Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Afghanistan

  • War Crime Blues

    Have you heard the terrible news?
    U.S. forces bombed a hospital in Kunduz.
    It gives me a case of the wartime blues,
    makes me shake with the war crime blues.
    You can’t win a war, you can only lose.

    U.S. forces already knew
    the place was off limits under the law, before
    they attacked, killing twenty-two.

    The chain of command I sadly accuse
    of being at fault and causing the spread
    of the war crime blues.

    The attack was launched at two
    in the morning.  It came without warning,
    with no sign or clue.

    The first bombs fell on the hospital’s I-C-U.
    Patients were burned in their hospital beds,
    it is tragically true.

    Despite frantic calls, the bombing continued
    for well over an hour, showing the wartime power
    to be arrogant, cowardly and relentlessly rude.

    That no U.S. leader would stand and refuse
    to carry out such orders makes me shake
    with the war crime blues.

    Bombing a hospital, no one should do.
    Among the dead were three young children,
    their lives cut short, who were murdered, too.

    The U.S. attacked the only hospital in Kunduz.
    Now it’s the people, wounded and writhing in pain,
    who will shake with the war crime blues.

    Have you heard the terrible news?
    U.S. forces bombed a hospital in Kunduz.
    Does it give you a case of the wartime blues?
    Does it make you shake with the war crime blues?
    You can’t win a war, you can only lose.

  • How Hawkish Are Americans?

    Lawrence Wittner


    This article was originally published by History News Network.


    In the midst of a nationwide election campaign in which many politicians trumpet their support for the buildup and employment of U.S. military power around the world, the American public’s disagreement with such measures is quite remarkable. Indeed, many signs point to the fact that most Americans want to avoid new wars, reduce military spending, and support international cooperation.


    The latest evidence along these lines is a nationwide opinion survey just released as a report (Foreign Policy in the New Millennium) by the highly-respected Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Conducted in late May and early June 2012, the survey resulted in some striking findings.


    One is that most Americans are quite disillusioned with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of the past decade. Asked about these conflicts, 67 percent of respondents said they had not been worth fighting. Indeed, 69 percent said that, despite the war in Afghanistan, the United States was no safer from terrorism.


    Naturally, these attitudes about military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan fed into opinions about future military involvement. Eighty-two percent of those surveyed favored bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan by 2014 or by an earlier date. Majorities also opposed maintaining long-term military bases in either country. And 71 percent agreed that “the experience of the Iraq war should make nations more cautious about using military force to deal with rogue states.”


    Certainly Americans seem to believe that their own military footprint in the world should be reduced. In the Chicago Council survey, 78 percent of respondents said that the United States was playing the role of a world policeman more than it should. Presented with a variety of situations, respondents usually stated that they opposed the use of U.S. military force. For example, a majority opposed a U.S. military response to a North Korean invasion of South Korea. Or, to take an issue that is frequently discussed today – Iran’s possible development of nuclear weapons — 70 percent of respondents opposed a U.S. military strike against that nation with the objective of destroying its nuclear facilities.


    Yes, admittedly, a small majority (53 percent) thought that maintaining superior military power was a “very important goal.” But this response was down by 14 points from 2002. Furthermore, to accomplish deficit reduction, 68 percent of respondents favored cutting U.S. spending on the military — up 10 points from 2010. Nor are these opinions contradictory. After all, U.S. military spending is so vast – more than five times that of the number 2 military spender, China – that substantial cuts in the U.S. military budget can be made without challenging U.S. military superiority.


    It should be noted that American preferences are anti-military rather than “isolationist.” The report by the Chicago Council observes: “As they increasingly seek to cut back on foreign expenditures and avoid military entanglement whenever possible, Americans are broadly supportive of nonmilitary forms of international engagement and problem solving.” These range from “diplomacy, alliances, and international treaties to economic aid and decision making through the UN.”


    For example, the survey found that 84 percent of respondents favored the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty (still unratified by the U.S. Senate), 70 percent favored the International Criminal Court treaty (from which the United States was withdrawn by President George W. Bush), and 67 percent favored a treaty to cope with climate change by limiting greenhouse gas emissions. When asked about China, a nation frequently criticized by U.S. pundits and politicians alike, 69 percent of respondents believed that the United States should engage in friendly cooperation with that country.


