Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Iraq War

  • Watada Beats the Government

    When the Army judge declared a mistrial over defense objection in 1st Lt. Ehren Watada’s court martial, he probably didn’t realize jeopardy attached. That means that under the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Constitution, the government cannot retry Lt. Watada on the same charges of missing movement and conduct unbecoming an officer.
    Lt. Watada is the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse orders to deploy to Iraq. He claimed those orders were unlawful because the war is illegal and he would be an accomplice to war crimes if he followed them.

    The judge refused to allow me and others to testify as expert defense witnesses on the illegality of the Iraq war and the war crimes the Bush administration is committing there.
    The Uniform Code of Military Justice sets forth the duty of military personnel to obey only lawful commands. Article 92 says: “A general order or regulation is lawful unless it is contrary to the Constitution, the law of the United States …”
    Lt. Watada said at a June 6, 2006 press conference in Tacoma, Washington, “The war in Iraq is in fact illegal. It is my obligation and my duty to refuse any orders to participate in this war.” He stated, “An order to take part in an illegal war is unlawful in itself. So my obligation is not to follow the order to go to Iraq.”
    Citing “deception and manipulation … and willful misconduct by the highest levels of my chain of command,” Lt. Watada declared there is “no greater betrayal to the American people” than the Iraq war.
    The “turning point” for Lt. Watada came when he “saw the pain and suffering of so many soldiers and their families, and innocent Iraqis.” He said, “I best serve my soldiers by speaking out against unlawful orders of the highest levels of my chain of command, and making sure our leaders are held accountable.” Lt. Watada felt he “had the obligation to step up and do whatever it takes,” even if that means facing court martial and imprisonment.
    Lt. Watada did face court martial, and four years in prison, until the judge declared a mistrial.
    This is what I would have said had I been allowed to testify at Lt. Watada’s court martial:
    The United States is committing a crime against the peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in Iraq.
    A war of aggression, prosecuted in violation of international treaties, is a crime against the peace. The war in Iraq violates the Charter of the United Nations, which prohibits the use of force. There are only two exceptions to that prohibition: self-defense and approval by the Security Council. A pre-emptive or preventive war is not allowed under the Charter.
    Bush’s war in Iraq was not undertaken in self-defense. Iraq had not attacked the US or any other country for 12 years. And Saddam Hussein’s military capability had been effectively neutered by the Gulf War, 12 years of punishing sanctions, and nearly daily bombing by the US and UK over the “no-fly-zones.”
    Bush tried mightily to get the Security Council to sanction his war on Iraq. But the Council refused. Bush then cobbled together prior Council resolutions, none of which, individually or collectively, authorized the use of force in Iraq. Although Bush claimed to be enforcing Security Council resolutions, the Charter empowers only the Council to enforce its resolutions.
    Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions constitute war crimes, for which individuals can be punished under the US War Crimes Act. Willful killing, torture and inhuman treatment are grave breaches.
    The torture and inhuman treatment of prisoners in US custody at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq are grave breaches of Geneva, and therefore, war crimes. The execution of unarmed civilians in Haditha and other Iraqi cities are also war crimes.
    Commanders in the chain of command, all the way up to the commander in chief, can be prosecuted for war crimes if they knew or should have known their subordinates were committing war crimes and failed to stop or prevent them. The torture policies and rules of engagement were set at the top. It is George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell who should be on trial – for the commission of war crimes.
    Inhumane acts against a civilian population are crimes against humanity and violate the Fourth Geneva Convention. The targeting of civilians and failure to protect civilians and civilian objects are crimes against humanity.
    The dropping of 2,000-pound bombs in residential areas of Baghdad during “Shock and Awe” were crimes against humanity. The indiscriminate US attack on Fallujah, which was collective punishment in retaliation for the killing of four Blackwater mercenaries, was a crime against humanity. The destruction of hospitals in Fallujah by the US military, its refusal to let doctors treat patients, and shooting into ambulances were crimes against humanity. Declaring Fallujah a “weapons-free” zone, with orders to shoot anything that moved, was a crime against humanity.
    Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal. He wrote: “No political or economic situation can justify the crime of aggression. If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
    Lt. Ehren Watada was correct when he said the war is illegal and he would be party to war crimes if he deployed to Iraq. The orders to deploy were unlawful and Lt. Watada had a duty to disobey them. Although he faces the possibility of a dishonorable discharge, the judge’s grant of a mistrial precludes retrial on the same criminal charges.

     

    Marjorie Cohn, MWC News Magazine senior editor, is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, will be published this spring by PoliPointPress.

  • Reflections on the Connections between the War in Iraq and Hawaii: the Stryker Brigade and the Watada Case

    Two great volcanoes comprise most of the Big Island of Hawai’i. Mauna Loa, measured by volume, is the largest mountain in the world, and Mauna Kea, if measured from the sea floor, would rank as the tallest. Both peaks are considered sacred, the realm of the gods (wao akua), not just for Hawai’ians, but throughout all of Polynesia.

    In October of 2002, the first of a series of protests against the imminent U.S. attack against Iraq took place at the Mo‘oheau Bandstand on the Hilo Bayfront. As I drove down to Hilo, I was struck by the majestic and stunning presence of Mauna Kea rising 13,792 ft. above Hilo—so unusually clear on a rare cloudless morning. It was a day that was startling in its beauty even for Hawai‘i, and as I listened to the various speakers call our attention to the horrors of what seemed about to take place in Iraq, my gaze often drifted to the tranquil bay and the waves softly rolling down on the sands below. The contrast couldn’t have been sharper between the peaceful setting of Hilo Bay and the looming war in Iraq. If it weren’t for the voices of the Hawai’ian rights activists—reminding us of the illegal overthrow of the Hawai’ian nation—I might have thought only of the profound difference between these beautiful islands and the war-torn country of Iraq. In fact, what was taking place a world away in Iraq was really not that far away at all and is, indeed, deeply connected to what happened and was still taking place in Hawai‘i. I was reminded of the “infinite extent of our relations” as Thoreau once put it, and from this perspective, the connections between the war in Iraq, the overthrow of the Hawai’ian nation, and the continuing controversy surrounding the military’s presence in Hawai‘i become more and more clear.

    The Stryker in Hawai’i Hawai’i senior Senator Daniel Inouye apparently doesn’t see these connections as is evident in a recent editorial in the Honolulu Advertiser in support of the Army’s plan to transform the 2nd Brigade in Hawai’i into a Stryker Combat Brigade.[1] The Army’s plan would involve basing about 300 Stryker vehicles at Schofield Barracks on Oahu and also expanding the Army’s Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island which the brigade will use for training. The Army’s project to bring a Stryker brigade to Hawai’i has met strong resistance for the last several years from native Hawai’ian groups as well as environmental and peace activists. In October of 2006 a federal appellate court, in response to a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit environmental group Earthjustice acting on behalf of three native Hawai’ian groups, found that the Army had violated environmental laws in not adequately considering alternatives to locating the brigade in Hawai’i.[2] The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reversed an April 2005 decision by U.S. District Judge David Ezra allowing the Army to proceed with its plans to bring the Stryker brigade to Hawai’i. The Army must now complete a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement assessing the feasability of alternative locations for the brigade. The appellate court decision ultimately sent the case back to Honolulu and U.S. District Judge Ezra in order to determine what an injunction must cover. On the eve of Judge Ezra’s decision Senator Inouye’s editorial appeared in which he argued that for the safety of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan “we must allow the training to resume while the Army completes the supplemental environmental study.” Not surprisingly, Judge Ezra’s decision allows for the Army’s plans to go forward while the SEIS is conducted.[3] Live fire training of the Stryker brigade is expected to commence at Pohakuloa on the Big Island in February.

    The Pohakuloa Training Area is already the largest live-fire military training area in the Pacific. It consists of approximately 109,000 acres of land that have been used for the last 60 years as a live-fire area and bombing range for an assortment of military weapons. The Strykers will come to the Big Island on the new Hawai’ian Superferry, offloading at Kawaiihae Harbor and then traveling up to Pohakuloa via a newly constructed military road. It is partly for the construction of this access road, and also to increase the training area for the Strykers, that the military’s plans include the expansion of the Pohakuloa Training Area by approximately 23,000 acres of land recently purchased from the Parker Ranch.

