Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Iran

  • Kenneth Waltz is not Crazy, but he is Dangerous: Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East

    Richard FalkIt seems surprising that the ultra-establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, would go to the extreme of publishing a lead article by the noted political scientist, Kenneth Waltz, with the title “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb” in its current issue. It is more the reasoning of the article than the eye-catching title that flies in the face of the anti-proliferation ethos that has been the consensus lynchpin of nuclear weapons states, and especially the United States. At the same time, Waltz takes pain to avoid disavowing his mainstream political identity. He echoes without pausing to reflect upon the evidence undergirding the rather wobbly escalating assumption that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons at this time. Waltz does acknowledge that Iran might be only trying to have a ‘breakout’ capability of the sort long possessed by Japan and several other countries, that is, the technological capacity if facing a national emergency to assemble a few bombs in a matter of months. Nowhere does Waltz allude to the recently publicized agreement among the 14 American intelligence agencies that there is no evidence that Iran has decided to resume its military program that had been reportedly abandoned in 2003. In other ways, as well, Waltz signals his general support for the American approach to Israeli security other than in relation to nuclear weapons, and so, it should be clear, Waltz is not a political dissenter, a policy radical, nor even a critic of Israel’s role in the region.


    Waltz’s Three Options


    Waltz insists that aside from the breakout option, there are two other plausible scenarios worth considering: sanctions and coercive diplomacy to induce Iran “to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons,” which he deems unlikely to overcome a genuine appetite for the bomb, or Iran defies the pressures and acquires nuclear weapons, which he regards as the most desirable of the three options. It seems reasonable to wonder ‘why.’ In essence, Waltz is arguing that experience and logic demonstrate that the relations among states become more stable, less war-prone, when a balance is maintained, and that there is no reason to think that if Iran acquired nuclear weapons it would not behave in accordance with the deterrence regime that has discouraged all uses of nuclear weapons ever since 1945, and especially during the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this regard, Waltz is expressing what I regard to be a wildly exaggerated faith in the rationality and prudence of leaders who make decisions on matters of war and peace.


    He does make a contextual argument that I mostly agree with, namely, that Israel alone possessing a regional nuclear monopoly is more dangerous and undesirable than Iran becoming a second nuclear weapons state in the region. In effect, a regional nuclear monopolist is worse than a regional system of balance that incorporates deterrence logic. For Israel to be deterred would contribute to peace and security in the region, and this seems likely to reduce somewhat, although at a level of risk far short of zero, the prospect of any use of nuclear weapons and other forms of aggression in the Middle East. But to say that A (Iran gets the bomb) is better than B (breakout capability but no bomb) and C (sanctions and coercive diplomacy induce Iran to forego bomb) is to forget about D, which is far better than A, B, and C in relation to sustainable stability, but also because it represents an implicit acknowledgement that the very idea of basing security upon the threat to annihilate hundreds of thousand, if not more, innocent persons is a moral abomination that has already implicated the nuclear weapons states in a security policy, which if ever tested by threat and use, would be genocidal, if not omnicidal, and certainly criminal. This anti-nuclear posture was substantially endorsed by a majority of judges in a groundbreaking Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on 8 July 1996, although these strong findings as to international law were, not surprisingly, cast aside and ignored by the nuclear weapons states, most defiantly by the United States.


    The Case for Option D


    What then is Option D? Option D would involve the negotiation and implementation of a nuclear weapons free zone throughout the Middle East (MENFZ), reinforced by non-aggression commitments, normalization of economic and political relations, and ideally accompanied by genuine progress toward a just and sustainable Palestine/Israel peace accord. Significantly, Waltz does not even pause to consider it as in all likelihood he regards such an approach as completely inconsistent with the hard power realities of global diplomacy, making it foolish and irrelevant to take the possibility of a MENFZ seriously. Needless to say, D is also not in the Netanyahu playbook, and quite likely no future Israeli leader will be prepared to give up the nuclear weapons arsenal that Israel has been consistently acquiring and developing over the last four decades. And it seems fair to conjecture that anyone who proposes a MENFZ would be at odds with the realist camp in international relations, and such a piece would almost certainly be rejected by the editors of Foreign Affairs, among the most ardent guardians of the realist status quo.


    Waltz’s preference for A, favoring an Iranian bomb, is an extension of his long-standing belief that proliferation as actually desirable based on a view of global security that depends on sustaining power balances. In my judgment this carries confidence in the logic of deterrence (that is, the rationality of not using the bomb because of a fear of nuclear retaliation) to absurd degrees that go well beyond even the extreme rationality relied upon by the most influential war thinkers during the Cold War era. In this sense, Waltz is correct to equate the Middle East with the rest of the world, and not engage in the widespread practice of ethno-religious profiling: that is, Israel’s bomb is okay because it is a rational and ‘Western,’ while Iran’s bomb would be a world order disaster as it is irrational and governed by Islamic zealots that have declared their implacable hostility to Israel. If such distinctions are to be made, which is doubtful, it should be appreciated that Israel is the antagonist that has been threatening war and pushing for coercive diplomacy, while it is Iran that has so far peacefully tolerated a variety of severe provocations, acts of war, such as the assassination of several of its nuclear scientists, the infecting of its enrichment centrifuges with the Stuxnet virus, and verified violent covert acts designed to destabilize the Tehran regime. Had such incidents been reversed, it is more than 100% likely that Israel would have immediately gone to war against Iran, quite likely setting the entire region on fire.


    Objections to Option A


    My basic objection to the Waltz position is a disagreement with two of his guiding assumptions: first, with respect to the region, that other countries would not follow Iran across the nuclear threshold, an assessment he bases largely on their failure to acquire nuclear weapons in response to Israel’s acquisition of the capability. Surely Saudi Arabia and Turkey would not, for reasons of international status and perceived security, want to be non-nuclear states in a neighborhood in which both Israel and Iran had the bomb. Such an expansion of the regional nuclear club would become more prone to accident, miscalculation, and the sort of social and political pathology that makes nuclear weaponry generally unfit for human use in a conflict, whatever the region or occasion. In this respect, the more governments possess the bomb, the more likely it becomes that one of those horrible scenarios about a nuclear war will become history.


    And secondly, Waltz does not single out nuclear weapons for condemnation on either ethical or prudential grounds. In fact, he seems to hold the view that we can be thankful for the bomb as otherwise the Cold War would likely have resulted in a catastrophic World War III. In my view to have sought the bomb and then used it against the helpless Japanese at the end of World War II was certainly one of the worst instances of Promethean excess in human history, angering not only the gods but exhibiting a scary species death wish. Leaders have acknowledged this moral truth from time to time, most recently by Barack Obama in his 2009 Prague speech calling for a world without nuclear weapons, but politicians, including Obama, seem unable and unwilling to take the heat that following through would certainly entail. In the end, anti-nuclearism for leaders seems mainly an exercise in rhetoric, apparently persuasive in Norway where the Nobel Prize committee annually ponders the credentials of candidates, but without any behavioral consequences relating to the weaponry itself.  To be sure nuclear policies are challenged from time to time by a surge of anti-nuclear populism. In this regard, to favor the acquisition of the bomb by any government or political organization is to embrace the nuclearist fallacy relating to security and the absurd hubris of presupposing an impeccable rationality over long stretches of time, which has never been the case in human affairs.


    The secrecy surrounding policy bearing on nuclear weapons, especially the occasions of their possible use, also injects an absolutist virus into the vital organs of a democratic body politic. There is no participation by the people or even their representatives in relation to this most ultimate of political decisions, vesting in a single person, and perhaps including his most intimate advisors, a demonic capability to unleash such a catastrophic capability. We now know that even beyond the devastation and radiation, the smoke released by the use of as few as 50 nuclear bombs would generate so much smoke as to block sunlight from the earth for as long as a decade, dooming much of the agriculture throughout the world, a dynamic that has been called ‘a nuclear famine.’ As disturbing as such a possibility should be to those responsible for the security of society, there is little evidence that such a realization of the secondary effects of nuclear explosions is even present in political consciousness. And certainly the citizenry is largely ignorant of such a dark eventuality bound up with the retention of nuclear weapons.


    It is for these reasons that I would call Kenneth Waltz dangerous, not crazy. Indeed, it is his extreme kind of instrumental rationality that is dominant in many influential venues, and helps explain the development, possession, and apparent readiness to use nuclear weapons under certain conditions despite the risks and the immorality of the undertaking. If human society is ever to be again relatively safe, secure, and morally coherent, a first step is to renounce nuclear weapons unconditionally and proceed with urgency by way of an agreed, phased, monitored, and verified international agreement to ensure their elimination from the face of the earth. It is not only that deterrence depends on perfect rationality over time and across space, it is also that the doctrine and practices of deterrence amounts to a continuing crime against humanity of unprecedented magnitude and clarity!   

  • Why Not Get the Law and Politics Right in Iran?

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

    Richard FalkIn his important article in the New York Times, March 17, 2012, James Risen summarized the consensus of the intelligence community as concluding that Iran abandoned its program to develop nuclear weapons in 2003, and that no persuasive evidence exists that it has departed from this decision. It might have been expected that such news based on the best evidence that billions spent to get the most reliable possible assessments of such sensitive security issues would produce a huge sigh of relief in Washington, but on the contrary it has been totally ignored, including by the highest officers in the government. The president has not even bothered to acknowledge this electrifying conclusion that should have put the brakes on what appears to be a slide toward a disastrous regional war. We must ask ‘why’ such a prudent and positive course of action has not been adopted, or at least explored.
     
