women and children.  By continuing to develop and improve these weapons, the United States, economically and militarily the strongest country in the world, is signaling to other nations that these weapons would be useful for them as well.

    Third, the International Court of Justice has stated that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is illegal under international law.  It allowed only one possible exception in which the “very survival of a state” was at stake.  In such a situation, it said that the law was unclear, but under any circumstance the use of nuclear weapons would not be legal if it violated international humanitarian law by failing to discriminate between civilians and combatants or causing unnecessary suffering.  There is virtually no possibility that nuclear weapons could be used in warfare without violating these precepts of international humanitarian law.

    Sir Joseph Rotblat, the only Manhattan Project scientist to leave the project on moral grounds and the 1995 Nobel Peace Laureate, asked: “If the use of a given type of weapon is illegal under international law, should not research on such weapons also be illegal, and should not scientists also be culpable?  And if there is doubt even about the legal side, should not the ethical aspect become more compelling?”

    In 1995, Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe, a senior physicist on the Manhattan Project, issued this plea: “I call on all scientists in all countries to desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons – and, for that matter – other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons.”

    If we are ever to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity, we must heed the words of words of wise individuals such as professors Rotblat and Bethe.  Even if for personal reasons the scientists and engineers at the nuclear weapons laboratories are unwilling to give up their role in creating and improving nuclear weapons, then at least the larger UC community could send a message to the rest of the country and the world that it is no longer willing to participate in the management and oversight of laboratories making weapons of mass murder.

    The motto of the University of California is Fiat Lux, meaning “let there be light.”  It is unlikely that the light the founders of the University had in mind was the flash “brighter than a thousand suns” from the explosion of a nuclear weapon.  I think they meant the light of knowledge, truth and beauty.  Unfortunately, the University of California’s relationship to the nuclear weapons laboratories, renewed at Los Alamos in 2005, casts a dark shadow over the higher values that a university is charged with passing on to future generations.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).  He is the author of many studies of peace in the Nuclear Age, including Nuclear Weapons and the World Court.

  • The Rebirth of the Spirit

    It has been only ten days and we; the inhabitants of Madrid, still carry on our shoulders the immeasurable burden of grievance, sadness and recollection, but also the spirit of solidarity and keen understanding.

    Only ten days and we walked the streets and plazas, crossed avenues in silence, drove our cars with glassy eyes, lost in expectancy and in a tremendous shock. Only those of us who were blessed and lucky enough not to lose any of our loved ones in the death trains were more or less unaffected, but always thoughtful about those people near us who found their destiny that morning, perhaps for having arrived too early or too late.

    A name, surnames, voices, gazes. Madrid reminded us of Hiroshima after World War II. All of us could feel in the air the psychological expansiveness of the gunpowder wave caused by the explosion in each of the four trains.

    It wasn’t the time to run madly, shouting widely to all four winds that it was the end of the world, nor to hide in our homes totally scared, under the wings of that Leviathan that Hobbes describes as the mortal god that emerges among men protecting them if at the cost of losing rights, fundamentally theirs, just for being men. However that very same Hobbes, when defining “state”, describes it as “one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all as he shall think expedient for their peace and common defence.” (Hobbes, T. Leviathan, part II chapter 17).

    But as we became more and more aware of the fact that besides two hundred two dead and fifteen hundred wounded, existing victims from the barbarous and senseless act, all of us had left behind something of ourselves in those trains, and that it had been a cruel attack against sheer existence by those who summoning the “true religion” repress the life of those who apparently do not profess such creed, we took rapid action, showing the world our undaunted exercise of reflection, and that our spirit remain more vivid than ever, being fed by these events.

    Madrid went over Madrid. Eye witnesses threw themselves without hesitation to help every possible victim; security and health assistance forces worked ceaselessly through entire shifts, doubling them when necessary: blood donation centres were full to capacity, and instead of calling for more blood, they constantly thanked people with the syringes already in their arms. Blood supply was more than satisfied. Psychological help was already available by citizens, anonymous or not, simply for the urge to attend anyone needing it.