    Pohakuloa sits between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. Even the Army acknowledges, in its Environmental Impact Statement, that “the entirety of Mauna Kea, whose southwestern slopes form part of PTA’s base, is considered holy.” Mauna Kea (The White Mountain) is associated with Poli‘ahu, the snow goddess of the summit, while Mauna Loa (The Long Mountain), last erupting as recently as 1984, is associated with Pele, the goddess of volcanic fires. The area between the two sacred mountains, considered to be a site of conflict between Poli‘ahu and Pele, is called “Pohakuloa” (The Veil that Covers the Spiritual Realm). Within the Pohakuloa Training Area there are seven stone shrines and a reported 291 archeological sites.

    By the Army’s own admission in the EIS, Pohakuloa is “spiritually and historically one of the most important places in Hawai’ian tradition and history…It is difficult to describe the emotional and spiritual link that exists between Native Hawai’ians and the natural setting. Hawai’ians generally believe that all things in nature have mana, or a certain spiritual power and life force. A custodial responsibility to preserve the natural setting is passed from generation to generation, and personal strength and spiritual well being are derived from this relationship. Because of this belief, Mauna Kea may be the most powerful and sacred natural formation in all Hawai‘i.” [4] The EIS acknowledges that there will be “significant unavoidable adverse biological impacts” upon the environment at Pohakuloa. The PTA is said, by former area commander Lt. Col. Dennis Owen, to have “the highest concentration of endangered species of any Army installation in the world.” The negative impacts will come from fires that result from live-fire training, as well as from off-road maneuvers by the Stryker vehicles that will adversely affect sensitive species and habitat. The Army also acknowledges significant negative impacts on air quality (caused by wind erosion by the off-road maneuvers of the Strykers), soil loss and soil contamination from training activities, lead and asbestos contamination caused by the construction and demolition of buildings, and destructive impacts on such cultural, historic, and archeological resources such as the Ke‘amuku Village and sacred sites such as the Pu‘ukohola Heiau.

    The Army also proposes an increase in live-fire training. This poses a significant risk, according to the EIS, to workers and army personnel from unexploded ordnance. Environmentalists have drawn attention to the danger from unexploded ordnance that litters many former military sites in Hawai‘i, as well as the military’s poor record of cleaning up these sites. The EIS states that “only simulated biological agents” will be used and that hazardous materials do not pose a significant impact. There is also some concern about the potential toxic contamination from depleted uranium since the primary armament on Stryker vehicles is the Stryker Mobile Gun System which uses ammunition made from depleted uranium. The Army has claimed that depleted uranium weapons will not be used in training at Pohakuloa, but this has hardly eased the concerns of local residents.

    While the military promises to do what it can to limit the adverse impacts from the training at Pohakuloa, it states that there is a practical limit to mitigation measures. The bottom line is that these adverse impacts and potential dangers are considered acceptable by the military.

    The issue that always looms large in the background of this controversy is the very presence of the U.S. military in Hawai‘i. For Hawai’ian sovereignty activists, the proposed expansion of the Pohakuloa Training Area is only the latest issue in a long history of U.S. military acquisitions of Hawai’ian lands—going back most notably to the 1875 “Treaty of Reciprocity” that ceded control of Pearl Harbor to the U.S. Navy. The military now controls 5 percent of land in Hawai‘i, 22 percent of O‘ahu (85,000 acres), and 4 percent of the Big Island (110,000 acres). Moreover, the proposed 23,000 acre expansion of the Pohakuloa Training Area is only about a quarter of the projected acquisition for the further development of the PTA.[5]

    It’s a sad irony that this latest land acquisition is almost the size of Kaho‘olawe (28,766 acres), the “Target Isle” used for bombing practice for nearly 50 years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Navy finally officially ceded control of Kaho‘olawe on November 11, 2003, after over two decades of protests by peace and Hawai’ian sovereignty activists. That campaign cost the lives of two Hawai’ian leaders, George Helm and Kimo Mitchell, who were lost at sea in 1977 in an effort to reach the island to protest the Navy’s occupation and bombing of the island. Their deaths became an emotional turning point in the struggle for Hawai’ian rights. Now, just as the Navy finally cedes control of Kaho‘olawe, the Army takes control of a similar-sized piece of land on the sacred slopes of Mauna Kea. It would be the largest military acquisition in Hawai‘i since WWII.

    For Hawai’ian sovereignty activists, Hawai‘i is an occupied country, and the lands in question are “stolen lands.” Though most Americans are either blissfully unaware or couldn’t care less, the sovereignty activists appear to have international law on their side. For its part, the United States government has already admitted to the illegal overthrow of the Hawai’ian nation, by issuing a formal apology by joint resolution of Congress in November of 1993 in acknowledgment of the 100th anniversary of the coup that dethroned Queen Lili’uokalani. Although the United States was the first nation to formally recognize the sovereignty of the Hawai’ian nation in 1842, it was the U.S. Navy that provided the force that enabled American business interests to dethrone the Queen in January of 1893. In recent years, experts in international law have called into question the legitimacy of “statehood” and American military occupation of Hawai’ian lands by pointing out that there is no known record of the Hawai’ian Kingdom ever relinquishing its sovereignty.

    Lessons from the war in Iraq Since that cloudless Hilo day in October of 2002, the war in Iraq has unfolded in its all-too-easily predictable catastrophe. As the violence spirals out of control and any remaining vestige of a fraudulent justification of the invasion evaporate—that Iraq is better off from having been ‘liberated’ from a despotic dictator or that the world is safer from the threat of global terrorism—the American people have slowly come to the realization that it was all a terrible mistake. It reminds me of a story I read in the paper a number of years ago when I was living in San Francisco about a jumper who had somehow managed to survive his plunge from the Golden Gate. As I remember it the hapless one said his first thought after his ill-conceived leap was “Oops, that was a mistake.” That’s about where we are today as a nation after failing to heed the warnings of so many experts and hundreds of thousands of protestors around the world and instead following the Fox News and New York Times propaganda that cheered on the Bush Administration’s leap into the abyss that is now the war in Iraq. All the head-scratching about what to do now, including the proposals of the Iraq Study Group, are nothing but the desparate flailings of one grasping at thin air after the ground has fallen away. The Bush Administration, of course, can only ‘stay the course’ and thus, with their sights now firmly set on ‘surging’ in Iraq and even more insanely on expanding the war into Iran, seems hell-bent on plunging the nation only further into the abyss.We’ve come to our “Oops” moment as a nation but we are still far from realizing just how devastating a mistake it was to launch this war.

    Senator Inouye’s editorial in support of the Stryker brigade in Hawai’i illustrates this point. The Senator writes: “Our country is at war. With the pace of operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, our Army is stretched thin. We simply cannot afford to stand down any of our forces right now.” After reminding us that he voted against the Iraq war, the Senator concludes that the “issue on the Stryker brigade should not be a referendum on the Iraq war.” Perhaps it’s the other way around, however, and that the Iraq war should be a referendum on the Stryker brigade.

    Our country is at war—but it is a war that was completely unnecessary. The United States has the most powerful military force in the world, spending more on the military than all the other nations of the world combined; and yet the United States has demonstrated a propensity to use that great military force irresponsibly and that is one of the underlying causes and certainly not the solution to the problem of terrorism. We cannot defeat the problem of terrorism by participating in terrorism and that is certainly what we are doing when we engage in unnecessary wars of aggression. Perhaps the lesson that should be drawn from the war in Iraq is that it is time to stand down all of our forces right now. The best hope for a peaceful world is for the United States to pull out of Iraq, stand down its military force, and recommit itself to the rule of law among nations.