    Given that the American debate proceeds on the basis of the exact opposite assumption– as if Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons is a virtual certainty.  This contrary finding that it is a high probability that iran gave up its quest of nuclear weapons almost a decade ago is quite startling. Listening to the Republican presidential candidates or even to President Obama makes it still seem as if Iran is without doubt hell bent on having nuclear weapons at the earliest possible time. With such a misleading approach the only question that seems worth asking is whether to rely on diplomacy backed by harsh sanctions to achieve the desired goal or that only an early attack to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold.
     
    It seems perverse that this public debate on policy toward Iran should be framed in such a belligerent and seemingly wrongheaded manner. After all the United States was stampeded into a disastrous war against Iraq nine years ago on the basis of deceptive reports about its supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, trumped up exile allegations, and media hype. I would have assumed that these bad memories would make Washington very cautious about drifting toward war with Iran, a far more dangerous enemy than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It would seem that at present the politicians are distrustful of reassuring intelligence reports and completely willing to go along with the intelligence community when it counsels war as ‘a slam dunk.’
     
    Reinforcing this skepticism about Iran’s nuclear intentions is a realistic assessment of the risk posed in the unlikely event that the intelligence community’s consensus is wrong, and Iran after all succeeds in acquiring nuclear weapons. As former heads of Mossad and others have pointed out the existential threat to Israel even then would still be extremely low. It would be obvious that Iran’s few bombs could never be used against Israel or elsewhere without producing an annihilating response. There is no evidence that Iran has any disposition to commit national suicide.
     
    There is a further troubling aspect of how this issue is being addressed. Even in the Risen article it is presumed that if the evidence existed that Iran possesses a nuclear weapons program, a military attack would be a permissible option. Such a presumption is based on the irrelevance of international law to a national decision to attack a sovereign state, and a silent endorsement of ‘aggressive war’ that had been criminalized back in 1945 as the principal conclusion of the Nuremberg Judgment.
     
    This dubious thinking has gone unchallenged in the media, in government pronouncements, and even in diplomatic posturing. We need to recall that at the end of World War II when the UN was established states agreed in the UN Charter to give up their military option except in clear instances of self-defense. To some extent over the years this prohibition has been eroded, but in the setting of Iran policy it has been all but abandoned without even the pressure of extenuating circumstances.
     
    Of course, it would be unfortunate if Iran acquires nuclear weapons given the instability of the region, and the general dangers associated with their spread. But no international law argument or precedent is available to justify attacking a sovereign state because it goes nuclear. After all, Israel became a stealth nuclear weapons state decades ago without a whimper of opposition from the West, and the same goes for India, Pakistan, and even North Korea’s acquisition of weapons produced only a muted response that soon dropped from sight.
     
    There are better policy options that are worth exploring, which uphold international law and have a good chance of leading to regional stability. The most obvious option is containment that worked for decades against an expansionist Soviet Union with a gigantic arsenal of nuclear weapons. A second option would be to establish a nuclear weapons free zone for the Middle East, an idea that has been around for years, and enjoys the endorsement of most governments in the region, including Iran. Israel might seem to have the most to lose by a nuclear free zone in the Middle East because it alone currently possesses nuclear weapons, but Israel would benefit immensely by the reduction in regional tensions and probable economic and diplomatic side benefits, particularly if accompanied by a more constructive approach to resolving the conflict with the Palestinian people. The most ambitious option, given political credibility by President Obama in his Prague speech of 2009 expressing a commitment to a world without nuclear weapons, would be to table a proposal for complete nuclear disarmament on a step-by-step basis. Each of these approaches seem far preferable to what is now planned, are prudent, accord with common sense, show respect for international law, a passion for the peaceful resolution of conflict, and at minimum deserve to be widely discussed and appraised.
     
    As it is there is no legal foundation in the Nonproliferation Treaty or elsewhere for the present reliance on threat diplomacy in dealing with Iran. These threats violate Article 2(4) of the UN Charter that wisely prohibits not only uses of force but also threats to use force. Iran diplomacy presents an odd case, as political real politik and international law clearly point away from the military option, and yet the winds of war are blowing ever harder. Perhaps even at this eleventh hour our political leaders can awake to realize anew that respect for international law provides the only practical foundation for a rational and sustainable foreign policy in the 21st century.

  • Iran in the Crosshairs Again

    This article was originally published by Red Pepper.

    Here we go again with the Iran hysteria. It is tempting to think this time will be just like previous periods of sabre rattling against Iran. But there are significant new dangers. The Arab Spring, Israel’s position, changes in the regional and global balance of forces, and national election campaigns, all point to this round of anti-Iranian hysteria posing potentially graver risks than five or six years ago.
     
    We have seen all this before. The US ratchets up its rhetoric, Israel threatens a military attack, escalating sanctions bite harder on the Iranian people, Iran refuses to back down on uranium enrichment. But at the same time, top US military and intelligence officials actually admit Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, is not building a nuclear weapon, and has not decided whether to even begin a building process.
     
    In 2004 Israel’s prime minister denounced the international community for not doing enough to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. In 2005 the Israeli military was reported to ‘be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran’. In 2006 the US House Armed Services Committee issued a report drafted by one congressional staffer (an aide to hard-line pro-war John Bolton, then US ambassador to the UN), claiming that Iran was enriching uranium to weapons-grade 90 per cent. That same year a different Israeli prime minister publicly threatened a military strike against Iran. In 2008, George W Bush visited Israel to reassure them that ‘all options’ remained on the table.
     
    The earlier crisis saw a very similar gap between the demonisation, sanctions, threats of military strikes against Iran, and the seemingly contradictory recognition by US, Israeli, United Nations and other military and intelligence officials that Iran actually did not possess nuclear weapons, a nuclear weapons programme, or even a decision to try to develop nuclear weapons.
     
    The 2005 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) determined that even if Iran decided it wanted to make a nuclear weapon, it was unlikely before five to ten years, and that producing enough fissile material would be impossible even in five years unless Iran achieved ‘more rapid and successful progress’ than it had so far. By 2007, a new NIE had pulled back even further, asserting ‘with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme … Tehran had not started its nuclear weapons programme as of mid-2007’. The NIE even admitted ‘we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons’. That made the dire threats against Iran sound pretty lame. So maybe it wasn’t surprising that Newsweek magazine described how, ‘in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document’.
     
    The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA – the UN’s nuclear watchdog) issued report after report indicating it could find no evidence that Iran had diverted enriched uranium to a weapons programme. The UN inspection agency harshly rejected the House committee report, calling some of its claims about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons activities incorrect, and others ‘outrageous and dishonest’. And outside of the Bush White House, which was spearheading much of the hysteria, members of Congress, the neo-con think tanks, hysterical talk show hosts, and much of the mainstream media went ballistic.
     
    Then and now

    All of that sounds very familiar right now. Military and intelligence leaders in Israel and the US once again admit that Iran does not have nukes. (Israel of course does, but no one talks about that.) Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta asked and answered his own Iran question: ‘Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.’ Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr. admitted the US does not even know ‘if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons’. The latest 2011 NIE makes clear there is no new evidence to challenge the 2007 conclusions; Iran still does not have a nuclear weapons programme in operation.
     
    According to the Independent, ‘almost the entire senior hierarchy of Israel’s military and security establishment is worried about a premature attack on Iran and apprehensive about the possible repercussions.’ Former head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said ‘it is quite clear that much if not all of the IDF leadership do not support military action at this point.’
     
    But despite all the military and intelligence experts, the threat of war still looms. Republican candidates pound the lecterns promising that ‘when I’m president…’ Iran will accept international inspectors – as if the IAEA had not maintained an inspection team inside Iran for many years now. We hear overheated rumours of Iranian clerics promising nuclear weapons to their people – as if Iran’s leaders had not actually issued fatwas against nuclear weapons, something that would be very difficult to reverse.
     
    Some strategic issues are indeed at stake, but the current anti-Iran mobilisation is primarily political. It doesn’t reflect actual US or Israeli military or intelligence threat assessments, but rather political conditions pushing politicians, here and in Israel, to escalate the fear factor about Iranian weapons (however non-existent) and the urgency for attacking Iran (however illegal). And the danger, of course, is that this kind of rhetoric can box leaders in, making them believe they cannot back down from their belligerent words.
     
    Israel at the centre

    One of the main differences from the propaganda run-up to the Iraq war is the consistent centrality of Israel and its supporters, particularly AIPAC in the US, in this push for war against Iran. Israel certainly jumped aboard the attack-Iraq bandwagon when it was clear that war was indeed inevitable, but US strategic concerns regarding oil and the expansion of US military power were first and primary. Even back then, Israel recognised Iran as a far greater threat than Iraq. And now, Israelis using that alleged threat to pressure US policymakers and shape US policy – in dangerous ways. During this campaign cycle, Obama is under the greatest pressure he has ever faced, and likely ever will face, to defend the Israeli position unequivocally, and to pledge US military support for any Israeli action, however illegal, dangerous, and threatening to US interests.
     
