Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: foreign policy

  • Nuclear Disarmament: Letter in the New York Times

    This letter to the editor was printed in the November 15, 2012, edition of The New York Times.


    To the Editor:


    We share with your editorial (“The Foreign Policy Agenda,” Nov. 12) the view that one of President Obama’s “singular contributions has been his vision of a world without nuclear weapons.” We would go further and suggest that realizing this vision would ensure Mr. Obama a legacy of honor, not only for America, but also for the world.


    Your editorial adds a caveat that nuclear disarmament “is a lofty goal that won’t be achieved in his second term, or maybe for years after that.” We dissent from this bit of conventional wisdom that almost always accompanies the affirmation of the goal, nearly taking back what was so grandly proposed.


    In our view, there has rarely been a better time to initiate a negotiated process of phased nuclear disarmament, and there is no reason that such a process should be stretched out over a long period. We are at one of those few times in international history with no acute conflict between major states.


    In our view, the United States should prepare proposals for nuclear disarmament and convene an international conference of the nine nuclear-weapon states. Nothing could do more to restore America’s claim to world leadership. At the very least, President Obama would belatedly show that his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was not wrongly awarded.


    RICHARD FALK
    DAVID KRIEGER
    Santa Barbara, Calif.


    The writers are senior vice president and president, respectively, of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • Tone Deaf US Foreign Policy Announcements Create New Provocations in Asia

    This article originally appeared in the January 2012 newsletter of the Global Network Against Nuclear Weapons and Power in Space.


    Alice Slater


    On UN Day, at a panel on Nuclear Disarmament, Secretary General Ban-ki Moon spoke about his 2008 five point proposal for nuclear disarmament, including the requirement for negotiations to ban the bomb.  It was dismaying  when the next speaker, a retired US Air Force General, Michal Mosley, breezily assured  the audience and his fellow panelists that it certainly was now possible to rid the world of nuclear weapons, since atomic bomb technology is thoroughly out of date.  He boasted that today “we” have long range attack weapons of such “unbelievable precision and lethality” that we no longer need nuclear weapons in the US arsenal.  Our conventional weapons are ever so superior to those of any other nation.  He said this as his fellow co-panelists, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors, took in the full import of his braggadocio, to my extreme embarrassment as a US citizen.  Did the General consider for a moment the effect his words were having on the Ambassadors and the other non-US participants in the meeting?  His astonishing disregard for the effect of such provocative war talk on our fellow earth mates seems to be a major failure of our “tin ear” foreign policy.


    Hillary Clinton proclaimed a similarly tone-deaf policy in an article in November’s Foreign Affairs, “America’s Pacific Century”,    remarking that now that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were winding down, we were at a “pivot point”   and that “one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will be to lock in a substantially increased investment—diplomatic economic, strategic and otherwise—in the Asia-Pacific region.”  Calling for “forward-deployed” diplomacy, she defined it to include “forging a broad-based military presence” in Asia…that would be “as durable and as consistent with American interests and values as the web we have built across the Atlantic…capable of deterring provocation from the full spectrum of state and non-state actors” She added that just as our NATO alliance “has paid off many times over…the time has come to make similar investments as a Pacific power”.


    Citing our Treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand as the “fulcrum for our strategic turn to the Asian-Pacific”, she also spoke of the need to expand our relationships to include India, Indonesia Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, Mongolia Vietnam, and the Pacific Island countries.  While acknowledging “fears and misperceptions that “linger on both sides of the Pacific”, stating that “some in our country see China’s progress as a threat to the United States; some in China worry that America seeks to constrain China’s growth” she blithely asserted, “we reject both those views …a thriving America is good for China and a thriving China is good for America”.  This said as the United States aggressively lines up a host of new nations in an expanded Pacific military alliance, providing them with missile defenses, ships, and warplanes, encircling China.   What is she thinking?


    Shortly after Clinton’s article appeared, Obama went to Australia to open up a new military base there with a token 250 US soldiers, and a promise of 2500 to come with plans for joint military training, promising that “we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.” He also adopted the “Manila Declaration”, pledging closer military ties with the Philippines and announced the sale of 24 F-16 fighter jets to Indonesia. Clinton just paid a visit to Myanmar, long allied with China, to re-establish relations there.


    In her article’s conclusion Clinton bragged, “Our military is by far the strongest and our economy is by far the largest in the world.   Our workers are the most productive.   Our universities are renowned the world over.   So there should be no doubt that America has the capacity to secure and sustain our global leadership in this century as we did in the last.”  Didn’t anyone tell her that the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest in the 52 years the census bureau has been publishing those figures?  Or that the United States deteriorating transportation infrastructure will cost the economy more than 870,000 jobs and would suppress US economic growth by $3.1 trillion by 2020, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers?  


    The tone-deaf quality of US foreign policy pronouncements is like an infant who pulls the covers over his head to play peek-a-boo, thinking he can’t be seen so long as he can’t see out.  China has responded as would be expected.  A Pentagon report warned Congress that China was increasing its naval power and investing in high-tech weaponry to extend its reach in the Pacific and beyond. It ramped up efforts to produce anti-ship missiles to knock out aircraft carriers, improved targeting radar, expanding its fleet of nuclear-powered submarines and warships and  making advances in satellite technology and cyber warfare.   What did we expect?  And now, having provoked China to beef up its military assets, the warmongers in the US can frighten the public into supporting the next wild burgeoning arms race in the Pacific and what appears to be endless war.


    This month, Mikhail Gorbachev, in The Nation, observed the US elite’s “winner’s complex” after the end of the Cold War, and the references to the US as a “hyperpower”, capable of creating “a new kind of empire”.  He said, “[t]hinking in such terms in our time is a delusion.  No wonder that the imperial project failed and that it soon became clear that it was a mission impossible even for the United States.”  The opportunity to build a “truly new world order was lost.”  The US decision to expand NATO eastward “usurped the functions of the United Nations and thus weakened it. We are engulfed in global turmoil, “drifting in uncharted waters.  The global economic crisis of 2008 made that abundantly clear.” 