    In spite of such solidarity, a more dangerous ghost hovered the ambient air. It wasn’t even the fear for after-attacks, instead, it was a sole question: “WHO?” Question which was not answered but two days afterwards, at least as to what was of concern within the Spanish boundaries, where news signalled “E.T.A.” the terrorist band that have been killing in Spain for more than thirty years, and that just a week ago tried to kill in this very same city with similar means of terror. However, the world voice declared Al Qaeda as perpetrators of this killing, thus confirming the most dreaded suspicion.

    The Spaniards were not prepared (no one is) to receive this news. Just a year ago, more than ten million people in this country, took to the streets to demand of this Leviathan to refuse any participation in the massacre which took place in Iraq not too long after; to refuse to support the imperial government of the U.S. in perpetrating the atrocious acts happening in the Middle East; and to avoid endangering Spain, that weak link of the chain called “Axis of Good”, to become another target of the Islamic fundamentalism, by adding another terrorist organization, keen to kill, to its already disgraceful list.

    But power enraptures and the zeal for protagonist of Aznar, a false leader disregarded the practical unanimity of the Spaniards who put him in office to watch over the wellbeing of his citizens and not over his own personal interests or those of his party.

    Things didn’t come out well for the “Azores Trio”. The terrorist attack rose at the worst timing. The events happening merely three days prior to the general elections could reinforce or at worst condemn the government role during the last two years.

    The massive call to the booths resulted into an electoral twist against that neo-fascism and favouring moderation in approaching and understanding the talks forfeited since 9/11.

    Spain is the first reflection that the people’s will cannot be contravened showing to the world that ultimately we, the “Civil Society”, in capital letters, are the vox populi. Our flag is, and always will be, the peace flag, and the vote we gave last Sunday was for the peace. Including those who endorsed the role of the government, perhaps, citing Hobbes again, in that zeal for protection.

    No doubt Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair are being forced to refashion a number of unwarranted assertions uttered during the last few days. Now, they manipulate the information assuring that the new President of the Government, legally elected in the Spanish booths Sunday 14, has decided to withdraw his troops from Iraq as an instance following the 3/11 events, in an act of cowardice and retraction. On the contrary, Mr. Rodriguez Zapatero responds only to a cohesion of thinking and to the message issued by the citizens at the macro-concentrations held against war on February 15th, 2003, the macro-concentrations held in support to the 3/11 victims, and the spontaneous macro-concentrations throughout the “Bull’s Skin” that is Spain, held on Saturday 13th, previous to the elections, which ultimately caused the results on Sunday.

    Also, the Socialist Government, social-democratic based and not strictly communist as some American media sources state … (media without professional ethics and without a trifle of education, sour, because Spain is turning from capitalism to socialism, do not have a clue that this country consolidated its democratic culture mainly because of the socialist Government headed by Felipe Gonzalez who led the nation – among other things – to the European Union and the NATO) is absolutely convinced that we cannot leave at its means a country like Iraq permanently shrouded with grievance during the entire last year and with those permanent 9/11’s and 3/11’s suffered by the terrified Iraqis individuals who manage to survive.

    It has been agreed the troops will remain in Iraq only if the United Nations takes command and the executioners relinquish their interests in the zone.

    Still, the challenge is not for those who exhibit the power, but for those of us who walk again the streets and plazas, drive our cars and cross avenues with a vivid latent gaze, convinced that terror, fundamentalist or State terror can only cut lives, but spirits are reborn day after day which help to build better societies here, in the US in Iraq, in Morocco, or Indonesia.

    Today we have seen the eyes of the victims; we have heard their grieving and heart-breaking cries. But today we have grown in numbers, in that rebirth of spirit we are much more sensitive to the atrocities performed in any part of our world, and that’s why we fight, from our little place in the planet, for a more rightful world. For peace, dialogue and understanding and for a real ethnic, religious and political pluralism.

    *Jose Alfredo Vallejo Canale lives in Madrid and is a Political Scientist. He is collaborating with the Director for Latin America of NAPF to establish the NAPF in Spain.

