Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

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  • Bush Seeks Immunity for Violating War Crimes Act

    Thirty-two years ago, President Gerald Ford created a political firestorm by pardoning former President Richard Nixon of all crimes he may have committed in Watergate — and lost his election as a result. Now, President Bush, to avoid a similar public outcry, is quietly trying to pardon himself of any crimes connected with the torture and mistreatment of U.S. detainees.

    The ”pardon” is buried in Bush’s proposed legislation to create a new kind of military tribunal for cases involving top al-Qaida operatives. The ”pardon” provision has nothing to do with the tribunals. Instead, it guts the War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal law that makes it a crime, in some cases punishable by death, to mistreat detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and makes the new, weaker terms of the War Crimes Act retroactive to 9/11.

    Press accounts of the provision have described it as providing immunity for CIA interrogators. But its terms cover the president and other top officials because the act applies to any U.S. national.

    Avoiding prosecution under the War Crimes Act has been an obsession of this administration since shortly after 9/11. In a January 2002 memorandum to the president, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales pointed out the problem of prosecution for detainee mistreatment under the War Crimes Act. He notes that given the vague language of the statute, no one could predict what future ”prosecutors and independent counsels” might do if they decided to bring charges under the act. As an author of the 1978 special prosecutor statute, I know that independent counsels (who used to be called ”special prosecutors” prior to the statute’s reauthorization in 1994) aren’t for low-level government officials such as CIA interrogators, but for the president and his Cabinet. It is clear that Gonzales was concerned about top administration officials.

    Gonzales also understood that the specter of prosecution could hang over top administration officials involved in detainee mistreatment throughout their lives. Because there is no statute of limitations in cases where death resulted from the mistreatment, prosecutors far into the future, not appointed by Bush or beholden to him, would be making the decisions whether to prosecute.

    To ”reduce the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act,” Gonzales recommended that Bush not apply the Geneva Conventions to al-Qaida and the Taliban. Since the War Crimes Act carried out the Geneva Conventions, Gonzales reasoned that if the Conventions didn’t apply, neither did the War Crimes Act. Bush implemented the recommendation on Feb. 7, 2002.

    When the Supreme Court recently decided that the Conventions did apply to al-Qaida and Taliban detainees, the possibility of criminal liability for high-level administration officials reared its ugly head again.

    What to do? The administration has apparently decided to secure immunity from prosecution through legislation. Under cover of the controversy involving the military tribunals and whether they could use hearsay or coerced evidence, the administration is trying to pardon itself, hoping that no one will notice. The urgent timetable has to do more than anything with the possibility that the next Congress may be controlled by Democrats, who will not permit such a provision to be adopted.

    Creating immunity retroactively for violating the law sets a terrible precedent. The president takes an oath of office to uphold the Constitution; that document requires him to obey the laws, not violate them. A president who knowingly and deliberately violates U.S. criminal laws should not be able to use stealth tactics to immunize himself from liability, and Congress should not go along.

    Elizabeth Holtzman, a former New York congresswoman, is co-author with Cynthia L. Cooper of The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens.

  • Humanity’s Future: Creating a Global Republic of Conscience and Creativity

    All my life, I have felt connected to the stars.  As a boy, I walked at night in the garden of my grandfather King’s house, looking up at the dazzling lights in the sky.  One world was not enough for me.  I wrote stories about the explorations of the stars that I knew human beings would undertake.  My tales landed me in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and in a book entitled Pioneers of Wonder.  


    As I went through my long life I encountered one glorious being after another.  I began to become aware of the tremendous role played by humanity in the development of the amazing planet called the Earth.


    I became aware of the spiritual wisdom of the saints and prophets; the writers of the Gospels and the soaring poets, ranging from Rumi to Shakespeare; the creators of great music, ranging from the singers of songs in all languages to the deep composers, Bach and Puccini and Beethoven, realizing that there were no limits to the creations pouring forth from the human soul.  I found everlasting pleasure in the lines of William Blake—The one “who kisses joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise.”


    I have just put together a book, which encompasses my life’s experiences with the many kinds of writing I have composed—beginning with my imaginary trips to the far stars and the pains of hunger endured with many people in the dark days of the 1930s.  When I went to the University of Kansas City, my professors encouraged me to shift from science fiction to the practice of journalism.


    My last story for an interstellar magazine was called “Star Ship Invincible.”  It described what happened to a group of people who attempted to travel from Earth to Jupiter in a new vessel built to be strong enough to pass through any pressures brought against it. But that ship was not invincible after all.  It fell into a Black Hole, a void in space that could not be passed through.


    The ship was absorbed into another universe from which it could not escape.  The attempts of human beings to go into other dimensions were not achievable.  They could not tell what had happened to them.  They had traveled beyond their finite limits.


    My next experience was to write a story about a man caught in the tortures of hunger—whose only solace came from a recording of human laughter.  In a day of desperation he tried to sell that recording to an old pawnbroker, but the old man did not find it worth more than a few dollars.  The old man was wounded by the anguish in that roar of laughter.  “Shut it off,” the broker said.  “Please shut it off.”


    The young man went back into the freezing night from which he had come.  The old man was alone with the echoes of that defiant mirth in his shop filled with the precious things sold to him by people who were dying of thirst and hunger.  That was the state of the world for many people in those years of pain and poverty.


    That story was broadcast on the NBC radio network and reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, edited by Edward O’Brien in England.  It caught the attention of editors on the Kansas City Star, and I was hired by that paper as a reporter although I had never taken a course in journalism.  The managing editor, C. G. Wellington, said he was reluctant to take me on—because I reminded him of Ernest Hemingway, a writer he had employed there in 1917.  Wellington said Hemingway had promised him to make a lifetime career on the Star—and then had run off to be an ambulance drive in World


    War I.


    Hemingway came to Kansas City soon after the publication of his great book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on the Civil War in Spain when General Franco overthrew the Spanish Republic and created a dictatorship there.  Hemingway visited the Star on a night when Wellington was not there—and I had a chance to show him some of my stories.  “You’ve got good stuff, kid,” Hemingway said.  “But if you want to get anywhere, you’ll have to get out of Kansas City.  The world is changing fast, kid.  You have to go places.”


    I followed his advice and went to New York in January 1941.  I landed a job on the Associated Press staff in Rockefeller Center, and dealt with news pouring in from all parts of the planet.  Then I was appointed to a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.  In January 1943, I was drafted into the United States Army and became a war correspondent.


    I landed in Normandy in 1944 and rode with General George Patton’s Third Army across France and into Paris.  The liberation of Paris on a golden day in August was one of the most exhilarating joys of my life.  The Nazi forces which had occupied that beautiful city in 1940 retreated from our troops in disarray.  As they retreated, they were fired upon by the Free French under the command of General Charles de Gaulle.


    We were aware of the fact that Adolf Hitler, the Nazis’ leader, had ordered the German general in command of Paris to set fire to the city.  But he had refused to do so.  Hitler kept asking: “Is Paris burning?” but no answer was given to him.  The innate humanity of a German officer was more powerful than Hitlerism.


    I was one of the American soldiers who were received with hugs and kisses when we entered the city.  I appreciated the warm welcome given to us by the French people, particularly the French girls.


    We rushed into the bars, followed by the girls.  While we drank bottles of champagne, we rejected the offers of the girls for unlimited sexual services.  When I shouted: “I’m a married man!” the girls murmured: “When the war’s over, you can go back to your wife, but you’re over here now.  You ought to be grateful for what we can give you now.”  I didn’t take advantage of the offers.  I wanted to survive—and get back to my wife in New York with a good body.  On our honeymoon, she had given me everything a woman could give to a man, and I hoped we would have many years of such enjoyments.


    When the Nazis surrendered, I flew home.  I had received a Certificate of Distinguished Service from Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee, one of Gen. Eisenhower’s deputy commanders, and I returned to the AP with a sense of recognition that I had given three years of my life to the struggle against Nazism.  Many of my friends had been wounded or killed—and I had interviewed many wounded men as a War Correspondent.  Yet, I had not been crippled or injured.  I thanked the Lord of the Universe for the blessings he had given me, but I had not received the punishment I expected.


    The AP did not give me the raise in salary I expected.  Barbara and I celebrated my return by deep lovemaking and we had produced a wonderful child, a boy we named Terence Francis Kelly.  The cost of living was rising and so I moved from the AP to the National Housing Agency, where I served as an information specialist and earned a much larger salary.  During the war a housing shortage had developed, and President Truman had launched a large-scale building program designed to meet the needs of millions of veterans and others whose lives had been disrupted by the war.


    I liked the Housing Agency and I knew that its work was important.  But I could not resist a tempting offer from a public relations agency, the Fitzgerald Company, which had been founded by a friend of mine.  I left that agency to become a consultant to the National Book Publishers Council and then to serve as the U.S. director of the Study of World News conducted by the International Press Institute, which had received a large grant from the Ford Foundation.


    Before I joined the Study of World News, I served as the Washington director of Averell Harriman’s 1952 campaign to become the Democratic candidate for president.  Harriman had the kind of experience that I thought a president should have.  He had been the U.S. Ambassador to Britain, the Ambassador to the Soviet Union, the director of Truman’s Security Agency, and one of the administrators of the Marshall Plan, which had revived Europe after the war.  I went with him across the United States in a chartered plane, and wrote speeches for him indicating that he was dedicated to the liberal program on which Truman had won his victory in 1948.  But the nomination went to Adlai Stevenson, who had been elected governor of Illinois that year.


    Stevenson offered me a place on his staff, but I was eager to get out of politics and I became vice president of the Fitzgerald agency again.  Then I leaped over to take part in the Study of World News, which had been started by the Ford Foundation under the leadership of Lester Markel, Sunday editor of the NY Times.


    The study got under way in September of 1952, when staffs were organized in Zurich, Switzerland; New York; and Madras, India.  W. MacNeil Lowry, formerly chief Washington correspondent for the Cox newspapers, was given operating responsibility for the entire project.  Lowry asked me to take charge of the work in the United States.


    Arrangements were made with a group of ten leading researchers in American journalism schools, headed by Dr. Ralph Casey of the University of Minnesota, to measure the amounts of foreign news printed in American papers.  The news flowing on agency wires from all over the world was surveyed by the IPI staff in New York.  The wire reports of all the major news agencies were made available by the agencies for study during the same weeks.


    Ninety-three of the American papers were put on the list through a statistical sampling method used by Dr. Chilton Bush, head of the Institute for Journalistic Studies at Stanford University.  The list gave fair representation to morning and evening papers, papers in different regions of the countries, papers representing a cross-section of American journalism.


    For purposes of comparison with this list, a separate list of large papers was prepared.  Papers in Europe and India were selected by the IPI staff in consultation with editors involved.  Forty-eight papers in Western Europe and 28 in India were chosen for examination.  The communist papers in the Soviet bloc and in China were not included however. It was assumed that these papers were instruments of government propaganda.


    When all the phases of the IPI studies were completed in the spring of 1953, the IPI had the largest assemblage of facts and ideas about the handling of news around the world.  The reports eventually released by the IPI showed the gaps and discrepancies in the handling of such information—and created enduring controversies about the prejudices shown by editors who favored certain countries and disfavored others.


    Lester Markel had declared in 1952 that “the main objective of the Institute is to bring out greater world understanding through a better flow of information.”  My participation in this vast project led me to believe that the task was almost impossible.