    The “isolationist” claim falls particularly flat when one examines American attitudes toward the United Nations. The Chicago Council survey found that 56 percent of respondents agreed that, when dealing with international problems, the United States should be “more willing to make decisions within the United Nations,” even if that meant that the United States would not always get its way.


    Overall, then, Americans favor a less militarized U.S. government approach to world affairs than currently exists. Perhaps the time has come for politicians to catch up with them!

  • Afghanistan: The War Turns Pathological – Withdraw!

    Richard Falk


    This article was originally published on Richard Falk’s blog.


    The latest occupation crime in Afghanistan is a shooting spree on March 11 by a lone American soldier in the village of Balandi in the Panjwai District of Kandahar Province of Afghanistan. 16 Afghan civilians, including women and children, were shot in their homes in the middle of the night without any pretense of combat activity in the area. Such an atrocity is one more expression of a pathological reaction by one soldier to an incomprehensible military reality that seems to be driving crazy American military personnel on the ground in Afghanistan. The main criminal here is not the shooter, but the political leader who insists on continuing a mission in face of the evidence that it is turning its own citizens into pathological killers.


    American soldiers urinating on dead Taliban fighters, Koran burning, and countryside patrols whose members were convicted by an American military tribunal of killing Afghan civilians for sport or routinely invading the privacy of Afghan homes in the middle of the night: whatever the U.S. military commanders in Kabul might sincerely say in regret and Washington might repeat by way of formal apology has become essentially irrelevant.


    These so-called ‘incidents’ or ‘aberrations’ are nothing of the sort. These happenings are pathological reactions of men and women caught up in a death trap not of their making, an alien environment that collides lethally with their sense of normalcy and decency. Besides the desecration of foreign lands and their cultural identities, American political leaders have unforgivably for more than a decade placed young American’s in intolerable situations of risk, uncertainty, and enmity to wage essentially meaningless wars. Also signaling a kind of cultural implosion are recent studies documenting historically high suicide rates among the lower ranks of the American military.


    Senseless and morbid wars produce senseless and morbid behavior. Afghanistan, as Vietnam 40 years earlier, has become an atrocity-generating killing field where the ‘enemy’ is frequently indistinguishable from the ‘friend,’ and the battlefield is everywhere and nowhere. In Vietnam the White House finally speeded up the American exit when it became evident that soldiers were murdering their own officers, a pattern exhibiting ultimate alienation that became so widespread it give birth to a new word ‘fragging.’


    Whatever the defensive pretext in the immediacy of the post-9/11 attacks, the Afghanistan War was misconceived from its inception, although deceptively so. (to my lasting regret I supported the war initially as an instance of self-defense validated by the credible fear of future attacks emanating from Afghanistan) Air warfare was relied upon in 2002 to decimate the leadership ranks of Al Qaeda, but instead its top political and military commanders slipped across the border. Regime change in Kabul, with a leader flown in from Washington to help coordinate the foreign occupation of his country, reverted to an old counterinsurgency formula that had failed over and over again, but with the militarist mindset prevailing in the U.S. Government, failure was once again reinterpreted as an opportunity to do it right the next time! Despite the efficiency of the radical innovative tactic of target killing by drones, the latest form of state terror in Afghanistan yields an outcome that is no different from earlier defeats.


    What more needs to be said? It is long past time for the United States and its NATO allies to withdraw with all deliberate speed from Afghanistan rather than proceed on its present course: negotiating a long-term ‘memorandum of understanding’ that transfers the formalities of the occupation to the Afghans while leaving private American military contractors—mercenaries of the 21st century—as the outlaw governance structure of this war torn country after most combat forces withdraw by the end of 2014, although incredibly Washington and Kabul, despite the devastation and futility, are presently negotiating a ten-year arrangement to maintain an American military presence in the country, a dynamic that might be labeled ‘re-colonization by consent,’ a geopolitical malady of the early 21st century.


    As in Iraq, what has been ‘achieved’ in Afghanistan is the very opposite of the goals set by Pentagon planners and State Department diplomacy: the country is decimated rather than reconstructed, the regional balance shifts in favor of Iran, of Islamic extremism, and the United States is ever more widely feared and resented, solidifying its geopolitical role as the great malefactor of our era.