  • The Two Sides of the Nuclear Coin

    Despite George W. Bush’s repeated warnings about nuclear proliferation, he and his fellow Republicans deserve much of the blame for it. Ever since the advent of the Bush administration, it has charged that other nations are acquiring nuclear weapons. Justifying war with Iraq, the administration hammered away at that nation’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. It has also assailed North Korea and Iran for their nuclear programs. On Feb. 11, in a major policy address, President Bush called for new steps to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. The world must act, he said, to “confront these dangers and to end them.”

    At the same time, the administration has virtually scrapped the longstanding U.S. policy of nuclear disarmament — exactly the policy that, over the decades, has provided the key to halting nuclear proliferation.

    In 1965, when the U.S. and Soviet governments worried about the prospect of nuclear weapons spreading to dozens of nations, they teamed up to submit nonproliferation treaties to the UN General Assembly. Non-nuclear nations immediately objected to these proposals, arguing that they would merely restrict the nuclear club to its current members (then the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China). Alva Myrdal, Sweden’s disarmament minister, insisted that “disarmament measures should be a matter of mutual renunciation.” Willy Brandt, West Germany’s foreign minister, argued that a nonproliferation treaty was justified “only if the nuclear states regard it as a step toward restrictions of their own armaments and toward disarmament.”

    Unlike the Bush administration, U.S. and Soviet leaders of the time recognized that nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament were two sides of the same coin. As a result, the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that emerged from the United Nations was substantially broadened. Non-nuclear states pledged “not to make or acquire nuclear weapons.” And nuclear nations agreed to take “effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” Further, when it signed and ratified this treaty, the U.S. government pledged not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that had endorsed the NPT and that were not allied with a nation possessing nuclear weapons.

    With this bargain struck between the nuclear haves and have-nots, nearly all nations signed the NPT. Over the next 30 years, only one additional nation (Israel) developed nuclear weapons. To some degree, the success of this nonproliferation policy reflected citizens’ campaigns for nuclear disarmament that stigmatized nuclear weapons and encouraged the signing of nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties. But it also resulted from the mutual renunciation features of the NPT, which paired abstention from building nuclear weapons by most nations with nuclear disarmament and non-threatening behavior by the others.

    Unfortunately, the NPT began unraveling in the late 1990s. The Republican-dominated U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a landmark measure negotiated and signed by President Clinton. Given their control of Congress, the Republicans also managed to advance plans for a national missile defense system, a venture that contravened a key arms control measure, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Meanwhile, India, pointing to the failure of the nuclear powers to divest themselves of their nuclear weapons, became a nuclear nation in 1998. This act provoked Pakistan to do the same.

    After the presidential election of 2000, U.S. policy tilted sharply against nuclear disarmament and other pledges made in the NPT. Ignoring the commitments made by his Democratic and Republican predecessors, Bush pulled the United States out of the ABM treaty, ordered the deployment of a missile defense system and rejected the test ban treaty. The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review called for sustaining and modernizing nuclear weapons for at least the next half-century. The review also included contingency plans for U.S. nuclear attacks upon non-nuclear nations, among them North Korea. In the fall of 2003, the Bush administration pushed legislation through Congress to authorize the development of new, “usable” nuclear weapons.

    Given this repudiation of NPT commitments, it’s not surprising that North Korea has pulled out of the NPT and, perhaps, has begun building nuclear weapons. Nor is it surprising that a number of other nations might be working to develop a nuclear weapons capability. If the nuclear powers cling to their nuclear weapons and threaten their use, then other nations will inevitably try to join the nuclear club.

    As Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has observed: “We all have to be moving away from nuclear weapons. It can’t be just a mandate from the United States that everybody goes in one direction while we go in another.” But this is exactly what the Bush administration — in yet another example of its go-it-alone foreign policy — is pressing for.

    Nuclear proliferation cannot be halted without nuclear disarmament. As the old song goes: “You can’t have one without the other!”
    *Mr. Wittner teaches history at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press). He is a writer for the History News Service.