    In my 92 years on this planet, I have been a professor of communication and disseminator of information to illuminate the tremendous tasks of the human species.  I have been appalled by the human capacity for evil and uplifted by the enormous capacity for good.


    We are evolutionary giants with origins linked to the cosmic explosion that brought the universe into being.  We are composed of whirling atoms and glowing molecules beyond our comprehension.  Albert Einstein, the greatest thinker of the 20th Century, who brought us into the nuclear age, which may destroy us all, decided that we were created by a Spirit we could never understand.  We can never understand how far we have come and how far we may have to go.


    We are electromagnetic fields of energy and yet many of us may become Glorious Beings rising like mountains on new horizons. As the poet William Blake said, we can kiss joy as it flies and live in eternity’s sunrise.  We can respond to the never-ending allurements we were born to enjoy.


    I have come here tonight to talk about humanity’s future and to hear your views on what the future may hold for us.  When I was a young writer of science fiction, I walked in darkness, fearing the terrible disasters that might lie ahead of us.  Yet, I went from one great experience to another.


    My mother gave me the name of King.  That was her maiden name—Martha King—and she wanted me to have it.  She married a man named Kelly, who sacrificed much of his manhood on a battlefield in France, and she did not want me to be completely identified with an Irish name and Irish history.  So I have gone through life with a resounding name—Frank King Kelly.  When I am down, overwhelmed by the awful things I have endured, I shout my name out loud:  “Frank King Kelly!” and I feel related to all the Kings and Kellys in the amazing history of humankind!


    How was it possible for me as a boy to endure the blows of bullies in my first years in school?  Why was I given a scholarship at the U. of Kansas City?  How did one of my stories get into a collection of Best American Short Stories when I was 21?  How did I get the advice I needed from a great writer, Ernest Hemmingway, who urged me to get out into the world and overcome my fears?


    When I went to New York, I couldn’t sell enough stories to survive there, even though I got some unexpected income by writing about the frustrated lives of girls in New York and Washington.  I was given a chance to write these “true stories” for a magazine edited by a man who was a friend of one of my professors in Kansas City.  He persuaded me to put more “zing” in those stories—and I made enough money to live well in New York until I got a good job on the AP staff.  One of my stories was featured in a volume of these “true romances,” and I wrote about them in an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Synthetic Sin.”


    In Manhattan I became a special correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other papers across the country.  I wrote an article about the successful campaign against prejudice being conducted by a state commission against discrimination, which had been fighting against racial, religious, and national group prejudices for 2 ½ years.  Commission Chairman Charles Garside disclosed that the AFL Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks, Freight Handlers, and Express and Station Employees had repealed regulations that had restricted Negroes.  The union had also eliminated from its constitution all the provisions that restricted membership to White persons.


    I was happy to write about such actions because I hated the treatment then given to Blacks, immigrants, and other minorities in American society.  When I was a reporter on the Kansas City Star, I rode ambulances from the General Hospital to the scenes of fires, murders, and accidents.  When we saw Black people in any of those painful situations, the ambulance went speeding by.  The ambulance drivers told me: “We don’t stop for Blacks.  They’ve got their own hospitals and their own ambulances.”  I was horrified by the separation of human beings in the city where I had been born.  


    I tried to get the city editor of the Star to let me do a series of articles on the brutality I had seen at the city jail, where police officers routinely beat homeless men who were arrested for wandering in the streets.  “We can’t get the cops down on us,” he said.  “We need their help in many places.”  I saw the corruption in the police force and other agencies, but I quickly gave up my efforts to expose what needed to be done.  I found out that I wasn’t a crusader.


    When I was offered a job as a researcher and speech writer for President Truman, I knew he had been elected with the backing of a notorious political machine—the Pendergast organization, run by Boss Tom Pendergast.  My liberal friends urged me to keep away from that organization. “If you work for Truman, you’ll be regarded as a crook or subnormal mentally,” one of these friends said.


    But I had been told by reporters who investigated Truman that he was not personally involved in any of Pendergast’s chicanery.  Pendergast had endorsed Truman because he was widely admired for his personal integrity.  My wife and my literary agent, Mary Abbot, were convinced that Truman was a fine man.  They admired the work he had done in trying to eliminate overcharging by the corporations, which had made huge profits in World War II.


    When I got a call from the White House in the spring of 1948, asking me to do research and writing for Truman in the Presidential campaign that year, I was reluctant to take it seriously.  I didn’t know anyone on his staff.  I was astonished when I learned that Kenneth Birkhead, one of my friends who had been a student with me at the University of Kansas City, had recommended me.  He had told Clark Clifford and Bill Batt, the two men who were organizing Truman’s “whistle stop” train trips, that I was a fast writer who had written articles for many newspapers and I shared Truman’s ideas about giving full rights to people of all colors and creeds.


    So I went to Washington, helped to draft the Democratic platform, wrote drafts of many of the speeches Truman delivered from the backend of his campaign train, and shared in Truman’s unexpected triumph at the polls.


    I hadn’t sought any appointment on Truman’s White House staff.  I was prepared to go back to the Fitzgerald agency, but my friends at the Atlantic Monthly had persuaded the president of Boston University to offer me an appointment as a professor of communications there.  The Atlantic press had just published my first serious novel—a book entitled An Edge of Light, about my role as an AP editor in New York—and they said that a professorship at Boston University would give me a stable income and enough free time to write books.


    On the night in November when Truman’s so shocking triumph set off celebrations by delighted Democrats in Washington and other cities, Barbara and I drank champagne together and packed our few belongings into suitcases and prepared to move to a house in a Boston suburb. We didn’t realize that we would spend only a few months in Boston.  When I arrived at the university, a secretary told me:  “A Senator with a fancy name has been calling you from Washington. I’ve put a note on your desk.”


    The Senator was Scott Lucas of Illinois.  He told me that he was scheduled to be the Majority Leader of the Senate, succeeding Alben Barkley of Kentucky, who had been elected Vice President on the Truman ticket.  He said he needed a speech written and asked me to join his staff in January of 1949.


    The president of Boston University was negative toward the idea when I talked to him about it.  “You want to run back to Washington when you’ve just been appointed here as an associate professor?” Daniel Marsh said, angrily.  “I won’t give you a leave of absence for any such purpose.”


    My friends at the Atlantic Monthly were negative also, and urged me to stay in Boston.  Members of the White House staff said, however, that Lucas would be a key factor in getting Truman’s proposals enacted by a Senate largely controlled by conservative Southern Democrats.


    I stayed four months on the faculty in Boston, and I found my students responsive to my arguments for the kind of progressive agenda offered by Truman.  Truman had strongly supported the formation of the United Nations; he had desegregated the American armed forces; he had favored an expansion of the social security system and a national health program.  In his inaugural address in January 1949, he had declared that every human being had a right to “a decent, satisfying life.”  He offered encouragement to the rising movement for women’s attainment to the highest positions in every field.


    I found that the students I had in my classes at Boston University—most of them war veterans—backed the creation of international laws to bring principles of justice into the world community.  They admired Truman’s willingness to confront critics and reactionary opponents.  I finally returned to Washington to work for the Senate leader and to participate in struggles against McCarthyism, the House of Un-American Activities Committee, and other bigots.


    I had lived through the oppressive years when one-third of the people had lived in poverty and despair while the federal government under President Hoover had been virtually paralyzed.  I favored a new democracy with places for everybody.


    But Senator Lucas was defeated when he ran for re-election—beaten by a man named Everett Dirksen, whose nickname was “the Wizard of Ooze.”  The American Medical Association sponsored pamphlets denouncing Truman’s health plan and many doctors took part in the opposition to Lucas because he had supported that plan.


    After Lucas was rejected by the voters, I stayed on for two years with his successor as the Senate Leader, Ernest McFarland of Arizona.  McFarland was a good-hearted man, but he was not a very progressive legislator.  I left my job as the staff director of the Senate Majority Policy Committee, and plunged into other activities.


    I helped the American Book Publishers Council repel attempts by right-wing groups to censor books, and I served as the U.S. director of an International Press Institute study of international news.  That study revealed that many American newspapers carried only small amounts of news from other countries—and revealed that many Americans were not aware of significant developments in other parts of a rapidly changing world.


    When the Soviet Union succeeded in putting a man into space, I urged my fellow Americans to applaud that achievement.  I was an advocate of cooperation between the two powerful nations.  I proposed that a statue be presented to the people of the Soviet Union as a gift from the American people just as the gift to the United States of the Statue of Liberty from France symbolized friendship between two great nations.


    My proposal came to the attention of leaders of the U.S.A.-U.S.S.R. Citizens’ Dialogue, which had been promoting exchange visits since 1979 to create “trust and understanding” between the two countries.  I was one of 29 Americans invited to make a trip to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1983.  I made a speech in the Kremlin, emphasizing the dangers of nuclear weapons.  I said that those weapons endangered the survival of life on earth.


    I also told the Soviets about my participation in efforts to establish a National Peace Academy.  The Academy was dedicated to the education and training of professional peacemakers and to the dissemination of information about the developing art of peaceful conflict resolution.  I had participated in a citizen’s movement with 30,000 members, which led to the approval of the Peace Academy project by both houses of Congress and the construction of a U.S. Institute of Peace on the mall in Washington.


    The part of my speech in Moscow, which aroused the most discussion, was my suggestion that either the U.S. or the Soviet Union should dismantle half of its nuclear weapons and invite the world to witness that event.  “Would not that nation open a new era, with humanity set free from the nightmare of a nuclear war?” I asked the Soviet leaders who took part in our dialogue.  Afterwards, a Soviet official approached me and said that he personally liked the idea.  Then he added: “But wouldn’t the nation that endorsed such a proposal be accused of weakness?”


    I said that I didn’t think that the building of thousands of such bombs should be considered a sign of strength.  The arms race is a road to planetary suicide, I said.  Why do you consider the present situation as a state of progress?  The American people believe that you are prepared to inflict catastrophic blows on the Western countries—and you believe that we are prepared to kill millions of men, women, and children in the Soviet nations.


    When I visited Moscow and other parts of the Soviet Union in 1983, the Soviets like Brezhnev were believed to be firmly in control of enormous forces.  None of the commentators predicted the rise of a Gorbachev and the rapid disintegration of the Soviet empire.  No one predicted that Ronald Reagan, a right-wing Republican, would take big steps to end the Cold War.


    On my visit to the Soviet Union in 1983, I found that the people there had a deep fear of another war.  Many young people had seen films and television programs that depicted how many things Americans had—houses, cars, many personal possessions.  The Soviet young people no longer believed in the promises of communism.  They wanted to be free to pursue happiness in the American style.  When I came back and reported on their commitment to peace and their friendliness toward Americans, many people in Santa Barbara thought I had been brainwashed and deceived.  When I reminded them that President Truman had predicted to me that the Soviet system would collapse—and that Russia would seek friendly relations with the United States—many Americans did not accept such a hopeful view of the future.


    Like Truman, however, I had come close to death many times, and I shared his deep feeling that human beings could be “glorious beings,” eventually capable of building a global society.  I shared his admiration for the poem by Alfred Tennyson entitled” Locksley Hall,” written in 1842.  Truman carried a copy of it in his wallet, and frequently referred to it.