    The United States needs to overcome its addiction to war and a good place to start would be to pull out of Iraq and to shut down the Army’s plan to base a Stryker brigade in Hawai’i. As Kyle Kajihiro, program director of the American Friends Service Committee, puts it: “The Stryker Brigade in Hawai‘i is an illegal and catastrophic project meant for use in an illegal and catastrophic war. The bitter history of the U.S. military in Hawai‘i has demonstrated that if the military gets an inch, it will take a mile, or in this case, 25,000 acres of land. We refuse to allow our sacred ‘aina to be used to perpetuate wars of aggression against other countries and peoples, or to let politicians send our loved ones to kill or be killed in such immoral and illegal wars.”[6]

    Perhaps a concern for the safety of our troops is not the primary reason behind Inouye’s support for the Stryker brigade. Obviously any training that needs to be done before the troops are withdrawn can be done at existing facilities elsewhere. Kajihiro continues: “The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said that the Army failed to answer the question ‘Why Hawai‘i?’ and ordered the Army to complete a supplemental environmental impact statement (EIS) that considered alternatives. But it is unlikely that another EIS will be able to honestly answer such a question that is essentially political. Stryker Brigades are in Hawai‘i and Alaska because of the power of Hawai‘i’s and Alaska’s Senators to secure ‘military pork’. Politicians cannot claim to be against the war while promoting the military expansion that drives wars.”[7]

    Perhaps the war in Iraq should be a referendum on the Stryker brigade in Hawai’i for there is a deep connection after all between the war in Iraq and the U.S. military’s presence in Hawai’i—the war in Iraq is really only the latest symptom of the same problem that led to the overthrow of the Nation of Hawai’i in 1893. Time and again U.S. military power has been used not really for the defense of ‘freedom’ but for the expansion of corporate global interests.

    War, if ever justified, should be an absolutely last resort. All peaceful means of resolving a conflict should be exhausted before resorting to war. There is every indication that the Bush Administration, acting to extend those corporate global interests, did everything they could to avoid any peaceful solution and manufacture a reason for war.

    Perhaps the problem is that it is far too easy for the United States with its overpowering military force to go to war. There obviously needs to be some greater force of restraint that would make it much harder for the nation to engage in war. Part of the problem is that too few Americans really feel the cost of war. I imagine that if professional sports were banned while the nation was at war, our leaders would make every effort to find a peaceful solution. It might seem a ridiculous suggestion to make, but obviously if it is important enough to go to war then sacrificing professional sports should be no big deal. Conversely, if it is not worth sacrificing professional sports, then it is obviously not worth going to war. Can one imagine just how long the Vietnam War would have lasted if there could be no World Series while the nation is at war? Would the nation so easily have accepted the fraudulant arguments for war and leapt off the cliff into the hell that is Iraq if there could be no Super Bowls while the nation is at war?

    The Watada Case Unfortunately, as Americans love their bread and circuses so much, the only hope for any restraint on the reckless militarism of the United States might be in the example set by the rare courage of the soldier from Hawai’i, Lt. Ehren Watada, who faces court martial for refusing deployment to Iraq. The military judge presiding over the court martial has, however, denied the attempt by Lt. Watada’s defense to ‘put the war on trial.’ The ruling by military circuit judge Lt. Col. John M. Head on January 16 denied the defense motion for a hearing on the “Nuremburg defense” thus preventing Watada’s defense from presenting evidence on the legality of the war. The highest ranking soldier to refuse deployment to Iraq, Lt. Watada has argued in his defense that according to the Nuremberg Principles and U.S. military regulations he was under oath to follow only “lawful orders” and that the war on Iraq is illegal under international treaties and under Article Six of the U.S. Constitution. Lt. Watada’s trial at Fort Lewis, Washington is set to begin on February 5. [8]

    The ruling by Judge Head conflicts with the statement by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, that the United States must be bound by the same rule of law used to prosecute the Germans: “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”[9] The Nuremberg trials established that soldiers are not immune from prosecution for war crimes just because they were following orders. The judgement at Nuremberg means that the common view held by Judge Head and apparently many Americans that “soldiers like Lt. Watada can’t pick and choose when to fight” is just flat out wrong. In denying the “Nuremberg defense” the military is simply setting aside the judgement at Nuremberg and ignoring Justice Jackson’s explicit statement.

    Lt. Watada’s refusal to deploy to Iraq should call to mind Thoreau’s startling words about the three ways one can serve one’s country:

    “The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, &c. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw of a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, —as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and officer-holders; —serve the state chiefly with their heads; and as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.” (Henry David Thoreau, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”, 1848.)

    Thoreau is clearly right that it is plainly wrong to think that the highest service one can give to one’s country is to serve blindly with one’s body, even if it means giving one’s life. To serve without conscience, as a mere weapon of war, is really to forsake what is highest and most human within us. To force our soldiers to surrender their conscience is not only to ignore the judgement at Nuremberg, it is also treating our soldiers like horses and dogs. Sending our troops into an unnecessary and immoral war is in fact treating them far worse than horses and dogs.

    The nation would be stronger not weaker if it recognized Lt. Watada’s right to refuse deployment to an illegal war. If Lt. Watada’s action is recognized as right, the nation would be far less prone to engage in unnecessary and immoral wars. In refusing deployment to Iraq Lt. Watada is serving the country with his conscience, and in so doing, is giving the highest service. If Lt. Watada goes to prison, as seems now very likely, he will be a powerful symbol of the injustice of the nation and its shame in ignoring the judgement at Nuremberg and refusing to remember Justice Jackson’s counsel.

    1. U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, “Don’t fence them in,” Commentary, The Honolulu Advertiser, Sunday, December 17, 2006. 2. “Stryker base here is found illegal,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Friday, October 6, 2006. 3. “Judge Allows Stryker training to resume,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Saturday, December 30, 2006. 4. Army Transformation Environmental Impact Statement, Section 8:11 Cultural Resources, p.4. 5. See Haunani-Kay Trask, “Stealing Hawai‘i: The war machine at work,” The Honolulu Weekly, July 17, 2002. 6. Kyle Kajihiro, “Aloha ‘Aina Statement on Proposed Stryker Training,” DMZ-Hawai‘i, December 18, 2006. 7. See also Jeffrey St. Clair, “The General, GM, and the Stryker,” Counterpunch, April 22/23, 2006. 8. David Krieger, “The Iraq War Goes on Trial,” Peace Journalism, January 17, 2007. 9. Robert Jackson, Minutes of Conference Session of July 23, 1945, International Conference on Military Trials : London, 1945.

     

    Timothy J. Freeman teaches philosophy at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo. He can be reached at freeman@hawaii.edu

  • Citizens’ Tribunal Finds Watada Acted Legally

    Citizens’ Tribunal Finds Watada Acted Legally

    A Citizens’ Hearing on the Legality of US Actions in Iraq was held in Tacoma, Washington on January 20-21, 2007. The Citizens’ Hearing was organized in response to US Army Lieutenant Ehren Watada’s refusal to deploy to Iraq on grounds that the war is illegal, and in the belief that when government fails to act responsibly and legally it is the duty of citizens in a democracy to act.

    Lt. Watada faces a court martial on February 5, 2007 at Fort Lewis, Washington for failing to deploy with his Stryker Brigade to Iraq and for “conduct unbecoming of an officer.” The military judge has refused to allow Lt. Watada to raise a Nuremberg defense, the basis of which is his contention that the war in Iraq is illegal and therefore orders to deploy to the war are illegal.

    The Citizens’ Hearing Panel, which I chaired, was composed of twelve citizens, who heard testimony on the issue of the illegality of the war – testimony that would have been introduced at Lt. Watada’s court martial if the military judge had allowed it. A majority of the Panel consisted of US military veterans going back to World War II, as well as a military family member, a Gold Star family member, a government leader, a religious leader, a union member and a high school student.

    The Panel heard testimony on four principal issues: whether the war in Iraq was an illegal war of aggression and thus a crime against peace; whether a systematic pattern of war crimes have been committed by US forces in Iraq; whether crimes against humanity have been committed; and whether a US military officer has a duty to refuse illegal orders. Testimony was presented by Iraq War veterans, experts in international law and diplomats.

    The testimony of the experts in international law was clear that the war in Iraq was initiated illegally. The US invasion of Iraq did not comply with the United Nations Charter, in that it was not authorized by the UN Security Council, nor was it required for immediate self-defense. It was a war of aggression, violating international law and the United States Constitution. Article 6, Section 2 of the Constitution makes the United Nations Charter, a treaty duly signed and ratified by the US government, a part of the “supreme Law of the Land.”

