Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Iraq War

The Case of Sergeant Benderman

When Sgt. Kevin Benderman went to Iraq on March of 2003, he saw the destruction of a nation, he saw a little girl with a burnt arm asking the soldiers for help they were ordered not to provide, he saw people drinking water from mud puddles, and he saw that Iraqis were regular people, just like himself, and that our military should not bring destruction to that country. What Sgt. Benderman saw in Iraq changed him in a way so profound, that after ten impeccable years in the Army, he decided to apply for conscientious objection. But Sgt. Benderman also spoke truth to the people about what is going on in Iraq, and he spoke about how the war is not destroying Iraq alone, but our own country as well. He spoke of how American soldiers are dehumanized by the war.

But today’s general Court-Martial did not deal with Sgt. Benderman’s war experience, nor with the dehumanization of America’s children in Iraq; it mostly dealt with a forty-five minute meeting Sgt. Benderman had with his Sgt. Major just an hour before his unit was to deploy to the Middle East, where they were to provide logistic support to American infantry units, and they were to train Iraqi police officers and military personnel.

The defense successfully showed how during that meeting Sgt. Benderman’s chain of command, not knowing how to deal with his Conscientious Objector packet, released him to work on documents and to have dinner with his wife, just an hour prior to his unit’s deployment, and how they made no effort to get him to the airfield, or to get him onboard a later flight. The defense showed how Sgt. Benderman, far from being absent without authority or having missed movement, continued to perform a sergeant’s duties while and after his unit deployed to Iraq.

The defense also showed the ambiguity in Sgt. Benderman’s chain of command. For instance, one of the government’s arguments in seeking both a conviction and a harsh punishment was that Sgt. Benderman’s logistic duties were crucial for the unit in Iraq, yet the defense proved that his chain of command had planned to fire him from his job and to assign him to latrine duty. Another argument was the hazardous component of the unit’s mission in Iraq, yet the 1st Sgt. insisted that Sgt. Benderman would be perfectly safe and in a position were he would see no combat at all. The defense successfully showed the humiliation Sgt. Benderman went through because of his Conscientious Objector beliefs, from the harassment of his wife by the Sgt. Major (who admitted to commenting on her physical figure) to his 1st Sgt. calling him a coward.

Why then, one wonders, was Sgt. Benderman convicted of Missing Movement by Design, and sentenced to 15 months of confinement, reduction to the lowest rank, and a dishonorable discharge? The defense strategy was sound and solid. The government’s prejudice and Sgt. Benderman’s chain of command’s unmeasured persecution and incompetence were all made evident. Why the conviction and the harsh sentence then?

Perhaps because a legal strategy is no match for a political strategy. The Army had in its hands a blond, blue-eyed, six foot two, all American soldier, born and raised in the south, someone white America can look up to and identify with, someone who went to Iraq and came back with his humanity enhanced, most definitely a threat to a government on a mission to militarize its society and spread its empire. The government threw the book at Sgt. Benderman to ensure others like him don’t follow behind. Therefore, his case should not have been boiled down to a forty-five minute meeting, because in doing so, the defense disconnected itself from the humanity of the action and from its message of resistance, and that is something America cannot afford at this time.

Sgt. Benderman is not an African American Muslim, he is not a Cuban Buddhist, his parents are not Latin Americans. Unlike other recent conscientious objectors, Binderman looks like he belongs at a George W. Bush rally. The humanity he displays in his refusal to fight a senseless war cannot be blamed on a foreign ethnicity, or on the color of his skin; it cannot be blamed on his religion either. And he cannot be accused of being a Yankee liberal. Sgt. Benderman’s courageous stance gives the conscientious objector response to the war in Iraq a universal touch that breaks down barriers and goes beyond borders, bringing down the issue of war resistance to the humanity in each and every one of us, regardless of who we are or where we come from.

Sgt. Kevin Benderman chose to put his weapon down; he chose not to kill but to love his fellow human beings; he chose to put his career and physical freedom in jeopardy; he chose to speak truth in the face of power and adversity; he was harassed, humiliated, accused, tried, convicted, and sentenced to jail. He kissed his wife goodbye, and he kept his head up high as he walked to his fifteen months of confinement. I have never seen a freer man.

Camilo E. Mejia is a former prisoner of conscience, Iraq war veteran, war resister, and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Camilo’s conscientious objector application is still pending. He served nine months in confinement for refusing to return to Iraq after a two-week leave.

July 28, 2005
The World Speaks on Iraq

The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) held its culminating session in Istanbul June 24-27, the last and most elaborate of sixteen condemnations of the Iraq War held worldwide in the past two years, in Barcelona, Tokyo, Brussels, Seoul, New York, London, Mumbai and other cities. The Istanbul session used the verdicts and some of the testimony from the earlier sessions; the cumulative nature of the sessions built interest among peace activists, resulting in this final session having by far the strongest international flavor. The cumulative process, described by organizers as “the tribunal movement,” is unique in history: Never before has a war aroused this level of protest on a global scale–first to prevent it (the huge February 15, 2003, demonstrations in eighty countries) and then to condemn its inception and conduct. The WTI expresses the opposition of global civil society to the Iraq War, a project perhaps best described as a form of “moral globalization.”

The WTI generated intense interest in Turkey, Europe, the Arab world and on the Internet but was ignored by the American mainstream media. Here in Istanbul, the WTI was treated for days as the number-one news story. There are several explanations for this, starting with near-unanimous opposition to the Iraq War in Turkey. More relevant were the vivid connections between Turkey and the war: physical proximity, an array of adverse effects and, more dramatic, a contradictory government posture–the refusal of the Turkish parliament in 2003 to give in to US pressure to authorize an invasion of Iraq from Turkish territory, while the Prime Minister allowed the continuing use of the huge US air base at Incirlik for strategic operations during and after the war.