    The English author wrote:


    “For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,


    Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that could be;


    Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails,


    Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;


    Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew


    From the nations’ aerial navies grappling in the central blue;


    Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled


    In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world…”


    I was amazed by Tennyson’s predictions in that poem and pleased by Truman’s long look forward.  But I, too, had expected human beings to build a planetary organization and enter into a global acceptance of all creeds and cultures.


    When I worked on the Democratic platform, which Truman advocated in his 1948 campaign, we approved statements supporting “the effective international control of all weapons of mass destruction, including the atomic bomb.”  Truman insisted that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified steps to end the most terrible war in history but he did not want to place such power in the hands of national leaders in any conflict in the future.  If Truman’s plans for international control over nuclear weapons had been adopted, the insane nuclear arms race of the last 50 years could have been avoided—and humanity could not have been brought to the brink of annihilation in later confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union.


    That 1948 platform also endorsed Truman’s recognition of the state of Israel and the help he had given to the new Jewish nation to survive during the bloody conflicts in Palestine.


    Truman was accused of acting emotionally—succumbing to the pleas of Eddie Jacobson, his former partner in a clothing store, and other Jewish friends—or of pandering to the wealthy American Jews who gave large amounts of money to his candidacy and other nominees of the Democratic Party.  But I and others who worked on that 1948 platform knew that the president was genuinely convinced that the Jewish people should have a homeland.  His primary motivation came from his reading of the Bible.  His religious faith came from the scriptures in that book regarded as holy by Jews and Christians.


    Truman was one of the few American leaders who tried to save the Jews from Hitler’s concentration camps.  In April 1943, after he learned that Jews had been herded into slaughter houses “like animals,” he voiced his indignation in a fiery speech to 125,000 persons in a Chicago stadium.  Saying that “no one can any longer doubt the horrible intentions of the Nazi beasts,” Truman urged all the governments then at war with the Nazis to help the Jews before it was too late.  He asked for the opening of “free lands” for the Jews and other persecuted minorities.


    If his plea had been heeded, millions of lives could have been saved—including thousands of the most gifted people who ever lived on this planet.  It is still impossible to accept the failures of many of the people (including myself) who did little to save the human beings destroyed by the racist Nazis.  “Today—not tomorrow—we must do all that is humanly possible to provide a haven and a place of safety for all those who can be grasped from the hands of the Nazi butchers.”  He begged all of us to “draw deeply on our traditions of aid to the oppressed—and our great national generosity.”  He said:  “This is not a Jewish problem, it is an American problem—and we must and we will face it squarely and honorably.”


    We did not face it squarely and honorably on the scale that it called for.  We did finally join other nations in crushing Hitler’s Nazis and the Japanese warlords.  As a member of General Patton’s Third Army, I had the joy of liberating Paris from the German occupation forces in 1944.  I must note that it was the humanity of a German general—commander of the Nazi forces in Paris—that kept Paris from being destroyed.  Hitler had ordered that general to set the city on fire, but he refused to do it. Hitler died in the wreckage of his bomb shelter in Berlin.


    In the years since World War II, there have been many savage events on our planet.  The United Nations—created by Truman and other farsighted leaders in 1945—has not been as effective as its founders and supporters hoped that it would be.  The destructive forces that have been manifested all through the long history of human beings have produced wars, persecutions of minorities, mass killings, the committing of tortures against international law, have made me wonder whether we will ever evolve into the “glorious beings” we were designed to be.


    But we now have an International Bill of Rights drafted by leaders in many countries—and there is a growing awareness of the fundamental value of every person in the developing world culture.  President Truman in his inaugural address in 1949 declared that every person is entitled to “a decent, satisfying life.”


    The fact that we live in a nuclear age when enough weapons exist to destroy all nations and bring down our whole civilization must awaken in every one of us a sense of personal responsibility for getting rid of those weapons.  The leaders of the nuclear powers are not carrying out that vital task.  So we the people must demand action to get every government to act for human survival.


    The Declaration if Interdependence adopted by this Institute on July 4 thirty years ago indicates the right path for humanity’s future.  Let me remind you of the 10 points in that great statement:


    (1)    To explore the classical and renaissance traditions of East and West—and their continuing relevance to emerging modes and patterns of living;


    (2)    To renew the universal vision behind the American Dream through authentic affirmations of freedom, excellence and self-transcendence in an ever-evolving Republic of Conscience;


    (3)    To honor through appropriate observance the contributions of men and women of all ages to world culture;


    (4)    To enhance the enjoyment of the creative artistry and craftsmanship of all cultures;


    (5)    To deepen awareness of the universality of humanity’s spiritual striving and its rich varieties of expression in the religions, philosophies and literatures of humanity;


    (6)    To promote forums for fearless inquiry and constructive dialogue concerning the frontiers of science, the therapeutics of self-transformation, and the societies of the future;


    (7)    To investigate the imaginative use of the spiritual, mental and material resources of the planet in the service of universal welfare;


    (8)    To examine changing social structures in terms of the principle that a world culture is greater than the sum of its parts and to envision the conditions, prospects and possibilities of the world civilization of the future;


    (9)    To assist in the emergence of men and women of universal culture, capable of continuous growth in non-violence of mind, generosity of heart, and harmony of soul. I call these persons “glorious beings”;


    (10)    To promote universal brotherhood and to foster human fellowship among all races, nations and cultures.


    Many of the topics were the subjects of long dialogues I had in the 1950s with Raghavan and Nandini Iyer when I served as vice president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.  The Iyers—and their brilliant son, Pico—certainly had the qualities of “glorious beings” and I want to express my gratitude for the inspirations they gave to me and to many others, including the founders of this Institute.


    In closing, I want to thank all of you who participated in our meeting here tonight.  You affirm my belief in the statement of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said:  “The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end”


    We are all rising together in Eternity’s sunrise!

  • Statement of an Atomic Veteran 60 Years After the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki

    My name is Eduardo Pablo Zaragoza and I am 79 years-old. I was born and raised in a coal mining community, Dawson, in Northern New Mexico. Life with my family was good. I had wonderful parents, and four sisters and two brothers, a harmonious family in every way. I liked school and excelled at sports.

    In January, 1945, when I was 17 years-old, I joined the Navy. I served in the South Pacific on the USS Wayne, an attack amphibious transport. Our first destination was Guam, where we unloaded Navy personnel and Marines who were replacement troops. We then went on to Saipan, where we picked up the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines of the 2nd Division, who were to be the occupation forces in Nagasaki.

    On September 23, 1945, we anchored in Nagasaki Harbor, then loaded small boats with Marine troops, and transported them onto land. I spent four days in Nagasaki. As our boat was landing, I saw steel ships, burned up and destroyed, in the water. Everywhere I looked everything was destroyed, melted. I also saw a horrible sight: many, many bloated bodies floating on the water. These were the bodies of dead Nagasaki citizens who had died in the days and weeks after the bomb was dropped. The Japanese people had disposed of them in the water. I could not believe what I saw! Even today I can still see the bloated bodies floating in the harbor.

    Once ashore in Nagasaki, we walked all over the place and we saw the devastation of the city and its inhabitants. I was numb. At 17 years of age, I could not take it all in! It was overwhelming. It didn’t help that we soldiers were in no way prepared by the Navy for what we would see there in Nagasaki. I walked all around. They allowed us to walk up to one mile from the hypocenter. Everything was burnt to the ground, burnt material everywhere. The only buildings I remember seeing left standing were a church and a hospital. Besides us U.S. military, there were also Japanese crews cleaning up the debris. As I looked around, I saw many imprints of bodies in the cement where charred bodies had been removed. I could smell flesh all over the place. To my amazement, I also saw the shadows of people who had been vaporized by the bomb. All over the city, Japanese vendors were selling rice balls with sardines to anyone who would buy it from them. I can still remember the smell of the rice with sardines.

    My first day in Nagasaki, I walked through the hospital there which housed the victims of the bomb. I walked through two wards: one for men and one for babies and children. It seemed to me they were all dying. The nurses were removing maggots from the patients’ burnt and rotting flesh. The men were crying out in agony, reaching out to me, moaning and pleading with me in their language, a language I did not know at all. All the time I was thinking, “They want me to help them. What can I do? I can do nothing!” I was shocked to see so many children badly burned and bandaged, in so much pain and dying. I have thought about this horrible scene over and over in my mind for 60 years. I try to forget it, but I can’t. I still see people in that hospital, even today remembering their faces, their burned bodies, reaching their hands out to me, as though it was yesterday.

    I was honorably discharged in 1966. I came back a changed man. I have experienced depression and PTSD my whole life since then. Ever since my discharge from the Navy, I have had awful nightmares, flailing my arms, thrashing in bed. I hear the children crying and I go outside the house to look for them, but they are not there. In other nightmares, I see the bodies all bloated in the water. And that has stayed with me all these years.

    The bomb on Nagasaki was a plutonium bomb. I have read much about the effects of radiation on the body, especially the lifelong effects of expose to Plutonium. I have experienced all of these medical conditions which are designated by the VA on their list of conditions caused by exposure to radiation: hemorrhaging nostrils (a few days after leaving Nagasaki), severe tonsillitis (2 years after Nagasaki), non-malignant thyroid disease, subcapsular cataracts, prostate cancer, diabetes, chronic fatigue and anemia.

    I have also read that Plutonium, an incredibly dangerous substance, settles in men’s testes. Doctors have told me that my wife, Lily’s illnesses could be attributed to the radiation I received in Nagasaki. She has experienced cervical cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and kidney shutdown. Lily suffered 3 miscarriages and we had one stillborn baby. Of our 4 children, all but one died at a young age. Jose Maria, our son, lived only 24 hours. The doctor said he had incredibly delicate skin. Our son, Ron, died at 32, ending his long ordeal with myasthenia gravis. Our daughter, Rita, also was afflicted with myasthenia gravis, and died at the age of 45. Our doctor told us that it is extremely rare for two members of the same family to have the disease. Our only living child, daughter, Theresa, has had thyroid cancer.

    To anyone who would say that our family just experienced more than our share of “bad luck” with all of these medical problems, I would point out that Lily’s and my parents lived to a ripe old age and there is no history of cancer, birth defects or serious disease in either of our families. Radiation is the weapon that keeps on killing through one’s lifetime, and our family sadly has found this to be true over these many years.

    What I want people to know about the atomic bombing of Nagasaki is that it never should have happened! I would like the people to know that it is so hard to live a happy life after you’ve gone through something like this. You have to actually see it to comprehend it. I went through it, I’ve lived it, and to this day, after 60 years, I still carry radiation in my body. As far as I know, there’s no medical cure for it.

    And I know the Japanese people have really suffered from these nuclear bombings that they experienced, up to today. There’s many, many Japanese who are worse off than I am. They have severe medical problems, cancers and so many different diseases that were caused by the radiation, and keloids from the horrible burns all over their bodies. The Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have really, really suffered, including those people who went back into the city to look for their relatives, and were contaminated by the radiation. Some of these people lived 1 year, 2 years, 5 years. And those who have survived, the Hibakusha, are still having medical problems caused by nuclear radiation 60 years ago.

    It seems to me that the Japanese now want the people all over the world to know how bad this experience was. The Japanese want people to unite to stop all of these governments from making any more nuclear weapons, because they know that most of the people in the world are for stopping the governments from making nuclear weapons.