    Iran simply is not, as former CIA analyst and presidential adviser Bruce Reidel makes clear, ‘an existential threat’ to Israel. Even a theoretical future nuclear-armed Iran, if it ever chose that trajectory, would not be a threat to the existence of Israel, but would be a threat to Israel’s longstanding nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. That is the real threat motivating Israel’s attack-Iran-now campaign. Further, as long as top US political officials, from the White House to Congress, are competing to see who can be more supportive of Israel in its stand-off with Iran, no one in Washington will even consider pressure on Israel to end its violations of international law and human rights regarding its occupation and apartheid policies towards Palestinians. Israel gets a pass.
     
    Israel is more isolated in the region than ever before. The US-backed neighbouring dictatorships Israel once counted on as allies are being challenged by the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Egypt’s Mubarak was overthrown, the king of Jordan faces growing pressure at home, and the threats to Syria’s regime mean that Israel could face massive instability on its northern border – something Bashar al-Assad and his father largely staved off since Israel occupied the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967.
     
    Syria’s two struggles in one

    The calamity underway in Syria is also directly linked to the Iran crisis. There are two struggles going on in Syria, and unfortunately one may destroy the potential of the other. First was Syria’s home-grown popular uprising against a brutal government, inspired by and organically tied to the other risings of the Arab Spring, and like them calling first for massive reform and soon for the overthrow of the regime. Syria is a relatively wealthy and diverse country, in which a large middle class, especially in Damascus and Aleppo, had prospered under the regime, despite its political repression. As a result, unlike some other regional uprisings, Syria’s opposition was challenging a regime which still held some public support and legitimacy.
     
    The regime’s drastic military assault on largely non-violent protests led some sectors of the opposition to take up arms, in tandem with growing numbers of military defectors, which of course meant waging their democratic struggle in the terrain in which the regime remains strongest: military force. The government’s security forces killed thousands, injuring and arresting thousands more, and in recent weeks even the longstanding support for Assad in Damascus and Aleppo began to waver. Simultaneously, attacks against government forces increased, and the internal struggle has taken on more and more the character of a civil war.
     
    The further complication in Syria, and its link to Iran, is that it has simultaneously become a regional and global struggle. Syria is Iran’s most significant partner in the Middle East, so key countries that support Israel’s anti-Iran mobilisation have turned against Syria, looking to weaken Iran by undermining its closest ally. Perhaps because the Assad regimes have kept the occupied Golan Heights and the Israeli-Syrian border relatively quiet, Israel itself has not been the major public face in the regionalisation of the Syrian crisis. But clearly Saudi Arabia is fighting with Iran in Syria for influence in the region. The Arab League, whose Syria decision-making remains dominated by the Saudis and their allied Gulf petro-states (such as Qatar and the UAE), is using the Syria crisis to challenge Iran’s rising influence in Arab countries from Iraq to Lebanon. And of course the US, France and other Western powers have jumped on the very real human rights crisis in Syria to try to further weaken the regime there – in the interest again of undermining Iran’s key ally far more than out of concern for the Syrian people.
     
    Diminishing US power

    Facing economic crisis, military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the loss or weakening of key client states in the Arab world, the US is weaker and less influential in the Middle East. But maintaining control of oil markets and US strategic capacity are still key regional goals for the US, which means that military power remains central. The nature of that military engagement is changing – away from large-scale deployments of ground troops in favour of rapidly expanding fleets of armed drones, special forces, and growing reliance on naval forces, navy bases and sea-based weapons.
     
    Thus the US backs Saudi intervention in Bahrain to insure the US Fifth Fleet maintains its Bahraini base; Washington’s escalating sanctions give the West greater leverage in control of oil markets; the Iranian rhetorical threat to close the Strait of Hormuz (only in desperation since it would prevent Iran from exporting its own oil) is used to justify expansion of the US naval presence in the region. Along with the possibility of losing Syria as a major military purchaser and regional ally, concerns about those US strategic moves played a large part of Russia’s veto of the UN resolution on Syria.
     
    In Iran, the pressure is high and the sanctions are really starting to bite, with much greater impact felt by the Iranian population, rather than the regime in Tehran. The assassination of Iranian nuclear experts, particularly the most recent murder of a young scientist which was greeted by Israeli officials with undisguised glee and barely-disguised triumph, are more likely aimed at provoking an Iranian response than actually undermining Iran’s nuclear capacity. So far, Iran has resisted the bait. But if Israel makes good on its threat of a military strike – despite the virtually unanimous opposition of its own military and intelligence leadership – there is little reason to imagine that Iran would respond only with words. The US and Israel are not the only countries whose national leaders face looming contests; Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and its president face huge political challenges as well.
     
    The consequences of a strike against Iran would be grave – from attacks on Israeli and/or US military targets, to going after US forces in Iran’s neighbours Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait, to attacks on the Pentagon’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, to mining the Strait of Hormuz … and beyond. An attack by the US, a nuclear weapons state, on a non-nuclear weapons state such as Iran, would be a direct violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran might kick out the UN nuclear inspectors. The hardest of Iran’s hard-line leaders would almost certainly consolidate ever greater power – both at home and in the Arab countries, and the calls to move towards greater nuclearisation, perhaps even to build a nuclear weapon, would rise inside Iran. Indeed, the Arab Spring’s secular, citizenship-based mobilisations would likely lose further influence to Iran – threatening to turn that movement into something closer to an ‘Islamic Spring’.
     
    Nuclear weapons-free zone

    At the end of the day the crisis can only be solved through negotiations, not threats and force. Immediately, that means demanding that the White House engage in serious, not deliberately time-constrained negotiations to end the current crisis – perhaps based on the successful Turkish-Brazilian initiative that the US scuttled last year. That means that Congress must reverse its current position to allow the White House to use diplomacy – rather than continuing to pass laws that strip the executive branch of its ability to put the carrot of ending sanctions on the table in any negotiations. And it means an Iran policy based on the real conclusions of US intelligence and military officials, that Iran does not have and is not building a nuclear weapon, rather than relying on lies about non-existent nuclear weapons, like the WMD lies that drove the US to war in Iraq.
     
    In the medium and longer term, we must put the urgent need for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East back on the table and on top of our agenda. Such a multi-country move would insure Iran would never build a nuclear weapon, that Israel would give up its existing 200 to 300 high-density nuclear bombs and the submarine-based nuclear weapons in its arsenal, and that the US would keep its nuclear weapons out of its Middle East bases and off its ships in the region’s seas. Otherwise, we face the possibility of the current predicament repeating itself in an endless loop of Groundhog Day-style nuclear crises, each one more threatening than the last.

  • The Ayatollah Is Right About One Thing: Nuclear Weapons Are Sinful

    This article was originally published by Truthdig.

    Given my own deep prejudice toward religious zealotry, it has not been difficult for me to accept the conventional American view that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme theocratic ruler of Iran, is a dangerous madman never to be trusted with a nuclear weapon. How then to explain his recent seemingly logical and humane religious proclamations on the immorality of nuclear weapons? His statement challenges the acceptance of nuclear war-fighting as an option by every U.S. president since Harry Truman, who, in 1945, ordered the deaths of 185,000 mostly innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    “We do not see any glory, pride or power in the nuclear weapons—quite the opposite,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Tuesday in summarizing the ayatollah’s views. Salehi added, “The production, possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons are illegitimate, futile, harmful, dangerous and prohibited as a great sin.”

    Of course, the ayatollah’s position will be largely interpreted by the media and politicians in the United States as a devious trick to lull critics, but words of such clarity will not be so easily dismissed by his devout followers. They are words that one wishes our own government would embrace to add moral consistency to our condemnation of other countries we claim might be joining us in holding nuclear arms.

    As awkward as it may be to recall, it was the United States that gifted the world with these sinful weapons. And even more to the point of assessing sin, ours is the only nation that has ever used such weapons toward their intended purpose of killing large numbers of the innocent. That fact alone should provoke some measure of humility in responding to Salehi’s offer this week at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva to negotiate a treaty banning nuclear weapons.

    Unfortunately, his remarks were all too predictably met with swift condemnation by the United States. Laura E. Kennedy, the American ambassador to the conference, said that Iran’s claim to be opposed to such weapons “stands in sharp contrast” to that nation’s failure to comply with international obligations. But the fact is that the administration she represents has stated that there is as yet no evidence that Iran is committed to building a nuclear bomb.

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    She is right that Iran’s resistance to inspection “is hardly illustrative of a commitment to nuclear disarmament,” but such a remark is grotesquely hypocritical coming from the representative of a nation that has produced more than half of the world’s nuclear arsenal under the most severe conditions of secrecy. It is also true that U.S. acceptance of nuclear weapons in Israel and Pakistan, both of which have been recipients of American military aid despite breaking international nonproliferation codes to which U.S. presidents have long subscribed, is hardly a sign of consistency on this issue.