    Sadly, the powers in control of US public policy and their far-flung global allies appear to have learned nothing from the extraordinary opportunity we lost for a more peaceful world at the Cold War’s end.  We are now repeating those expansionary designs in Asia, and “thus we continue to drift towards unparalleled catastrophe” as Albert Einstein observed when we split the atom which “changed everything save man’s mode of thinking”.

  • US Missile Defense: The Magic Pudding that Will Never Run Out

    Article originally appeared in the Guardian Comment is Free

    It’s a novel way to take your own life. Just as Russia demonstrates what happens to former minions that annoy it, Poland agrees to host a US missile defence base. The Russians, as Poland expected, respond to this proposal by offering to turn the country into a parking lot. This proves that the missile defence system is necessary after all: it will stop the missiles Russia will now aim at Poland, the Czech Republic and the UK in response to, er, their involvement in the missile defence system.

    The American government insists that the interceptors, which will be stationed on the Baltic coast, have nothing to do with Russia: their purpose is to defend Europe and the US against the intercontinental ballistic missiles Iran and North Korea don’t possess. This is why they are being placed in Poland, which, as every geography student in Texas knows, shares a border with both rogue states.

    They permit us to look forward to a glowing future, in which missile defence, according to the Pentagon, will “protect our homeland … and our friends and allies from ballistic missile attack”; as long as the Russians wait until it’s working before they nuke us. The good news is that, at the present rate of progress, reliable missile defence is only 50 years away. The bad news is that it has been 50 years away for the past six decades.

    The system has been in development since 1946, and so far it has achieved a grand total of nothing. You wouldn’t know it if you read the press releases published by the Pentagon’s missile defence agency: the word “success” features more often than any other noun. It is true that the programme has managed to hit two out of the five missiles fired over the past five years during tests of its main component, the ground-based midcourse missile defence (GMD) system. But, sadly, these tests bear no relation to anything resembling a real nuclear strike.

    All the trials run so far – successful or otherwise – have been rigged. The target, its type, trajectory and destination, are known before the test begins. Only one enemy missile is used, as the system doesn’t have a hope in hell of knocking down two or more. If decoy missiles are deployed, they bear no resemblance to the target and they are identified as decoys in advance. In order to try to enhance the appearance of success, recent flight tests have become even less realistic: the agency has now stopped using decoys altogether when testing its GMD system.

    This points to one of the intractable weaknesses of missile defence: it is hard to see how the interceptors could ever outwit enemy attempts to confuse them. As Philip Coyle – formerly a senior official at the Pentagon with responsibility for missile defence – points out, there are endless means by which another state could fool the system. For every real missile it launched, it could dispatch a host of dummies with the same radar and infra-red signatures. Even balloons or bits of metal foil would render anything resembling the current system inoperable. You can reduce a missile’s susceptibility to laser penetration by 90% by painting it white. This sophisticated avoidance technology, available from your local hardware shop, makes another multibillion component of the programme obsolete. Or you could simply forget about ballistic missiles and attack using cruise missiles, against which the system is useless.

    Missile defence is so expensive and the measures required to evade it so cheap that if the US government were serious about making the system work it would bankrupt the country, just as the arms race helped to bring the Soviet Union down. By spending a couple of billion dollars on decoy technologies, Russia would commit the US to trillions of dollars of countermeasures. The cost ratios are such that even Iran could outspend the US.

    The US has spent between $120bn and $150bn on the programme since Ronald Reagan relaunched it in 1983. Under George Bush, the costs have accelerated. The Pentagon has requested $62bn for the next five-year tranche, which means that the total cost between 2003 and 2013 will be $110bn. Yet there are no clear criteria for success. As a recent paper in the journal Defense and Security Analysis shows, the Pentagon invented a new funding system in order to allow the missile defence programme to evade the government’s usual accounting standards. It’s called spiral development, which is quite appropriate, because it ensures that the costs spiral out of control.

    Spiral development means, in the words of a Pentagon directive, that “the end-state requirements are not known at programme initiation”. Instead, the system is allowed to develop in whatever way officials think fit. The result is that no one has the faintest idea what the programme is supposed to achieve, or whether it has achieved it. There are no fixed dates, no fixed costs for any component of the programme, no penalties for slippage or failure, no standards of any kind against which the system can be judged. And this monstrous scheme is still incapable of achieving what a few hundred dollars’ worth of diplomacy could do in an afternoon.

    So why commit endless billions to a programme that is bound to fail? I’ll give you a clue: the answer is in the question. It persists because it doesn’t work.

    US politics, because of the failure by both Republicans and Democrats to deal with the problems of campaign finance, is rotten from head to toe. But under Bush, the corruption has acquired Nigerian qualities. Federal government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the industries that give millions of dollars in political donations with contracts worth billions. Missile defence is the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding that won’t run out, however much you eat. The funds channelled to defence, aerospace and other manufacturing and service companies will never run dry because the system will never work.

    To keep the pudding flowing, the administration must exaggerate the threats from nations that have no means of nuking it – and ignore the likely responses of those that do. Russia is not without its own corrupting influences. You could see the grim delight of the Russian generals and defence officials last week, who have found in this new deployment an excuse to enhance their power and demand bigger budgets. Poor old Poland, like the Czech Republic and the UK, gets strongarmed into becoming America’s groundbait.

    If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government’s interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders. That they threaten the world with 57 varieties of destruction is of no concern to the current administration. The only question of interest is who gets paid and what the political kickbacks will be.