The WTI was loosely inspired by the Bertrand Russell tribunal held in Copenhagen and Stockholm in 1967 to protest the Vietnam War, which documented with extensive testimony the allegations of criminality associated with the American role in Vietnam. The Russell tribunal featured the participation of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and other notable European left intellectuals. It relied on international law and morality to condemn the war but made no pretension of being a legal body, and its jury contained no international law experts.

Of course, a tribunal of this sort is immediately criticized on one hand as a kangaroo court that ignores the other sides of the legal and political argument and, on the other, is treated as a meaningless use of a courtroom format since there is neither an adversary process nor enforcement powers. In my view, these criticisms reveal a misunderstanding of the undertaking. To be sure, the WTI is not an organ of the state and cannot count on its judgments being implemented by such state institutions as police or prisons. Rather, the WTI is self-consciously an organ of civil society, with its own potential enforcement by way of economic boycotts, civil disobedience and political campaigns. And on the substantive issues of legality, it is designed to confirm the truth of the widely held allegations about the Iraq War, not to discover the truth by way of political, legal and moral inquiry and debate. It proceeds from a presumption that the allegations of illegality and criminality are valid and that its job is to reinforce that conclusion as persuasively and vividly as possible.

The motivations of citizens to organize such a tribunal do not arise from uncertainty about issues of legality and morality but from a conviction that the institutions of the state, including the UN, have failed to act to protect a vulnerable people against such Nuremberg crimes as aggression, violations of the laws of war and crimes against humanity. It is only because of such institutional failures in the face of ongoing suffering and abuse in Iraq that individuals and institutions made the immense organizational effort to put together this kind of transnational civic tribunal. We should also recall that the Nuremberg Tribunal’s enduring contribution was not finding out whether the Nazi regime had committed the crimes alleged but documenting its criminality.

The decision of the WTI was rendered by a fifteen-member Jury of Conscience, chaired by Indian novelist Arundhati Roy and including two Americans, David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and Eve Ensler of Vagina Monologues fame. A Panel of Advocates–coordinated by Turgut Tarhanli, dean of the Bilgi Law School in Istanbul, and myself–organized the fifty-four presentations. The advocates came from diverse backgrounds, and the presentations included some incisive analyses of international-law issues by such respected world experts as Christine Chinkin of the London School of Economics; two former UN assistant secretaries general, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponek, both of whom had resigned in the 1990s to protest the UN’s role in Iraq; several seemingly credible eyewitnesses who had held important nongovernment jobs in pre-invasion Iraq, who gave accounts of the devastation and cruelty of the occupation; Tim Goodrich, a former American soldier and co-founder of Iraq Veterans Against the War, who gave a moving presentation of why he turned against the war; and overall assessments of how the war fits into American ambitions for global empire, by such renowned intellectuals as Samir Amin, Johan Galtung and Walden Bello. Their presentations combined an acute explanation of the strains on world order arising from predatory forms of economic globalization with the view that the US response to 9/11 was mainly motivated by regional and global strategic aims and only incidentally, if at all, by antiterrorism.

After compromise and debate, the jury reached a unanimous verdict that combined findings with recommendations for action. Its core conclusion condemned the Iraq War as a war of aggression in violation of the UN Charter and international law, and determined that those responsible for planning and waging it should be held criminally responsible. George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz were listed in the verdict by name. Less predictable was that the UN was faulted for failing to fulfill its responsibilities to protect member states against aggression. One recommendation supported the rights of the Iraqi people to resist an illegal occupation, as authorized by international law. Further recommendations specified that US media be held responsible for contributing to the war of aggression, that American products associated with corporations doing business in Iraq–like Halliburton, Coca-Cola, Bechtel and Boeing–be boycotted and that peace movement activists around the world urge the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Iraq. The verdict was framed as a moral and political assessment of the Iraq War, and relied on the guidelines of international law to lend weight to its conclusions. The jury’s view of international law accords with a virtually unanimous consensus of international-law experts outside the United States and Britain.

Arundhati Roy imparted the prevailing spirit of civic dedication and moral leadership in a public statement at the culminating session. Her words summarize the experience for many of us: “The World Tribunal on Iraq places its faith in the consciences of millions of people across the world who do not wish to stand by and watch while the people of Iraq are being slaughtered, subjugated and humiliated.”

Richard Falk, chair of the board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, is the author of Religion and Humane Global Governance (Palgrave) and, most recently, The Great Terror War (Olive Branch). He is currently visiting professor of global studies at UC Santa Barbara.

Originally published in the August 1, 2005 edition of The Nation.

July 14, 2005
Human Rights and the US/UK Illegal Attack on Iraq

Distinguished Members of the Jury of Conscience; Fellow Advocates; Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends –

The testimonies have brought the reality of an Iraq tortured by the US/UK (and a coalition of willing clients) illegal attack, and illegal occupation, into our minds and hearts. With a sense of deep anger at the continued aggression and deep compassion with the victims we have witnessed the reality of crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity, including nuclear war through the use of depleted, radioactive uranium, on top of the genocidal economic sanctions, and the general “softening up” of Iraq for a quick, decisive war and remolding to the taste of the aggressors.

Members of the Jury: what we are witnessing is the geo-fascist state terrorism of US imperialism, following the defunct British Empire, soon to follow it into the graveyard of empires. In my research-based opinion at the latest by 2020, but, past experience being a guide, there is more to come. By some counts the attack on Iraq is US aggression no. 239 after the Thomas Jefferson start in the early 19th century and no. 69 after the Second World War; with between 12 and 16 million killed in that period alone. All in flagrant contradiction of the most basic human rights, like the “right to life, liberty and security of persons” (UD:3) and the condemnation of the “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” (UD:5). In a Pentagon Planner’s chilling words: “The de facto role of the United States Armed Forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing”. [1]

And in my drier words: “Imperialism is a transborder structure for the synergy of killing, repression, exploitation and brain-washing.”