    It is obvious, in a week when the U.S. welcomed North Korea’s renewed commitment to inspections, that even the most recalcitrant of nations can be induced to reason. The treatment of Iran is complicated by this being a U.S. election season, during which the Republican candidates, with the exception of Ron Paul, have been beating the war drums over what they claim is Iran’s nuclear threat. In no way has the GOP’s zeal for military confrontation been chastened by the fact that a similar crusade in 2003 by Republican hawks led to the invasion of Iraq over patently false claims that it was developing a nuclear arsenal. The result was a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad.

    Neither Iraq nor Iran had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks that launched our nation on a never-ending and essentially irrational “war on terror.” Irrational, because the terrorist enemy has come to be defined through political convenience rather than through an objective threat assessment. Iran’s Shiite leaders were sworn enemies of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida, which was inspired and financed by the Wahhabi Sunnis of Saudi Arabia. Yet when the Obama administration recently concluded a huge, 10-year arms deal with the Saudi kingdom, the top Republican candidates were in full approval.

    Of course the world’s people should be alarmed by the prospect of Iran, or any other nation, joining the nuclear weapons club. But demonizing Iran and attempting to further isolate that nation’s leadership hardly advances the cause of nonproliferation. If Washington can find a basis of reasonable accommodation with a bizarrely erratic and paranoid North Korea, serious negotiations with Iran should be eminently possible. A place to begin would be with the acceptance that the justifiably reviled ayatollah might for once be demonstrating moral leadership when he denounces all nuclear weapons, including those in our own massive arsenal, as sinful.

  • A Nuclear-Free Middle East: Necessary, Desirable and Impossible

    This article was originally published by Al Jazeera.


    Richard FalkFinally, there is some discussion in the West that supports the idea of a nuclear-free zone for the Middle East. Such thinking is still treated as politically marginal, and hardly audible above the deafening beat of the war drums. To the extent proposed, it also tends to be defensively and pragmatically phrased to reinforce the prevailing anti-Iran consensus.


    For instance, in a recent New York Times article by Shibley Telhami and Steven Kull a full disclosure title gives the plot away: “Preventing a Nuclear Iran”. The authors offer us a prudential argument against attacking Iran to avoid a damaging Iranian retaliation and in view of the inability of an attack to do more than delay Iran’s nuclear programme by a few years. Beyond this, an attack seems likely to create irresistible pressures in Iran to do everything possible to obtain a nuclear option with a renewed sense of urgency, as well as to disrupt Western interests wherever possible.


    This Telhami/Kull position is reinforced by evidence that Israeli society is not as war-prone as claimed, and would be receptive to a more cautious and less belligerent approach. They refer readers to a recent Israeli poll finding that only 43 per cent of Israelis favour a military strike, while 64 per cent support establishing a nuclear-free zone (NFZ) in the region that included Israel.


    In effect, then, establishing a NFZ that includes Israel would seem politically feasible, although not a course of action that seems within the range of options being considered by the current Israeli political leadership.


    The failure of the United States to raise the possibility of a solution to the conflict other than either an Iranian surrender with respect to its enrichment rights or an impending military attack is also discouraging. The silence of Washington with respect to a peaceful regional solution to the conflict with Iran confirms what is widely believed around the world – that the US Government will not deviate from the official Israeli line on security issues in the Middle East.


    The fact that the Israeli public may be more peace-oriented than its elected leaders seems to make no difference to strategic thinking in the US, and what is more, the realisation that the exercise of the military option would have a likely huge negative impact on national and global interest is also put to one side.


    Prince Turki‘s proposals


    Another variant of NFZ thinking is more oriented to the realities of the Middle East. It has most clearly formulated by the influential Saudi Prince, Turki Al-Faisal, former Saudi ambassador to the United States and once the head of his country’s intelligence service. He argues that NFZ is preferable to the military option for many reasons, and he believes, in contrast to President Obama, that it should be removed from the bag of tricks at the disposal of diplomats.


    Prince Turki believes that sanctions have not, and will not alter Iran’s behaviour. His proposal is more elaborate than simply advocating a NFZ. He would be in favour of coercive steps against Iran if there is ever convincing evidence that it actually possesses nuclear weapons, but he also argues for the imposition of sanction on Israel if it fails to disclose openly the full extent of its nuclear weapons arsenal.  


    Prince Turki’s approach has several additional features: extending the scope of the undertaking to all weapons of mass destruction (WMD), that is, including biological and chemical weapons; a nuclear security umbrella for the region maintained by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council; a resolution of outstanding conflicts in the region in accordance with the Mecca Arab proposals of 2002 that calls for Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territories and the Golan Heights occupied in 1967, as well as the political and commercial normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab world.


    Prince Turki warns that if some such arrangement is not soon put in place, and Iran proceeds with its nuclear programme, other countries in the region, including Turkey, will almost certainly be drawn into an expensive and destabilising nuclear arms race.


    In effect, as with Telhami/Kull, Prince Turki’s approach is designed to make sure that worst case scenarios do not happen. It is more contextually framed to encompass several larger challenges in the Middle East, rather than confining its rationale to addressing the Israel/Iran confrontation.  


    The Turki proposals have some problematic aspects, including the idea that governments in the region could be expected to rely on the five permanent members of the Security Council to co-operate effectively if faced with a challenge to the NFZ. From another perspective, the proposal might be questioned as a historically insensitive effort to delegate authority over future security issues in the region to former colonial powers.


    NFZ or WMDFZ without Israel


    There is another perplexing feature of Prince Turki’s vision of a peaceful future for the Middle East. He urges the adoption of such a collective commitment to the elimination of WMD in the region with or without Israeli support at a conference of parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty scheduled for later this year in Finland, which seems to play into the hands of Western hawks.


    Israel is not even a party to the NPT, has so far not indicated its willingness to attend the conference, and if participating, would likely play an obstructive role. What is the point of a NFZ or WMDFZ without Israel? As long ago as the 1995 NPT Review Conference, the Arab countries put forward a proposal to establish in the Middle East a WMD-free zone, but it has never been subsequently invoked.


    Israel, which is not a member of the NPT, has consistently taken the position over the years that only after peace prevails throughout the region, will it consider lending support to a legal regime, prohibiting the possession of nuclear weapons.


    The NFZ or WMDFZ initiatives need to be seen in the setting established by the NPT regime. An initial observation involves Israel’s failure to become a party to the NPT coupled with its covert nuclear programme that resulted in the acquisition of the weaponry more than 20 years ago with the complicity of the West as documented in Seymour Hersh’s 1991 The Samson Option.


    This Israeli pattern of behaviour needs to be contrasted with that of Iran, a party to the NPT that has reported to and accepted, although with some friction in recent years, international inspections on its territory by the Western oriented International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran has consistently denied any ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, but has insisted on its rights under Article IV of the treaty to exercise “… its inalienable right… to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination…”


    Iran has been under constant threat of an attack by Israel. It has also been the target for several years of Israel’s extremely dirty low intensity war, as well as being the subject of a US Congressionally funded destabilisation programme of the US that is reinforced by a diplomacy that constantly reaffirms the relevance of a military option, and operates in a political climate that excludes consideration of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.


    What is surprising under these circumstances is that Iran has not freed itself from NPT obligation as it is entitled to do. All parties to the NPT have a treaty right to withdraw set forth in Article X requiring only that a withdrawing state give notice to other treaty parties and provide an explanation of its reasons for withdrawing.


    Geopolitical priorities


    Comparing these Israeli and Iran patterns of behaviour with respect to nuclear weapons, it would seem far more reasonable to conclude that it is Israel, not Iran, that should be subjected to sanctions, and put under pressure to participate in denuclearising negotiations. After all, Israel acquired the weaponry secretly and defiantly, has not been even willing to accept the near universally applicable discipline of the NPT, and has engaged periodically in aggressive wars against its neighbours that have resulted in several long-term occupations.


    It can be argued that Israel was entitled to enhance its security by remaining outside the NPT, and thus is acting within its sovereign rights. This is a coherent legalistic position, but we should also appreciate that the NPT is more a geopolitical than a legal regime, and that Iran, for instance, would be immediately subject to a punitive response if it tried to withdraw from the treaty. In other words, geopolitical priorities override legal rights in the NPT setting.


    The history of the NPT has reflected its geopolitical nature. This is best illustrated by the utter refusal of the nuclear weapons states, above all the US, to fulfill its core obligation under Article VI “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”


    The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its 1996 Advisory Opinion on The Legality of Nuclear Weapons unanimously affirmed in its findings the legal imperative embodied in Article VI: “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament in all its aspects under strict international control.”


    This finding that has been completely ignored by the nuclear weapons states (who had made full use of their diplomatic leverage in a failed effort to convince members of the UN General Assembly not to seek guidance from the ICJ with respect to the legal status of nuclear weapons and the obligations of the NPT). The refusal to uphold these obligations of Article VI would certainly appear to be a material breach of the treaty that under international law authorises any party to regard the treaty as void.


    Again, the international discourse on nuclear weapons is so distorted that it is a rarity to encounter criticism of its discriminatory application, its double standards as between nuclear and non-nuclear states, and its geopolitical style of selective enforcement. In this regard, it should be appreciated that the threat of military attack directed at Iran resembles reliance on the so-called Bush Doctrine of preventive war that had been used to justify aggression against Iraq in 2003, and represents a blatant geopolitical override of international law.