    The most powerful testimony presented came from five Iraq War veterans. They described a military training process in which the dehumanization of Iraqis was pervasive, creating an unhealthy environment conducive to the commission of war crimes. The veterans described the constant reference to Iraqis, at all levels of the chain of command, as hajis, ragheads and worse. Some described orders to shoot and kill children.

    One veteran described an instance in which he witnessed a frightened mother and daughter being shot in the back as they ran away from US troops. There was also testimony on the beating and killing of prisoners. The soldiers testified that the atmosphere of targeting civilians did not come simply from the individual soldiers, but from far higher in the command structure.

    The consistent testimony of the Iraq War veterans was that the lives of Iraqis were devalued and that war crimes were systematically committed as a result of the rules of engagement in Iraq. The Panel also received testimony on the systematic torture of Iraqi prisoners and on the use of heavy US weaponry in a manner that failed to discriminate between soldiers and civilians. Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations Denis Halliday described the “shock and awe” initiation of the war as “a terrorist act.”

    Colonel Ann Wright, a former army officer and diplomat, testified that the United States had not met its obligations as an occupying power, and that grave breeches of the Geneva Conventions were occurring regularly in the treatment and torture of prisoners. Colonel Wright and other expert witnesses urged that US leaders be held accountable for their criminal actions.

    There was also testimony on crimes against humanity. Prominent in this testimony was discussion of the systematic destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, including water facilities, sewage treatment facilities and electric power facilities. One expert, Antonia Juhasz, a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, testified that all the US orders to change Iraq’s laws to provide economic advantage to the US, particularly in relation to Iraq’s oil, were in violation of international law. Thus, all contracts created in this way must be rescinded and the profits returned to the Iraqi people.

    On the critical question regarding Lt. Watada’s refusal of orders, there was strong testimony that soldiers and officers are only required to obey lawful orders. In accord with the Nuremberg Charter and Principles, the US Constitution and US Army Field Manual 27-10, an officer has a duty to act lawfully by refusing to follow illegal orders. Insofar as the war in Iraq is an illegal aggressive war in which war crimes and crimes against humanity are being systematically committed, Lt. Watada acted lawfully in refusing orders to deploy to Iraq. Professor Richard Falk testified that the military judge’s order preventing Watada from presenting evidence on the illegality of the war was “criminally disallowing him from obeying the law.”

    The full report of the Panel of the Citizens’ Hearing will be released soon; some of the testimony is now available on the website www.wartribunal.org. The preliminary, but unanimous, finding of the Panel is that the US has committed crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Iraq. Further, Lt. Watada acted legally and honorably in refusing orders to deploy to Iraq, and his actions are in accord with the oath he took to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He was the panel chair and a member of the Jury of Conscience of the World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul in July 2005.

  • A Very Costly I Told You So

    All was in vain. The rhetoric and deceptions by the officials supporting our self-anointed “War President” prevailed, and America launched an attack on a country that was not an enemy or a real threat to the US.

    I wrote several articles denouncing the tricks and lies supporting the war—from the former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, from the then National Security Council Advisor Condolezza Rice and, of course, from Vice President Dick Cheney—who were all hovering like hawks over the war drums being beaten by President Bush.

    We, who were in opposition, risked our reputation, friends and even our means of living. It was easier to follow the big river of chorus praising the “march for democracy.” We were branded weird, unpatriotic, even traitors.

    In one of my articles titled “Lying to Provoke a War, Not a New Issue in Washington,” published on the NAPF website on June 9, 2003 and reproduced on many other websites, I finished my comments with the following lines:

    “The Iraq war is not over yet. American soldiers continue dying nearly every week in the occupied Arab nation. Thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children have died. So much for the ‘sparing the innocent’ stated by President Bush. The business of oil and the big contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq conceded to the inner club of companies linked to top officials of this administration cover the air with a smell of suspicion.

    The possibility of an investigation by the Senate to determine if the American people and the world were deceived in what George W. Bush pompously called ‘the first war of the 21st century’ could lead to an impeachment and political disgrace.”

    Three years later the situation has changed. The majority of the US public condemns the actions of Mr. Bush and his failed and devious policies. When I wrote that article, two months earlier President Bush had declared “Major combat has ended.” In those days no more than 70 US fatalities were added to the count since the beginning of the war. Now, more than 3,000 American soldiers have died in Iraq and tens of thousands of Iraqis have been seriously injured by bombings, “friendly fire” mistakes, etc.

    Making things worse, George Bush is now ordering more troops to Iraq without a real plan to solve the big mess he has created in that volatile part of the world.

    If this situation were not so tragic and absurd, we could say this is just a chapter of the Human Comedy written by Honore de Balzac in 1842.

    Let’s hope that a better nation, better informed and with true morals demands justice and holds responsible those that have been lying and deceiving not just the US but the whole world.

     

    Ruben Arvizu is Director for Latin America of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and International President of Freedom From War.

  • Opening Remarks Delivered at the Citizens’ Hearing on the Legality of US Actions in Iraq: The Case of Lt. Ehren Watada

    Opening Remarks Delivered at the Citizens’ Hearing on the Legality of US Actions in Iraq: The Case of Lt. Ehren Watada

    This Citizens’ Hearing was convened to examine the legality of US actions in Iraq. We were prompted and inspired in this effort by the actions of Lt. Ehren Watada, who refused orders to deploy to Iraq on the grounds that the war is illegal, a “crime against peace” as defined in the Nuremberg Principles.

    Lt. Watada has stated, “The war in Iraq is in fact illegal. It is my obligation and my duty to refuse any orders to participate in this war. An order to take part in an illegal war is unlawful in itself. So my obligation is not to follow the order to go to Iraq.”

    We believe that Lt. Watada’s contentions about the illegality of the war deserve a full and fair hearing. Unfortunately, this has been made impossible at his court martial, since the military judge has already ruled that the issue of the legality of the war may not be raised in the defense of Lt. Watada. This ruling cuts out the heart of Lt. Watada’s defense, and denies him the opportunity to make his case before the military court.

    In addition to challenging the legality of the war, Lt. Watada has challenged the manner in which the war and occupation have been conducted. He has stated, “This administration used us for rampant violations of time-tested laws banning torture and degradation of prisoners of war. Though the American soldier wants to do right, the illegitimacy of the occupation itself, the policies of this administration and the rules of engagement of desperate field commanders will ultimately force them to be party to war crimes.”

    It is Lt. Watada’s deeply held conviction that as an officer in the United States Army, who has sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, he cannot follow orders to participate in the Iraq War, nor lead the men and women assigned to his command to do what he believes is illegal. “How,” he has asked, “could I order other men to die for something I believe is wrong?”

    The implications of Lt. Watada being correct in his assessment of the war are extremely significant. Such a finding would mean that all officers and soldiers have an obligation under the Nuremberg Charter and Principles, the United States Constitution and US military regulations to refuse orders to participate in this war. Further, this finding would have repercussions that could implicate individuals at the highest levels of the US government in the same crimes tried at Nuremberg after World War II: crimes against the peace; war crimes and crimes against humanity.

    The fourth of the Nuremberg Principles says that superior orders are not a defense to the commission of an illegal act. This is echoed in US Army Field Manual 27-10. The military court, however, intends to focus only on whether or not the order was obeyed, rather than upon the legality of the order. By narrowing the scope of the inquiry, the military tramples upon international law and the Nuremberg Principle of individual accountability.

    In a second ruling, on issues of permissible speech, the military judge found that Lt. Watada’s criticism of the war was not shielded by his First Amendment right to free speech. This means, in essence, that though officers in the Armed Forces may be asked to give their lives for their country, the truth of their assertions regarding the illegality of US actions is not even a matter to be considered in charges of “conduct unbecoming of an officer.”

    The combination of the military judge’s rulings in the Watada case makes it virtually impossible for Lt Watada to obtain legal relief in a military court. These rulings also make a mockery of the Nuremberg Charter and the Nuremberg Principles established by the United Nations International Law Commission following the Nuremberg Tribunals. The military judge’s ruling would certainly be repugnant to US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was the chief prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Jackson believed strongly that history would judge the United States by how it applied the Nuremberg standards to its own leaders in the future.