  • No Exceptions

    Article originally published in Haaretz on 11/5/2007

     

    How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that “Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel.” This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.
    What will Israel’s policy – or for that matter, America’s – be, if in Iran’s upcoming elections, Ahmadinejad were to give way to a more moderate leader, who were to announce that Iran recognizes Israel’s right to exist within the 1967, borders? Will Iran become one of the “moderate” Muslim states, like, say, Pakistan, which is allowed to develop nuclear weapons? There was a day when our friend the Shah ruled Iran, and then came the Ayatollahs, with whom we were happy to trade arms, until the whole affair became muddled. Regimes come and go, but nuclear weapons are forever.
    According to foreign reports, Israel recently bombed a Syrian nuclear reactor that was under construction. It was reported that the United States approved the attack on the Syrian installation and went so far as to encourage Israel’s violation of Syrian sovereignty. Syria is part of the axis of evil, mostly because of its ties with Iran, its involvement in Lebanon and its intentional failure to prevent the entry of anti-American extremists into Iraq. But it is a well-known phenomenon, in the world in general and in the Middle East in particular, that an evil leader can become a popular friend overnight. What will the Israeli and American policies be toward the Syrian nuclear program if Assad were to announce his intentions to step away from Iran, not interfere in Lebanon and seal the border with Iraq?

    A visit to Jerusalem 30 years ago transformed Anwar Sadat from enemy No. 1 into a hero for peace. President Hosni Mubarak is considered an astute, peace-loving leader, and a friend of the west. He was even democratically elected. Sort of. But what would happen if one day, when the nuclear reactor is operational in the middle of Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood does to Mubarak’s heir what their Hamas brethren did to Mahmoud Abbas? Will we fly over to bomb the Egyptian nuclear reactor? And how does the free world need to deal with Pakistan, if its nuclear weapons fall under the control of Islamists? Is anyone proposing to preempt and invade Islamabad?
    Jordan’s King Abdullah said several months ago that most of the countries in the region, including his own, would begin developing nuclear energy. He was quick to stress that the Hashemite Kingdom would obviously place its nuclear installations under international supervision. He did not need to point out that this was “contrary to Israel.”
    The question is not therefore whether the Middle East is going nuclear, but when it will happen. The demand for a sanity certificate as a precondition for joining this club ensures that even the opponents of the Iranian regime will back Ahmadinejad against the entire world. Visitors who recently were in Tehran say that intellectuals, who did not hide their displeasure with their president, have expressed full support for his position on the nuclear question. They said that relinquishing the nuclear program would be interpreted as an admission that Iran belongs to the club of pariah nations and persisted in asking, “Why should it be forbidden to Iran when it is permitted to Pakistan and Israel?”
    The struggle against the Iranian and Syrian nuclear programs, and in the future perhaps the Egyptian and Jordanian programs, is meant to divert attention from the real problem in the Middle East – the war for hegemony over the region between the religious-extremist camp and the moderate-pragmatic one. The Annapolis summit is an excellent opportunity to update the formula for peace posed by the Arab League and conclude that when the conflict is resolved, the Middle East will be free of nuclear weapons. No exceptions!

     

    Akiva Eldar is the diplomatic affairs analyst for the Haaretz newspaper.

  • 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

  • What the Rest of the World Watched on Inauguration Day

    Dublin, on U.S. Inauguration Day, didn’t seem to notice. Oh, they played a few clips that night of the American president saying, “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.”

    But that was not their lead story.

    The picture on the front page of The Irish Times was a large four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark night. Her white clothes and spread hands and small tight face were blood-spattered. The blood was the blood of her father and mother, shot through the car window in Tal Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her parents in the car, her four brothers and sisters in the back seat.

    A series of pictures of the incident played on the inside page, as well. A 12-year-old brother, wounded in the fray, falls face down out of the car when the car door opens, the pictures show. In another, a soldier decked out in battle gear, holds a large automatic weapon on the four children, all potential enemies, all possible suicide bombers, apparently, as they cling traumatized to one another in the back seat and the child on the ground goes on screaming in her parent’s blood.

    No promise of “freedom” rings in the cutline on this picture. No joy of liberty underlies the terror on these faces here.

    I found myself closing my eyes over and over again as I stared at the story, maybe to crush the tears forming there, maybe in the hope that the whole scene would simply disappear.

    But no, like the photo of a naked little girl bathed in napalm and running down a road in Vietnam served to crystallize the situation there for the rest of the world, I knew that this picture of a screaming, angry, helpless, orphaned child could do the same.

    The soldiers standing in the dusk had called “halt,” the story said, but no one did. Maybe the soldiers’ accents were bad. Maybe the car motor was unduly noisy. Maybe the children were laughing loudly — the way children do on family trips. Whatever the case, the car did not stop, the soldiers shot with deadly accuracy, seven lives changed in an instant: two died in body, five died in soul.

    BBC news announced that the picture was spreading across Europe like a brushfire that morning, featured from one major newspaper to another, served with coffee and Danish from kitchen table to kitchen table in one country after another. I watched, while Inauguration Day dawned across the Atlantic, as the Irish up and down the aisle on the train from Killarney to Dublin, narrowed their eyes at the picture, shook their heads silently and slowly over it, and then sat back heavily in their seats, too stunned into reality to go back to business as usual — the real estate section, the sports section, the life-style section of the paper.

    Here was the other side of the inauguration story. No military bands played for this one. No bulletproof viewing stands could stop the impact of this insight into the glory of force. Here was an America they could no longer understand. The contrast rang cruelly everywhere.

    I sat back and looked out the train window myself. Would anybody in the United States be seeing this picture today? Would the United States ever see it, in fact? And if it is printed in the United States, will it also cross the country like wildfire and would people hear the unwritten story under it?

    There are 54 million people in Iraq. Over half of them are under the age of 15. Of the over 100,000 civilians dead in this war, then, over half of them are children. We are killing children. The children are our enemy. And we are defeating them.

    “I’ll tell you why I voted for George Bush,” a friend of mine said. “I voted for George Bush because he had the courage to do what Al Gore and John Kerry would never have done.”

    I’ve been thinking about that one.

    Osama Bin Laden is still alive. Sadam Hussein is still alive. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is still alive. Baghdad, Mosul and Fallujah are burning. But my government has the courage to kill children or their parents. And I’m supposed to be impressed.

    That’s an unfair assessment, of course. A lot of young soldiers have died, too. A lot of weekend soldiers are maimed for life. A lot of our kids went into the military only to get a college education and are now shattered in soul by what they had to do to other bodies.