    Need to avoid war


    In summary, it is of utmost importance to avoid a war in the Middle East arising from the unresolved dispute about Iran’s nuclear programme. One way to do this is to seek a NFZ or a WMDFZ for the entire region that must include the participation of Israel. What has given this approach a renewed credibility for the West at this time is that such a measure seems to be the only way to prevent a lose/lose war option from materialising in an atmosphere where mainstream pundits are increasingly predicting an attack on Iran during 2012. 


    A NFZ plan has some prudential appeal to change minds in Tehran and Tel Aviv before it is too late, and could also encourage Washington to take a less destructive and self-destructive course of action. Whether this prudential appeal is sufficiently strong to overcome the iron cage of militarism that constrains policy choices in Israel and the US remains doubtful.


    Thinking outside the militarist box remains a forbidden activity, partly reflecting the domestic lock on the political and moral imagination of these countries by their respective military industrial media think-tank complexes.


    I would conclude this commentary with three pessimistic assessments that casts a dark shadow over the regional future:



    (1) an NFZ or WMDFZ for the Middle East is necessary and desirable, but it almost certainly will not be placed on the political agenda of American-led diplomacy relating to the conflict;


    (2) moves toward nuclear disarmament negotiations that have been legally mandated and would be beneficial for the world, and for the nuclear weapons states and their peoples, will not be made in the current atmosphere that blocks all serious initiatives to abolish nuclear weapons;


    (3) the drift toward a devastating attack on Iran will only be stopped by an urgent mobilisation of anti-war forces in civil society, which seems unlikely given other preoccupations. 


    To overcome such pessimism requires a broader vision of peace and justice that is even broader than the contextual approach taken by Prince Turki. It would centre on demilitarisation of the region through disarmament, as well as a firm regional commitment to avoid entangling alliances with external actors, meaning no military deployments or bases in the region. With drones engaging in lethal missions in the Middle East and an array of American military bases, this seems like a utopian fantasy, and maybe it is.


    But maybe also we have reached a paradoxical stage in the region, and possibly the world, where only the utopian imagination can offer us a realistic vision of a hopeful human future.

  • Open Letter on Middle East Nuclear Weapon Free Zone

    2012_01_31_menwfz_open_letter.pdf

  • The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence Today: International Law as Anchoring Ground

    Ladies and gentlemen:

    I am very happy to be speaking with you this evening. I want to express my gratitude to Zeit-Fragen for publishing the German language edition of my book The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence (Clarity Press: 2002) which comes out now on the anniversary of the end of the Second World War.  At this time 65 years ago, Japan surrendered to the United States after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the incineration of 250,000 completely innocent human beings.

    My father was a Marine who invaded Saipan, Tinian, and Okinawa, and was preparing to invade Mainland Japan. I was brought up to believe that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had saved my father’s life and thus made mine possible, although my father never raised me to be anti-Japanese or anti-German.  But when I came to study international relations, I realized: This simply was not true.  Indeed it was total propaganda by the United States government to justify nuclear terrorism and the mass-extermination of a quarter of a million human beings. Even Justice Pal in his dissent to the Tokyo Judgment said that the Japanese war criminals had nothing to their discredit as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which you can only compare to Nazi Acts.

    Today the world is at a precipice of another world war. The United States government has committed acts of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and has authorized, armed, equipped, and supplied Israel to commit acts of aggression, crimes against humanity, and outright genocide against Lebanon and Palestine. Today the United States government is threatening to attack Iran under the completely bogus pretext that they might have a nuclear weapon, which the International Atomic Energy has said is simply not true. If they attack Iran with the Israelis, a British think-tank has predicted they could exterminate 2.8 million Iranians! They are fully prepared — the Americans and the Israelis — to use tactical nuclear weapons.

    Indeed today tactical nuclear weapons have been fully integrated into U.S. armed forces and tactical training and programs. I have read the manual myself.  Nukes are now treated — starting with the Bush Junior administration — as if they were just another weapon.

    We must remember when President Putin was in Iran and he said he did not believe the Iranians had a nuclear weapon, President Bush Jr. publicly got up and threatened World War III. Remember that threat! He threatened World War III! I cannot recall in my lifetime a threat of this nature. You would have to go back to Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo to find high level government officials threatening a world war.

    What did this threat mean? It was saying to Russia: “You had better stand back if we attack Iran.” It wasn`t a threat to Iran; that would not produce a world war attacking Iran, but just a slaughter.  But saying to Russia: “You had better stand back, we are prepared to risk World War III if you don’t let us get our way with Iran.” An attack on Iran would set this entire region of the world on fire, from Egypt over to India, from Uzbekistan down to Diego Garcia. And as my friend and my colleague, Hans von Sponeck pointed out yesterday with his map: We see the counter-alliance to NATO: Russia, China and the so-called Central Asia Collective Security Organization. If you read about the origins World War I or World War II an attack on Iran could clearly set off World War III – remember Bush threatened it. And it could easily become nuclear. I kid you not on the dangers we are facing us all as human beings today.

    We stand on a nuclear precipice, and any attempt to dispel this ideology of nuclearism and its myth propounding the legality and morality of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence must come to grips with the fact that the nuclear age was conceived in the original sins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These weapons have always been criminal!  Remember they were developed to deal with the Nazis, out of fear that the Nazis would get them first. And yet for some reason they used them on the Japanese to make a point, to terrorize the rest of the world.

    The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg Charter of August 8th 1945 — right after the United States bombed Hiroshima, and the day before they bombed Nagasaki — that condemned the wanton destruction of cities, towns, and villages; and applied it to the Nazi leaders, but of course never applied it to themselves. In my book The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence there is an entire chapter on the criminality of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I list all the legal violations there, up to and including the United States Department of War Field Manual 27-10 (1940).  So these bombings, and also the firebombing of Tokyo, exterminating 100,000 civilians, were war crimes. Even as recognized officially by the United States government itself.

    The start of any progress towards resolving our nuclear predicament as human beings must come from the realization that nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence have never been legitimate instruments of state policy, but have always constituted instrumentalities of internationally lawless and criminal behaviour. And those states that wield nuclear weapons, their government officials are criminals in accordance with the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles, and the Tokyo Charter and Judgment that the Allies applied to the Nazi war criminals and the Japanese war criminals after World War II.  So I’m not talking here about applying any principle of law that the United States government and the other victors of World War II applied to their enemies to hold them accountable.

    The use of nuclear weapons in combat is contemplated now by the United States and Israel against Iran. How many times have we heard U.S. government officials involved in the Bush Junior administration and now the Obama administration say: “All options are on the table.”  They mean it: not just the use the force but the use of nuclear weapons as well. These are prohibited by conventional and customary international law, including the Genocide Convention of 1948, designed to prevent a repetition of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, the Poles, the Russians, the Ukrainians. The use of nuclear weapons would also violate Resolutions of the U.N. General Assembly that repeatedly condemned their use as an international crime.  We must understand that when dealing with nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence: They are not simply immoral, they are not simply illegal, but they are criminal across the board!

    The Swiss Foreign Ministry a commissioned a study of nuclear deterrence by three American authors, I read it, and I agree with what they said. They pointed out that the critical factor is the delegitimisation of nuclear weapons in the minds of the people. Having litigated nuclear weapons protest cases in the United States, Canada, Britain, and elsewhere since 1982, for me the critical factor in winning these cases is to explain to the common, ordinary people on juries that nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence are criminal. Not simply illegal, not simply immoral, but criminal!

    Yet the government officials in all the nuclear weapon states, not just the United States — they are the worst of them — but also Russia, France, Britain, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea: They are the criminals! For threatening to exterminate all humanity! For threatening Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. That’s what nuclear deterrence really is: threatening mass extermination.  And in the Advisory Opinion by the International Court of Justice on nuclear weapons, the World Court ruled that the threat stands or falls on the same legal grounds as the actual use.  If mass extermination of human beings is a crime, the threat to commit mass extermination is also a crime.

    It is as if the leaders of the nuclear weapon states have all taken out a gun, cocked the trigger, and held it at the heads of all humanity! In any system of criminal justice today that activity is criminal! In the United States it would be attempted murder, and you would be prosecuted for it.  Yet today U.S. government officials threaten murder to millions of people around the world. And now especially in Iran.

    According to the Nuremberg Judgment soldiers would be obliged to disobey criminal orders to launch and wage a nuclear war. And yet, how many soldiers have been educated to understand these principles? A few have educated themselves, acted on it, and have been prosecuted by the United States government.  I have helped to defend them, with a good deal of success, but not complete success. You can read about this in my latest book Protesting Power: War Resistance and Law (Rowman & Littlefield: 2008). How we defended military resisters in our all-volunteer Armed Forces who refused to fight in illegal, criminal wars waged by the United States government, going back to Gulf War I by Bush Senior, Haiti by Clinton, Gulf War II by Bush Junior.

    All government officials and military officers who might launch or wage a nuclear war would be personally responsible for the commission of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. And such individuals whether statesmen or high level military personnel would not be entitled to any defenses of superior orders, act of state, tu quoque, self-defense, presidential authority, etc. All those defenses were made by lawyers for the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg and they were rejected. And yet today in the United States of America starting with the Bush Junior administration and now continuing with Obama you will hear international lawyers working for the government, and many in the private sector, making Nazi arguments to justify what the United States government is doing around the world. That’s how desperate the situation is!