    “We must never forget,” Jackson said, “that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”

    What makes this Citizens’ Hearing critically important is that it provides a forum for testimony relevant to Lt. Watada’s refusal to deploy and his statements on the illegality of the Iraq War. It is our intention, as citizens of a democracy, to give a full and fair hearing to Lt. Watada’s claims about the illegality of the war. We cannot rectify the denial of Lt. Watada’s rights in the military courts, but we can examine the truth of his claims in a public hearing.

    I would like to explain what this Hearing is and is not. I will start with what it is not.

    • First, and most obviously, this is not a court of law, and no one is on trial here.
    • Second, we are not engaged in a mock trial of any person.
    • Third, we make no claim to impartiality, only to truth.
    • Fourth, this is not an official hearing or commission of the United States government. No government agency has convened or authorized this Hearing.

    The authority for this Hearing stems from the power vested in citizens in a democracy to become informed, speak out and play a role in the process of determining national policy. This is a Citizens’ Hearing; one organized and composed of citizens – those in whom the foundational power of the state vests in a democracy. The impetus for the Citizens’ Hearing evolved from three principal concerns.

    First, that Lt. Watada will not receive a full and fair trial at his court martial, inasmuch as Lt. Watada will not be able to raise a Nuremberg-based defense to his contention regarding the illegality of the war and his speech will not be protected by First Amendment rights.

    Second, that the war in Iraq may be illegal, and this issue deserves close scrutiny, expert testimony and the full engagement of the public.

    Third, that it is both a right and responsibility of citizens in a democracy to oversee the actions of their government, and this holds particularly true with regard to government conduct on issues of war and peace.

    This Citizens’ Hearing will be conducted in the manner of a hearing held before a committee of the Congress. It will be a hearing that seeks to elicit evidence, reach conclusions, and make these conclusions known to a broader public. Over the next two days the Panel of this Citizens’ Hearing will receive testimony related to the legality of US actions in Iraq. Specifically, this Hearing will focus on the following questions:

    1. Is the war in Iraq an illegal war of aggression, causing the invasion of Iraq by the United States and the “coalition of the willing” to constitute a crime against peace?
    2. Have US actions in the hostilities in Iraq been such as to constitute a pattern of war crimes?
    3. Does the ongoing occupation of Iraq constitute a crime against humanity?
    4. Does a member of the United States Armed Forces have a duty under the Nuremberg Principles, the US Constitution and US military regulations to refuse to follow an order to participate in an illegal war?

    This Hearing will seek to answer these questions based upon the testimony provided by eyewitness and expert witnesses. At the end of the Hearing, the Panel will prepare and release a Final Statement containing its findings. The Final Statement will be sent to every member of the United States Congress. We hope that the findings will also be widely distributed by the media throughout the country, and will cause our fellow citizens to give greater consideration to the challenge that Lt. Watada’s refusal to deploy to Iraq on grounds of illegality presents to each of us as Americans.

    We act here at this Citizens’ Hearing in the belief that the testimony and Final Statement that will be produced will provide important information and conclusions relevant not only to the court martial of Lt. Watada, but additionally to all members of the Armed Forces and to every American citizen. If the war and occupation are found to be illegal and in violation of the United States Constitution, then each of us as a citizen bears some portion of responsibility. If this is, in fact, the finding and citizens choose to accept this responsibility, then the leaders who initiated and directed this war, far more than a lone Lieutenant, should be held to account for their actions under international law and the United States Constitution.

    I declare this Citizens’ Hearing open. We on the Panel pledge to seek the truth and to act with justice.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He was the panel chair and a member of the Jury of Conscience of the World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul in July 2005.

  • President Bush’s Iraq Policy Renewed

    The hope that President Bush might move toward an American withdrawal from Iraq was decisively rejected in his important speech of January 10. This was the first response by the American president to the November electoral mandate that was, above all, an unmistakable rejection of the Iraq policy by the voting public. It was also the first formal response to the report of the high-profile Iraq Study Group headed by former Secretary of State, James Baker, and Democratic Congressional leader, Lee Hamilton, that had recommended a gradual American withdrawal, a robust regional diplomatic strategy designed to encourage help in stabilizing Iraq, and a renewed sense of urgency about seeking a solution for the Palestine-Israel conflict.

    In all respects, rather than heeding these demands of his Iraq critics, or at least meeting them halfway, Bush proposed a set of initiatives that moved precisely in the opposite direction. Instead of withdrawal, Bush decreed a clear escalation of the American combat role, deploying an additional 21,500 American troops to be used in Baghdad and Anbar province, the two areas of most intense resistance to the American occupation of the country. Instead of initiating a regional diplomatic effort that invited the participation of Iran and Syria, the president clearly signaled his intention to confront these countries in a more hostile manner that is almost certain to further heighten regional tensions. This unfortunate prospect was given immediate tangible expression the day after the speech by a provocative American military raid on an Iranian diplomatic mission in the northern city of Arbil, situated in the Kurdish region. And to complete the discouraging picture, not a word was uttered about an increased effort to achieve peace between Israel and Palestine.

    How should we interpret this defiant posture? Already this reaffirmation of the old Iraq policy by Bush has antagonized the Democratic opposition now in control of Congress, and has even disappointed and puzzled most Republicans. This Bush ‘stay the course’ stubbornness almost requires Congress to confront the president on Iraq. If Congress acts it would likely be seen as a challenge to Bush’s authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces under wartime conditions, and could produce a paralyzing constitutional crisis, which might damage the political prospects of the Republican Party for years.

    Part of the explanation of the approach adopted Bush involves a recognition of the extent to which the White House continues to be steered by neoconservative hard liners when it comes to foreign policy. Well ahead of the speech it was widely publicized that these new tactics of escalated deployment in Baghdad had been mainly crafted by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, a hawkish signatory of the pre-9/11 neoconservative blueprint for American foreign policy published under the auspices of the Project for a New American Century. By relying on Kagan and AEI the Bush presidency reaffirmed its ideological identity, while at the same time repudiating the more pragmatic and realistic option offered by the Baker-Hamilton recommendations. If Bush had gone along with Baker-Hamilton, his leadership would almost certainly have received a dramatic spike of popular support from an American public clamoring for relief from a costly and failing war policy. To have so adjusted would have been applauded throughout the world as a brave effort to acknowledge failure and move in a more hopeful direction. But to do so would have meant renouncing the neoconservative agenda of exporting democracy to the Middle East and of refusing to engage diplomatically with ‘the bad guys’ in control of Iran and Syria. At this point, the Bush presidency remains locked in what increasingly appears to be a death embrace with the neoconservative ideologues. It was they who had advocated regime change in Iraq by military intervention ever since Bush was elected in 2000, if not earlier. It probably should come as no surprise that Bush has so clearly cast his lot with this band of neoconservative extremists, but it is still a disappointment that will make Iraq something worse than the tragedy it has already become.

    Most of Bush’s argument on behalf of the approach he adopted was an elaboration of a single thought: “Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.” To avert failure Bush proposed new tactics involving a dramatic upgrading of the American combat presence in Baghdad, including a new willingness to clear and hold neighborhoods presently controlled by both Sunni and Shi’ia militias, including those of Muqtadar al-Sadr. Bush insisted that the success of such tactics depended on the willingness of the Iraqi government of Nuri al-Maliki to be fully committed to achieving such goals of pacification. Such dependence is almost a guaranty of the failure Bush is preoccupied with avoiding!

    The available evidence clearly establishes that the goal of the Maliki leadership is to consolidate Shi’ia dominance, not to share power with its Sunni adversaries as is implicit in the Bush political strategy. Actually, Maliki had been actively pushing for an adjustment of the American role in Iraq that is diametrically opposed to both the Bush decisions and the Baker-Hamilton recommendations. Maliki was seeking the removal of the American military presence from Baghdad, with its combat mission being redefined as exclusively devoted to engaging and defeating the Sunni elements of the overall insurgency, which would leave the Shi’ia in uncontested control of Iraq. Of course, this makes political sense. Maliki owes his position of leadership to the support of the thirty members of the Iraqi parliament that belong to Muqtador al-Sadr’s political party. For Maliki to act against his own strongest constituency, except verbally to appease the American occupiers, would almost certainly lead to the immediate collapse of his government. In effect, then, Bush’s announced plan of stepped up joint pacification efforts in the Iraqi capital seems doomed before being attempted. More than this, to override Baghdad’s policy on internal security in this way is to make a mockery of the purported transfer of sovereignty to an elected Iraqi government, and to add credibility to the opponents of the Maliki regime who regard it as a puppet government.