    A lot of adult civilians have been blasted out of their homes and their neighborhoods and their cars. More and more every day. According to U.N. Development Fund for Women, 15 percent of wartime casualties in World War I were civilians. In World War II, 65 percent were civilians. By the mid ’90s, over 75 percent of wartime casualties were civilians.

    In Iraq, for every dead U.S. soldier, there are 14 other deaths, 93 percent of them are civilian. But those things happen in war, the story says. It’s all for a greater good, we have to remember. It’s all to free them. It’s all being done to spread “liberty.”

    From where I stand, the only question now is who or what will free us from the 21st century’s new definition of bravery. Who will free us from the notion that killing children or their civilian parents takes courage?

    A Benedictine Sister of Erie, Sister Joan is a best-selling author and well-known international lecturer. She is founder and executive director of Benetvision: A Resource and Research Center for Contemporary Spirituality, and past president of the Conference of American Benedictine Prioresses and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Sister Joan has been recognized by universities and national organizations for her work for justice, peace and equality for women in the Church and society. She is an active member of the International Peace Council.

    © 2005 The National Catholic Reporter

  • What If (It Was All a Big Mistake)?

    Delivered to the U.S. House of Representatives.

    America’s policy of foreign intervention, while still debated in the early 20th century, is today accepted as conventional wisdom by both political parties. But what if the overall policy is a colossal mistake, a major error in judgment? Not just bad judgment regarding when and where to impose ourselves, but the entire premise that we have a moral right to meddle in the affairs of others? Think of the untold harm done by years of fighting – hundreds of thousands of American casualties, hundreds of thousands of foreign civilian casualties, and unbelievable human and economic costs. What if it was all needlessly borne by the American people? If we do conclude that grave foreign policy errors have been made, a very serious question must be asked: What would it take to change our policy to one more compatible with a true republic’s goal of peace, commerce, and friendship with all nations? Is it not possible that Washington’s admonition to avoid entangling alliances is sound advice even today?

    In medicine mistakes are made – man is fallible. Misdiagnoses are made, incorrect treatments are given, and experimental trials of medicines are advocated. A good physician understands the imperfections in medical care, advises close follow-ups, and double-checks the diagnosis, treatment, and medication. Adjustments are made to assure the best results. But what if a doctor never checks the success or failure of a treatment, or ignores bad results and assumes his omnipotence – refusing to concede that the initial course of treatment was a mistake? Let me assure you, the results would not be good. Litigation and the loss of reputation in the medical community place restraints on this type of bullheaded behavior.

    Sadly, though, when governments, politicians, and bureaucrats make mistakes and refuse to reexamine them, there is little the victims can do to correct things. Since the bully pulpit and the media propaganda machine are instrumental in government cover-ups and deception, the final truth emerges slowly, and only after much suffering. The arrogance of some politicians, regulators, and diplomats actually causes them to become even more aggressive and more determined to prove themselves right, to prove their power is not to be messed with by never admitting a mistake. Truly, power corrupts!

    The unwillingness to ever reconsider our policy of foreign intervention, despite obvious failures and shortcomings over the last 50 years, has brought great harm to our country and our liberty. Historically, financial realities are the ultimate check on nations bent on empire. Economic laws ultimately prevail over bad judgment. But tragically, the greater the wealth of a country, the longer the flawed policy lasts. We’ll probably not be any different.

    We are still a wealthy nation, and our currency is still trusted by the world, yet we are vulnerable to some harsh realities about our true wealth and the burden of our future commitments. Overwhelming debt and the precarious nature of the dollar should serve to restrain our determined leaders, yet they show little concern for deficits. Rest assured, though, the limitations of our endless foreign adventurism and spending will become apparent to everyone at some point in time.

    Since 9/11, a lot of energy and money have gone into efforts ostensibly designed to make us safer. Many laws have been passed and many dollars have been spent. Whether or not we’re better off is another question. Today we occupy two countries in the Middle East. We have suffered over 20,000 casualties, and caused possibly 100,000 civilian casualties in Iraq. We have spent over $200 billion in these occupations, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars here at home hoping to be safer. We’ve created the Department of Homeland Security, passed the PATRIOT Act, and created a new super CIA agency.

    Our government now is permitted to monitor the Internet, to read our mail, to search us without proper search warrants, to develop a national ID card, and to investigate what people are reading in libraries. Ironically, illegal aliens flow into our country and qualify for driving licenses and welfare benefits with little restraint.

    These issues are discussed, but nothing has been as highly visible to us as the authoritarianism we accept at the airport. The creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has intruded on the privacy of all airline travelers, and there is little evidence that we are safer for it. Driven by fear, we have succumbed to the age-old temptation to sacrifice liberty on the pretense of obtaining security. Love of security, unfortunately, all too often vanquishes love of liberty.

    Unchecked fear of another 9/11-type attack constantly preoccupies our leaders and most of our citizens, and drives the legislative attack on our civil liberties. It’s frightening to see us doing to ourselves what even bin Laden never dreamed he could accomplish with his suicide bombers.

    We don’t understand the difference between a vague threat of terrorism and the danger of a guerilla war. One prompts us to expand and nationalize domestic law enforcement while limiting the freedoms of all Americans. The other deals with understanding terrorists like bin Laden, who declared war against us in 1998. Not understanding the difference makes it virtually impossible to deal with the real threats. We are obsessed with passing new laws to make our country safe from a terrorist attack. This confusion about the cause of the 9/11 attacks, the fear they engendered, and the willingness to sacrifice liberty prompts many to declare their satisfaction with the inconveniences and even humiliation at our nation’s airports.

    There are always those in government who are anxious to increase its power and authority over the people. Strict adherence to personal privacy annoys those who promote a centralized state.

    It’s no surprise to learn that many of the new laws passed in the aftermath of 9/11 had been proposed long before that date. The attacks merely provided an excuse to do many things previously proposed by dedicated statists.