  • Robert Strange McNamara: An American Idol

    It is hardly a surprise that “The Fog of War” won the Oscar for documentaries this year. As a film on the life of the former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, “The Fog of War” succeeds brilliantly. It conveys the distinctive complexity of this fascinating man who occupied such a prominent place in the American political and moral imagination during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. And the documentary presentation of this material, centered on issues of nuclear war and Vietnam, makes us think deeply about the troublesome interplay between war and political leadership, an issue that has again assumed a tragic salience since 9/11. “Fog of War” limits its consideration to McNamara’s reflections on and experience of war, and ignores altogether the thirteen years that he spent as president of the World Bank, which are to me as revealing as the seven years that he spent at the Pentagon. Although this exclusion makes the film fall short as a biographical statement, there are artistic and dramatic gains achieved by limiting the focus to war, and its complexities.

    The technique of the film maker, Errol Morris, is quite remarkable, managing to command our attention for almost two hours despite McNamara delivering what is essentially a monologue. Of course, some of the credit belongs to McNamara’s captivating words and delivery, and some to the editorial surgery that reduced some twenty hours of film to what we watch in the theater. Also, helpful in breaking the potential monotony of listening to a single voice are McNamara’s eleven lessons that are flashed on the screen at intervals giving us a sense of narrative structure. But what is most riveting, I think, is the cinematography that weaves a coherent fabric of a film consisting of illuminating archival footage, cascading images associated with McNamara’s words and deeds, and various bits of recorded conversations between McNamara and his superiors in the White House. Philip Glass’s edgy, rhythmically repetitive, music wonderfully complements the visual presentation, reinforcing the themes of death and destruction, as well as the contradictory pulls that make this singular individual both fascinating and ultimately elusive. It is never becomes clear whether this great man is genuinely trying to impart the wisdom gained from his deep immersion in the power games of the 20th century or whether he is elaborately engaged in masking a rather pathetic appeal for absolution from the gods of public assessment. Most probably, it is both.

    The title “The Fog of War” is a phrase taken from the Karl von Clausewitz, the early 19th century German theorist of war, and used to explain the inability of a military commander to grasp the full realities of a battlefield, given its complexity. It bears so centrally on the McNamara enigma because it is exculpatory in effect, suggesting that the mistakes of war are due to its complexity, rather than the incompetence or depravity of the leaders. What is misleading here is that Clausewitz was explaining why tactical errors are made in war, while McNamara is indirectly excusing moral shortcomings, including those that have been criminalized by international law. Technology has lifted much of the fog that existed in Clausewitz’s day, but the process of war continues to be enshrouded in the far thicker fog of personal ambition and national pride. To confuse the one with other, as McNamara does throughout the film is deeply self-serving, and in the end, quite discrediting.

    The substance of the eleven lessons is as revealing about McNamara’s frailties as it is about learning from the mistakes of past wars. For instance, Lesson #1: “empathize with your enemy” is used to vindicate the flexibility of the Kennedy leadership in the Cuban Missile Crisis in helping to extricate Khrushchev and the Soviets from the crisis without producing a nuclear war. Later on, somewhat inconsistently, McNamara becomes quite animated when he acknowledges that it was “pure luck” that saved us in this country and the world from a nuclear war, discovering after the fact how ready each side was to engage in catastrophic behavior to avoid backing down in the crisis. One might have expected at this point some expression of concern for the suffering inflicted by American military tactics, especially the deliberate reliance on terror bombing in World War II, but instead such issues surface, of all places, in relation to Lesson #4: “Maximize efficiency.”

    A disturbing motif throughout the film is the recurrent reference to General Curtis LeMay, a leading air force general during both World War II and the early phases of the cold war, who epitomizes the pure logic of warfare carried on without regard to the limits of law or morality, but dedicated single mindedly to victory and the total destruction of the enemy. McNamara’s attitudes toward LeMay are revealing, combining undisgusied admiration for his “efficiency” and dedication to duty, with an effort to contrast McNamara’s contrasting active moral indignation about killing people with Lemay’s indifference. It was LeMay who, for the sake of efficiency in the latter stages of World II, proposed and engaged in the fire bombing of 67 Japanese cities causing hundreds of thousands of deaths of women and children. At a telling moment in the film LeMay acknowledges that if the Allies had lost the war then he, and McNamara who was working under his command at the time, would have prosecuted as war criminals. At another point, McNamara wonders out loud “What makes it immoral if you lose, but moral if you win.”