I hold up against this organized atrocity–whether attempted legitimized through packs of lies about weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda, or by invoking a divine mandate or a mandate to export democracy and human rights through dictatorship and world crimes–a slip of paper, Article 28 of the Universal Declaration:

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized. (UD:28)

This admirable formulation provides an excellent linkage between various levels of social organization, from the individual level at which these rights are implemented or violated, to the structure of the social and world spaces. It indicates the spaces in which these conditions may be identified. The basic needs served by human rights are located inside the individual, but the conditions for their satisfaction are social and/or international, generally speaking. UD:28 is a meta-right, a right about rights, with nothing short of revolutionary implications.

US imperialism in general, and its articulation in Iraq in particular, invokes the whole International Bill of Rights, but the focus is on the UD:3 right to life, in the context of Article 29:

Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible. (UD:29)

There are no rights without duties, and right-holder and duty-bearer may also be the same actor. The word “community” rather than, but not excluding, “country” is used. This is very realistic as human beings developed personalities long before there were countries run by states and peopled by nations in our sense. But “communities” are as old as humankind itself. To a growing part of humanity the most important are non-territorial, like the NGOs.

Problem: What are the rights that flow from the conjunction of UD:3 with UD:28, and what are the corresponding UD:29 duties?

First Exercise: The entitlement to a social and international order where everything is done to resolve conflicts nonviolently.

Obvious, but worth emphasizing: the US/UK continued warfare is not only criminal, even by intent as demonstrated by the Downing Street Memorandum, but also plainly stupid, a folly. The criminal and the stupid can operate singly, but they also often combine and reinforce, due to a simple mechanism. Criminal acts have to be planned in secret, also to deceive their own peoples, by small gangs with cojones, in Bush’s words. They do not benefit from the dialogue of open agreements openly arrived at in an open society, also known as a democracy. Democracy’s traitors easily become its fools.

Barbara W. Tuchman, in her fine book The March of Folly, [2] gives us some leads. She studies Troy in the Battle of Troy, the Renaissance Popes during the Protestant Reformation, England and the American Revolution, and the USA in Viêt Nam and concludes that their action was simply foolish. [3] And she presents three criteria for a policy to be characterized as a “folly” [4]:

[1] It was perceived as counter-productive in its own time; [2] A feasible alternative course of action was available; and [3] The policy was not the policy of one particular ruler only.

All criteria are met in the US/UK illegal attack on Iraq. Hardly ever has a policy been so massively critiqued for being “counterproductive”, including the 15 February 2003 demonstration of 11 million in 600 places around the world, the biggest in human history. As I shall indicate, alternative courses were available. And there was more than one ruler involved, a whole coalition defying their people, headed by 2B, Bush-Blair, followed by clients like 2b, Berlusconi-Bondevik (the Norwegian fundamentalist prime minister). Only two countries were democratic in the sense that executive, legislature and public opinion coincided: the USA for the war, and our host country, Turkey, against. EU, take note.

Two Security Council members, France and Germany, put forward an alternative course of action: continued, deeper inspection that could then be extended to a human rights inspection, gradually eliminating two of the pretexts for a war which obviously was for geo-economic. geo-political and geo-cultural (Judeo-Christian anti Islam, that is what the content of the torture and the desecration of the Qur’an are about). This proposal could easily have been developed into something that could serve to organize a General Assembly Uniting for Peace resolution, possibly also using the highly successful Helsinki Conference for Security and Cooperation of 1973-75 as a model (also to avoid US/UK veto).

But this was not the road traveled. Not to do so was not a US/UK brutal act of commission, but an act of omission that always comes as a poor second in Judeo-Christian philosophy and Western jurisprudence. Many can be blamed, including France and Germany themselves for not having followed up, lesser coalition members, the UNGA for not mustering the collective courage against the bullying by Colin Powell telling that Uniting for Peace (in the UNSC-run UN) is seen by the USA as an “unfriendly act”.

We are sensing here a missing human right with corresponding duty: the right to live in a “social and international order” where everything is done to solve conflicts nonviolently. That right can only be implemented if others fulfill certain duties. It is not for everybody to have an impact on the “social and international order” in such concrete and partly technical issues. In other words, for the right to be implemented somebody “high up”, socially and/or internationally, indeed including the media, will have to do a better job, being more open to nonviolent alternatives and more closed to violence, war and the “military option” in general.

This point becomes even more clear in the next example, Saddam Hussein’s peace proposal in the New York Times (6 November 2003) ” Iraq said to have tried to reach last minute deal to avert war”:

In February 2003 Hassan Al-Obeidi, chief of foreign operations of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, met with Imad Hage, a Lebanese-American Businessman in his Beirut office. Mr. Obeidi told Mr. Hage that Iraq would make deals to avoid war, including helping in the Mideast peace process. He said, “If this is about oil, we will talk about U.S. oil concessions. If this is about weapons of mass destruction, let the Americans send over their people.” Mr. Obeidi said Iraq would agree to hold elections within the next two years. Of all people Richard Perle seems to have been willing to pursue this channel, but was overruled by higher officials. Said Perle: The message was, “Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad”.