    The whole Bush Doctrine of preventive warfare, which is yet to be officially repealed by Obama now after 18 months, was made by the Nazi lawyers for the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, and it was rejected. And the argument by Nuremberg was: There is no such thing as preventive self-defense or things of this nature. What is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law. And the test is clearly: the necessity of self-defense must be instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, no moment for deliberation. Certainly not Afghanistan or Iraq or Lebanon or Palestine or Iran or Somalia or Yemen or Pakistan. And yet all victims of this Nazi doctrine of preventive self-defense that is now justified by all these prostituted international lawyers on the payroll of the United States government, leaving government service, now they infiltrate into American academia where they likewise try to justify these doctrines and policies that were condemned as criminal at Nuremberg.

    Article 2, paragraph 4 of the United Nations Charter prohibits both the threat and the use of force except in cases of legitimate self-defense. And there is a standard for self-defense. Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, and as supplemented by Nuremberg, that clearly rejects the wars against Afghanistan as aggression – explained in my book in greater detail — against Iraq, against Pakistan, which by the way has nuclear arms.  The Obama administration has now escalated to a war against Pakistan, trying to set off civil war and destabilize Pakistan, just as they did in Yugoslavia, just as they did in Iraq, just as they did in Afghanistan. As we lawyers say: “The modus operandi is the same.”

    The Empire does not change from one administration to the next! In America the government is run by elites who are either liberal imperialists, conservative imperialists, or reactionary imperialists, like the Neocons. But they are all imperialists! And they believe in the god-given right to the American Empire. That’s the way America started. Remember, how did the United States of America start? White European settlers coming over to North America, exterminating millions of indigenous people, and robbing their land, and building an Empire. The process just continues today as we speak.

    The threat to use nuclear weapons, what we call “nuclear deterrence” — I would call “nuclear terrorism” — constitutes ongoing international criminal activity: planning, preparation, solicitation, and conspiracy to commit Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.  These are what we lawyers call inchoate crimes, not the substantive offences themselves, but crimes leading up to the commission of the substantive offences. They were made criminal at Nuremberg in order to establish a bright line and that we would punish even walking up to that bright line as criminal.

    In the case of nuclear weapons once a nuclear war starts I doubt very seriously we are going to be having another war crimes tribunal for anyone.  So what that means then is that it is up to us citizens of the world to stop and prevent a nuclear war, and to stop and prevent the threat, conspiracy, solicitation of the use of nuclear weapons. “Everything is on the table” — clearly a threat to use nuclear weapons, clearly a criminal threat under the World Court Advisory Opinion, against Iran.

    As I explain in more detail in my book, the design, research, testing, production, manufacture, fabrication, transportation, deployment, installation, storing, stockpile, sale, and purchase and the threat to use nuclear weapons are criminal under well-recognized principles of international law.  And I know the German government has finally asked the United States, NATO, to take its nukes out of Germany. And Mrs. Clinton has said: “We don’t support it.” Well is the German government going to cave in? Or will it use law and international law and the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and Principles to get American criminal nukes out of Germany? I guess we will find out this Fall.

    Those government decision-makers in all nuclear weapon states with command responsibility for nuclear weapons are responsible today for personal criminal activity under the Nuremberg Principles for this practice of nuclear deterrence/nuclear terrorism, that they inflict on all states and peoples in the world today.  And in particular counter-ethnic targeting for the United States, destroying Russians just because they are Russian.

    Also counter city-targeting!  When I worked on the case of the U.K. nuclear weapons in Scotland we established that the entire purpose of the U.K. nuclear weapons force, under the control and allocated to NATO, was to destroy the city of Moscow, seven million human beings! It had no other purpose. Needless to say, once we did that we got all of our defendants off for four counts each of malicious destruction of property when they destroyed a tender servicing the U.K. Trident II nuclear weapons submarines with these weapons of mass extermination. They might have destroyed the tender, but they did not act maliciously.  They acted for the perfectly lawful reason to stop the nuclear extermination of seven million human beings.

    So, I argue in my book, the simple idea of the criminality of nuclear weapons and deterrence can be used to pierce through the ideology of nuclearism, to which so many citizens in the nuclear weapon states and around the world have succumbed — by means of propaganda techniques, propagated by the governments, going back to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the U.S. government tried to present this as positive to the American people and in particular that it was necessary to end a war to avoid an invasion of Japan, which of course was not going to happen, because the Japanese were already defeated and were trying desperately to negotiate a surrender.

    It is with this simple idea of the criminality of nuclear weapons that people can easily comprehend the illegitimacy and fundamental lawlessness of these policies that their governments pursue in their names — or allied governments as well. And to those living in the NATO states today: Their leaders are all accomplices, they go along with nuclear policies as well. They send their generals over to NATO headquarters to be integrated into NATO’s strategy.

    I remember after the Berlin Wall fell, the German Branch of International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms had a big conference in Berlin and I gave the keynote address along these lines. And they asked the German General of the Bundeswehr in charge of liaison with NATO on nuclear weapons to respond to me. And he got up and he said: “Well, we all know that Nuremberg is soft law.”

    I had two reactions to that. One: “Mister General, we hanged your predecessors at Nuremberg, under the Nuremberg laws. How can you say it is soft law?”  Not that I support the death penalty even for major war criminals like Bush Junior and Tony Blair.

    But the second reaction I had to this notion of soft law like Joe Nye’s “soft power”: “Soft law’”, I said, “you know, he got that from us.” So we Americans have convinced German generals that Nuremberg is soft law in order to pursue our nuclear policies with the cooperation of the next generation of German generals whose predecessors we hanged at Nuremberg.

    After the public speech I discussed this matter with him, and he agreed with me but he said: “Look, we have no alternative but to do what the Americans tell us to do.” And I quoted to him a passage from the Bible saying: “Yes, and the blind shall lead the blind.”  And the German General said:  “We have to trust that the Americans are doing the right thing.”  Right over the nuclear precipice! The German people have to stand up here and say: “Enough! We want your nukes out of Germany for sure and we are no longer going to cooperate with you on nuclear weapons policies.”

    Humankind must abolish nuclear weapons before nuclear weapons abolish humankind!  Nevertheless there are a small number of governments in the world that continue to maintain their nuclear weapons systems despite the rules of international criminal law to the contrary. I would respond in a very simple way: Since when has a small gang of criminals — the leaders of the nuclear weapons states — been able to determine what is illegal or legal for the rest of the world by means of their own criminal behaviour? What right do nuclear weapons states have to argue that by means of their own criminal behaviour — nuclear deterrence/nuclear terrorism — they have made criminal acts legitimate? No civilized state would permit a small gang of criminal conspirators to pervert its domestic legal order in this way. Indeed both the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Tokyo Tribunal made it clear that a conspiratorial band of criminal states has no right to opt-out of the international legal order by means of invoking their own criminal behaviour as the least common denominator of international deportment. It’s a basic rule of international law: Right cannot arise out of injustice! Ex iniuria ius non oritur!

    The entire human race has been victimized by an international conspiracy of ongoing criminal activity carried out by the nuclear weapons states and their leaders under this doctrine of nuclear deterrence which is really a euphemism for nuclear terrorism. And the expansion of NATO has now drawn in almost all of Europe. They have broken down – the United States and NATO – even the traditionally neutral states. Sweden today acts as if it were a de facto but not yet de jure member of NATO. Finland has basically abandoned its neutrality. Austria, with a constitutional obligation to be neutral, has basically abandoned its neutrality. Even Ireland, little bitty Ireland – I have dual nationality with Ireland.  The Americans have forced and compelled Ireland to join up to the Partnership for Peace (PFP) which is one step away from NATO membership, and have forced Ireland then under PFP to put some troops in Afghanistan to help them wage an illegal and criminal war of aggression against Afghanistan.

    The only state in Europe still holding out is Switzerland. Yes, it signed up for Partnership for Peace which it should never have done. But at least Switzerland is holding out, it has no troops in Afghanistan or Iraq. And Switzerland must continue to hold out. And that is exactly why it is been subjected to so much pressure! Including an attack on its banking and financial system to bring Switzerland into line with NATO and the United States, exactly as every other country in Europe has done and succumbed.  That is really what’s at stake here. Are you, the Swiss, going to join up – either de facto or de jure – with NATO and the Americans, so that if and when they attack Iran and perhaps set off a new world war, you and your children will get sucked into it? Switzerland avoided the last two world wars. I certainly hope Switzerland will avoid the next one by having nothing to do with the United States and NATO. And somehow working your way out of Partnership for Peace.

    This international criminal conspiracy of nuclear deterrence/nuclear terrorism, is no different from any other conspiracy by a criminal gang or band. They are the outlaws. We are the sheriffs — the citizens of the world. So it is up to us to repress and dissolve this international criminal conspiracy by whatever non-violent means are at our disposal and as soon as possible.  As I said: If we all don’t act now, Obama and his people could very well set off a Third World War over Iran, that has already been threatened publicly by Bush Junior.