    America seems incapable of grasping the pathologies it has inflicted on its own citizenry, let alone the physical and psychological wreckage it leaves behind in the countries it attacks and occupies. The disgusting 2004 pictures of American soldiers getting their kicks from torturing and humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib should have made clear once and for all to the leaders and the public that it was time to bring American troops home, and keep them there if we cared for their welfare.  Instead punishments were inflicted on these hapless young citizens who were both perpetrators and victims, and their commanders resumed their militarist misadventures as if nothing had happened except an unwelcome ‘leak’ (Donald Rumsfeld said as much) What this pattern of descretation exhibits is not only a criminal indifference to the wellbeing of ‘others’ but a shameful disregard of the welfare of our collective selves. The current bellicose Republican presidential candidates calling for attacks on Iran amounts to taking another giant step along the road that is taking American over the cliff. And the Obama presidency is only a half step behind, counseling patience, but itself indulging war-mongering, whether for its own sake or on behalf of Israel is unclear.


    President Obama recently was quoted as saying of Afghanistan “now is the time for us to transition.”  No, it isn’t. “Now is the time to leave.”  And not only for the sake of the Afghan people, and surely for that, but also for the benefit of the American people Obama was elected to serve. 

  • Ten Years, Ten Lessons

    David KriegerSeptember 11, 2001 was a traumatizing day for the United States.  The photographs of the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Towers are still haunting, and the senseless loss of life is still painful.  Images of the burning trade towers and people jumping to their deaths are indelibly etched into the minds of those who saw them.

    U.S. policy decisions after 9/11 have turned what began as a traumatizing day into a traumatizing decade for the United States and the world.  It is not clear what our political leaders have learned over the span of these ten years, but here are some lessons that seem clear to me:

    1. The United States, despite its vast military power, was and remains vulnerable.  Our borders are not inviolate.  Our citizens may be attacked on our own territory.

    2. The U.S. is not hated for its freedom, as President George W. Bush opined, but for its policies in supporting dictatorial and repressive regimes, particularly in the Middle East.  Whatever freedoms the American people had on 9/11 have been greatly restricted over the past decade by the Patriot Act and other measures to increase governmental powers.

    3. Wars are costly and they undermine economic prosperity at home.  The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have overdrawn the U.S. budget and helped to create the current economic malaise in the country.

    4. American leaders are willing to lie the country into war, specifically the war in Iraq.  We should have learned this lesson from the Vietnam War.  There has been no accountability for the initiation of an aggressive war, as there was for the German leaders who were tried and convicted at Nuremburg following World War II for their crimes against peace.

    5. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have injured and killed large numbers of civilians.  For each terrorist who has been killed, more terrorists have been recruited to expand their numbers.  What the Bush administration called the “Global War on Terror,” and the Obama administration prefers to call the “Overseas Contingency Operation,” is unwinnable by military means and likely to be endless.

    6. A volunteer military can be used and abused with little response from the American people.  Large numbers of volunteer soldiers have served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    7. Despite the illegality and moral repugnance of torture, American officials have been willing to engage in it and, as in the case of Dick Cheney, many remain unrepentant for its use.

    8. President Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan has shown that there is bipartisan political support for keeping the flames of war burning.

    After the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, it had the sympathy of the world.  By its policies of endless war, the U.S. long ago lost those sympathies.  If the U.S. wants to find a more decent foundation on which to rest its policies, I would hope that it would be based upon these two larger lessons:

    9. War is not the answer to dealing with the threat of terrorism.

    10. The way forward is with policies that are legal (under U.S. and international law), moral (demonstrating appropriate care for the innocent) and thoughtful (not based in hubris, alienating to the rest of the world and conducive to creating more terrorists).

    Sadly, at the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, the U.S. seems lacking in sufficient self-reflection to grapple with these lessons. 

  • Why the Pentagon Papers Matter Now

    Daniel Ellsberg


    This article was originally published by Reader Supported News.