The blame for this act of omission falls on the U.S. itself. But this is entirely in line with a very transparent U.S. approach: the U.S. reports its own proposals but not the other side, like in Viêt Nam, in the Rambouillet negotiations over to bomb or not to bomb Serbia, or in general over Israel-Palestine. When the other side, denied access to public space by the compliant media of the military-corporate-media complex, fails to accept U.S. proposals they can more easily be portrayed as being “against peace”.

In a Helsinki style Conference for Security and Cooperation In and Around Iraq these proposals would be on the table, as “it” was about all those issues, holding Saddam Hussein to his words. “Oil issues” could be translated into quotas and put the U.S. in a negotiating rather than dictating position. WMD: the U.S. knew the program had been discontinued in 1995; the CIA is hardly that badly informed. And even if Hussein is not credible as a guardian of democracy these elections would not be under the U.S./corporate press/”one dollar one vote” control that gives democracy such a bad name, close to a synonym for “US client state”. However that may be, to have closed this channel was both criminal and stupid.

Second Exercise: The entitlement to a social and international order where perpetrators of (major) crimes are brought to justice.

With major perpetrators having major power through major veto, the UN today is not an adequate instrument for bringing US/UK to justice; the USA even having exempted itself from ICC adjudication. Yet they should not get away with impunity. Justice has to be done.

When a government fails to live up to its duty civil society, meaning nongovernment, has to step in. When the major international instrument of governments, the UN, fails to live up to its duty the international civil society has to step in. This World Tribunal on Iraq is an example of a tribunal based on the international civil society. But how about the instruments of punitive justice?

The answer is that the international civil society, everyone of us, has that instrument: an economic boycott of US/UK products. A boycott could include consumer goods (drinks and food of iconic nature, fuels), capital goods (like not using Boeing, a major death factory, aircraft whenever there are alternatives), and financial goods (like using other currencies than dollars for international transactions including tourism and price denomination; divestment from US/UK stock and bonds). It could relate to all products, or only to products from the most obnoxious, empire-related companies, like US/UK oil companies. It could be combined with a “girlcott” favoring non-coalition countries and acceptable US/UK companies.

Members of the Jury: Everybody could find his/her own formula, seeing some boycott not only as a human duty but as a human right not to be interfered with. For Iraq a focus on oil is recommended.

However, channels of communication should be kept open for dialogues. The goal is less to inflict pain than to bring about an end to an illegal aggression and, by implication and atrocities, illegal occupation. When the occupation is over, so is the boycott.

Third Exercise: The entitlement to a social and international order without imperial structures perverting the order.

We are today talking about a US empire, which may or may not have successors, in which case what follows also applies to them.

The empire is a structure based on unequal exchange in the military, political, economic and cultural fields, and has to be counteracted in all four fields. Being the negation of the social and international order in the sense of UD:28 there is not only a human duty for people at all levels to counteract an empire but also a human right, not to be interfered with, to do so.

Unequal exchange is injustice. To counteract it will be construed as hostile action, as “terrorism”, interfering with the “normal” flow of resources and products, “normal” as established by the empire (see Article 24 of the new NATO Pact of 1999).

In reality, not to interfere is complicity, and to interfere is justice, and more particularly restorative justice. It restores not only victim countries, groups and individuals, but also the perpetrator, to normalcy and sanity, coexisting peacefully in a world of more equal, or at least less flagrantly unequal, exchange.

The country to benefit most from the dismantling of the US Empire is the U.S. which, while enriching its upper classes at the same time has degenerated into a paranoid, angst-ridden country tormented by the existential fear that “one day they will do to us what we have done to them” (yes, one day they did: 9/11 2001.).

I join the ranks of those who say “I love the US Republic, and I hate the US Empire”. The question is how to engage in these colossal acts of restorative justice. And the answer is that it is happening all the time militarily and politically, that more can and should be done, and that there is a need for action in the economic and cultural fields. And who are the actors? Everybody.

How can it be done? Four examples, covering the four fields:

Militarily this is happening all places in the world where that “most powerful country” is challenged by people shedding their uniform, dressing and living like the people around them with their total support and more dedicated than soldiers fed packs of lies.

Members of the Jury: All resistance against an illegal attack is legitimate, and the Iraqi resistance is fighting for us all. But I also blame us in the peace movement for having been unable to share our insights in nonviolent resistance with our Iraqi friends.

Politically regionalization is happening all over the world, in part motivated by getting out of the US grip: the EU, the AU and similar incipient movements in Latin America, OIC and East Asia.

Economically there is the economic boycott, adding to punitive justice the restorative, gandhian aspect of taking on the challenge of developing your own products and helping the U.S. accommodate to a reasonable and equitable niche in world trade. In John Perkins Confessions of an Economic Hit Man lies the depth of U.S. insanity.

Culturally we are confronted with US/UK legitimacy. It used to be that “the U.S. is chosen by God; the UK by the U.S.” like a pale moon reflecting that divine Anglo-American light. Today the idea of God using Bush as his instrument is sheer blasphemy, and countries chosen by the USA should ask, “what is wrong about me”. If you are so immature as to need a strong father seek psycho-therapy, not a mafia boss. To kill Iraqis as therapy is despicable.

Members of the Jury: My own buddhism is sufficiently close to the gentle Christianity of a St Francis to sense the blasphemy. I call on the Jury to call on Christian communities to protest this blasphemy, including Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who had the task of protecting the faith. The time to act is now.

Notes: [1] From Susan George, “The Corporate Utopian Dream”, The WTO and the Global War System, Seattle, November 1999. He is missing the political dimension and might have added “a fair amount of bullying” or “arm-twisting” after killing. [2] The March of Folly, From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1984) [3] Visitors today to the ruins of Troy (in Turkey, near the Dardanelles, on the Asian side) will find a model of the famous wooden horse, and can judge for themselves the wisdom of letting such a thing within their walls. In the other three cases a little patience, flexibility, willingness to listen, and real dialogue might have come a far way. But then we might have had neither economic growth and individualizing democracy as we know them, if we accept that both are related to the world view of Protestantism, nor the end of the beginning of the US Republic, nor the beginning of the end of the US Empire. [4] Op.cit.., p. 5

Johan Galtung, Dr. hc mult serves on the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Advisory Council, is founder of the Oslo Peace Research Institute, founder of Transcend, and a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award.