    Right now, the United States has the biggest supply of bombs, and especially here in Albuquerque, where we have more than 2,400 nuclear bombs stored at Kirtland AFB. And Sandia and Los Alamos labs are thinking of making a more powerful bomb, a bomb that penetrates deep into the ground. What we have to do is unite and see if we can stop them from proceeding and getting these powerful, powerful bombs. And if we unite, I know that we can stop them.

    We want the United States government, and all governments, to stop producing any more weapons of mass destruction, because if they don’t, our future generations will suffer like the Hibakusha of Japan. It’s a crime to leave this inheritance for our children and our grandchildren. May they live in peace.

  • The Soldier as Sacrificial Victim: Awakening from the Nightmare of History

    “BLOOD SACRIFICE PRESERVES THE NATION”

    In Violence and the Sacred and other books, Rene Girard theorizes that sacrificial scapegoating is the fundamental mechanism supporting and sustaining religion and civilized communities. The maintenance of group unity, according to Girard—prevention of discord between members of the community—requires that violence be deflected outward. Society identifies a “scapegoat”—toward which members of the group safely may displace violence. By virtue of the scapegoat mechanism, divisions in the community are reduced to but one division: the division of all against one common victim or minority group.

    Prime candidates for scapegoating, Girard says, are the “marginal and the weak,” a minority group, or those isolated by their very prominence. In this paper, building on my own research and that of Carolyn Marvin, I wish to extend and expand upon Girard’s analysis by focusing on what Marvin calls “insider violence:” the desire to sacrifice members of one’s own group. Specifically, I shall focus on the institution of warfare and to show how the soldier functions as a sacrificial victim.

    Summarizing Girard’s theory in an online article entitled “Visible Victim,” S. Mark Heim states that the scapegoating process does not just accept innocent victims, but prefers them—outsiders who are not closely linked to established groups in society. “The sad good thing that happens as a result of this bad thing,” Heim states, “is that scapegoating actually works.” In the wake of murdering the victim or victims, communities find that the “sudden war of all against one has delivered them from the war of each against all.”

    Girardian scholar Duncan Ragsdale states that “All the kingdoms of the world are based on the scapegoat mechanism.” This mechanism, Ragsdale says, depends on a “collective unknowing” for it to work. The title of one of Girard’s books, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, alludes to this idea of a concealed dynamic that has worked to maintain civilizations from their beginnings. People perform scapegoating, but are not aware of what they are doing, or why. Girard suggests there is profound resistance—in the psychoanalytic sense of the term—toward becoming aware of the victimage mechanism; what amounts to a taboo against knowing.

    In her groundbreaking Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, Carolyn Marvin states that we “misunderstand the genuinely religious character of patriotism.” The power to compel believers to die in the West, she says, has passed from Christianity to the nation-state. Willingness to sacrifice oneself for the community, according to Marvin, constitutes the “ultimate sign of faith in social existence.” Whereas Girard theorizes that preserving the unity of the community requires violence toward an outsider or marginal group, Marvin proposes a more radical hypothesis: that preservation of the nation-state requires sacrificing members of one’s own group.

    The sacrifice of members of one’s own group, Marvin proposes, is the fundamental purpose of the institution of warfare. In our conventional way of thinking, nations go to war to defend the homeland, defeat the enemy, achieve “victory,” etc. Marvin suggests that beneath these declared motives lies the real purpose of warfare, namely the desire or need to sacrifice members of one’s own community. “Blood sacrifice,” Marvin declares, “Preserves the nation.”

    It is the task of the soldier to perform acts of self-sacrifice in the name of the nation. General Douglas MacArthur told graduating West Pointers in 1962 that they as soldiers “above all other men” were required to practice “the greatest act of religious training—sacrifice.” Marvin calls soldiers the “sacrificial class.” Soldiers are that group of people within a nation who are required to “die for their country” when asked to do so. They are the designated sacrificial victims.

    THE FIRST WORLD WAR AS A SACRIFICIAL RITUAL

    My understanding of the sacrificial dynamic of warfare grows out of research on the First World War. This war (1914-1918) is famous for the way in which battles were fought. Soldiers hunkered down in trenches on opposing sides on the Western front: France and Great Britain on one side; Germany on the other. Battles or attacks occurred when a line of soldiers got out of a trench— often several miles in length—and advanced en masse toward the enemy line, where there was a probability that the soldier would be hit by an artillery shell or mowed down by machine-gun fire as he moved forward.

    Historian Modris Eksteins describes the typical pattern of “battle” that characterized the First World War:

    The victimized crowd of attackers in no man’s land has become one of the supreme images of this war. Attackers moved forward usually without seeking cover and were mowed down in rows, with the mechanical efficiency of a scythe, like so many blades of grass. “We were very surprised to see them walking,” wrote a German machine gunner of his experience of a British attack at the Somme. “The officers went in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in the hundreds. You didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.”

    In spite of the absurdity, futility and massive casualties that resulted from this strategy, this way of fighting continued throughout the war’s duration. Most historians agree that the endless battles produced insignificant results, apart from the monumental wastage of lives. Writing about the first two years of the war, Eksteins says that the belligerents on the Western front “hammered at each other in battles that cost millions of men their lives but moved the front line at most a mile or so in either direction.”

    At the Battle of the Somme that began on July 1, 1916, 60,000 men were killed or injured on the first day of the 110,000 on the British front who got out of trenches and began to walk forward along a thirteen-mile front. One would imagine that the British would have received the message and abandoned this disastrous strategy shortly thereafter, but they did not. Day after day, week after week, month after month, soldiers got out of trenches, advanced toward the German line, and were slaughtered. Over 416,000 Britons were killed at the Somme, but the battle lines did not change.

    Even the best historians are mystified, struggling to explain what was going on—the perpetual, senseless carnage. The problem is that their thinking is too conventional. They continue to assume that nations were trying to “win” the war; that it was a question of “victory or defeat.” When pressed to explain the suicidal battle-strategies, commentators say that Generals were held in thrall by an antiquated battle strategy or that they underestimated the power of the machine-gun. Frequently, people throw up their hands in despair and declare that the Generals simply were “stupid.”

    In our conventional way of thinking, we say that a soldier has died because the enemy has killed him. When French and British soldiers got out of trenches to attack and were mowed down by machine gun fire, we say that they were killed by Germans. Likewise, when German soldiers moved forward en masse and were slaughtered by the opposing forces, we say that the French or British killed them. Wouldn’t it be more parsimonious to say that nations and leaders—by putting their soldiers into such an impossible situation—were killing their own men?

    Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that France was killing Frenchmen, that Germany was killing Germans, and that Great Britain killed British soldiers? We disguise the sacrificial meaning of war by delegating their execution to the other nation. The nation, Marvin says, sends its soldiers to die, but is not their visible executioner: “The enemy executes the members of the sacrificial class.”

    Significant political figures of the time seem to have been edified by the spectacle of mass slaughter that occurred during the First World War. Here is what P. H. Pearse, founder of the Irish revolutionary movement, had said upon observing the daily carnage in France:

    The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth. It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.

    Pearse describes the First World War in the language of mythic sacrifice, proclaiming that the heart of the earth needed to be “warmed with the red wine of the battlefield.” He declares that the war is “glorious” and is pleased to observe that “heroism” has come back to the earth. He characterizes slaughter as an offering to God, a form of august homage taking the form of “millions of lives given gladly for love of country.”

    Observing the war as it took its course, French nationalist Maurice Barres wrote that nothing was “more beautiful yet more difficult to understand than these boys, today cold in their graves, who gave themselves for France.” Barres called the early years of war—during which thousands of French soldiers were slaughtered on a daily basis—“marvelous times, in which one may again find himself, times in which the splendor of our profound unity is revealed.” While the young soldiers had been learning the lessons of war through sledgehammer blows and in the furnace of fire, Barres said, the “differences and the divisions, which yesterday seemed insurmountable have today completely disappeared.”

    Like Pearse, it would appear that Barres was thrilled and exhilarated by the death of young men. Barres links the achievement of unity within the French nation—disappearance of “differences and divisions”—directly to the fact that soldiers have been willing to sacrifice their lives. How does the soldier’s death function to produce national unity? Perhaps sacrificial death in warfare is the means by which a people demonstrate that it is devoted to and united behind its sacred ideals. Willingness to send young men to die is the way a nation “puts its money where its mouth is.”

    According to Marvin, “The community celebrates and reveres its insiders turned outsiders. From within the boundaries, the community fears and worships these outsiders it consumes to preserve its life.” Soldiers are celebrated, revered and worshipped because they (like Christ) take the sacrificial burden upon themselves. They are the designated victims who are required to suffer—and perhaps to die—for other members of the group. The soldier is an “insider turned outsider,” member of the community who has been thrust outward from within the nation’s boundaries in order to do battle over there—on foreign soil.

    The task of political and military leaders is to persuade young men of the virtue of sacrifice. This is accomplished by appealing to their narcissism and idealism through the use of words like “honor,” “glory” and “heroism.” In a lecture that formed an important part of the training of British Officers in the First World War, Colonel Shirley stated that his objective was to convince the soldier who had entered the service of his Country to proceed to serve her “with all your heart and with all your soul.” If you have done your best and yet must fall, Colonel Shirley explained to his Officers, you may take comfort in the thought that you will have “suffered for a cause greater and more noble than that for which any man has ever yet sacrificed his all.”

    One million volunteers joined the British army the first year of World War I, 1914. War Office recruiting stands were inundated with men persuaded of their duty to fight. On September 9, 1915 Basil Hart asked his parents not to wear mourning clothes in the event he died. “I do not wish you to regard my death as an occasion for grief,” he said, “but of one for thanksgiving. For no man could desire a nobler end than to die for his country and the cause of civilization.” Frenchman Robert Dubarle wrote similarly, shortly before his death, of the “glorious privilege of sacrificing oneself, voluntarily. Let us try, without complaining too much, to offer our sacrifice to our country and to place the love of fatherland above our own grief.”

    HIDING THE VICTIM

    We’ve noted that Girard believes that in order for it to be effective, the sacrificial mechanism must be disguised or hidden; we avoid knowing what is going on by averting our eyes from the victim. S. Mark Heims states that the working of mythical sacrifice in society requires that people “know not what they do.” He says that the scapegoating mechanism is “most virulent when it is most invisible” and that the effectiveness of the mechanism of sacrificial killing depends on “blindness to its workings.” To “avert one’s eyes from the sight of the real victims,” Heims says, is that “characteristically human act” that lies at the essence of scapegoating.

    Perhaps a similar dynamic is operative in the case of warfare. War as a unifier of the national community works best when people are able to avert their eyes from the sight of the victims; when they don’t have to look closely at what happens to the bodies of soldiers. People enjoy the idea of war, but would prefer to participate at a distance. They would rather not see the maimed bodies. Sight of a soldier’s mutilated body drains warfare of its glory.

    The son of Douglas Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief responsible for the disastrous Battle of the Somme, reports that the General “felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty stations because these visits made him physically ill.” The French Commander Joffre, after pinning a military decoration on a blinded soldier, said to his Staff: “I mustn’t be shown any more such spectacles. I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack.” In war, the body of the soldier is given over to slaughter in the name of the sacred ideal. We want the “beautiful” ideal, but don’t want to look too closely at what happens to the body of the soldier.

    Hypocrisy lies at the heart of the institution of warfare. People plug into the spectacle and relish the fantasy of their nation’s power and glory. They embrace war as a righteous struggle between good and evil. However, most people themselves do not wish to be put in harm’s way. War is enjoyable to the extent that killing, suffering and dying are delegated to someone else. Further, people would rather that the carnage take place somewhere else, at a distance from the homeland.