    The declassification and online release Monday of the full original version of the Pentagon Papers – the 7,000-page top secret Pentagon study of US decision-making in Vietnam 1945-67 – comes 40 years after I gave it to 19 newspapers and to Senator Mike Gravel (minus volumes on negotiations, which I had given only to the Senate foreign relations committee). Gravel entered what I had given him in the congressional record and later published nearly all of it with Beacon Press. Together with the newspaper coverage and a government printing office (GPO) edition that was heavily redacted but overlapped the Senator Gravel edition, most of the material has been available to the public and scholars since 1971. (The negotiation volumes were declassified some years ago; the Senate, if not the Pentagon, should have released them no later than the end of the war in 1975.)


    In other words, today’s declassification of the whole study comes 36 to 40 years overdue. Yet, unfortunately, it happens to be peculiarly timely that this study gets attention and goes online just now. That’s because we’re mired again in wars – especially in Afghanistan – remarkably similar to the 30-year conflict in Vietnam, and we don’t have comparable documentation and insider analysis to enlighten us on how we got here and where it’s likely to go.


    What we need released this month are the Pentagon Papers of Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen and Libya). We’re not likely to get them; they probably don’t yet exist, at least in the useful form of the earlier ones. But the original studies on Vietnam are a surprisingly not-bad substitute, definitely worth learning from.


    Yes, the languages and ethnicities that we don’t understand are different in the Middle East from those in Vietnam; the climate, terrain and types of ambushes are very different. But as the accounts in the Pentagon Papers explain, we face the same futile effort in Afghanistan to find and destroy nationalist guerrillas or to get them to quit fighting foreign invaders (now us) and the corrupt, ill-motivated, dope-dealing despots we support. As in Vietnam, the more troops we deploy and the more adversaries we kill (along with civilians), the quicker their losses are made good and the more their ranks grow, since it’s our very presence, our operations and our support of a regime without legitimacy that is the prime basis for their recruiting.


    As for Washington, the accounts of recurrent decisions to escalate in the Pentagon Papers read like an extended prequel to Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s War, on the prolonged internal controversies that preceded the president’s decisions to triple the size of our forces in Afghanistan. (Woodward’s book, too, is based on top secret leaks. Unfortunately, these came out after the decisions had been made, and without accompanying documentation: which it is still not too late for Woodward or his sources to give to WikiLeaks.)


    In accounts of wars 40 years and half a world apart, we read of the same irresponsible, self-serving presidential and congressional objectives in prolonging and escalating an unwinnable conflict: namely, the need not to be charged with weakness by political rivals, or with losing a war that a few feckless or ambitious generals foolishly claim can be won. Putting the policy-making and the field realities together, we see the same prospect of endless, bloody stalemate – unless and until, under public pressure, Congress threatens to cut off the money (as in 1972-73), forcing the executive into a negotiated withdrawal.


    To motivate voters and Congress to extricate us from these presidential wars, we need the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East wars right now. Not 40 years in the future. Not after even two or three more years of further commitment to stalemated and unjustifiable wars.


    Yet, we’re not likely to get these ever within the time frame they’re needed. The WikiLeaks’ unauthorised disclosures of the last year are the first in 40 years to approach the scale of the Pentagon Papers (and even surpass them in quantity and timeliness). But unfortunately, the courageous source of these secret, field-level reports – Private Bradley Manning is the one accused, though that remains to be proven in court – did not have access to top secret, high-level recommendations, estimates and decisions.


    Very, very few of those who do have such access are willing to risk their clearances and careers – and the growing possibility (under President Obama) of prosecution – by documenting to Congress and the public even policies that they personally believe are disastrous and wrongly kept secret and lied about. I was one – and far from alone – with such access and such views, as a special assistant to the assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs in the Pentagon in 1964-65. (My immediate boss John T McNaughton, Robert McNamara’s primary assistant on Vietnam, was another; as documented in the recent publication of his personal diary.)


    I’ve long regretted that it didn’t even occur to me, in August 1964, to release the documents in my Pentagon safe giving the lie to claims of an “unequivocal, unprovoked” (unreal) attack on our destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf: precursors of the “evidence beyond any doubt” of nonexistent WMDs in Iraq, which manipulated Congress, once again, to pass the exact counterpart of the Tonkin Gulf resolution.


    Senator Morse – one of the two senators who had voted against that unconstitutional, undated blank cheque for presidential war in 1964 – told me that if I had provided him with that evidence at the time (instead of 1969, when I finally provided it to the senate foreign relations committee, on which he had served): “The Tonkin Gulf resolution would never have gotten out of committee; and if it had been brought to the floor, it would have been voted down.”