    The incoherence of what Bush proposes for a revised Iraq policy is pervasive. On the one side, as mentioned, Bush indicates that failure in Iraq spells disaster for the United States, but arguably in most respects ‘failure’ already exists. On the other side, Bush pins his vain hopes for success on cooperation with the Iraqi government on an approach that contradicts its own power base, and is almost certainly a non-starter. How can a radical Shi’ite leadership suddenly turn around and cooperate in the violent destruction of the most militant Shi’ia political formation with which it has been so closely allied. Think back only a few weeks to the execution of Saddam Hussein, whose hanging was presided over by Shi’ia extremists who were shrieking ‘Muqtador! Muqtador!’ even while the noose was tightened around the deposed dicatator’s neck. This grisley microcosm of the political realities in Iraq should by itself have shown how futile it is to enlist the Maliki government in an effort to crush the Shi’ia militia presence in Baghdad. Maliki is himself a Shi’ia militant, not a captive to forces that he wishes, but is presently unable, to control.

    In the end, what may be most scary, is the double likelihood of continued frustration of the American effort in Iraq combined with growing tensions in the region. In such a setting one cannot ignore the Israeli resolve to confront Iran by military means, possibly on its own, but preferably, more indirectly, by exerting pressure on the United States to do so. There have even been several media reports that Israel has prepared an attack scenario that features the use of bunker buster nuclear bombs against Iranian targets associated with their nuclear program. Such war plans, even if only hypothetical, involve the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki that a government seems to be seriously contemplating the use of nuclear weapons as an instrument of its foreign policy. If anything is likely to hasten the collapse of the nonproliferation regime, already tottering, it is such a reckless wielding of nuclear weapons for purposes other than self-defense and deterrence.

    Although American military resources are spread thin, such an expansion of the war zone has some attractive features from the perspective of the neoconservative planners who continue to hold sway in Washington. In one respect, Rumsfeld’s ghost may be a player in this new phase of Middle Eastern diplomacy. The most notorious of the so-called ‘Rumsfeld rules’ fits the present situation—‘if a problem seems insoluble, make it bigger.’ Extending the war zone to Iran and Syria would make the challenge bigger, and divert attention from a deteriorating situation in Iraq. What is more, with Israel strongly behind such an expansion, the Democrats in America might find themselves badly divided and politically confused. And from the perspective of neoconservative priorities, Iraq was always regarded as a prelude to the main goal, which was to achieve regime change in Tehran and Damascus. This kind of objective seems less outlandish as a result of the apocalyptic language used by Mahmoud Ahmedinejad with respect to Israel. As new setbacks in Iraq capture media headlines, the Bush leadership would have to choose between a final admission of humiliating defeat, which it has repeatedly defined as an unacceptable American disaster, or embarking on a regional war, which will end up being a much worse American disaster, but probably not immediately. It may gain the Bush time he desperately needs to end his term in office, and manage to slink back to civilian life on his Crawford ranch before the sky falls.

    We can only hope that prudence intrudes to stop this gathering momentum that is propelling the region toward a calamitous culmination of the neoconservative crusade. It is not a time for American friends in the region and Europe to be silent. It is a great opportunity for Ankara to show that it is an independent actor in the Middle East that has a strategic stake in the conflict, but that also has a constructive view of peace and security for the region.

     

     

    Richard Falk is professor emeritus of international law and practice at Princeton University, and visiting distinguished professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

  • Enough Time Has Been Wasted, Mr. President. Enough!

    Last night in his address to the nation, the President called for a “surge” of 20,000 additional U.S. troops to help secure Baghdad against the violence that has consumed it. Unfortunately, such a plan is not the outline of a brave new course, as we were told, but a tragic commitment to a failed policy; not a bold new strategy, but a rededication to a course that has proven to be a colossal blunder on every count. The President never spoke truer words than when he said, “the situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people.” But he once again failed to offer a realistic way forward, instead giving us more of his stale and tired “stay the course” prescriptions.

    He espoused a strategy of “clear, hold, and build” — a doctrine of counterinsurgency that one of our top commanders, General David Petraeus, helped to formulate. Clear, hold, and build involves bringing to bear a large number of troops in an area, clearing it of insurgents, and holding it secure for long enough for reconstruction to take place. But what the President did not say last night is that, according to General Petraeus and his own military experts, this strategy of “clear, hold, build” requires a huge number of troops — a minimum of 20 combat troops for every 1,000 civilians in the area. Applying this doctrine to Baghdad’s six million people means that at least 120,000 troops will be needed to secure Baghdad alone. Right now, we have about 70,000 combat troops stationed throughout Iraq; even if they all were concentrated in the city of Baghdad, along with the 20,000 new troops the President is calling for, we would still fall well short of what is needed.

    But let us assume that the brave men and women of the U.S. military are able to carry out this Herculean task, and secure Baghdad against the forces that are spiraling it into violence; what is to keep those forces from regrouping in another town, another province, even another country, strengthening, festering, and waiting until the American soldiers leave to launch their bloody attacks again?

    It brings to mind the ancient figure of Sisyphus, who was doomed to push a boulder up a mountainside for all eternity, only to have it roll back down as soon as he reached the top. As soon as he would accomplish his task it would begin again, endlessly. I fear that we are condemning our soldiers to a similar fate, hunting down insurgents in one city or province only to watch them pop up in another. For how long will U.S. troops be asked to shoulder this burden?

    Over 3,000 American soldiers have now been killed in Iraq, and over 22,000 have been wounded. Staggering. And President Bush now proposes to send 20,000 more Americans into the line of fire, beyond the 70,000 already there. The cost of this war of choice to American taxpayers is now estimated to be over $400 billion, and the number continues to rise. One wonders how much progress we could have made in improving education, or resolving our health care crisis, or strengthening our borders, or reducing our national debt, or any number of pressing issues, with that amount of money. And the President proposes sending more money down that drain.

    On every count, an escalation of 20,000 troops is a misguided, costly, unwise course of action. This is not a solution. This is not a march toward “victory.” The President’s own military advisors have indicated that we do not have enough troops for this strategy to be successful. It will put more Americans in harm’s way than there already are. It will cost more in U.S. taxpayer money. It will further stretch an army that many commanders have already said is at its breaking point. It is a dangerous idea.

    Why, then, is the President advocating it? This decision has the cynical smell of politics to me. Suggesting that an additional 20,000 troops will alter the balance of this war is a way for the President to look forceful, to appear to be taking bold action. But it is only the appearance of bold action, not the reality — much like the image of a cocky President in a flight suit declaring “mission accomplished” from the deck of a battleship. This is not a new course, but a continuation of the tragically costly course we have been on for almost five years now. It is simply a policy that buys the President more time: more time to equivocate, more time to continue to resist any suggestion that he was wrong to enter us into this war in this place, in this time, in this manner. And importantly, calling for more troops gives the President more time to hand the Iraq situation off to his successor in the White House. The President apparently believes that he can wait this out, that he can continue to make small adjustments to a misguided policy while he maintains the same trajectory — until he leaves office and it becomes someone else’s problem.

    But if you are driving in the wrong direction, anyone knows you will not get to your destination by going south when you should be going north. You turn around. You get better directions. This President is asking us to step on the gas in Iraq — full throttle, while he has not even clearly articulated where we are going. What is our goal? What is our end game? How much progress will we need to see from the Iraqi government before our men and women come home? How long will American troops be stationed in Iraq to be maimed and killed in sectarian bloodshed?