    All too often government acts perversely, professing to advance liberty while actually doing the opposite. Dozens of new bills passed since 9/11 promise to protect our freedoms and our security. In time we will realize there is little chance our security will be enhanced or our liberties protected.

    The powerful and intrusive TSA certainly will not solve our problems. Without a full discussion, greater understanding, and ultimately a change in the foreign policy that incites those who declared war against us, no amount of pat-downs at airports will suffice. Imagine the harm done, the staggering costs, and the loss of liberty if the next 20 years pass and airplanes are never employed by terrorists. Even if there is a possibility that airplanes will be used to terrorize us, TSA’s bullying will do little to prevent it. Patting down old women and little kids in airports cannot possibly make us safer!

    TSA cannot protect us from another attack and it is not the solution. It serves only to make us all more obedient and complacent toward government intrusions into our lives.

    The airport mess has been compounded by other problems, which we fail to recognize. Most assume the government has the greatest responsibility for making private aircraft travel safe. But this assumption only ignores mistakes made before 9/11, when the government taught us to not resist, taught us that airline personnel could not carry guns, and that the government would be in charge of security. Airline owners became complacent and dependent upon the government.

    After 9/11 we moved in the wrong direction by allowing total government control and a political takeover by the TSA – which was completely contrary to the proposition that private owners have the ultimate responsibility to protect their customers.

    Discrimination laws passed during the last 40 years ostensibly fuel the Transportation Secretary’s near obsession with avoiding the appearance of discrimination toward young Muslim males. Instead TSA seemingly targets white children and old women. We have failed to recognize that a safety policy by a private airline is quite a different thing from government agents blindly obeying anti-discrimination laws.

    Governments do not have a right to use blanket discrimination, such as that which led to incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II. However, local law-enforcement agencies should be able to target their searches if the description of a suspect is narrowed by sex, race, or religion.

    We are dealing with an entirely different matter when it comes to safety on airplanes. The federal government should not be involved in local law enforcement, and has no right to discriminate. Airlines, on the other hand, should be permitted to do whatever is necessary to provide safety. Private firms – long denied the right – should have a right to discriminate. Fine restaurants, for example, can require that shoes and shirts be worn for service in their establishments. The logic of this remaining property right should permit more sensible security checks at airports. The airlines should be responsible for the safety of their property, and liable for it as well. This is not only the responsibility of the airlines, but it is a civil right that has long been denied them and other private companies.

    The present situation requires the government to punish some by targeting those individuals who clearly offer no threat. Any airline that tries to make travel safer and happens to question a larger number of young Muslim males than the government deems appropriate can be assessed huge fines. To add insult to injury, the fines collected from airlines are used for forced sensitivity training of pilots who do their very best, under the circumstances, to make flying safer by restricting the travel of some individuals. We have embarked on a process that serves no logical purpose. While airline safety suffers, personal liberty is diminished and costs skyrocket.

    If we’re willing to consider a different foreign policy, we should ask ourselves a few questions:

    1. What if the policies of foreign intervention, entangling alliances, policing the world, nation building, and spreading our values through force are deeply flawed?
    2. What if it is true that Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction?
    3. What if it is true that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were never allies?
    4. What if it is true that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein did nothing to enhance our national security?
    5. What if our current policy in the Middle East leads to the overthrow of our client oil states in the region?
    6. What if the American people really knew that more than 20,000 American troops have suffered serious casualties or died in the Iraq war, and 9% of our forces already have been made incapable of returning to battle?
    7. What if it turns out there are many more guerrilla fighters in Iraq than our government admits?
    8. What if there really have been 100,000 civilian Iraqi casualties, as some claim, and what is an acceptable price for “doing good?”
    9. What if Rumsfeld is replaced for the wrong reasons, and things become worse under a Defense Secretary who demands more troops and an expansion of the war?
    10. What if we discover that, when they do vote, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis support Islamic (Sharia) law over western secular law, and want our troops removed?
    11. What if those who correctly warned of the disaster awaiting us in Iraq are never asked for their opinion of what should be done now?
    12. What if the only solution for Iraq is to divide the country into three separate regions, recognizing the principle of self-determination while rejecting the artificial boundaries created in 1918 by non-Iraqis?
    13. What if it turns out radical Muslims don’t hate us for our freedoms, but rather for our policies in the Middle East that directly affected Arabs and Muslims?
    14. What if the invasion and occupation of Iraq actually distracted from pursuing and capturing Osama bin Laden?
    15. What if we discover that democracy can’t be spread with force of arms?
    16. What if democracy is deeply flawed, and instead we should be talking about liberty, property rights, free markets, the rule of law, localized government, weak centralized government, and self-determination promoted through persuasion, not force?
    17. What if Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda actually welcomed our invasion and occupation of Arab/Muslim Iraq as proof of their accusations against us, and it served as a magnificent recruiting tool for them?
    18. What if our policy greatly increased and prolonged our vulnerability to terrorists and guerilla attacks both at home and abroad?
    19. What if the Pentagon, as reported by its Defense Science Board, actually recognized the dangers of our policy before the invasion, and their warnings were ignored or denied?
    20. What if the argument that by fighting over there, we won’t have to fight here, is wrong, and the opposite is true?
    21. What if we can never be safer by giving up some of our freedoms?
    22. What if the principle of preemptive war is adopted by Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and others, “justified” by current U.S. policy?
    23. What if preemptive war and preemptive guilt stem from the same flawed policy of authoritarianism, though we fail to recognize it?
    24. What if Pakistan is not a trustworthy ally, and turns on us when conditions deteriorate?
    25. What if plans are being laid to provoke Syria and/or Iran into actions that would be used to justify a military response and preemptive war against them?
    26. What if our policy of democratization of the Middle East fails, and ends up fueling a Russian-Chinese alliance that we regret – an alliance not achieved even at the height of the Cold War?
    27. What if the policy forbidding profiling at our borders and airports is deeply flawed?
    28. What if presuming the guilt of a suspected terrorist without a trial leads to the total undermining of constitutional protections for American citizens when arrested?
    29. What if we discover the army is too small to continue policies of preemption and nation-building? What if a military draft is the only way to mobilize enough troops?
    30. What if the “stop-loss” program is actually an egregious violation of trust and a breach of contract between the government and soldiers? What if it actually is a backdoor draft, leading to unbridled cynicism and rebellion against a voluntary army and generating support for a draft of both men and women? Will lying to troops lead to rebellion and anger toward the political leadership running the war?
    31. What if the Pentagon’s legal task-force opinion that the president is not bound by international or federal law regarding torture stands unchallenged, and sets a precedent which ultimately harms Americans, while totally disregarding the moral, practical, and legal arguments against such a policy?
    32. What if the intelligence reform legislation – which gives us bigger, more expensive bureaucracy – doesn’t bolster our security, and distracts us from the real problem of revamping our interventionist foreign policy?
    33. What if we suddenly discover we are the aggressors, and we are losing an unwinnable guerrilla war?
    34. What if we discover, too late, that we can’t afford this war – and that our policies have led to a dollar collapse, rampant inflation, high interest rates, and a severe economic downturn?