    That’s a heavy burden for me to bear: especially when I reflect that, by September, I had a drawer-full of the top secret documents (again, regrettably, not published until 1971) proving the fraudulence of Johnson’s promises of “no wider war” in his election campaign, and his actual determination to escalate a war that he privately and realistically regarded as unwinnable.


    Had I or one of the scores of other officials who had the same high-level information acted then on our oath of office – which was not an oath to obey the president, nor to keep the secret that he was violating his own sworn obligations, but solely an oath “to support and defend the constitution of the United States” – that terrible war might well have been averted altogether. But to hope to have that effect, we would have needed to disclose the documents when they were current, before the escalation – not five or seven, or even two, years after the fateful commitments had been made.


    A lesson to be drawn from reading the Pentagon Papers, knowing all that followed or has come out in the years since, is this. To those in the Pentagon, state department, the White House, CIA (and their counterparts in Britain and other Nato countries) who have similar access to mine then and foreknowledge of disastrous escalations in our wars in the Middle East, I would say:


    Don’t make my mistake. Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait until a new war has started in Iran, until more bombs have fallen in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, Libya, Iraq or Yemen. Don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you go to the press and to Congress to tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. Don’t wait 40 years for it to be declassified, or seven years as I did for you or someone else to leak it.


    The personal risks are great. But a war’s worth of lives might be saved.

  • Depleted Uranium: What we know, what we don’t know, and what we must find out

    2010_09_15_passera_du.pdf

  • Condition Black: End the War in Afghanistan

    On any given day NATO hospitals in southern Afghanistan enter “CONDITION BLACK” – a status that alerts military tactical commanders that hospital beds are full and patients should be diverted elsewhere. Commanders’ options are limited however – in the south NATO has only two Role-3 hospitals – those that are capable of dealing with complex polytrauma that is a common result of IED blasts.

    It’s typical for a soldier to arrive from the battlefield with injuries requiring vascular, orthopedic, burn, and general surgery. The most seriously wounded will stop at the British hospital in Helmand province or the US hospital in Kandahar province for stabilization surgery prior to the long flight to Europe for further care. These hospitals are modern-day “trauma factories” dealing with scores of brutally battered patients daily, not all of whom are soldiers.

    Many of the wounded are innocent Afghan civilians whose neighborhoods have become battlefields. In fact, Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) (an independent and impartial Afghan rights group) reports that 1,074 civilians were killed and over 1,500 were injured in the first six months of 2010. And that’s where this gets complicated.

    Even though the NATO hospitals will report CONDITION BLACK, they will always make room for NATO troops requiring care; there just is not another option. Not so for the civilian casualties; in CONDITION BLACK NATO will either refuse to collect them from the battlefield, or deliver them to the poorly-staffed Afghan Army hospital near Kandahar – the only Afghan Army hospital in the entire southern region – and not capable of complex polytrauma surgery. The result is that NATO is triaging patients based on nationality vice on medical need.

    Although the Geneva Conventions require the warring parties to protect civilians and provide medical care to the wounded, the US chose to escalate the war knowing that civilians would increasingly be killed and wounded – without a proper level of trauma care in place. While ARM attributes 60 percent of civilian casualties to the Taliban, they are not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions and have no medical facilities. Such is the condition of conducting a counterinsurgency – the burden lies with the nation states – US/UK.

    The General: In July 2009 General McChrystal issued a directive that required commanders to more carefully consider civilian casualties while engaging the enemy. A 29 June 2010 article by Amnesty International credits this policy with a 28 percent reduction in civilian deaths in the second half of 2009 from the same period in 2008. Ironically, also on 29 June, The New York Times quoted General Petraeus as having a “moral imperative” to protect his troops. General Petraeus has since directed a review of the rules of engagement that will likely result in lessening restraint and increasing civilian deaths. As the principle author of the US counterinsurgency doctrine, General Petraeus must realize what this failure to protect the population will cost in terms of civilian support of foreign troops.

    The Senator: A small group of veterans – part of Veterans For Peace – in Traverse City Michigan – appealed to the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee to investigate the lack of medical care to civilians. Senator Levin has yet to respond. Meanwhile, in this poor isolated nation with few true allies, it continues that the most innocent bear the brunt of the suffering; six civilians are killed and eight wounded daily. It’s time to end the war. Short of that the Commander-In-Chief must do the morally right thing – provide medical care to civilians at the same level offered to NATO forces.