    George M. Cohan was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his World War I song, Over There. Even now it is difficult to resist this fervent appeal to our idealism and sense of moral responsibility.

    Johnnie, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun, Take it on the run, on the run, on the run, Hear them calling you and me, ev’ry son of liberty Hurry right away, no delay, go today Over there, over there! Send the word; send the word, over there! That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, And we won’t come back ‘til it’s over, Over There!

    What actually was occurring “over there?” John Ellis writes about the sights that stretcher-bearers had to endure as they attempted to recover the bodies lying in “no man’s land.” Some soldiers might be found alive, even semi-conscious, with the lower half of their face sliced off or the top of their head and their brains clearly visible. Men arrived still breathing at the regimental aid posts with holes the size of a football between their shoulder blades. Doctors might gently prise apart the hands of a man clutching his midriff and recoil, sickened, as his intestines spilled out over his trousers. Horrific events such as this occurred a million times over during the First World War.

    Insofar as approximately 53,000 Americans were killed and 204,000 wounded in the First World War, we may assume that tens-of-thousands of American soldiers experienced horrors precisely like the ones described above. What astonishing incongruity between the joyful, optimistic song that emboldened men to become soldiers and the nauseating results of battle. How sad to realize that societies play upon the idealism and good will of young men in order to send them “over there,” where they may become sacrificial victims.

    “BODY-BAGS” AND THE EVOLUTION OF A COUNTER-SACRIFICIAL CULTURE

    Is there no escape from the victimage mechanism; the need to sacrifice human beings in the name of maintaining the sacred community? Girard suggests that just as societies have created the scapegoat mechanism, so powerful forces have evolved that operate in opposition to perpetuating this mechanism. Girard’s writings focus specifically upon historical events and trends acting to generate greater awareness of the victim, and of the victim’s innocence. To the extent that attention is brought to bear upon the victim and his innocence, Girard believes, so does the efficacy of the scapegoating mechanism diminish.

    I theorize that precisely such a mechanism working to bring about greater awareness of the victimage mechanism arose in the United States in relationship to the institution of warfare. I’m referring to the custom (let us use this term for the time being) that developed during the past thirty-five years showing body-bags containing dead American soldiers returning from the field of battle. Televised reports of the body-bags functioned to make it more difficult for people to “avert their eyes.”

    The return of dead soldiers in body bags correlated with the development of a profoundly counter-sacrificial culture in American society. For a long period of time after the Viet Nam war (up until September 11, 2001), there was virtually no international situation that was considered to be worthy of American intervention if it meant that even a single soldier might die in battle. Americans had developed a zero tolerance for casualties. In an October, 1994 article in Newsweek written while the invasion of Haiti was being considered, Jacob Weisberg noted that only about 400 U. S. soldiers had been killed in action in the twenty years since the end of the Vietnam war. This meant that serving in the armed forces was a relatively safe job. Driving a truck was three times riskier than being in the military, driving a taxi six times riskier.

    On the eve of an invasion that did not happen, Richard Cheney appeared on Meet the Press and stated that Haiti was “not worth American lives.” Senator John Glenn suggested that the case for intervention could not pass the “Dover Test,” the televised return of body bags from Port-au-Prince to the Air Force base in Dover, Delaware. Writing in the New York Times on July 16, 1995, Roger Cohen suggested that unwillingness to intervene in Bosnia spelled the “death of Western honor.” Eric Gans noted on June 26, 1999 that the “model of heroism constituted by the sacrifice of the individual life for the sake of the collectivity is rapidly losing its viability.”

    Another milestone in the American experience of war was the movie Saving Private Ryan, depicting the landing of American soldiers on Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944. This was the first time in fifty-four years, according to military authority David M. Hart, that the viciousness and brutality of this amphibious assault had been shown in such graphic detail. For me—and I’m sure for many others—this was the first time that I’d seen battle portrayed as a form of unrelenting slaughter.

    While most movies about the Second World War depict the soldier as an individual possessing a substantial degree of agency—capable of shaping the course of battle—what we see in the famous first half-hour of Saving Private Ryan is how helpless soldiers were; how narrow was their capacity for choice or agency. What occurred essentially was that soldiers jumped off boats into the ocean, where they faced a barrage of machine-guns and artillery shelling. Many soldiers drowned, while others immediately were massacred.

    Luckier soldiers made it to the beach intact, although at this point they continued to be subject to attack and often were killed. Among other horrors, the movie shows body parts floating in the ocean and strewn upon the beach. Carolyn Marvin states that many who participated in the D-Day invasion sensed that they were being sacrificed. “We knew that we were considered to be expendable,” recalled a participant who survived the D-Day invasion. “That was the price of doing it.”

    AWAKENING

    What would it mean to “awaken from the nightmare of history?” In the first place, the ability to awaken means recognizing that we already exist as if in the midst of a bad dream, one however that is occurring within the space of reality or waking life. Many aspects of political history possess the characteristics of a nightmare. One need only turn on the television set or read today’s newspaper to apprehend the “waking nightmare” to which I refer.

    The fact that one is present within “reality” or awake does not mean, however, that one is not dreaming. It is a mistake to equate “reality” with that which is real. War, I suggest, may be conceived as a shared or collective fantasy, like a bad dream that many people are having at the same time. What is the nature of the shared fantasy that is the source of the ideology of war?

    The ideology of war is generated based on the fantasy that nations are real entities— bodies politics—that substantially exist. This fantasy of the nation as an actual body politic is complemented by another one, namely the fantasy that these bodies will continue to exist to the extent that we feed them with sacrificial victims. It is this grotesque fantasy—of sacrificing human bodies for the body politic—that is the source of collective acts of mass-murder manifesting as war and genocide.

    Awakening from the nightmare of history means that we become aware of this sacrificial fantasy and how it functions. Becoming aware of the sacrificial fantasy means perceiving how the “victimage mechanism” operates within human communities (Girard); involves revealing the “totem secret” (Marvin); and implies “making conscious the unconscious on the stage of social reality” (N. O. Brown).

    If the ideology of sacrificial violence depends on “collective unknowing” in order to be effective, perhaps our capacity to know—to become aware of how human beings act to generate this violence—will lead to abandoning this ideology. On the other hand, perhaps it will not. Perhaps the human attachment to the fantasy of society or nation or body politic is so profound that we are unable to live in separation from the idea of these entities.

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  • Amazing Grace and Cindy

    Amazing Grace and Cindy

    There is a wonderful movie, Amazing Grace and Chuck, which came out in 1987. It tells the story of a star Little League pitcher, Chuck, who, along with other youngsters on a field trip visits a missile silo in his home state of Montana. Chuck is an unusually sensitive and decent young person with wisdom beyond his years and the experience makes him aware of the threat to humanity posed by nuclear weapons. Instead of remaining complacent in the face of this threat, like most Americans, Chuck commits himself to doing something about the situation. He decides to give up the most important thing in his life, baseball, in protest of nuclear weapons. He stops pitching for his Little League team until the world is on the path to eliminating these weapons.

    A lot of people in Chuck’s community become upset with him because his protest jeopardizes his team’s chances in the Little League championships. There is considerable pressure on Chuck to conform, get back to his pitching, and just get over it. Chuck is committed, though, and doesn’t capitulate to the pressure. He thinks that nuclear weapons are a real problem, not only because Americans are threatened but also because by their existence tens of million, perhaps hundreds of millions, of innocent people could be annihilated with our nuclear weapons.

    When a small article about Chuck and his protest appears in the national media, a professional basketball star, Amazing Grace, reads about it, and is sympathetic to Chuck and his courageous position. So Amazing Grace decides to join Chuck in Montana, giving up basketball in protest of the threat of US nuclear policies. He announces that he will not be rejoining his team until the problem of nuclear weapons dangers is eliminated and Chuck is willing to go back to pitching. This starts a movement among professional athletes, and pretty soon professional stars from all major sports are showing up in Montana to join Chuck in protest.

    With so many big-time athletes gathered in support of Chuck, the media has little choice but to pay attention to Chuck’s demands. Before long, Chuck’s simple wisdom has captured the imagination of people across America. He has meetings with the President, and forces the President (Gregory Peck) to implement policies leading to global nuclear disarmament.

    Chuck’s fictional story, one that every American should know about, has a lot in common with the story of Cindy Sheehan. Chuck responded to the dangers of US nuclear policies after becoming aware of them. Cindy responded to the tragedy of her son’s death as a US soldier in Iraq. Both wanted answers from the US President and both aroused interest and concern throughout the country. Chuck got his meeting with the President and the President agreed to new policies. So far, Cindy, who is camped out outside the President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, has gotten the cold shoulder from Mr. Bush, while he tries to get on with his vacation and fundraising.

    But Cindy has put the eyes of the world on Mr. Bush and his Iraq War policies. Mr. Bush has said that US troops are dying for a “noble cause” in Iraq. Cindy Sheehan wants Mr. Bush to tell her what the “noble cause” is that her son, Casey, died for in Iraq. Cindy’s presence in Crawford reminds her fellow citizens that Mr. Bush and many of his top officials lied to the American people, the US Congress and the world about nuclear weapons in Iraq. Her presence in Crawford reminds her fellow citizens that the President is on another of his long vacations while US soldiers continue to die in Iraq. Her presence in Crawford challenges the President’s veracity, his competence and his compassion. Her presence in Crawford reveals a President lacking in the courage to answer a grieving mother’s questions about what purpose her son died for in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

    Cindy Sheehan’s stand in Crawford is sending a powerful message to the American people, just as Chuck’s fictional protest did. Cindy’s protest is forcing Americans to probe deeper and to not accept the facile responses of the administration in the increasingly deteriorating situation in Iraq. Cindy Sheehan is a true American hero, reminding us of the power of one. She is forcing Americans to wake up and pay attention to a war that is continuing to spill the blood of young Americans, drain our resources, and stretch our military to its limits. She is forcing Americans to face her grief, and that of other soldiers’ relatives, who suspect that there is no nobility in fighting and dying under the false pretenses of this war – a war that appears to many Americans to be for oil and military bases in an oil-rich country rather than for any noble cause.

    Mr. Bush owes Cindy an honest answer to her question, and the rest of America should be standing shoulder to shoulder with Cindy. It is long past time that Mr. Bush and his colleagues be held to account for their policies in Iraq. We should also be demanding that Mr. Bush provide the American people with answers to the questions the fictional Chuck posed to his President in Amazing Grace and Chuck concerning the continuing dangers of US nuclear policies and the obstacles these policies pose to global nuclear disarmament.

    Cindy Sheehan’s courage should help restore our faith in the power of individuals to speak truth to power and make a difference. Her protest is in the best traditions of this country, those of Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez. She has showered us all with her Amazing Grace.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), and the author of a recent book of peace poetry, Today Is Not a Good Day for War.

  • Live 8: Corporate Media Bonanza

    Live 8, “the greatest concert” ever aired live, has been presented to World public opinion as an “awareness campaign” in solidarity with Africa. Its stated objective was to put pressure on the Group of Eight leaders (G8) to increase foreign aid flows and cancel the debt of the World’s poorest countries.

    In the words of its promoter Bob Geldof, Live 8 has provided a “unique opportunity” to save a continent from a humanitarian disaster.