    Why do I believe these are such important questions? Because the #1 function of the federal government – to provide for national security – has been severely undermined. On 9/11 we had a grand total of 14 aircraft in place to protect the entire U.S. mainland, all of which proved useless that day. We have an annual DOD budget of over $400 billion, most of which is spent overseas in over 100 different countries. On 9/11 our Air Force was better positioned to protect Seoul, Tokyo, Berlin, and London than it was to protect Washington, D.C., and New York City. Moreover, our ill-advised presence in the Middle East and our decade-long bombing of Iraq served only to incite the suicidal attacks of 9/11.

    Before 9/11 our CIA ineptly pursued bin Laden, whom the Taliban was protecting. At the same time, the Taliban was receiving significant support from Pakistan – our “trusted ally” that received millions of dollars from the United States. We allied ourselves with both bin Laden and Hussein in the 1980s, only to regret it in the 1990s. And it’s safe to say we have used billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in the last 50 years pursuing this contradictory, irrational, foolish, costly, and very dangerous foreign policy.

    Policing the world, spreading democracy by force, nation building, and frequent bombing of countries that pose no threat to us – while leaving the homeland and our borders unprotected – result from a foreign policy that is contradictory and not in our self interest.

    I hardly expect anyone in Washington to pay much attention to these concerns. If I’m completely wrong in my criticisms, nothing is lost except my time and energy expended in efforts to get others to reconsider our foreign policy.

    But the bigger question is:

    What if I’m right, or even partially right, and we urgently need to change course in our foreign policy for the sake of our national and economic security, yet no one pays attention?

    For that a price will be paid. Is it not worth talking about?

    Ron Paul is a Republican Congressman from Texas.

  • Perestrojka for International Policy, Too?

    In Northern Ireland, we sometimes tell the following joke. A man was traveling in his car and lost his way. He asked a farmer, the way to the town. The farmer replied, “If I was you I wouldn’t start from here.”

    I believe, we the human family, like the traveler, have lost our way. We are on the wrong road. Our government’s international policies, particularly those of the United States of America , are taking us down a dangerous road. Most of us wish that we did not have to start from here, but we have to face the facts of where we currently stand.

    Policies, such as: ongoing wars, pre-emptive strike, unilateralism, increased militarism and nuclearism, invasions, occupations, imperialism, erosion of civil and political liberties, ignoring the United Nations and humanitarian and international laws, government sanctions of murder (Pentagon’s SAP – special-access program), state sanctioned systematic torture (Abu Ghraib prison, etc.), unethical corporate globalization, and run-away capitalism

    Not only will such policies take us around a cul-de-sac of counter-violence, but they may also take us well over the cliff of total destruction.

    We need urgently to move onto a new road. We can choose to do this individually, by seeking truth and living our lives with as much integrity as possible. But in order to bring about the enormous changes necessary, we have to demand our Governments change those current national and foreign policies, which are destroying the lives of millions of our brothers and sisters on the planet, and damaging the earth itself. We have to challenge our governments to abolish these policies and take a different road to where we want to go, as a united human family.

    I suspect when Mr. Gorbachev initiated Perestrojka, it was because he recognized that the Soviet Union and the world were on the wrong road. His courage in initiating reforms, and his vision, not only brought about great changes such as the ending of the Cold War, but in that period of history, he gave hope to humanity. Millions

    of us were high on Hope. We were aflame with unlimited possibilities. We too shared his vision of stopping the nuclear and arms race. We believed that everyone could share in the Peace Dividend. We too wanted stop the madness of such huge military spending, and spend it instead on tackling the real enemies of the human family, poverty, diseases, etc.,

    Alas, it is for historians to record why so many Governments and people, never took the different road. But we don’t need historians to tell us what we now in our hearts – the World missed a ‘golden opportunity’ to demilitarize, denuclearise, and unite together as the human family to tackle the enormous problems, which no one nation can solve alone.

    Well, maybe we are slow learners. However I believe this generation is now being graced with another opportunity to make, yet again, new and better choices. But will we.?

    Yes, I am convinced we will. One great hope lies in the fact that there is a new consciousness in our World, particularly among young people. We recognize we are inter-connected as the human family, and Global Citizenship is upon us. In this increasingly multi-cultural, multi-faith, pluralist world citizenship, we are challenged to build Unity in our diversity.

    However, with this new consciousness, comes too the realization that the old structures, institutions, and ways of doing things no longer work, nor do they meet the needs of our struggling into birth a united world. The Organization, which represents us all, the United Nations, is I believe much in need of re-financing, renewal and reform, but we do not have, to date, world institutions that are truly democratic, and which would constitute genuine World Government.

    These, we are challenged to build, both across the international level, but also downwards, and on a local level. We have to do both. Politics begin where people live, in villages, communities, etc., so empowering people at a local level is most important. Economic, political and social restructing starts at a local level but is necessary also on an international level. We can all play our part, as village and world citizens, in building what Martin Luther King called, “the beloved community.”