  • Obey’s Afghanistan: At Long Last, It’s Guns vs. Butter

    One of the many destructive legacies of the Reagan Era was the effective Washington consensus that wars and other military spending exist on their own fiscal planet. Reagan got a Dixiecrat Congress to double military spending at a time when the U.S. was not at war (unless you were a poor person in Central America.) Meanwhile, Reagan got the Dixiecrat Congress to cut domestic spending – we just couldn’t afford those costly social programs. Reagan pretended the two things were totally unrelated, and the Dixiecrat Congress went along.

    Ever since, the Democratic leadership and the big Democratic constituency groups have largely collaborated in maintaining the destructive fiction that we can shovel tax dollars to war and to corporate welfare called “defense spending” without having any impact on our ability to provide quality education, health care, effective enforcement of environmental, civil rights, and worker safety laws, and other basic services to our citizens that are taken for granted by the citizens of every other industrialized country.

    But maybe – maybe – that destructive connivance is coming to an end.

    This week, House Appropriations Committee Chair David Obey told the White House that he was going to sit on the Administration’s request for $33 billion more for pointless killing in Afghanistan until the White House acted on House Democratic demands to unlock federal money to aid the states in averting a wave of layoffs of teachers and other public employees.

    Obey didn’t just link the two issues rhetorically; he linked them with the threat of effective action.

    At last, at long last.

    But why is David Obey standing alone?

    Perhaps, behind the scenes, the big Democratic constituency groups are pulling for Obey.

    But you wouldn’t know it from any public manifestation. Why? This should be a “teachable moment,” an opportunity to mobilize the majority of America’s working families to push to redirect resources from futile wars of empire and the corporate welfare of the “base military budget” to human needs at home and abroad. Where is the public mobilization of the Democratic constituency groups?

    If we could shorten the Afghanistan war by a month, that would free up the $10 billion that Obey is asking for domestic spending. Rep. Jim McGovern’s bill requiring a timetable for military redeployment from Afghanistan currently has 94 co-sponsors in the House (act here.) If McGovern’s bill became law, it would surely save the taxpayers at least $10 billion. Why aren’t the big Democratic constituency groups aggressively backing the McGovern bill, demanding that it be attached to the war supplemental?

    This isn’t just a question of missing an opportunity. There is a freight train coming called “deficit reduction.” If the big Democratic constituency groups continue to sit on their hands on the issue of military spending, then we can predict what the cargo of that freight train is likely to be: cut Social Security benefits, cut Medicare benefits, raise the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare, cut domestic spending for enforcing environmental regulations and civil rights and worker safety.

    Ending the war in Afghanistan with a timetable for withdrawal would likely save hundreds of billions of dollars. That’s money that could be used to prevent cuts from jobs and services at home.

    And we can cut the “base military budget” – the money we are purportedly spending to prepare for wars in the future, whether those wars have any measurable probability of occurring or not – without having any impact on our security.

    The Sustainable Defense Task Force – initiated by Rep. Barney Frank, Rep. Walter Jones, Rep. Ron Paul, and Sen. Ron Wyden – has modestly proposed a trillion dollars in cuts to the military budget over ten years, targeting long-derided weapons systems like F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and the V-22 Osprey. As Joshua Green notes in the Boston Globe, even Dick Cheney says the V-22 is “a turkey.” As the current annual military expenditure of the U.S. is roughly $660 billion, this would roughly amount to a 15% cut. Note that the U.S. is currently spending about 4.3% of its GDP on the military, more than twice what China spends as a percentage of its economy (2%.) If we cut our military spending 15%, we’d still be spending far more as a percentage of our economy (3.7%) than China, and far more than Britain (2.5%) and France (2.3%). And in absolute terms, we’d still be spending more than the next ten countries combined – most of whom are our allies. Such a cut would free $100 billion a year for deficit reduction and protecting domestic spending from cuts.

    The president’s Deficit Reduction Commission will recommend a package of cuts to Congress in December for an up-or-down vote. Will the Deficit Reduction Commission recommend real cuts to military spending?