    There is undoubtedly something mesmerizing about McNamara’s sustained discussion of what we should learn from the experience of war. It is connected with his obsessive effort to portray himself as a man of reason and efficiency who always performed as well as humanly possible in view of the historical circumstances. Sure, he made mistakes with horrifying human consequences, but he could not do otherwise and serve the leadership and reflect the priorities of his country. Significantly, the McNamara of the movie and of real life has trouble expressing emotion except in highly personal encounters. It is odd that the only times that McNamara seems choked with emotion is when he recalls picking out a cemetery plot for the burial of JFK after his assassination and when Lyndon Johnson awards him the Medal of Freedom after dismissing him as Secretary of Defense over disagreements on how to prosecute and explain the Vietnam War. When he is talking about destroying nations with nuclear bombs or about the millions of Vietnamese killed by American tactics or about the toxic effects of Agent Orange used extensively as a defoliant, McNamara remains cool as a cucumber, all head, no heart.

    Closely related, are the revealing points at which he draws red lines as to where he refuses to go with the inquiry. When asked about why he did not speak out on the war after he left the Defense Department, he refuses to answer. Similarly, when it comes to the specifics of his personal responsibility. I know that close friends and associates begged McNamara to speak out against the Vietnam War after he left the Pentagon, which just might have led to a dramatic shortening of a futile effort, saving thousands of lives, and yet he refused. In the present global setting McNamara is deeply critical of the American response to 9/11, especially to the Iraq War, but when asked to comment, he refuses once again to offer any criticism of the roles played by Rumsfeld and Bush. From personal experience, I went to see McNamara at the World Bank in the 1970s about loaning money to Chile during the brutal Pinochet dictatorship. He asked that our meeting be treated as “off-the-record,” and then proceeded to say how he more than anyone would rejoice at the overthrow of Pinochet, but said he would continue to encourage the bank to prop up the regime with loans. Once again McNamara was blending almost seamlessly a career at the summits of power with moral indignation that is kept safely “in the closet.”

    We learn from the film that at every stage of his life, from primary school onwards, McNamara burned with ambition and glowed with a sense of achievement. He tells us that he was the youngest assistant professor ever appointed at the Harvard Business School. In a sense, McNamara can be best understood as a consummate careerist who was also remained a compulsive teacher throughout his life. Serving the rich and powerful, whether in the Ford Motor Company, or in Washington, he is at every stage more loyal to his superiors than responsive to the moral precepts he has always delighted in espousing. McNamara is the man of reason who still at the age of 85 turns lives into statistics, with a self-satisfying smile, while explaining his Lesson # 6: “Get the Data.”

    McNamara seems amused while recalling that when his fiancé, then living in a separate city, wanted to send out engraved wedding invitations, she sent him a message asking for his full middle name, to which McNamara responded “Strange.” His future wife replied, “I know you are strange, but what is your middle name?” Perhaps, in the end, McNamara’s life and sensibility are best understood by having given a original and enigmatic twist to the word strange!

    *Richard Falk, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is chair of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • Nuclear Weapons ‘Immoral,’ Say Religious, Scientific Leaders

    WASHINGTON — An international group of religious and scientific leaders Monday launched an appeal to the United States and all other nuclear states to pledge never to use nuclear weapons and re-affirm their commitments to achieving total nuclear disarmament.

    The appeal, signed by the head of the U.S. National Council of Churches (NCC) and the president of the international Catholic peace group, Pax Christi, and 74 others–including four Nobel laureates–declared such weapons to be “inherently immoral” and expressed particular concern over U.S. plans to develop of a new generation of nuclear bombs.

    ” Even so-called ‘mini-nukes’ and ‘bunker-busters’ would have disastrous effects,” the statement declared. “Threatened use of nuclear weapons in the name of deterrence is morally wrong because it holds innocent people hostage for political and military purposes.”