June 25, 2005
Opening Speech at the World Tribunal on Iraq

Let me express at the outset, on behalf of the Panel of Advocates our profound gratitude to the convenors of this Istanbul session of the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) for their exceptional effort, and at the same time acknowledge the extraordinary contributions of the twenty earlier sessions of the WTI that have produced invaluable testimony and results that have increased awareness the world over of the criminality of the Iraq War. This unprecedented process of truth-telling about an ongoing war has produced what can best be described as ‘a tribunal movement’ of which this Istanbul session is the culminating phase to date of this process.

The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) is remarkable for two principal reasons: WTI bears witness to the depth and persistence of the popular mobilization of people throughout the world in opposition to the Iraq War. Such a mobilization against a particular war has never occurred before on such a scale. It started with the massive street demonstrations before the war on Feb. 15, 2003 in which some 11 million people took part in 80 countries and more than 600 urban communities. The WTI gives a continuing legal, moral, and political expression to this anti-war opposition which itself has entered a new phase: an insurgent war of liberation being waged in resistance to the illegal occupation of the country by the greatest military power in the history of the world. In this struggle, the Iraqi people are being denied their fundamental rights of self-determination, first by aggression and then by a cruel and criminal dynamic occupation.

The second reason for claiming historical significance on behalf of WTI relates to this initiative of, by, and for citizens to hold leaders accountable for severe violations of international law, especially in relation to matters of war and peace. It is not that this is an entirely new idea. The first such effort was inspired by the eminent British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who convened such a tribunal back in 1967 to assess the legal responsibility of the United States and its leaders for the Vietnam War. It gathered testimony and documented the massive abuses of Vietnamese sovereignty by a devastating war that took millions of innocent Vietnamese lives. Above all, this citizens’ tribunal was a cry of anguish intended to break the wall of silence behind which the crimes associated with the Vietnam War were daily committed. The Russell Tribunal in turn led to the formation of the Permanent Peoples Tribunal, located in Rome, operating since 1976 to reinforce the claims of international law by filling in the gaps where governments and even the United Nations are unable and unwilling to act, or even to speak. The WTI continues and extends this tradition of refusing to be silent or to be silenced. It accepts as a responsibility of democracy the obligation of citizens to insist on the relevance and applicability of international law to every use of force. This insistence includes a demand for criminal accountability, whenever a government disavows its commitment to respect international law. It is primarily to honor this commitment to uphold international law that this tribunal has been organized, and its mission is to confirm the truth of the allegation directed at the United States and the United Kingdom, while also extending to all governments that support directly or indirectly the Iraq War.

We should be aware that such a commitment by the WTI is part of a longer journey of international law that has evolved by stages that can be identified.

The initial stage was to create in some authoritative way the norms of law, morality, and politics associated with the prohibition of wars of aggression. The legal culmination of this process occurred in 1928 when leading states, including the United States and the UK, ratified without qualification the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an instrument of National Policy, also known as the Kellogg-Brand Pact;

This was followed by a second stage that attached criminal consequences to the violation of this norm prohibiting aggressive war through establishing accountability. The criminal trial of German and Japanese leaders after World War II, the Nuremberg Judgment issued in 1945 was a milestone in this process. The Judgment declared: “To initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole,” and although Nuremberg was flawed by being an example of “victors’ justice,” the American prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson, made what has been described as the Nuremberg Promise in his closing statement: “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or 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” This promise has been broken, but such behavior is not acceptable, and we are gathered in part to insist even now that the promise that every state will pay the consequences if it wages a war of aggression.

This treaty pledge to renounce aggressive war informed the United Nations Charter. The Charter imposes a core obligation on Members to refrain from the use of force in international relations except in circumstances of self-defense strictly defined and under the authority of the Security Council. It also, in a spirit relevant to the WTI, confirmed in its opening words that it is the peoples of the world and not the governments or even the UN that have been entrusted with the ultimate responsibility for upholding this renunciation of war: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…” that set forth the duties of states in the UN Charter. This tribunal is dedicated to precisely this undertaking as a matter of law, as an imperative of morality and human rights, and as an engagement with the politics of global justice.

Of course, this tribunal does not pretend to be a normal court of law with powers of enforcement. At the same time, it is acting on behalf of the peoples of the world to uphold respect for international law. When governments and the UN are silent, and fail to protect victims of aggression, tribunals of concerned citizens possess a law-making authority. Their unique contribution is to tell the truth as powerfully and fully as possible, and by such truthfulness to activate the conscience of humanity to resist. The US Government told a pack of lies in its feeble attempt to find a legal justification for the invasion of Iraq. The WTI will expose these lies by presenting evidence and testimony. The task of exposing lies and confirming truth has become easier as a result of the release of the Downing Street memos. These official documents show that British and American officials understood fully that the Iraq War was unlawful, and not only did they go ahead, but they fabricated evidence to build a completely dishonest legal case. Neither governments, nor the UN, nor most of the media will tell this story of deception, destruction, and criminality. It is the mission of the WTI, building on the efforts of the 20 or so earlier citizens’ tribunals, to tell this story and to appeal to the peoples of the world to join with the people of Iraq in opposing aggression against Iraq. The tribunal is formed on the basis of a Panel of Advocates and a Jury of Conscience. The Panel will present the evidence and the Jury will draw legal, moral, and political conclusions and offer recommendations. The pledge of advocates and jurors is to act in an honest, non-partisan, independent, and objective spirit to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

This tribunal differs from a normal court of law in the following main respects:

–it is an organ of civil society, not of the state;

–its essential purpose is to confirm the truth, not to discover it;

–its jurors are dedicated, informed, and committed citizens of the world, not neutral and indifferent individuals of the community;

–its advocates are knowledgeable, wise and decent, but not legally trained specialists;

–its trust for the future is not based on violence and police, but on conscience, political struggle, and public opinion.