    On June 26, the deficit reduction freight train may be coming to your town. The well-financed America Speaks is hosting a “national town hall” discussion in twenty cities on June 26 about ways to cut the deficit, promising that they will push the result into the Washington deficit-cutting decision. Check to see if the freight train is coming to your town. If it is, why not go and see if you can stow away some military spending cuts – like ending the war and cutting the V22 – on board the train?

  • US Opposes ICC Bid to Make ‘Aggression’ a Crime Under International Law

    This article was originally published by the Christian Science Monitor.

    The United States under the Obama administration has developed an increasingly close working relationship with the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But that growing engagement with a controversial institution of international law was unable to prevent the ICC from expanding the scope of its work to include the murky crime of “aggression,” a move the US had vehemently opposed.

    At the 111-nation ICC’s first review conference that wrapped up last week in Kampala, Uganda, delegates decided to expand the international court’s purview to include the crime of aggression – a crime that only the US has successfully tried, in the post-World War II tribunals in Nuremburg and Tokyo.

    State Department officials say the US, which is not a signatory to the ICC, was able to mitigate the drawbacks of such an expansion of the court’s reach, primarily by putting off any prosecution of the newest international crime until at least 2017.

    But some critics say the US failure to stop the enshrining of “aggression” as an international crime demonstrates the limits of President Obama’s multilateralist vision – and sets the US on a collision course with the ICC when the issue comes up again later in the decade.

    “The fact remains that the Obama administration’s vaunted ‘engagement’ strategy was only able to check the ICC’s move towards defining ‘aggression,’ not stop it entirely,” says Brett Schaefer, an expert in international institutions at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “And it sets the US up for another battle in 2017 when the ICC’s advocates will make another push to activate the ICC’s jurisdiction over ‘aggression.’”

    The US confirmed its new footing with the world’s first permanent court for trying war crimes and crimes against humanity, US officials say, although they acknowledge that the US did not get everything it wanted in Kampala. The Rome Statute establishing the ICC was finalized in 1998, but the court did not begin to function until 2002, when the minimum 60 countries ratified it.

    US participation in the Kampala conference “reset US relations with the court from hostility to positive engagement,” says State Department legal adviser Harold Koh. He says the US focus at the review conference was on efforts to “strengthen justice on the ground” in countries so that eventually their judicial systems will be strong enough to take on the kinds of human-rights work the ICC addresses.

    Mr. Koh says that focus was particularly well-received in Africa, “where there is a strong desire to have these cases tried at the national level.”

    Some ICC critics have also noted that the court has only taken up two cases so far, both involving African countries – one involving the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, and the other regarding Sudan – and they dismiss the largely European-Union funded court as a colonial institution pressing Western interests.

    But the US increasingly sees the value of the ICC, especially as it has tried cases that begged for international intervention.

    “If it weren’t for the ICC [in cases like Sudan or Uganda] you would have had to set up a special tribunal,” says Stephen Rapp, the State Department’s coordinator for war crimes issues.

    One of the main US concerns in seeing “aggression” added to the ICC’s jurisdiction was the impact it could potentially have on US military operations abroad. But Koh says the US successfully negotiated the “aggression” statute’s wording so that US forces won’t be susceptible to it.

    “No US national can be prosecuted for ‘aggression’ while the US is not a signatory” to the ICC, he says.

  • My Once-in-a-Generation Cut? The Armed Forces. All of them.

    This article was originally published by The Guardian.

    I say cut defence. I don’t mean nibble at it or slice it. I mean cut it, all £45bn of it. George Osborne yesterday asked the nation “for once in a generation” to think the unthinkable, to offer not just percentage cuts but “whether government needs to provide certain public services at all”.

    What do we really get from the army, the navy and the air force beyond soldiers dying in distant wars and a tingle when the band marches by? Is the tingle worth £45bn, more than the total spent on schools? Why does Osborne “ringfence” defence when everyone knows its budget is a bankruptcy waiting to happen, when Labour ministers bought the wrong kit for wars that they insisted it fight?

    Osborne cannot believe the armed forces are so vital or so efficient as to be excused the star chamber’s “fundamental re-evaluation of their role”. He knows their management and procurement have long been an insult to the taxpayer. The reason for his timidity must be that, like David Cameron, he is a young man scared of old generals.