    Every person around the world has a basic human right to be free from the criminal practice of nuclear deterrence/nuclear terrorism, and its specter of nuclear extinction. All human beings in our capacities as creatures of God possess the basic right under international law to engage in civil resistance for the purpose of preventing, impeding or terminating the ongoing commission of these international crimes.

    And this is not civil disobedience.  It’s civil resistance! We have disobeyed nothing! We are obeying the dictates of international law! It is the government officials in the nuclear weapons states and their allied states that are disobeying international law. They are the criminals! We are the sheriffs! And it is up to us to stop them!

    Every citizen of the world community has the right and the duty to oppose the existence of nuclear weapons systems by whatever non-violent means are at his or her disposal. Otherwise the human race will suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs. And the planet earth will become a radioactive waste-land. And it very well could happen in our life-time.

    The time for preventive action is now! And civil resistance by all of us human beings is the way to go.

    Thank you.

  • Nuclear Dangers and Opportunities in the Middle East

    Iran’s uranium enrichment program has drawn much criticism, and there has been talk in both Israel and the United States of possible attacks against Iranian nuclear facilities.  The drift toward a military solution seems to be gathering an alarming momentum, with little public discussion of alternative approaches in the mainstream US media.  There would likely be very heavy costs associated with carrying out such attacks.

    Iranian leaders have a variety of instruments available for retaliation, and there is little reason to think that these would not be used. It is highly probable that Israel would be attacked in response by Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which have the capabilities to inflict serious damage. Even more damage could be done by Iran itself, which is developing long-range delivery capacities by way of advanced missile technology and a type of bomb-carrying drone aircraft.   

    There exists also the Iranian option to block passage through the Strait of Hormuz through which two-thirds of the world’s imported oil travels, undoubtedly producing supply shortages, a spike in prices, long gas lines in countries around the world, and global economic chaos.  Beyond this, there are a variety of unresolved conflicts in the region that could be easily inflamed by Iranian interventions, most obviously Iraq.   

    Attacks against Iran, as a non-defensive recourse to force, would violate international law and the UN Charter. Force is only lawful in international conflict situations if used as self-defense in response to a prior armed attack. The core Charter commitment in Article 2(4) prohibits threats as well as uses of force.  By that standard, both Israel and the United States, by their threats alone, may already be viewed as law-breakers.  The actual use of force would leave no doubt.

        A far better option than attacking Iran would be attempting to negotiate a Middle East Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone. There is widespread support for this initiative among the governments in the region and the world.  It was a priority goal agreed to by consensus at the 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference.  But there is one large catch that has so far been a decisive inhibitor: Israel is unalterably opposed, as the establishment of the zone would require Israel to dismantle its own nuclear weapons arsenal.

    Obviously, the idea of a Middle East Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone has little regional appeal if it does not include Israel.  Israel’s insistence on retaining nuclear weapons while being ready to wage a war, with menacing repercussions, to prevent Iran from acquiring such weaponry is expressive of the deeply troubling double standards that are an overall feature of the nonproliferation regime.

    A Middle East Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone would immediately improve overall regional stability and, as well, take account of the prospect of many Arab countries poised to embark on nuclear energy programs of their own. Indeed, without such a zone, there is a substantial possibility of a regional nuclear arms race that would tempt countries such as Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, as well as Iran, to have the supposed deterrent benefits of a nuclear arsenal.

    A Middle East Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone that includes all the countries of the region is an issue that demands U.S. leadership.  Only the United States has the leverage and stature to bring the diverse cast of regional actors to the negotiating table to make the needed effort to avert war. There can be no advance assurances that such a diplomatic initiative would succeed, but to fail to try would be lamentable.

  • Tale of Two Nuclear Whistleblowers

    Reliable sources have revealed that as a result of a secret trial, Iranian nuclear whistleblower Amid Nasri has been sentenced to 18 years in solitary confinement.  Nasri, a former worker at an Iranian uranium enrichment plant, revealed to the The Sunday Times in London that Iran was developing nuclear materials as part of a program to create nuclear weapons.  Lured to Rome by a strikingly beautiful Iranian secret agent, Nasri was kidnapped by the secret service and returned to Iran for trial.  

    The government of Iran issued a brief statement in which they claim that Nasri violated the national security of the Islamic Republic of Iran and was tried and punished accordingly.  They state that he had a contractual obligation not to release any information concerning the work of the uranium enrichment plant where he worked.  

    Nasri has been incarcerated in Iran’s highest level security prison and has not been allowed to speak to the press or to foreign officials.  He is under such severe restrictions that he is not allowed even to speak with other prison inmates.  

    There have been widespread protests from Western governments about Nasri’s treatment at the hands of the Iranian government.  A high-level UK official called the secret trial a “sham of the first order,” and harshly criticized the Iranian government for its heavy handed treatment of Nasri.   US officials have also protested Nasri’s conviction, calling him a hero for making public the information on the Iranian nuclear weapon program. 

    Before you become too concerned about the harsh treatment of this Iranian whistleblower acting for the common good, I need to tell you that he is fictional.  He does not exist.  There is no Iranian whistleblower Amid Nasri.  There is also no proof of an Iranian nuclear weapon program, although there are concerns about its nuclear enrichment program.

    The story, though, is not entirely false.  There is an Israeli nuclear whistleblower by the name of Mordechai Vanunu.  He worked as a nuclear technician at the Negev Nuclear Research Center in Israel.  He revealed information on the Israeli nuclear weapon program to the The Sunday Times in London in 1986.  He was lured from London to Rome by a beautiful Israeli secret agent, where he was kidnapped by Israel’s secret service and returned to Israel.  There he was given a secret trial, convicted and sentenced to 18 years imprisonment.  He served more than 11 years of his sentence in solitary confinement.  The Israelis claimed that Vanunu violated his contractual obligations of secrecy and was a national security risk. 

    Vanunu was released from prison in 2004, but under harsh parole terms.  He is not allowed to leave Israel or to travel too close to the Israeli border.  Nor is he allowed to talk to foreign journalists.  In 2007, Vanunu was sentenced to six more months in prison for violating the terms of his parole for speaking to the foreign media in 2004.  The sentence was later reduced by half, and in May 2010 Vanunu was returned to prison for three months.  Amnesty International has called Vanunu a prisoner of conscience.  Although he has received many awards for his courage in blowing the whistle on Israel’s nuclear weapons program and has been nominated many times for the Nobel Peace Prize, he has received virtually no support from Western governments.

    What are we to learn from this tale of two whistleblowers, one fictional, one real?  One important lesson is the danger of nuclear double standards.  We cannot be content to make a hero of a fictional Iranian nuclear whistleblower, while turning a blind eye to the treatment of a real-life Israeli nuclear whistleblower and to the Israeli nuclear arsenal.

    Nuclear weapons are not reasonable weapons in the hands of any nation – not Israel, not Iran, not the US, the UK, or any other nation.  We should not be complacent with the punishment of truth-telling messengers such as Vanunu.  We should laud them and work to assure that no nation holds in its hands the nuclear power of mass annihilation. 

    The Final Document of the 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference calls for a Middle East Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone, a long time aspiration of the people of this region.  If such a zone is created, it will mean that Iran and other countries in the region will not be able to develop nuclear weapons, but it will also mean that Israel will not be able to continue to possess its nuclear arsenal, which is thought to contain some 200 nuclear weapons. 

    If we are going to prevent future replays of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or even worse scenarios, we must rid the world of nuclear weapons.  It will not be easy, but it is necessary if we are to assure the continuation of human life on our planet.  President Obama has told us that America seeks “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”  In that world, whistleblowers like Mordechai Vanunu will be respected and honored for the courage they displayed in revealing the truth in the face of the overwhelming power and hypocrisy of the state and of a global system that unwisely supported nuclear double standards.

  • Rebalancing the World

    It may turn out that May 17, 2010 will be remembered as an important milestone on the road to a real new world order.  Remember that the phrase ‘new world order’ came to prominence in 1990 after Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait. It was used by George W. H. Bush, the elder of the two Bush presidents, to signify the possibility after the end of the Cold War to find a consensus within the UN Security Council enabling a unified response to aggressive war. The new world order turned out to be a mobilizing idea invoked for a particular situation, and not the beginning of a new framework for collective security. The United States did not want to create expectations that it would always be available to lead a coalition against would be breakers of world peace. The apparent commitment, and even the language, of a ‘new world order’ disappeared altogether from American diplomacy right after the First Gulf War of 1991. What one wonders now is whether the Brazilian/Turkish effort to resolve the Iran nuclear crisis with the West is not more genuinely expressive of a changing global setting, perhaps leading this time to something durable–a ‘real new world order.’

    May 17th was the day that the Brazilian/Turkish initiative bore fruit in Tehran, with Iran agreeing to a ten-point arrangement designed to defuse the mounting confrontation with the United States and Israel with regard to its enrichment facilities. The essence of the deal was that Iran would ship 1200 kilograms of low enriched uranium (LEU) to Turkey for deposit, and receive in return 120 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20% for use in an Iranian  nuclear reactor devoted to medical research. The agreement reaffirmed support for the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as well as acknowledged Iran’s right under the treaty to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, which meant the entire fuel cycle, including the enrichment phase.