    The ultimate solution to the situation in Iraq is political, and will have to come from the Iraqis themselves. The Iraqi government will have to address the causes of the insurgency, by creating a sustainable power-sharing agreement between Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds — and it is far from clear that the government has the power or the willingness to do that at this point. But as long as American troops are there to bear the brunt of the blame and the fire, the Iraqi government will not shoulder the responsibility itself. And Iraq’s neighbors — especially Iran and Syria — won’t commit to helping to stabilize the country as long as they see America bogged down, and losing credibility and strength. Keeping the U.S. army tied up in a bloody, endless battle in Iraq plays perfectly into Iran’s hands, and it has little incentive to cease its assistance to the insurgency as long as America is there. America’s presence in Iraq is inhibiting a lasting solution, not contributing to one. The President has, once again, gotten it backwards.

    What I had hoped to hear from the President last night were specific benchmarks of progress that he expects from the Iraqi government, and a plan for the withdrawal of American troops conditioned on those benchmarks. Instead, we were given a vague admonition that “the responsibility for security will rest with the Iraqi government by November” — with no suggestion of what that responsibility will mean, or how to measure the government’s capacity to handle it. The President is asking us, once again, to trust him while he keeps our troops mired in Iraq. But that trust was long ago squandered.

    I weep for the waste that we have already seen. Lives, treasure, time, goodwill, credibility, opportunity. Wasted. Wasted. And this President is calling for us to waste more.

    I say, enough. If he will not provide leadership and statesmanship, if he does not have the strength of vision to recognize a failed policy and chart a new course, then leadership will have to come from somewhere else. Enough waste. Enough lives lost on this President’s misguided venture in Iraq. Enough time and energy spent on a civil war far from our shores, while the problems Americans face are ignored, while we wallow in debt and mortgage our children’s future to foreigners. Enough. It is time to truly change course, and start talking about how we rebalance our foreign policy and bring our sons and daughters home.

    There are a lot of people making political calculations about the war in Iraq, turning this debate into an exercise of political grandstanding and point-scoring. But this is not a political game. This is life and death. This is asking thousands more Americans to make the ultimate sacrifice for a war that we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt was a mistake. There were those of us who cautioned against the hasty rush to war in Iraq. And unfortunately, our cries, like Cassandra’s, went unheeded. And like Cassandra, our warnings and our fears proved prophetic.

    But we are not doomed to repeat our mistakes. We must learn from the past. We must understand that more money and more troops are not the answer. The clock is running on our misadventure in Iraq.

    Enough time has been wasted, Mr. President. Enough!

  • Appeal for Support for Lt. Ehren Watada

    Fellow Americans, ladies of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, I am honored by your invitation and I salute you for being a compelling voice regionally, nationally and internationally. I am awed by the fact that your time honored organization, which emerged out of the chaos of World War I, remains dynamic and relevant in the everchanging political, social, economic landscape. In an effort to extend the reach, you have taken on the formidable issues of our day, one being the illegality of the war and occupation of Iraq. Since the administration’s pre-emptive war in March 2003, the death toll among the “coalition of the willing” and the Iraqi people mounts daily and still there is no end in sight. You have called for “.a comprehensive and rapid plan for troop withdrawal (to) include the closure of all US military bases, support of a peace process in the post-occupation transition, payment of reparations to Iraq, and return of Iraqi control over its oil.”

    It is within this context that I speak. It is within this context that I ask for your support of my son, Lt. Ehren Watada, the first officer in the US military to refuse participation in the Iraqi war and occupation. In January 2006, he submitted a request for discharge, citing the illegality of the war and the ongoing crimes of occupation. He was not taken seriously. Several months later, he submitted a formal resignation packet and was formally denied. On June 22, 2006, despite overt pressure to comply, he quietly defied the movement order to board the Iraq-bound plane with his Stryker brigade unit.

    How did he arrive at this point, you ask? Through unbiased, rigorous scrutiny of the facts, reported by experts inside and outside the military and the structures of government, Lt. Watada concluded that he could no longer remain silent. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, he swore to uphold the Constitution which includes all international treaties which the present administration chose to ignore. Blind obedience to orders that violated international law, he maintained, would make him party to illegal acts, multiplied many times over in his capacity as an officer.

    Through the inner turmoil of the past year, he realized that, despite being a member of the armed forces, he had not sold his soul. He had not relinquished the inalienable right to choose. Furthermore, he was not a mercenary or a mindless tool of politicians and the military-industrial complex whose sole interest lies in the “spoils of war,” no matter what the cost.

    As an officer in the US Army, conditioned not to think but to follow orders, he found that an act of conscience is a lonely road, traversed only if one is willing to accept the harsh consequences meted out by the military, the media, the manipulated masses who remain in ignorance and the “powers that be.”

    Since his case became part of mainstream media, he has been vilified on one hand and cast as a hero on the other. He maintains that the issue is not about him but about the illegality of the Iraqi war and occupation. He hopes that his action will empower others to take a stand, that it will awaken the consciousness of the American people and impel them to make their voices heard. He believes that the demand for the end to the war, the withdrawal of occupation forces and reparations must be an American agenda and not merely the agenda of anti-war activists, liberals, progressives and left-wing elements.

    On July 5th, the military formally charged Lt. Watada with failure to obey a movement order, contemptuous remarks against the president and behavior unbecoming an officer. Taken together, these offenses are punishable by up to 7 ½ years in a military prison. He awaits the article 32 hearing, slated for Aug. 17, 18 2006. This is a pretrial hearing to determine if there are grounds for a court martial. Whether or not he is given a fair hearing and permitted to submit evidence supporting his refusal to deploy and his first amendment rights remains to be seen.

    As his mother, I initially feared for my son’s safety and his future. The thought of the consequences overwhelmed me. Today, I can truly say that I have taken “the first step in a journey of a thousand miles.” I am lifted by the realization that there is a higher purpose to all that has transpired.

    When he first broke the news to me, I asked him to re-evaluate what he was about to do, to think about the impact of this decision on his career. He later said to me, “Mom, I felt betrayed by your trying to dissuade me. I know you love me and I know where all this comes from but you are asking me to betray myself. When all is said and done, I must be able to look at myself and be content that I followed the dictates of my conscience.” My son hoped for my understanding and reassured me that he loved me but it was clear, whether I approved or not, he would follow through with his decision. He said, ” Mom, whether one person supports me or no one does, I have the duty to do the right thing.” The die is cast. Come what may, he is committed to staying the course. For this, he has my utmost respect. I would expect no less from him.

    In closing, I wish to leave you with the words of William Butler Yeats. His poem, The Second Coming, written after the horrors of World War I during the rise of communism and fascism, forecasted the demise of Western civilization and the menacing advance of an “unknown world about to be born.” Though written during a different period, it is as compelling now as it was then.

    William Butler Yeats: “The Second Coming” (1921)

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre (1) The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
    Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming (2) is at hand; The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi (3) Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries (4) of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

    Despite the cadence of doom, one is left with the choice to accept or reject Yeat’s fatalism. Lt. Watada chose to reject the inevitable. Today, I invite you to stand with him in his hour of protest. For ways you can participate, please visit www.thankyoult.org. Sign the petition to show your support. Familiarize yourself with the issues surrounding his case. Join us on August 16th, National Day of Education. On this day, supporters, nationally and internationally will host teach-ins, forums, house parties, etc. to address the question: “Is the Iraq War illegal?” Click on Resource Toolkit on the website’s main menu for some basic materials to use.

    August 16th is not only a day of education but a day of action as well. Rallies, bannering, vigils, church gatherings are planned. Join an existing group or create one that will make a difference. Begin laying the foundation for mass mobilization during the October court martial. For updates on this action, see www.thankyoult.org.

    The Lieutenant’s pretrial hearing on Aug.17th and 18th, in effect, puts the Iraq War on trial. This is a moment that has the capacity to alter the course of history. To this end, we must stand with Lt. Watada, remain of one mind, unwavering in our resolve. Through a collective will, energized by vision and courage, we will restore the beast to his “stony sleep.”

    Thank you.

    Speech delivered on July 22, 2006 for the Women’s International League for Peace And Freedom at Portland State University.

  • America’s Blinders

    Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?

    The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans—members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen—rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq. A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell’s presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his “evidence”: satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled “Irrefutable” and declared that after Powell’s talk “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

    It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

    One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

    If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don’t know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

    But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials.