Nevertheless, we claim for this tribunal the authority to declare the law and to impose its judgment and to hope — hope that a demonstration of this criminality will not fall on deaf ears, but will awaken and exercise the peoples of the world to intensify their resistance to America’s plans for world domination and stand in solidarity with the Iraqi people.

We need to realize that the Iraq war is the eye of a larger global storm. The storm expresses the fury of this American project to dominate the world by force of arms, to exploit the peoples of the world through the medium of economic globalization, and to administer its idea of security from its Washington headquarters. This project of World Empire hides its true colors beneath the banner of anti-terrorism. It justifies every abuse by pointing to the September 11 attacks. These attacks, even if they are what is claimed, do not justify aggression against states or the torture of individuals. We should remember that the imperial brain trust said before September 11 that only “a new Pearl Harbor” would produce the political climate needed to achieve global hegemony. And they got a new Pearl Harbor, or did they? Read David Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor and you will never be able to take 9/11 at face value in the future. The convenors of the WTI are mindful of this wider context of the Iraq War.

It should also be observed that Turkey is an appropriate site for this culminating session of the WTI, remembering that earlier sessions of the WTI in all regions of the world have gathered evidence of the illegality of the Iraq War and the criminal policies and practices that have been associated with its conduct. To begin with, Turkey stands at the crossroads between the old European geopolitical core and the Third World periphery. Earlier Russell, PPT initiatives were European. Now the moral, political, and legal platform is moving away from the Christian West. It was Turkey’s proudest moment when its parliament refused the request of the US Government to mount the invasion of Iraq from Turkish territory; this represented an expression of an increasingly robust democratic process here in Turkey. Turkey is also a natural site for the tribunal because it is an important neighbor of Iraq, and suffers a variety of bad consequences from the war and the turmoil in the region that has resulted. And further, the Turkish government has been complicit with the Iraq war, as well as with the preceding period of sanctions, by allowing its territory to be used for a strategic base that has been extensively used for the bombing of Iraq ever since 1990. It is a purpose of this tribunal to show that such complicity engages legal responsibility for Turkey, and for other governments in the region that support directly or indirectly such aggressive war making.

A special concern of the WTI is to take sharp issue with American claims of exception whether based on an alleged freedom to wage war anywhere on the planet as a result of the 9/11 attacks or securing an exemption for itself in relation to the basic obligation to uphold international law. The pernicious American exceptionalism contradicts completely the role played by the United States in seeking to promote the Rule of Law, the Nuremberg approach, and the UN Charter after 1945. The claim of exception moves in two directions: it operates, first of all, as an explicit effort to exempt Anerican leaders from individual accountability for violating international law, specifically in relation to the recently established International Criminal Court; and secondly, in relation to the lawless barbarism of the detention of alleged terrorist and insurgency suspects being held in such notorious outposts of torture and official evil as Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq and Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo. This tribunal stands against such outrageous claims of exception, and operates beneath the jurisprudential principle that no government or leader is above the law and that every government and leader is criminally accountable for failures to uphold international law. If governments and the UN are unwilling to pass judgment, it is up to initiatives by citizens of the world to perform this scared duty. The WTI has been formed against the background of these essential beliefs.

It should also be understood that the WTI views the Iraq War as part of this wider assault by the United States, and the UK, against wider prospects for a just world order. These prospects depend upon respecting the sovereign rights of all states, of working to achieve human rights, including economic, social, and cultural rights for all peoples, and to struggle on behalf of a humane world order, including a far more equitable world economy that is indispensable for achieving a sustainable world peace.

There was a tart in this direction made during the 1990s, although amid an array of contradictions. But it is worth noting these progressive moves that have been stymied by the wars of aggression launched by the United States by relying upon the pretext of a war against terrorism. It is worth observing because it is important to revive these moves toward humane global governance based on the principles of global justice:

–the spread of democracy, and especially the rise of global civil society and of global social movements in the area of environment, human rights, women, and peace;

–the increased support for human rights by civil society actors and governments around the world;

–the attention given to the remembrance and partial erasure of historic grievances toward indigenous peoples on all continents, toward the victims of forced labor, including so-called “comfort women” during World War II, toward the descendants of slavery;

–and most of all, to the revival of Nuremberg ideas about criminal accountability, challenging impunity – the Chilean dictator Pinochet was indicted by Spain and detained by Britain; the UN established tribunals to prosecute those responsible for ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in former Yugoslavia and for genocide in Rwanda; and over the objections of the leading states, the ICC was brought into existence due to the active coalition of hundreds of NGOs working together with dozens of governments dedicated to establish a framework for applying international criminal law.

Such positive steps have been derailed, at least temporarily, by the firestorm released in the world by the US Government since the September 11 attacks. This tribunal hopes that truth-telling with respect to Iraq will also revive the emergent normative revolution of the 1990s, making us move again in the Puerto Alegre direction of insisting that “another world is possible,” and adding, “if possible, it is necessary,” and with this affirmation, the WTI will not only stimulate resistance to appression and solidarity with victims, but will revive the vision of the 1990s that can be best summarized as the cause of “moral globalization.”