    Change, can only be built by each one of us, and joining together as a United People of the World. By rejecting violence and war, and adopting a local and international ethic of nonviolence, we can start to reshape our own lives, our communities, our countries, and our world. It must be done person-to-person, group-to-group, building nonviolent and truly democratic societies from the ground up. There is no alternative, but slow hardwork, which each of us must do.

    There will be no quick fixes. We are on a long journey, but at least if we change onto a new road now, and insist our governments do likewise, we can travel together united as the human family, celebrating the gift of life, the gift of each other, and the joy of simply being alive. For the journey we gain inner strength by following our own spiritual paths, but also from the example of others whose courage and self-sacrifice uphold and uplift us.

    Speech by Mairead Corrigan Maguire At 5th World Summit at Nobel Peace Laureates in Rome 10-12 November, 2004

  • Cronkite: US ‘Excited the Arab World’ by Waging War on Iraq

    Veteran TV network newsman Walter Cronkite told a Santa Barbara audience Saturday that he sees the nation as less safe for having waged war on Iraq .

    “The problem, quite clearly, is we have excited the Arab world, the Muslim world, to take up arms against us,” he said, adding that this excitement far exceeds the anger that existed among terrorist groups prior to the war.

    The comments came moments after Mr. Cronkite received an annual award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at a gala event focused on his longtime and storied journalism career and his views on current U.S. foreign policy. They came in response to questions posed by veteran ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson in front of an audience of more than 400 people in a ballroom at Fess Parker’s Doubletree Resort.

    At age 87, Mr. Cronkite is far more outspoken with regard to his personal opinions than he ever was or arguably could be during his career as a reporter and news anchor.

    Dubbed “the most trusted man in America ,” even after his 1981 retirement, Mr. Cronkite is increasingly regarded as an advocate for world peace. In its 21st year, the Distinguished Peace Leadership Award goes to individuals who have demonstrated “courageous leadership in the cause of peace,” according to the nonprofit Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, which works to eliminate nuclear weapons and inspire antiwar activism.

    Past recipients include the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jacques Cousteau and King Hussein of Jordan .

    David Krieger, foundation president, said Mr. Cronkite was chosen this year because he represents integrity in the media and spoke the truth to the American public. “We believe that is essential for Democracy to function and for peace to have a chance in any society.”

    Speaking with Santa Barbara news media before the ceremony, Mr. Cronkite said he thinks the Nov. 2 presidential election will be one of the most important since perhaps the Civil War because it comes on the heels of a drastic change in U.S. foreign policy and a ballooning national debt.

    The war on Iraq marked the first time the United States has conducted a pre-emptive invasion and occupation of another country. The debt, now at $7.43 trillion, has grown by almost a third since President Bush took office.

    So what will it take to achieve peace in this world?

    “It certainly has to include, as a major factor, diplomacy,” Mr. Cronkite said, adding that an increased understanding between nations and cultures is critical, coupled with the involvement of an international organization such as the United Nations.

    He said TV news could do more to serve the public. In particular, he said networks should expand their nightly news offerings to one hour from a half hour, and should use news magazine shows more wisely.

    “The material that flows over the newsroom desks each day cannot be handled in the proper detail,” Mr. Cronkite said, adding that magazine shows focus too much on sex, crime and scandal. “Why don’t they take those hours and do instant documentaries, which they are certainly capable of doing?”

    He said these could focus on the major stories of the day. “This great informative medium we’ve got of television is really not fulfilling its obligation to the public.”

    Slightly stooped and gray, Mr. Cronkite walks in measured steps. He appeared in a dark suit and yellow tie and, at times Saturday, relied on his chief of staff to repeat questions.

    “I am a little bit hard of hearing,” he said. Then he added: “That’s a darn lie. I’m as deaf as a post.”

    The Missouri-born journalist began his career writing for public relations, small newspapers and at radio stations before joining United Press International to cover World War II.

    Five years after the war, he joined CBS, hosting warmly remembered shows such as “You Are There” and “Twentieth Century” before taking the anchor slot on the “CBS Evening News” in 1962. His broadcasts after the Tet offensive and afterwards, in which he suggested the war was in stalemate, have been credited by some with helping turn public sentiment against the war.

    On foreign shores, his on-the-air question to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, asking if he would go to Jerusalem if invited, ended with such an invitation and eventually to a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt .

    Mr. Cronkite is perhaps remembered best by some viewers for his famous sign off: “And that’s the way it is.”

  • A Call to Conscience

    The diplomat who quit over Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia asks Americans on the front lines of foreign service to resign from the “worst regime by far in the history of the republic.”

    Dear Trustees:

    I am respectfully addressing you by your proper if little-used title. The women and men of our diplomatic corps and intelligence community are genuine trustees. With intellect and sensibility, character and courage, you represent America to the world. Equally important, you show the world to America. You hold in trust our role and reputation among nations, and ultimately our fate. Yours is the gravest, noblest responsibility. Never has the conscience you personify been more important.

    A friend asked Secretary of State Dean Acheson how he felt when as a young official in the Treasury Department in the 1930s, he resigned rather than continue to work for a controversial fiscal policy he thought disastrous — an act that seemed at the time to end the public service he cherished. “Oh, I had no choice,” he answered. “It was a matter of national interest as well as personal honor. I might have gotten away with shirking one, but never both.” As the tragedy of American foreign policy unfolded so graphically over the past months, I thought often of Acheson’s words and of your challenge as public servants. No generation of foreign affairs professionals, including my own in the torment of the Vietnam War, has faced such anguishing realities or such a momentous choice.

    I need not dwell on the obvious about foreign policy under President Bush — and on what you on the inside, whatever your politics, know to be even worse than imagined by outsiders. The senior among you have seen the disgrace firsthand. In the corridor murmur by which a bureaucracy tells its secrets to itself, all of you have heard the stories.