    ” Why do we continue to construct weapons that have the power to destroy us,” asked Rev. Robert Edgar, general secretary of the NCC, which represents some 140,000 Protestant congregations in the U.S., “rather than build systems and structures that will save lives and help all persons reach the potential for which God created them?”

    Edgar said the appeal was being made with a “sense of real urgency,” in light of new nuclear planning by the Bush administration and the failure to date of any of the declared nuclear powers to substantially reduce their stockpiles.
    More than a decade after the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia retain a total of about 10,000 tactical and strategic nuclear weapons each. Together, they account for more than 95 percent of the world’s total arsenal.

    According to recent estimates by the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, China is next with an estimated 400 warheads, followed by France, with 350; Israel, with perhaps 200; Britain, with 185; India, with 60 or more; and Pakistan, with as many as 48. The Central Intelligence Agency says it believes North Korea has had as many as two devices for several years.

    Under the 1968 Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), nuclear countries must not only halt the spread of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear countries, but also agree to reduce their own arsenals to zero. In 1996, the International Court of justice at The Hague ruled that the NPT required eventual disarmament, a position that was formally reaffirmed in 2000 by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

    Sign the Moral Appeal for a Safer World without Nuclear Weapons

    This article was originally published by OneWorld.net.

  • The Bravo H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn’t Hide

    “There’s a story I can tell you”, a fellow called Bruno Lat said to me a few years back in Hawaii. “I was 13 at that time. My dad was working with the Navy as a laborer on Kwajalein”, an atoll in Lat’s native Marshall Islands controlled by the US military. “It was early, early morning. We were all outside on that day waiting in the dark. Everybody was waiting for the Bravo.”

    That day was fifty years ago, yesterday. March 1, 1954. Bravo was not the first, or the last, just the worst of America’s nuclear tests in the Pacific, a fission-fusion-fission reaction, a thermonuclear explosion, an H-Bomb, America’s biggest blast. In today’s poverty of expression, it would be called a WMD. Except that it was “ours”, and so real that days after marveling that some strange sun had lighted the western sky with “all kinds of beautiful colors”, young Bruno also took in the sight of refugees from downwind of the blast at Bikini Atoll, miserable and burned and belatedly evacuated to Kwajalein. Their scalp, he recalled, “you could peel it like fried chicken skin”.

    In the standard history of Bravo, much of what happened that morning was “an accident”. That is the term Edward Teller, the bomb’s designer, uses in his memoirs. The Navy said it had anticipated a six-megaton bomb, but Bravo came in at 15. It had anticipated the winds to blow one way, but they blew another. It had not evacuated downwinders in advance because the danger was deemed slight, and anyway the budget that year was tight. It had not expected that a Japanese fishing trawler, the Lucky Dragon, would be out on the sea 87 miles from the blast, or that when it returned home two weeks later its catch would be “hot”, creating a panic in Japanese fish markets. It had not expected reports of radioactive horses in New Zealand, radioactive rain in Sydney. It really had not expected that one of the Lucky Dragon fishermen, hospitalized with radiation sickness for months along with his mates, would die. Officially the US government maintained that the cause of death was hepatitis unrelated to radiation.

    Officially the Atomic Energy Commission also claimed, ten days after the blast, that the Bravo shot had been “routine” and that among those stricken Marshallese at whom Bruno Lat was gaping, “there were no burns. All were reported well.” A month later AEC chairman Lewis Strauss told reporters they were not only well but “happy” too.

    Their medical records from the time tell a story of burns and lesions, nausea, falling hair and weeping sores. Dr. Seiji Yamada of the University of Hawaii Medical School reviewed them in Kwajalein three years ago, and it is a simple matter to find government reports acknowledging same, now that that particular lie is unnecessary.