June 24, 2005
Navy Judge Finds War Protest Reasonable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 13, 2005
To an Iraqi Child

So you wanted to be a doctor?

It was not likely that your dreams would have come true anyway.

We didn’t intend for our bombs to find you.

They are smart bombs, but they didn’t know that you wanted to be a doctor.

They didn’t know anything about your dreams and they know nothing of love.

They only know how to find their targets and explode in fulfillment.

We call them smart, but they cannot be trusted with dreams.

After all, they are only gray metal casings with violent hearts.

They do only what they were created to do.

It isn’t their fault that they found you.

Perhaps you were not meant to be a doctor.

April 2, 2005
Another Soldier

The fifteen hundredth American soldier has died In an ancient land.

I don’t know his name, nor can I imagine his face, Surprised or perhaps contorted, as he fell like an anchor Through the sea. . Like all of us, he had dreams.

One is seized by the penetrating beauty of flowers, By their arrangement in a crystal vase, and cannot help Sinking to the sad earth, sobbing and bleeding.

When the flowers, too, have faded and fallen, The empty container will remain solid and solitary, Still reflecting light, but lifeless and achingly alone.

March 26, 2005
The War on Iraq as Illegal and Illegitimate
“The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons.”

George W. Bush, October 7, 2002

“I think unless the United Nations shows some backbone and courage, it could render the Security Council irrelevant.”

George W. Bush, February 17, 2003

We now know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as repeatedly alleged by Mr. Bush and other members of his administration. And contrary to Mr. Bush’s allegation that the United Nations showed no backbone and courage, the Security Council did, in fact, stand up to the Bush administration’s pressure and did resist authorizing war prior to the UN weapons inspectors completing their task. It was the Bush administration’s impatience with the Security Council process and unwillingness to abide by it that led them to initiate an unauthorized attack on Iraq in violation of international law. Although the war in Iraq is widely regarded throughout the world as illegal under international law, few consequences seem to be flowing from this in holding to account the perpetrators of the war, including leading figures in the Bush administration.

At issue is a view often articulated by detractors of the war, such as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, describing the war in Iraq as a “war of choice,” rather than a war of necessity.1 This would suggest that those with sufficient power have choices in matters of war and peace in which they can initiate war without being held accountable; or, at best, be held accountable only by the democratic process of defeat in the next election. The implication is that an illegal war of aggression, while it may be neither wise nor necessary, is a prerogative of power.

The two main justifications offered by the Bush administration for the war against Iraq prior to its inception have by now been completely discredited. First, administration spokespersons repeatedly pointed to an imminent threat that Iraq would use weapons of mass destruction against the US or its allies, or would transfer these weapons to terrorist organizations. UN weapons inspectors in Iraq prior to the war reported that they were not finding weapons of mass destruction and needed more time to complete their inspections. The Bush administration, however, continued to assert that Iraq had such weapons, despite a lack of credible corroboration, and finally warned the UN inspectors to leave Iraq before the US initiated what they called a “preemptive” war. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council, asserted without question that the US had knowledge of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and proceeded to produce intelligence photographs of the sites where they were being manufactured and stored.2 His assertions turned out to be false.

In the aftermath of the war, no weapons of mass destruction were located in Iraq, despite extensive efforts on the part of UN inspectors and US military personnel. This wholly discredited the numerous pronouncements by members of the Bush administration that they not only knew there were such weapons but even knew where they were located within Iraq.

The second justification for the war made by the Bush administration prior to initiating the war was that there was a link between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist organization. The evidence establishing this link has also proven to be false or, at best, extremely tenuous. This led the US to come up with new post hoc justifications for the war, such as the assertion that Saddam Hussein was a bad man and evil dictator, even though the US supported Hussein despite his poor human rights record when it believed that it served its interests to do so. While the latter, after-the-fact justifications may be true, they do not make an effective case for legality, or even legitimacy, of an aggressive war initiated without UN authorization.

If allowed to stand unchallenged, the US initiation of war on Iraq and the rationale that permitted it could set an extremely dangerous precedent. Such actions could also undermine the legal and normative system to prevent wars of aggression, centered in the United Nations and enunciated in the Nuremberg Principles, which were the basis for the trials of Axis leaders in the aftermath of World War II. The Nuremberg Principles list “Crimes against peace” as first among the crimes punishable under international law and define Crimes against peace as: “(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation of a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).”

The words of the US chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, Justice Robert Jackson, are relevant. Jackson was adamant that the true test of what was done at Nuremberg would be the extent to which the Allied victors, including the US, applied these principles to themselves in future years. In his opening statement to the Court, Jackson placed the issue of “victor’s justice” in context: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.”3 Such “aspirations to do justice” included for Jackson applying the law equally and fairly to all. “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes,” he stated, “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.”4

The Illegality of the Iraq War

The UN Charter is clear that wars of aggression are prohibited. Article 2(4) states: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”5 This prohibition on the use of force finds an exception in Article 51 of the Charter, which allows for the possibility of self-defense.6

Article 51 states: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.”7 It should be emphasized that this exception to the general prohibition against the use of force is only valid in the event of “an armed attack” and only “until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”

In the case of the US war against Iraq, there was no armed attack against the US by Iraq, nor any substantiated threat of armed attack. There was no credible evidence that Iraq had any relationship to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the US. There was, therefore, no appropriate justification for the invocation of the self-defense exception to the UN Charter’s prohibition against the use of force. If the US could proceed to war against Iraq on the basis of a claim of potential future attack, it would open the door to a broad range of assertions of potential future attacks by one country against another that would justify unilateral initiation of warfare, whether or not based on factual foundations, paranoia or simple expediency. It would throw the international order into a state of chaos.