    The Live 8 concerts organized in the eight major industrial countries (as well as in South Africa), however, were not intended to raise money for the World’s poorest countries.

    In fact quite the opposite.

    Live 8 is a multimillion dollar undertaking, which will result in huge profits for its corporate sponsors including AOL Time Warner, the US based media giant, the Ford Motor company, through its Swedish affiliate Volvo and Nokia, the cell phone company, not to mention Britain’s EMI Music Group, which has entered into a highly lucrative arrangement with the Live 8 organizers.

    AOLTime Warner controls the US broadcasting rights which it has licenced to the Walt Disney Company for broadcast TV on ABC and a myriad of affiliated TV and radio stations, including Premiere Radio Networks, XM Satellite Radio and Viacom’s MTV Networks (for cable TV). AOL also holds the exclusive online rights for the event on the internet.

    TV air-time has been auctioned off around the world. Millions of dollars of advertising revenues are expected from the broadcasting of the event, not to mention the repeats, the video-clips, the internet broadcasting and the DVDs, which will be available commercially.

    According to the producers, Live 8 will go down as “the biggest global broadcast in history“. The organizers expect –through TV, radio and the internet– to reach some 5.5 billion people, or 85 per cent of the world’s population. The advertising industry places the number of potential viewers at a conservative two billion, approximately one third of the World’s population.

    By far this is largest media advertising operation in history, which will line the pockets of the promoters, producers, corporate sponsors, not to mention the royalties accruing to the performers and “celebrities”. A small percentage of the proceeds might accrue to charitable organizations involved in developing countries but this is not the stated objective of Live 8.

    The Ford Motor Company has used the event to promote its “up-market” Swedish car division Volvo, with advertising spots during the US broadcast.

    Volvo has also provided for artist transportation to and from the London and Philadelphia concerts as well as a VIP entertainment suite at the Philadelphia concert. (See www.adage.com/news, June 30, 2005).

    “The event, said company spokesman Soren Johansson, “fits with the DNA of the company” and “appeals to peoples emotions.” One of Volvo’s TV spots features ’Volvo for Life” award-winner Rosamond Carr, “who operates an orphanage in Rwanda, and two others talking about Volvos values and their reasons for Live 8 involvement.” (Ibid)

    Moreover, Vonage, the US based phone company is said to have spent “’six figures’ to become a primary sponsor of Premiere Radio Networkscoverage“. And will also run a Live 8 schedule on MTV Networks.

    The EMI Deal

    In a multimillion dollar agreement with the Live 8 organizers, Britain’s EMI Music Group has secured the exclusive rights on the DVDs of the concerts in six of the G8 countries including the US, France, Britain, UK, Italy and Germany:

    “An EMI spokeswoman said that once sales had paid for the advance, Live 8 would pay a ’very generous royalty rate’ to Live 8 on the rest of the sales.”

    In the words, of Bob Geldof, “I hope this will be the biggest-selling DVD of all time.”

    Meanwhile, the event has contributed to boosting stock market values with EMI’s share price triple its 2003 level.

    Distorting the Causes of Global Poverty

    The concerts are totally devoid of political content. They concentrate on simple and misleading clichés.

    They use poverty as a marketing tool and a consumer-advertising gimmick to increase the number of viewers and listeners worldwide.

    Live 8 creates an aura of optimism. It conveys the impression that poverty can be vanquished with the stroke of the pen. All we need is good will. The message is that G8 leaders, together with the World Bank and the IMF, are ultimately committed to poverty alleviation.

    In this regard, the concerts are part of the broader process of media disinformation. They are used as a timely public relations stunt for Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is hosting the G-8 Summit at Gleneagles, Scotland. Tony Blair is presented as stepping up his campaign to convince other G8 nations “to take action on poverty“.

    The G8’s Debt Forgiveness Proposal

    Live 8 fails to challenge or comprehend the G8 policy agenda which directly contributes to creating poverty, nor does it question the role of the World Bank, now under the helm of Paul Wolfowitz, the neo-conservative architect of the invasion of Iraq,

    In addressing the issue of debt forgiveness, Live 8 does not even acknowledge the impacts of IMF-World Bank “economic medicine” imposed on the World’s poorest countries on behalf of Western creditors.

    These deadly macro-economic reforms have contributed to the impoverishment of miillions of people. They oblige countries to close down their schools and hospitals, privatize their public services and sell off the most profitable sectors of their national economy to foreign capital. In return, the G8 promises to increase foreign aid and provide token debt relief. These reforms kill and the G8 is not the solution but the cause. Actor Will Smith addressed the crowds at the concert venues “to snap their fingers” as a reminder that every three seconds a child dies in Africa. What he failed to mention is that the main cause of child mortality in Africa are the deadly macroeconomic reforms.

    Bob Geldof sees an increase in foreign aid completely out of context, as a “unique opportunity” to eradicating poverty, when in fact the proposed increase in aid flows by the rich G8 countries will lead to exactly the opposite results.

    A large percentage of the debt of these countries is owed to the World Bank, the IMF and the African Development Bank

    To address this issue, G8 finance ministers had indeed put forth a proposal which consisted in “foregiving” the outstanding debt owed to these three international financial institutions by the 18 highly indebted countries. The debt forgiveness figure mentioned was of the order of 40 billion dollars. Concurrently, there was a vague commitment to eventually increasing foreign aid flows to the 0.7% of GDP target. (http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/finance/fm050611_dev.htm)

    Where is the hitch behind this seemingly reasonable “debt forgiveness” proposal?

    The IMF, the World Bank and the African Development Bank, never cancel or forgive outstanding debts.

    Because they do not forgive debts, the G8 has committed itself to reimbursing the multilateral creditors acting on behalf of the World’s poorest countries.

    Where will they get the money?

    For each dollar of “debt cancellation” to the international financial institutions, the G8 will reduce the flow of foreign aid to these countries. In other words, the foreign aid earmarked to finance much needed social programs will now go directly into the coffers of the IMF and the World Bank.

    There is nothing new in this financial mechanism. It has been used time and again since the onslaught of the debt crisis.

    “Social Safety Net” for the IMF and the World Bank

    What we are dealing with is not a debt forgiveness program, but a “reimbursement” process which directly serves the interests of the creditors.

    The deal constitutes a much needed “social safety net” for the multilateral creditors. It ensures a cash flow towards these institutions, while maintaining the World’s poorest countries in the stranglehold of the IMF and the World Bank. It also prevents these countries from declaring default on their external debt.

    President Bush has made it very clear. The money paid to the World Bank on behalf of the countries, will be “taken out of existing aid budgets.”

    The “debt forgiveness” program, even if it is accompanied by an increase in foreign aid commitments, will result in a significant compression of real foreign aid flows to the highly indebted countries.

    The proposed increases in foreign aid commitments are ficticious since the money is intended for the multilateral creditors. And the deal will only be implemented if the indebted countries promise to carry out the usual gamut of “free market” reforms, under IMF/World Bank supervision.

    An added condition emanating directly from the Bush administration pertains to “governance”. It requires these countries to “democratize” on the US model under Western supervision, as well as carry out “free elections” on the example of Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Concluding Remarks

    The concerts serve to usefully distract public attention from the US-UK led war on Iraq and the broader relationship between war and global poverty. Not a word is mentioned in the concerts on the fact that George W. Bush and Tony Blair are considered “war criminals” under international law.

    Moreover, Live 8 tends to undermine all forms of meaningful and articulate dissent to the G8 policy agenda. With the exception of the South African venue, which included the appearance of Nelson Mandela, the concerts are devoid of a broader understanding and commitment.

    Live 8 undermines both the anti-globalization and anti-war movements. It diverts public opinion and distracts media attention from the G8 protest movement. It also serves to undermine the articulation of more radical voices against the New World Order.

    More generally, the event instills an atmosphere of ignorance among the millions who listen to the music and who have the feeling of doing something positive and constructive. But none of the core elements needed to understand the causes of global poverty are presented.

    To the Live 8 corporate sponsors, including Bob Geldof, the EMI Group, AOL Time Warner, The Ford Motor Company, Nokia, MTV, the Walt Disney Company, etc. “Put your money where you mouth is.”

    If you are really committed to poverty alleviation, give the entire proceeds of this multimillion dollar media operation, including the revenues generated by the corporate sponsors, TV networks, advertising firms, royalties accruing to celebrities and performers, to the people of Africa. Let them use this money as they see fit, without interference from donors and creditors.

    To the people of Africa. Do not let yourself be deceived by a giant corporate media stunt where poverty is used as a logo, to attract consumers and make money. Default on your debt to the IMF and the World Bank.

    Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), He is the author of The Globalization of Poverty and the New World, Second Edition, Global Research, 2003.

  • Navy Judge Finds War Protest Reasonable

    “I think that the government has successfully proved that any service member has reasonable cause to believe that the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal.” — Lt. Cmdr. Robert Klant, presiding at Pablo Paredes’ court-martial

    In a stunning blow to the Bush administration, a Navy judge gave Petty Officer 3rd Class Pablo Paredes no jail time for refusing orders to board the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard before it left San Diego with 3,000 sailors and Marines bound for the Persian Gulf on December 6th. Lt. Cmdr. Robert Klant found Pablo guilty of missing his ship’s movement by design, but dismissed the charge of unauthorized absence. Although Pablo faced one year in the brig, the judge sentenced him to two months’ restriction and three months of hard labor, and reduced his rank to seaman recruit.

    “This is a huge victory,” said Jeremy Warren, Pablo’s lawyer. “A sailor can show up on a Navy base, refuse in good conscience to board a ship bound for Iraq, and receive no time in jail,” Warren added. Although Pablo is delighted he will not to go jail, he still regrets that he was convicted of a crime. He told the judge at sentencing: “I am guilty of believing this war is illegal. I am guilty of believing war in all forms is immoral and useless, and I am guilty of believing that as a service member I have a duty to refuse to participate in this War because it is illegal.”

    Pablo maintained that transporting Marines to fight in an illegal war, and possibly to commit war crimes, would make him complicit in those crimes. He told the judge, “I believe as a member of the armed forces, beyond having a duty to my chain of command and my President, I have a higher duty to my conscience and to the supreme law of the land. Both of these higher duties dictate that I must not participate in any way, hands-on or indirect, in the current aggression that has been unleashed on Iraq.”

    Pablo said he formed his views about the illegality of the war by reading truthout.org, listening to Democracy Now!, and reading articles by Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Naomi Klein, Stephen Zunes, and Marjorie Cohn, as well as Kofi Annan’s statements that the war is illegal under the UN Charter, and material on the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals.

    I testified at Pablo’s court-martial as a defense expert on the legality of the war in Iraq, and the commission of war crimes by US forces. My testimony corroborated the reasonableness of Pablo’s beliefs. I told the judge that the war violates the United Nations Charter, which forbids the use of force, unless carried out in self-defense or with the approval of the Security Council, neither of which obtained before Bush invaded Iraq. I also said that torture and inhuman treatment, which have been documented in Iraqi prisons, constitute grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and are considered war crimes under the US War Crimes Statute. The United States has ratified both the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, making them part of the supreme law of the land under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

    I noted that the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires that all military personnel obey lawful orders. Article 92 of the UCMJ says, “A general order or regulation is lawful unless it is contrary to the Constitution, the laws of the United States….” Both the Nuremberg Principles and the Army Field Manual create a duty to disobey unlawful orders. Article 509 of Field Manual 27-10, codifying another Nuremberg Principle, specifies that “following superior orders” is not a defense to the commission of war crimes, unless the accused “did not know and could not reasonably have been expected to know that the act ordered was unlawful.”