    The Bravo blast was so immense, so terrible that the typical comparison_”equal to 1,000 Hiroshimas”_seems almost evasive, as if there were a continuum of comprehensibility within which it might fit. The bomb on Hiroshima instantly killed 80,000 people, more or less. By crude mathematics, Bravo had the power to incinerate 80 million. Ten New Yorks? 26,666 Twin Towers, more or less? No one can grasp such numbers, and because they are crude abstractions, the easier thing, for most Americans, has been to forget the whole thing_or at best to regard Bikini as a bit of cold war kitsch, a curio in the attic of memory.

    Perhaps we can imagine a mushroom cloud with a “stem” 18 miles tall and a “cap” 62 miles across, but probably not. That’s a cloud five times the length of Manhattan, vaporizing all beneath it, sucking everything_in Bravo’s case, three islands’ worth of coral reef, sand, land and sea life, millions of tons of it_into the sky, and then moving, showering this common stuff, now in a swirl of radioactive isotopes, along its path.

    The Marshallese on the island of Rongelap, 120 miles from ground zero, had imagined snow only from missionaries’ photographs of New England winters. That March 1 they imagined the white flakes falling from the sky, sticking everywhere but especially to sweaty skin, piling up two inches deep, as some freakish snowstorm. Children played in it, and later screamed with pain. Unlike Bruno Lat, they had not been waiting for Bravo.

    On other islands the “snow” appeared variably as a shower, a mist, a fog. The Navy had a practice of sending planes into the blast area hours after detonation to measure “the geigers”, as radioactivity was colloquially known among sailors, and the early readings over inhabited islands after Bravo are staggering. Scientists didn’t know in 1954 that a radiation dose of 30 roentgens would double the rate of breast cancer in adults, that 90 would double the rate of stomach and colon cancer, that young children were ten times as vulnerable. But they did know that 150 roentgens, noted in one of the earliest military estimates for Rongelap, were catastrophic. Yet the Navy waited two days to evacuate Rongelap and Ailinginae; three days to evacuate Utirik.

    Nine years later thyroid cancers started appearing in exposed islanders who had been children during Bravo, then leukemia. Even in “safe” atolls, babies began being born retarded, deformed, stillborn or worse. In 1983 Darlene Keju-Johnson, a Marshallese public health worker, gave a World Council of Churches gathering this description: “The baby is born on the labor table, and it breathes and moves up and down, but it is not shaped like a human being. It looks like a bag of jelly. These babies only live for a few hours.”

    The Marshallese say that Bravo was not an accident. Decades after the fact, a US government document surfaced showing that weather reports had indeed indicated shifting winds hours before the blast. In 1954 the United States had nine years of data on direct effects of radiation but none on fallout downwind; select Marshallese have been the subject of scientific study ever since.

    In all events, as Alexander Cockburn once put it, “an ‘accident’ is normalcy raised to the level of drama”. Marshall Islanders endured sixty-seven US nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958. It has been calculated that the net yield of those tests is equivalent to 1.7 Hiroshima bombs detonated every day for twelve years. A full accounting of the displacements and evacuations, the lies and broken promises, beginning with the Bikini people’s surrender of their land to US officers who vowed “to test this new weapon which is designed to end all wars”, would fill pages. A full accounting of the health impact would fill volumes, and has never been done. Bruno Lat is not an official victim of any test, so his thyroid cancer doesn’t count; the same with his father’s stomach tumors.

    Of the broken culture and broken hearts, there can be no accounting. Never to be sure if the food is poison, if the doctors are honest, if the cancer will get you next; to never know home because however beautifully its white sands shimmer beneath the dome of blue, however energetically its coconut crabs skitter among the palms, living there is lethal; to live a different kind of lethal, in a Pacific ghetto hell, unknown in the region before the displacements and the testing, and to see no way out_we don’t call those things terror. Yesterday, March 1, on the fiftieth anniversary of Bravo, the Marshallese formally petitioning the US Congress to make full compensation for the ruin of their lands and their health. They also want Congress to express “deep regret for the nuclear testing legacy”. Some had wanted an apology, but that, the majority decided, America would never concede.

    *Joann Wypijewski, former managing editor of The Nation, writes about labor and politics for CounterPunch. She can be reached at: jw@counterpunch.org. This article was originally published by CounterPunch on 2 March 2004.