    We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon the American soil,” but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

    We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to “civilize” the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

    President Woodrow Wilson—so often characterized in our history books as an “idealist”—lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.

    Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.”

    Everyone lied about Vietnam—Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

    Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

    The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.

    And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991—hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq’s taking of Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

    Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives for oil?

    A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught.

    We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was “we the people” who established the new government after the Revolution. When the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that the Constitution represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, he became the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times.

    Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn’t talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, “Father of the Constitution,” said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.

    Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

    Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that—not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor—is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.

    If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there—the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be “checks and balances”—do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

    The deeply ingrained belief—no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general—that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to “pledge allegiance” (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with “liberty and justice for all.”

    And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” announcing that we are “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” There is also the unofficial national anthem “God Bless America,” and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation—just 5 percent of the world’s population—for his or her blessing. If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values—democracy, liberty, and let’s not forget free enterprise—to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world. It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

    These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.

    Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this “the American century,” saying that victory in the war gave the United States the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

    Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading liberty around the world was “the calling of our time.” Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared: “The values you learned here . . . will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities.”

    What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how well people in the United States live? The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per capita for health care than any other nation. One of five children in this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty. There are more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality. Cuba does better. And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead the world in the number of people in prison—more than two million.

    A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world. It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race in the common cause of peace and justice.

    Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”

  • An Alternative to Iraq Delusions

    The American public needs to force its leaders to act before the Iraq war becomes even more a replica of the Vietnam tragedy.

    When United States Congressman John Murtha made his passionate speech on 17 November calling for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq within six months, it seemed for an instant as though the public mood had swung so strongly against the Iraq policies of the Bush administration that to hope for a change of course wasn’t unrealistic.

    A month on, any such hopeful prospect of addressing the realities of Iraqi failure has now vanished beneath a presidential sky beclouded by tired reiterations of an utterly unconvincing “plan for victory”. Indeed the rededication to “complete victory” recalls the May 2003 delusion of “mission accomplished” proclaimed on a banner draped in the background while Bush delivered his notoriously premature speech of celebration on the deck of the USS Lincoln.

    Murtha’s ideas were the reflections of a foreign-policy hawk that had the integrity and prudence to cut American losses in Iraq, and thereby diminish the prospects of a deeper tragedy. The timetable of his basic proposal could be faulted, but not the principle. I think a year makes more sense, to give time to the main Iraqi political forces to take account of the US departure and strike a deal based on compromise and reconciliation. As long as American forces remain, the imbalances between the main groupings in Iraq — especially the privileged positions of the Kurds and Shi’a — virtually guarantee a prolonging, and even an escalation, of the violent civil strife.

    A time of radical uncertainty

    Present indicators of violence suggest a rising curve of death and devastation, not, as the White House and Pentagon constantly claim, an increase in domestic security. The more reliable polls also suggest that average Iraqis are desperate above all for security in their daily lives, and feel overwhelmingly that their situation would improve if American forces were to leave the country.

    Such an outlook makes sense. Without the protection of an occupying army the Kurds and Shi’a would likely succumb to the insurgency, but if the foreign military presence were to be gradually removed, the incentives for those now benefiting from the occupation to strike a political/economic bargain would rise dramatically. As it would for the Sunni as well, if their alternatives were a fair share of authority and a secular governing process versus a civil war that might result in either a stalemate or an Iranian intervention, and possibly in a combination of the two.

    American policy prospects are also enhanced by an unconditional military departure. It would be widely regarded in Europe and the Middle East as a constructive, if belated, move that gave both peace and diplomacy a chance, and clearly renounced imperial goals relating to oil and bases, which are widely believed overseas to be the main rationale for “staying the course”.

    If Iraqi political tendencies can deliver a sustainable compromise, it would save lives, money, and reputations. If the Iraqi domestic situation should further degenerate as US forces withdraw — which cannot be ruled out — it is likely to produce a return to secular, authoritarian rule under Sunni leadership (most likely without the Tikrit entourage of Saddam Hussein), which would likely keep Iraq unified and stable, though certainly not democratic. This outcome can be anticipated if negotiation and compromise fail, as there is little reason to believe that either the Kurds or Shi’a can prevail against an insurgency that draws on the superior experience and weaponry of the Ba’ath-led military forces of the Saddam era.

    There is no way to avoid the radical uncertainty of the situation. It was after all Donald Rumsfeld (characteristically assimilating Iraq into a wider frame of reference and thus failing to register the particularity of its conflict) who acknowledged in October 2003 that the US government “(lacks) metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror”. Not surprisingly, such a revealing acknowledgement was made in a secret internal Pentagon memo, and conflicted rather sharply with Rumsfeld’s public posturing portraying a rosy picture in Iraq after the invasion marred only by the nuisance of mopping up what he once called “the dead-enders”. What remains true and crucial to admit on all sides is that offering recommendations and speculating about Iraq’s future is afflicted by this condition of radical uncertainty: we simply do not know what will happen in the future in Iraq, and can only make reasonable conjectures based on the circumstances understood as objectively as possible.

    It is here where the Bush administration is again failing the American and Iraqi people – and in a sense, itself. Leaving aside the pre-invasion manipulation of evidence in the mobilisation of support for the war, what seems now inexcusable is to falsify the current situation on the ground. To pretend that the occupation is succeeding, that the majority of the public in Iraq is satisfied with the rate of progress in achieving stability and reconstruction, and that democracy is taking hold in the country is to become enmeshed in a net of delusion that rigidifies policy, and precludes adjustments, except those made below the radar of media awareness.

    For instance, a gradual transfer of security roles to Iraqi military and police forces without an appreciation of the virtual certainty that these forces will lack the will and capabilities to deal effectively with a resistance movement that a major US military presence and engagement could not defeat. Even worse would be efforts to reduce American combat fatalities by relying more and more on airpower, which in urban settings is a blunt and illegal instrument that is sure to kill mainly civilians and would further turn Iraqi public opinion against the US presence.

    We know that Bush/Cheney seem incapable of admitting errors and changing course. Bush seems to be proceeding apolitically, buoyed by his apparent underlying belief that his victory plan for Iraq is divinely ordained. We also know that the Pentagon has been planting disinformation in the Iraqi press by paying Iraqi journalists and newspapers to print US propaganda (we in the United States can only wonder whether we are not being fed similar falsehoods manipulations at home, presumably by more sophisticated techniques.)

    The echo of Vietnam

    In such a public atmosphere of distrust — what was called “a credibility gap” during the last stages of the Vietnam war — wildly contradictory views get a hearing. For instance, Nixon’s Secretary of Defence, Melvin R Laird believed that the United States lost the Vietnam war only because it did not appreciate the success of its tactics of Vietnamization and counterinsurgency, and risks repeating the same mistake in Iraq. Such a reconstruction of historical memory amounts to resurrection of the credibility gap, a retelling of the story of Vietnam, where victory was always a horizon away, and required only perseverance and added troop strength (see “Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam”, Foreign Affairs, November-December 2005).

    Dangling the prospect of victory before the American public after the Tet offensive of January-February 1968 prolonged the Vietnam war for as many as seven blood-soaked years after most US policymakers privately understood that the war was lost. We should act now in order to avoid repeating in Iraq the Vietnam-era mistake of waiting year after year for a leadership willing to acknowledge defeat.

    There is no assured path toward peace and stability for Iraq. But there is accumulating evidence that the occupation is not succeeding in producing a viable Iraqi state, and is now resting its prospects for a democratic Iraq on a highly regressive constitution that among other things sets things back for women far below what it was during Saddam’s brutal rule. It is also clear that the daily incidents of violence are adding to casualty totals in an environment where a favorable political outcome under American occupying auspices is even less plausible than it was a year or so ago. Whatever else, under these overall circumstances it is obscene to continue the killing and dying.

    Richard Falk, chair of the board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, is the author of Religion and Humane Global Governance (Palgrave), The Great Terror War (Olive Branch), and most recently, The Declining World Order (Routledge). Since 2002 he has been Distinguished Visiting Professor of Global Studies at UC Santa Barbara.