    I concluded that the Iraq war is illegal. US troops who participate in the war are put in a position to commit war crimes. By boarding that ship and delivering Marines to Iraq – to fight in an illegal war, and possibly to commit war crimes – Pablo would have been complicit in those crimes. Therefore, orders to board that ship were illegal, and Pablo had a duty to disobey them.

    On cross-examination, Navy prosecutor Lt. Jonathan Freeman elicited testimony from me that the US wars in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan also violated the UN Charter, as neither was conducted in self-defense or with the blessing of the Security Council. Upon the conclusion of my testimony, the judge said, “I think that the government has successfully proved that any service member has reasonable cause to believe that the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal.”

    The Navy prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Pablo to nine months in the brig, forfeiture of pay and benefits, and a bad conduct discharge. Lt. Brandon Hale argued that Pablo’s conduct was “egregious,” that Pablo could have “slinked away with his privately-held beliefs quietly.” The public nature of Pablo’s protest made it more serious, according to the chief prosecuting officer.

    But Pablo’s lawyer urged the judge not to punish Pablo more harshly for exercising his right of free speech. Pablo refused to board the ship not, as many others, for selfish reasons, but rather as an act of conscience, Warren said.

    “Pablo’s victory is an incredible boon to the anti-war movement,” according to Warren. Since December 6th, Pablo has had a strong support network. Camilo Mejia, a former Army infantryman who spent nine months in the brig at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for refusing to return to Iraq after a military leave, was present throughout Pablo’s court-martial. Tim Goodrich, co-founder of Iraq Veterans against the War, also attended the court-martial. “We have all been to Iraq, and we support anyone who stands in nonviolent opposition,” he said. Fernando Suárez del Solar and Cindy Sheehan, both of whom lost sons in Iraq, came to defend Pablo.

    The night before his sentencing, many spoke at a program in support of Pablo. Mejia thanked Pablo for bringing back the humanity and doubts about the war into people’s hearts. Sheehan, whose son, K.C., died two weeks after he arrived in Iraq, said, “I was told my son was killed in the war on terror. He was killed by George Bush’s war of terror on the world.”

    Aidan Delgado, who received conscientious objector status after spending nine months in Iraq, worked in the battalion headquarters at the Abu Ghraib prison. Confirming the Red Cross’s conclusion that 70 to 90 percent of the prisoners were there by mistake, Delgado said that most were suspected only of petty theft, public drunkenness, forging documents and impersonating officials. “At Abu Ghraib, we shot prisoners for protesting their conditions; four were killed,” Delgado maintained. He has photographs of troops “scooping their brains out.”

    Pablo’s application for conscientious objector status is pending. He has one year of Navy service left. If his C.O. application is granted, he could be released. Or he could receive an administrative discharge. Worst case scenario, he could be sent back to Iraq. But it is unlikely the Navy will choose to go through this again.

  • Wake Up! Washington’s Alarming Foreign Policy

    The Rubicon is a small stream in northern Italy just south of the city of Ravenna. During the prime of the RomanRepublic, roughly the last two centuries B.C., it served as a northern boundary protecting the heartland of Italy and the city of Rome from its own imperial armies. An ancient Roman law made it treason for any general to cross the Rubicon and enter Italy proper with a standing army. In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar, Rome’s most brilliant and successful general, stopped with his army at the Rubicon, contemplated what he was about to do, and then plunged south. The Republic exploded in civil war, Caesar became dictator and then in 44 B.C. was assassinated in the Roman Senate by politicians who saw themselves as ridding the Republic of a tyrant. However, Caesar’s death generated even more civil war, which ended only in 27 B.C. when his grand nephew, Octavian, took the title Augustus Caesar, abolished the Republic and established a military dictatorship with himself as “emperor” for life. Thus ended the great Roman experiment with democracy. Ever since, the phrase “to cross the Rubicon” has been a metaphor for starting on a course of action from which there is no turning back. It refers to the taking of an irrevocable step.

    I believe that on November 2, 2004, the United States crossed its own Rubicon. Until last year’s presidential election, ordinary citizens could claim that our foreign policy, including the invasion of Iraq, was George Bush’s doing and that we had not voted for him. In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote and was appointed president by the Supreme Court. In 2004, he garnered 3.5 million more votes than John Kerry. The result is that Bush’s war changed into America’s war and his conduct of international relations became our own.

    This is important because it raises the question of whether restoring sanity and prudence to American foreign policy is still possible. During the Watergate scandal of the early ’70s, the president’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, once reproved White House counsel John Dean for speaking too frankly to Congress about the felonies President Nixon had ordered. “John,” he said, “once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s very hard to get it back in.” This homely warning by a former advertising executive who was to spend 18 months in prison for his own role in Watergate fairly accurately describes the situation of the United States after the reelection of George W. Bush.

    James Weinstein, the founding editor of In These Times, recently posed for me the question “How should US foreign policy be changed so that the United States can play a more positive role on the world stage?” For me, this raises at least three different problems that are interrelated. The first must be solved before we can address the second, and the second has to be corrected before it even makes sense to take up the third.

    Sinking the Ship of State

    First, the United States faces the imminent danger of bankruptcy, which, if it occurs, will render all further discussion of foreign policy moot. Within the next few months, the mother of all financial crises could ruin us and turn us into a North American version of Argentina, once the richest country in South America. To avoid this we must bring our massive trade and fiscal deficits under control and signal to the rest of the world that we understand elementary public finance and are not suicidally indifferent to our mounting debts.

    Second, our appalling international citizenship must be addressed. We routinely flout well-established norms upon which the reciprocity of other nations in their relations with us depends. This is a matter not so much of reforming our policies as of reforming attitudes. If we ignore this, changes in our actual foreign policies will not even be noticed by other nations of the world. I have in mind things like the Army’s and the CIA’s secret abduction and torture of people; the trigger-happy conduct of our poorly trained and poorly led troops in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; and our ideological bullying of other cultures because of our obsession with abortion and our contempt for international law (particularly the International Criminal Court) as illustrated by Bush’s nomination of John R. “Bonkers” Bolton to be US ambassador to the United Nations.

    Third, if we can overcome our imminent financial crisis and our penchant for boorish behavior abroad, we might then be able to reform our foreign policies. Among the issues here are the slow-moving evolutionary changes in the global balance of power that demand new approaches. The most important evidence that our life as the “sole” superpower is going to be exceedingly short is the fact that our monopoly of massive military power is being upstaged by other forms of influence. Chief among these is China’s extraordinary growth and our need to adjust to it.

    Let me discuss each of these three problems in greater depth.

    In 2004, the United States imported a record $617.7 billion more than it exported, a 24.4 percent increase over 2003. The annual deficit with China was $162 billion, the largest trade imbalance ever recorded by the United States with a single country. Equally important, as of March 9, 2005, the public debt of the United States was just over $7.7 trillion and climbing, making us easily the world’s largest net debtor nation. Refusing to pay for its profligate consumption patterns and military expenditures through taxes on its own citizens, the United States is financing these outlays by going into debt to Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and India. This situation has become increasingly unstable, as the United States requires capital imports of at least $2 billion per day to pay for its governmental expenditures. Any decision by Asian central banks to move significant parts of their foreign exchange reserves out of the dollar and into the euro or other currencies in order to protect themselves from dollar depreciation will likely produce a meltdown of the American economy. On February 21, 2005, the Korean central bank, which has some $200 billion in reserves, quietly announced that it intended to “diversify the currencies in which it invests.” The dollar fell sharply and the US stock market (although subsequently recovering) recorded its largest one-day fall in almost two years. This small incident is evidence of the knife-edge on which we are poised.

    Japan possesses the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, which at the end of January 2005 stood at around $841 billion. But China also sits on a $609.9 billion pile of US cash, earned from its trade surpluses with us. Meanwhile, the American government insults China in every way it can, particularly over the status of China’s breakaway province, the island of Taiwan. The distinguished economic analyst William Greider recently noted, “Any profligate debtor who insults his banker is unwise, to put it mildly. … American leadership has … become increasingly delusional – I mean that literally – and blind to the adverse balance of power accumulating against it.”

    These deficits and dependencies represent unusual economic statistics for a country with imperial pretensions. In the 19th century, the British Empire ran huge current account surpluses, which allowed it to ignore the economic consequences of disastrous imperialist ventures like the Boer War. On the eve of the First World War, Britain had a surplus amounting to 7 percent of its GDP. America’s current account deficit is close to 6 percent of our GDP.

    In order to regain any foreign confidence in the sanity of our government and the soundness of our policies, we need, at once, to reverse President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, including those on capital gains and estates (the rich are so well off they’ll hardly notice it), radically reduce our military expenditures, and stop subsidizing agribusinesses and the military-industrial complex. Only a few years ago the United States enjoyed substantial federal surpluses and was making inroads into its public debt. If we can regain fiscal solvency, the savers of Asia will probably continue to finance our indebtedness. If we do not, we risk a fear-driven flight from the dollar by all our financiers, collapse of our stock exchange and global recession for a couple of years – from which the rest of the world will ultimately emerge. But by then we who no longer produce much of anything valuable will have become a banana republic. Debate over our foreign policy will become irrelevant. We will have become dependent on the kindness of strangers.

    Ugly Americans

    Meanwhile, the bad manners of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their band of neoconservative fanatics from the American Enterprise Institute dominate the conduct of American foreign policy. It is simply unacceptable that after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal Congress has so far failed to launch an investigation into those in the executive branch who condoned it. It is equally unacceptable that the president’s chief apologist for the official but secret use of torture is now the attorney general, that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld did not resign, and that the seventh investigation of the military by the military (this time headed by Vice Admiral Albert Church III) again whitewashed all officers and blamed only a few unlucky enlisted personnel on the night shift in one cellblock of Abu Ghraib prison. Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and a veteran of 23 years of service as an army officer, says in his book The New American Militarism of these dishonorable incidents: “The Abu Ghraib debacle showed American soldiers not as liberators but as tormentors, not as professionals but as sadists getting cheap thrills.” Until this is corrected, a president and secretary of state bloviating about freedom and democracy is received by the rest of the world as mere window-dressing.

    Foreign policy analysts devote considerable attention to the concept of “credibility” – whether or not a nation is trustworthy. There are several ways to lose one’s credibility. One is to politicize intelligence, as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney did in preparing for their preventive war against Iraq. Today, only a fool would take at face value something said by the CIA or our other secret intelligence services. China has already informed us that it does not believe our intelligence on North Korea, and our European allies have said the same thing about our apocalyptic estimates on Iran.

    Similarly, our bloated military establishment routinely makes pronouncements that are untrue. The scene of a bevy of generals and admirals – replete with campaign ribbons marching up and over their left shoulders – baldly lying to congressional committees is familiar to any viewer of our network newscasts.