    I was content to be expensively defended against the threat of global communism. With the end of the cold war in the 1990s that threat vanished. In its place was a fantasy proposition, that some unspecified but potent “enemy” lurked in the seas and skies around Britain. Where is it?

    Each incoming government since 1990 has held so-called defence reviews “to match capabilities to policy objectives”. I helped with one in 1997, and it was rubbish from start to finish, a cosmetic attempt to justify the colossal procurements then in train, and in such a way that any cut would present Labour as “soft” on defence.

    Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and George Robertson, the then defence secretary were terrified into submission. They agreed to a parody of generals fighting the last war but one. They bought new destroyers to defeat the U-boat menace. They bought new carriers to save the British empire. They bought Eurofighters to duel with Russian air aces. Trident submarines with nuclear warheads went on cruising the deep, deterring no one, just so Blair could walk tall at conferences.

    Each weekend, the tranquillity of the Welsh countryside is shattered by inane jets screaming through the mountain valleys playing at Lord of the Rings. With modern bombs, no plane need fly that low, and the jets are said to burn more fuel in half an hour than a school in a year. Any other service wasting so much money would be laughed out of court. Yet the Treasury grovels before the exotic virility of it all.

    Labour lacked the guts to admit that it was crazy to plan for another Falklands war. It dared not admit that the procurement executive was fit for nothing but appeasing weapons manufacturers. No armies were massing on the continent poised to attack. No navies were plotting to throttle our islands and starve us into submission. No missiles were fizzing in bunkers across Asia with Birmingham or Leeds in their sights. As for the colonies, if it costs £45bn to protect the Falklands, Gibraltar and the Caymans, it must be the most ridiculous empire in history. It would be cheaper to give each colony independence and a billion a year.

    Lobbyists reply that all defence expenditure is precautionary. You cannot predict every threat and it takes time to rearm should one emerge. That argument might have held during the cold war and, strictly up to a point, today. But at the present scale it is wholly implausible.

    All spending on insurance – be it on health or the police or environmental protection – requires some assessment of risk. Otherwise spending is open-ended. After the cold war there was much talk of a peace dividend and the defence industry went into intellectual overdrive. It conjured up a new “war” jargon, as in the war on drugs, on terror, on piracy, on genocide. The navy was needed to fight drug gangs in the Caribbean, pirates off Somalia and gun-runners in the Persian Gulf. In all such “wars” performance has been dire, because each threat was defined to justify service expenditure rather than the other way round.

    Whenever I ask a defence pundit against whom he is defending me, the answer is a wink and a smile: “You never know.” The world is a messy place. Better safe than sorry. It is like demanding crash barriers along every pavement in case cars go out of control, or examining school children for diseases every day. You never know. The truth is, we are now spending £45bn on heebie-jeebies.

    For the past 20 years, Britain’s armed forces have encouraged foreign policy into one war after another, none of them remotely to do with the nation’s security. Asked why he was standing in an Afghan desert earlier this year, Brown had to claim absurdly that he was “making London’s streets safer”. Some wars, as in Iraq, have been a sickening waste of money and young lives. Others in Kosovo and Afghanistan honour a Nato commitment that had nothing to do with collective security. Like many armies in history, Nato has become an alliance in search of a purpose. Coalition ministers are citing Canada as a shining example of how to cut. Canada is wasting no more money in Afghanistan.

    Despite Blair’s politics of fear, Britain entered the 21st century safer than at any time since the Norman conquest. I am defended already, by the police, the security services and a myriad regulators and inspectors. Defence spending does not add to this. It is like winning the Olympics – a magnificent, extravagant national boast, so embedded in the British psyche that politicians (and newspapers) dare not question it. Yet Osborne asked that every public service should “once in a generation” go back to basics and ask what it really delivers for its money. Why not defence?

    There are many evils that threaten the British people at present, but I cannot think of one that absolutely demands £45bn to deter it. Soldiers, sailors and air crews are no protection against terrorists, who anyway are not that much of a threat. No country is an aggressor against the British state. No country would attack us were the government to put its troops into reserve and mothball its ships, tanks and planes. Let us get real.

    I am all for being defended, but at the present price I am entitled to ask against whom and how. Of all the public services that should justify themselves from ground zero, defence is the first.