    The bargain negotiated in Tehran closely resembled an arrangement provisionally reached some months earlier at the initiative of the International Atomic Energy Agency in which Iran had agreed to turn over a similar amount of low enriched uranium to France and Russia in exchange for their promise of providing fuel rods that could be used in the same medical research reactor. That 2009 deal floundered when Iran raised political objections, and then withdrew. The United States had initially welcomed this earlier arrangement as a desirable confidence-building step toward resolving the underlying conflict with Iran, but it wasted no time repudiating the May 17th agreement, which seemed so similar in its content.

    How should we understand this discrepancy in the American response? It is true that in recent months Iran has increased its LEU production, making 1200 kg of its existing stockpile amount to 50% of its total rather than the 80% that would have been transferred in the earlier arrangement. Also, there were some unspecified features in the May 17th plan, including how the enriched uranium would be provided to Iran, and whether there would be a system of verification as to its use to produce medical isotopes. In this regard, it would have seemed appropriate for Washington, if genuinely troubled by this, for Washington to express its substantive concerns, such as requesting Iran to transfer a larger quantity of LEU and to spell out the details, but this is not what happened.

    Instead of welcoming this notable effort to reduce regional tensions, which it had once encouraged, the Brazilian/Turkish initiative was immediately branded as an amateurish irrelevance by the American Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton. She insisted that the concerns about Iranian nuclear enrichment be left exclusively in the hands of the ‘major powers,’ and immediately rallied China and Russia (in addition to France and the United Kingdom) to support a fourth round of punitive sanctions that were to be presented to the UN Security Council in the near future.  It now appears that the five permanent members of the Security Council will support this intensification of sanctions that is expected to call for an arms embargo on heavy weapons, travel restrictions on Iranian officials, a boycott of banks and companies listed as linked to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, and a provocative authority to search ships to and from Iran suspected of carrying prohibited items. Such a resolution if implemented would certainly increase tensions in the Middle East without any discouragement of the Iranian nuclear program.  Indeed a new round of sanctions would almost certainly increase Iran’s incentives to exercise its full rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and complete its development of the complete fuel cycle as has been previously done by several other parties to the treaty, including Japan, Germany, The Netherlands, and ironically, Brazil.

    Given the generally constructive character of the agreement reached in Tehran, the uncompromisingly hostile reaction in Washington can only be understood in one of two ways, neither of which is reassuring. If the U.S. Government, with or without Israeli prodding, had already resolved to impose sanctions, then a tension-reducing development of this sort would weaken the case for this coercive approach and needed to be somehow undermined. All indications point to a conclusion that the United States was determined to go forward with sanctions, and was unpleasantly surprised when it suddenly became clear on May 17th that a credible deal had been negotiated. So long as the Brazil/Turkey initiative was given no chance of success, it was encouraged as a way to reinforcing the impression that Iran was not interested in a diplomatic solution, and the political atmosphere would be supportive of moves to tighten anti-Iranian sanctions. When it turned out that the U.S. had guessed wrong, and that the Brazilian/Turkish diplomacy would reach a positive outcome, the American leadership shifted course, and seemed to blame for Brasilia and Ankara for interfering in a policy domain where thy lacked experience and leverage.  The Brazilians gave the lie to this posturing by Washington when Lula released Obama’s letter of April 20, 2010 in which a green light had been given to the Brazil/Turkey diplomatic effort to find a breakthrough that would reduce tensions and calm the region.

    Perhaps, the more weighty explanation of the hostile response has to do with the changing cast of players in the geopolitical power game. If this reasoning is correct, then the United States angry response was intended to deliver a public reprimand to Brazil and Turkey, warning them to leave questions pertaining to nuclear weapons in the hands of what Hilary Clinton called ‘the major powers.’ In effect, the non-Western world should have no say in shaping global security policy, and any attempt to do so would be rebuffed in the strongest possible terms. Here, too, it was probably felt that this lesson could be indirectly given through the anticipated Iranian rejection of the proposed new arrangement. When this didn’t transpire, then the United States would have had to cede graciously part of the geopolitical stage, or do what it decided to do, and try to slap down the upstart Brazilians and Turks. Perhaps, it might have accepted the outcome had it not meant also giving up its plan to rely on enhanced sanctions.  

    The world of 2010 is very different from what it was in the late 20th century. Globalization, the decline of American power, and the rise of non-Western states have changed the landscape. This process has recently accelerated as a result of the world economic crisis, and the unresolved difficulties in the Euro zone. As the famous Bob Dylan 1960’s song goes, “The times, they are a-changing.” Recall that it was not long ago that the G-8 was scrapped in favor of the more inclusive G-20. Recently, as well, much attention has been given to the rise of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries. What seems most at stake in this attempt to supersede and nullify the Iran deal is banishing the Brazilian and Turkish intruders from the geopolitical playing field. For the West to claim that the Security Council remains remotely representative of the arrangement of power in 2010 is ludicrous. The identity of the five permanent members made some sense in 1945 following World War II, but today it is unquestionably anachronistic due to its failure to take any account of the fundamental shifts in world power that have taken place in recent decades. Brazil and Turkey were recently elected to be non-permanent two-year members of the Security Council, and have justified their selection by pursuing active and independent paths to a more secure and peaceful world. The old guard in world politics should have congratulated the Brazilians and Turks for succeeding where they had failed rather than complaining, and should have settled for defusing tensions rather than seeking their intensification, but this is not the world we are living in.

    Further, this is not just a childish ploy by to grab a few headlines and tweak the old guard. The confrontation with Iran is exceedingly dangerous, agitated by Israel’s periodic threats of launching a military attack and reports of pushing hard on the United States behind the scenes to move toward exercising the military option that, in Beltway jargon, has never been taken off the table. This prevailing strategy of tension could easily produce a devastating regional war, disrupting the world economy, and causing widespread human suffering. Both Brazil and Turkey have strong national interests in working for regional peace and security, and one way to do this is to calm the diplomatic waters, especially in relation to Iran’s contested nuclear program. The fact that Iran seems prepared to go ahead with the agreement, at least if the UN refrains from further sanctions, argues for giving the deal a chance to succeed, or at worst, working to make the LEU transfer more reassuring to those countries that suspect Iran of secretly planning to become a nuclear weapons state.

    The concern about Iran seems genuine in many quarters, given the inflammatory language sometimes used by President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and considering the repressive internal practices in Iran. At the same time, even in this regard the United States leadership has rather dirty hands. While insisting that Iran cannot be allowed to do what several other non-nuclear states have already done in conformity with Non-Proliferation Treaty, the United States has acknowledged that it has been engaged in a variety of destabilizing military activities under Pentagon auspices within Iranian territory. (For confirmation see Mark Mazzeti, “U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Actions in Mideast,” NY Times, May 24, 2010). Also, it is impossible to overlook the dispiriting silence that has long insulated Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal from scrutiny and censure, as well as the closely related refusal of the Western powers to back proposals put forward by Egypt and others for a nuclear free Middle East.

    Back in 2003 Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, made headlines by contrasting ‘Old Europe’ (especially France and Germany) that he denigrated as decadent because it opposed the invasion of Iraq, and ‘New Europe’ that was supposed to be the flourishing wave of the future in Eastern Europe that favored American policy. Now it is Old Europe that is again partnering with the United States, and so restored to the good graces of Washington. In this sense, Brazil and Turkey are being treated as geopolitical trespassers because of their refusal to absent themselves from any further engagement in Middle East diplomacy.

    We seem to be witnessing the passing of an era in world politics, which has yet to be acknowledged. It is two decades since Charles Krauthammer, writing in Foreign Affairs, declared that “The immediate post-Cold War world is not multipolar. It is unipolar. The center of world power is the unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies.” The abrupt rejection of the Brazil/Turkey initiative can probably best understood as a nostalgic clinging by Obama’s Washington to the ‘unipolar moment’ long after its reality has passed into history, at lease with respect to nuclear weapons policy, including administering the non-proliferation regime. The U.S. Government has been more flexible in other substantive areas, so far encouraging reliance on the G-20 and treating the BRIC countries as virtual partners in the Copenhagen climate change high-level conference of last December.

    Turkey has already demonstrated the enormous gains for itself and the region arising by the pursuit of an independent and activist foreign policy based on resolving conflicts and reducing tensions to the extent possible, with benefits for itself and its neighbors as measured by peace, stability, and prosperity.  Not all of its initiatives have met with success. It tried to encourage the world to treat Hamas as a political actor after it fairly won elections in Gaza back in January 2006, but was rebuffed by Washington and Tel Aviv. Similarly, it brought to bear its mediating skill in trying to broker a peace deal between Israel and Syria, only to have the process break down after a series of promising negotiating rounds. Maybe also the Brazil/Turkey initiative will be effectively beaten down, but it was still definitely worth trying. For the sake of human security such governments should continue trying to supplant war and militarism with diplomacy and cooperative international relations. Outside of Western diplomatic circles it is already widely appreciated that the May 17th agreement showcases the exciting reality of a new geopolitical landscape in which the countries of the global South are now acting as subjects, being no longer content as mere objects in scenarios devised in the North. In the near future it is likely to be widely appreciated that there does exist a ‘real new world order’! At that time, the May 17th initiative might finally come into its own as the day that the North/South divide disappeared with respect to the shaping of global policy and the quest for the peaceful resolution of war-threatening conflicts.