    For example, on February 3, 1998, Marine pilots were goofing off in a military jet and cut the cables of a ski lift in northern Italy, plunging 20 individuals to their deaths. The Marine Corps did everything in its power to avoid responsibility for the disaster, then brought the pilots back to the States for court-martial, dismissed the case as an accident and exonerated the pilots. The Italians haven’t forgotten either the incident or how the United States treated an ally. On March 4, 2005, American soldiers opened fire on a civilian car en route to Baghdad airport, killing a high-ranking Italian intelligence officer and wounding the journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who had just been released by kidnappers. The US military immediately started its cover-up, claiming that the car was speeding, that the soldiers had warned it with lights and warning shots and that the Italians had given no prior notice of the trip. Sgrena has contradicted everything our military said. The White House has called it a “horrific accident,” but whatever the explanation, we have once again made one of our closest European allies look like dupes for cooperating with us.

    In its arrogance and overconfidence, the Bush administration has managed to convince the rest of the world that our government is incompetent. The administration has not only tried to undercut treaties it finds inconvenient but refuses to engage in normal diplomacy with its allies to make such treaties more acceptable. Thus, administration representatives simply walked away from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming that tried to rein in carbon dioxide emissions, claiming that the economic costs were too high. (The United States generates far more such emissions than any other country.) All of the United States’ democratic allies continued to work on the treaty despite our boycott. On July 23, 2001, in Bonn, Germany, a compromise was reached on the severity of the cuts in emissions advanced industrial nations would have to make and on the penalties to be imposed if they do not, resulting in a legally binding treaty so far endorsed by more than 180 nations. The modified Kyoto Protocol is hardly perfect, but it is a start toward the reduction of greenhouse gases.

    Similarly, the United States and Israel walked out of the United Nations conference on racism held in Durban, South Africa, in August and September 2001. The nations that stayed on eventually voted down Syrian demands that language accusing Israel of racism be included. The conference’s final statement also produced an apology for slavery as a “crime against humanity” but did so without making slaveholding nations liable for reparations. Given the history of slavery in the United States and the degree to which the final document was adjusted to accommodate American concerns, our walkout seemed to be yet another display of imperial arrogance – a bald-faced message that “we” do not need “you” to run this world.

    Until the United States readopts the norms of civilized discourse among nations, it can expect other nations – quietly and privately – to do everything in their power to isolate and disengage from us.

    Future Reforms

    If through some miracle we were able to restore fiscal rationality, honesty and diplomacy to their rightful places in our government, then we could turn to reforming our foreign policies. First and foremost, we should get out of Iraq and demand that Congress never again fail to honor article 1, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution giving it the exclusive power to go to war. After that, I believe the critical areas in need of change are our policies toward Israel, imported oil, China and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, although the environment and relations with Latin America may be equally important.

    Perhaps the most catastrophic error of the Bush administration was to abandon the policies of all previous American administrations to seek an equitable peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Bush instead joined Ariel Sharon in his expropriation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. As a result, the United States has lost all credibility, influence and trust in the Islamic world. In July 2004, Zogby International Surveys polled 3,300 Arabs in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. When asked whether respondents had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of the United States, the “unfavorables” ranged from 69 to 98 percent. In the year 2000 there were 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide, some 22 percent of the global population; through our policies we have turned most of them against the United States. We should resume at once the role of honest broker between the Israelis and Palestinians that former President Clinton pioneered.

    The United States imports about 3.8 billion barrels of oil a year, or about 10.6 million barrels a day. These imports are at the highest levels ever recorded and come increasingly from Persian Gulf countries. A cut-off of Saudi Arabia’s ability or willingness to sell its oil to us would, at the present time, constitute an economic catastrophe. By using currently available automotive technologies as well as those being incorporated today in new Toyota and Honda automobiles, we could end our entire dependency on Persian Gulf oil. We should do that before we are forced to do so.

    China’s gross domestic product in 2004 grew at a rate of 9.5 percent, easily the fastest among big countries. It is today the world’s sixth largest economy with a GDP of $1.4 trillion. It has also become the trading partner of choice for the developing world, absorbing huge amounts of food, raw materials, machinery and computers. Can the United States adjust peacefully to the reemergence of China – the world’s oldest, continuously extant civilization – this time as a modern superpower? Or is China’s ascendancy to be marked by yet another world war like those of the last century? That is what is at stake. A rich, capitalist China is not a threat to the United States and cooperation with it is our best guarantee of military security in the Pacific.

    Nothing is more threatening to our nation than the spread of nuclear weapons. We developed a good policy with the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which with its 188 adherents is the most widely supported arms control agreement ever enacted. Only India, Israel and Pakistan remained outside its terms until January 10, 2003, when North Korea withdrew. Under the treaty, the five nuclear-weapons states (the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom) agree to undertake nuclear disarmament, while the non-nuclear-weapons states agree not to develop or acquire such weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is authorized to inspect the non-nuclear-weapons states to ensure compliance. The Bush administration has virtually ruined this international agreement by attempting to denigrate the IAEA, by tolerating nuclear weapons in India, Israel, and Pakistan while fomenting wars against Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and by planning to develop new forms of nuclear weapons. Our policy should be to return at once to this established system of controls.

    Finally, the most important change we could make in American policy would be to dismantle our imperial presidency and restore a balance among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government. The massive and secret powers of the Department of Defense and the CIA have subverted the republican structure of our democracy and left us exposed to the real danger of a military takeover. Reviving our constitutional system would do more than anything else to protect our peace and security.

    Chalmers Johnson is the author of the Blowback Trilogy. The first two books of which, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic – are now available in paperback. The third volume is being written.

    Originally published by In These Times – Online

  • Increasing the Nuclear Threat: A Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post

    In his Nov. 16 op-ed piece, “New Threats, Old Weapons,” retired Adm. Robert R. Monroe said that to have a more effective deterrent against rogue states and terrorist groups, we need a new generation of nuclear weapons.

    His notion that a leaner nuclear arsenal will deter rogue states and terrorist groups from using nuclear weapons to harm us presumes that we are dealing with reasonable adversaries. Given the tactics that terrorists use, that is a naive assumption.

    Further, the Bush administration’s January 2002 Nuclear Posture Review stresses the importance of being prepared to use nuclear weapons in an offensive manner and against a wider range of countries, even those that are not nuclear. In my view, the president’s initiatives to develop additional nuclear weapons are not about deterrence but about adding a tool to our military arsenal.

    Adm. Monroe said that we must have nuclear weapons with “greatly increased accuracy,” “specialized capabilities” and “tailored effects.” But according to Stanford University physicist Sidney Drell, the effects of even a small nuclear bunker buster would be disastrous. A one-kiloton weapon detonated 20 to 50 feet underground would dig a crater the size of Ground Zero and eject a million cubic feet of radioactive debris into the air.

    Our reopening the nuclear door to a new generation of weapons will only encourage proliferation. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent statement that Russia is developing new nuclear missile systems is testimony to that effect.

    This year Congress eliminated funding for new nuclear weapons programs in the recent appropriations bill. This was the right move because, to make our nation safer from nuclear threats, the best investment we could make is to secure nuclear materials at facilities around the world while insisting that other nations follow us down the path of nonproliferation.

    Dianne Feinstein U.S. Senator (D-Calif.) Washington

  • … Unless It’s All Greek to Him

    During a lull in the war between Athens and Sparta , the Athenians decided to invade and occupy Sicily . Thucydides tells us in “The Peloponnesian War” that “they were, for the most part, ignorant of the size of the island and the numbers of its inhabitants . and they did not realize that they were taking on a war of almost the same magnitude as their war against the Peloponnesians.”

    According to Thucydides, the digression into Sicily in 416 BC – a sideshow that involved lying exiles, hopeful contractors, politicized intelligence, a doctrine of preemption – ultimately cost Athens everything, including its democracy.

    Nicias, the most experienced Athenian general, had not wanted to be chosen for the command. “His view was that the city was making a mistake and, on a slight pretext which looked reasonable, was in fact aiming at conquering the whole of Sicily – a considerable undertaking indeed,” wrote Thucydides.

    Nicias warned that it was the wrong war against the wrong enemy and that the Athenians were ignoring their real enemies – the Spartans – while creating new enemies elsewhere. “It is senseless to go against people who, even if conquered, could not be controlled,” he argued.

    Occupying Sicily would require many soldiers, Nicias insisted, because it meant establishing a new government among enemies. “Those who do this [must] either become masters of the country on the very first day they land in it, or be prepared to recognize that, if they fail to do so, they will find hostility on every side.”

    The case for war, meanwhile, was made by the young general Alcibiades, who was hoping for a quick victory in Sicily so he could move on to conquer Carthage . Alcibiades, who’d led a dissolute youth (and who happened to own a horse ranch, raising Olympic racers) was a battle-tested soldier, a brilliant diplomat and a good speaker. (So much for superficial similarities.)

    Alcibiades intended to rely on dazzling technology – the Athenian armada – instead of traditional foot soldiers. He told the Assembly he wasn’t worried about Sicilian resistance because the island’s cities were filled with people of so many different groups. “Such a crowd as this is scarcely likely either to pay attention to one consistent policy or to join together in concerted action.. The chances are that they will make separate agreements with us as soon as we come forward with attractive suggestions.”

    Another argument for the war was that it would pay for itself. A committee of Sicilian exiles and Athenian experts told the Assembly that there was enough wealth in Sicily to pay the costs of the war and occupation. “The report was encouraging but untrue,” wrote Thucydides.

    Though war was constant in ancient Greece , it was still usually justified by a threat, an insult or an incident. But the excursion against Sicily was different, and Alcibiades announced a new, or at least normally unstated, doctrine.

    “One does not only defend oneself against a superior power when one is attacked: One takes measures in advance to prevent the attack materializing,” he said.

    When and where should this preemption doctrine be applied? Alcibiades gave an answer of a sort. “It is not possible for us to calculate, like housekeepers [perhaps a better translation would be “girlie men”], exactly how much empire we want to have. The fact is that we have reached a state where we are forced to plan new conquests and forced to hold on to what we have got because there is danger that we ourselves may fall under the power of others unless others are in our power.”

    Alcibiades’ argument carried the day, but before the invasion, the Athenian fleet sailed around seeking allies among the Hellenic colonies near Sicily . Despite the expedition’s “great preponderance of strength over those against whom it set out,” only a couple of cities joined the coalition.

    At home, few spoke out against the Sicilian operation. “There was a passion for the enterprise which affected everyone alike,” Thucydides reports. “The result of this excessive enthusiasm of the majority was that the few who actually were opposed to the expedition were afraid of being thought unpatriotic if they voted against it, and therefore kept quiet.”

    In the face of aggressive posturing, Nicias appealed to the Assembly members to show true courage.

    “If any of you is sitting next to one of [Alcibiades’] supporters,” Nicias said, “do not allow yourself to be browbeaten or to be frightened of being called a coward if you do not vote for war.. Our country is on the verge of the greatest danger she has ever known. Think of her, hold up your hands against this proposal and vote in favor of leaving the Sicilians alone.”

    We don’t know how many Athenians had secret reservations, but few hands went up against the war.

    In the end, the Athenians lost everything in Sicily . Their army was defeated and their navy destroyed. Alcibiades was recalled early on; Nicias was formally executed while thousands of Athenian prisoners were left in an open pit, where most died.

    The Sicilians didn’t follow up by invading Attica; they just wanted Athens out. But with the leader of the democracies crippled, allies left the Athenian League. Then the real enemy, Sparta , ever patient and cautious, closed in over the next few years. But not before Athens descended, on its own, into a morass of oligarchic coups and self-imposed tyranny.

    Originally published by the Los Angeles Times