    You know how recklessly a cabal of political appointees and ideological zealots, led by the exceptionally powerful and furtively doctrinaire Vice President Cheney, corrupted intelligence and usurped policy on Iraq and other issues. You know the bitter departmental disputes in which a deeply politicized, parochial Pentagon overpowered or simply ignored any opposition in the State Department or the CIA, rushing us to unilateral aggressive war in Iraq and chaotic, fateful occupations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

    You know well what a willfully uninformed and heedless president you serve in Bush, how chilling are the tales of his ignorance and sectarian fervor, lethal opposites of the erudition and open-mindedness you embody in the arts of diplomacy and intelligence. Some of you know how woefully his national security advisor fails her vital duty to manage some order among Washington’s thrashing interests, and so to protect her president, and the country, from calamity. You know specifics. Many of you are aware, for instance, that the torture at Abu Ghraib was an issue up and down not only the Pentagon but also State, the CIA and the National Security Council staff for nearly a year before the scandalous photos finally leaked.

    As you have seen in years of service, every presidency has its arrogance, infighting and blunders in foreign relations. As most of you recognize, too, the Bush administration is like no other. You serve the worst foreign policy regime by far in the history of the republic. The havoc you feel inside government has inflicted unprecedented damage on national interests and security. As never before since the United States stepped onto the world stage, we have flouted treaties and alliances, alienated friends, multiplied enemies, lost respect and credibility on every continent. You see this every day. And again, whatever your politics, those of you who have served other presidents know this is an unparalleled bipartisan disaster. In its militant hubris and folly, the Bush administration has undone the statesmanship of every government before it, and broken faith with every presidency, Democratic and Republican (even that of Bush I), over the past half century.

    In Afghanistan, where we once held the promise of a new ideal, we have resumed our old alliance with warlords and drug dealers, waging punitive expeditions and propping up puppets in yet another seamy chapter of the “Great Game,” presuming to conquer the unconquerable. In Iraq — as every cable surely screams at you — we are living a foreign policy nightmare, locked in a cycle of violence and seething, spreading hatred continued at incalculable cost, escaped only with hazardous humiliation abroad and bitter divisions at home. Debacle is complete.

    Beyond your discreetly predigested press summaries at the office, words once unthinkable in describing your domain, words once applied only to the most alien and deplored phenomena, have become routine, not just at the radical fringe but across the spectrum of public dialogue: “American empire,” “American gulag.” What must you think? Having read so many of your cables and memorandums as a Foreign Service officer and then on the NSC staff, and so many more later as a historian, I cannot help wondering how you would be reporting on Washington now if you were posted in the U.S. capital as a diplomat or intelligence agent for another nation. What would the many astute observers and analysts among you say of the Bush regime, of its toll or of the courage and independence of the career officialdom that does its bidding?

    “Let me begin by stating the obvious,” Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said at the Abu Ghraib hearing the other day. “For the next 50 years in the Islamic world and many other parts of the world, the image of the United States will be that of an American dragging a prostrate naked Iraqi across the floor on a leash.” The senator was talking about you and your future. Amid the Bush wreckage worldwide, much of the ruin is deeply yours.

    It is your dedicated work that has been violated — the flouted treaties you devotedly drew and negotiated, the estranged allies you patiently cultivated, the now thronging enemies you worked so hard to win over. You know what will happen. Sooner or later, the neoconservative cabal will go back to its incestuous think tanks and sinecures, the vice president to his lavish Halliburton retirement, Bush to his Crawford, Texas, ranch — and you will be left in the contemptuous chancelleries and back alleys, the stiflingly guarded compounds and fear-clammy, pulse-racing convoys, to clean up the mess for generations to come.

    You know that showcase resignations at the top — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or flag officers fingered for Abu Ghraib — change nothing, are only part of the charade. It is the same with Secretary of State Colin Powell, who may have been your lone relative champion in this perverse company, but who remains the political general he always was, never honoring your loss by giving up his office when he might have stemmed the descent.

    No, it is you whose voices are so important now. You alone stand above ambition and partisanship. This administration no longer deserves your allegiance or participation. America deserves the leadership and example, the decisive revelation, of your resignations.

    Your resignations alone would speak to America the truth that beyond any politics, this Bush regime is intolerable — and to an increasingly cynical world the truth that there are still Americans who uphold with their lives and honor the highest principles of our foreign policy.

    Thirty-four years ago this spring, I faced your choice in resigning from the National Security Council over the invasion of Cambodia. I had been involved in fruitful secret talks between Henry Kissinger and the North Vietnamese in 1969-1970, and knew at least something of how much the invasion would shatter the chance for peace and prolong the war — though I could never have guessed that thousands of American names would be added to that long black wall in Washington or that holocaust would follow in Cambodia. Leaving was an agony. I was only beginning a career dreamed of since boyhood. But I have never regretted my decision. Nor do I think it any distinction. My friends and I used to remark that the Nixon administration was so unprincipled it took nothing special to resign. It is a mark of the current tragedy that by comparison with the Bush regime, Nixon and Kissinger seem to many model statesmen.

    As you consider your choice now, beware the old rationalizations for staying — the arguments for preserving influence or that your resignation will not matter. Your effectiveness will be no more, your subservience no less, under the iron grip of the cabal, especially as the policy disaster and public siege mount. And your act now, no matter your ranks or numbers, will embolden others, hearten those who remain and proclaim your truths to the country and world.

    I know from my own experience, of course, that I am not asking all of you to hurl your dissent from the safe seats of pensioners. I know well this is one of the most personal of sacrifices, for you and your families. You are not alone. Three ranking Foreign Service officers — Mary Wright, John Brady Kiesling and John Brown — resigned in protest of the Iraq war last spring. Like them, you should join the great debate that America must now have.

    Unless and until you do, however, please be under no illusion: Every cable you write to or from the field, every letter you compose for Congress or the public, every memo you draft or clear, every budget you number, every meeting you attend, every testimony you give extends your share of the common disaster.

    The America that you sought to represent in choosing your career, the America that once led the community of nations not by brazen power but by the strength of its universal principles, has never needed you more. Those of us who know you best, who have shared your work and world, know you will not let us down. You are, after all, the trustees.

    Respectfully,

    Roger Morris