Further, the matter of Iraq’s failure to complete the disarmament obligations imposed upon it by the Security Council following the 1991 Gulf War was actually placed before the Security Council by the US for action, and the Security Council resisted US pressure to provide the US with an authorization to use force. The Bush administration, at the urging of Secretary of State Colin Powell and over objections of other administration officials, sought a Security Council mandate to initiate what the US called a “preemptive war” (but was actually a “preventive war” since it involved no imminent threat of attack but only sought to prevent the imagined possibility of a future attack) against Iraq.

The Security Council did agree to one resolution, UNSC Resolution 1441, that called on Iraq to disarm its weapons of mass destruction and cooperate with UN inspectors, but did not include an authorization for the use of force against Iraq.8 In Resolution 1441, the Security Council indicated that it would remain “seized” of the matter, meaning that it continued to assert its authority as the final international arbiter of the use of force in the matter. When the US went back to the Security Council for a second and follow-up resolution to 1441, this one to provide authorization to proceed to war against Iraq, the Security Council refused to comply with the US demand for such authorization on the grounds that it wanted to give the UN inspectors more time to finish their work.

Rather than awaiting authorization from the Security Council or abiding by the Council’s unwillingness to provide such authorization, the US, under the Bush administration, which had been gradually repositioning its military forces into the Middle East in preparation for war with Iraq, abandoned its quest for UN authorization and proceeded to attack and invade Iraq. The Bush administration sought to justify its illegal actions on the basis of Security Council Resolution 678, a 1990 resolution that authorized “all necessary means” to uphold previous resolutions related to Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait and to restore peace and security in the area.9 The resolution authorized the use of force unless Iraq fully complied with previous Council resolutions by January 15, 1991. This resolution was used as legal justification for the attack against Iraq on that date by the US-led coalition and also by the Bush II administration for its attack in March 2003. While the justification is relevant, at least legally, to the 1991 Gulf War, it is basically used as sophistry in relation to the 2003 attack.

Following the first Gulf War, Iraq accepted a cease-fire contained in Security Council Resolution 687.10 This resolution imposed certain conditions on them, including weapons of mass destruction (WMD) disarmament obligations. In justifying the 2003 war on Iraq, Bush administration officials continued to rely upon the Security Council resolutions preceding and immediately following the 199l Gulf War. State Department Legal Advisers, for example, argued, “As a legal matter, a material breach of the conditions that had been essential to the establishment of the cease-fire left the responsibility to member states to enforce those conditions, operating consistently with Resolution 678 to use all necessary means to restore international peace and security in the area.”11

These officials further argued that the provision in Resolution 1441 indicating that Iraq was in “material breach of its obligations” to cooperate with UN inspectors on WMD inspections under previous resolutions, including resolutions 678 and 687, allowed them to legally initiate their attack on Iraq.12 In fact, however, Resolution 1441 offered Iraq “a final opportunity to comply with disarmament obligations,”13 and Iraq was doing so. Iraq was cooperating with UN inspectors on these issues, and the arguments to the contrary, by Colin Powell and others in the Bush administration, have since been exposed as misrepresentations.14 Most important, though, Security Council Resolution 1441 stated that the Security Council would remain seized of the matter, thus indicating that without further Council authorization there was not legal justification for the US and its allies to proceed to war against Iraq.15

The US-led attack against Iraq constitutes a clear undermining of established Security Council authority in the realm of war and peace. The attack and initiation of the Iraq War would later be described by President Bush in terms of the US not needing a “permission slip,” presumably from the United Nations, when US security interests were threatened.16 As was subsequently revealed, however, US security interests were not threatened, as had been alleged by the Bush administration, and the war therefore had no legal basis. It was considered by the opposition party in the US to be at best a “war of choice.” More realistically, it was understood by large majorities of the populations of nearly all countries in the world to be an aggressive and illegal war of the type for which Axis leaders were held to account by the Allied powers after World War II. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said unequivocally that the war was illegal. Referring to the war, he stated, “I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of view and from the Charter point of view it was illegal.”17

The Security Council could have chosen to act under Article 39 of the UN Charter to authorize the use of force against Iraq if it determined that there had been a breach of the peace or act of aggression. Article 39 states,18“The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.”19 Article 41 refers to actions the Security Council can take that do not involve the use of force. Article 42 refers to acts of force the Security Council can take if it finds the measures under Article 41 to be inadequate. These include “such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security.”20 No such actions were authorized by the Security Council in relation to the Iraq War initiated by Mr. Bush and other US and coalition leaders in March 2003.

The Illegitimacy of the Iraq War

Despite the nearly universal understanding of the illegality of the war, it might be asked under what conditions it might nonetheless be considered legitimate, even if not legal. This line of inquiry takes into account the argument that the threat of a possible attack with weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, would allow for some bending of international law to fit the extreme dangers associated with such weapons. In response to this line of inquiry, it seems reasonable to suggest that evidence of the development of weapons of mass destruction, when combined with further evidence of imminent intent to use such weapons, could constitute a sufficient threat to justify preemptive war in an attempt to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction. (Query: Would the 2001 US Nuclear Posture Review,21 which calls for developing contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons against seven countries, suggest imminent threat, and constitute sufficient grounds for a preemptive attack by one of these states against the US?)

Hans Blix, the former chief UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq, analyzed the pre-war situation in Iraq in this way: “Any government learning that a 9/11, perhaps with weapons of mass destruction, is about to happen cannot sit and wait, but will seek to prevent it. However, such preventive action, if undertaken without the authorization of the Security Council, would have to rely critically upon solid intelligence if it were to be internationally accepted. The case of Iraq cannot be said to have strengthened faith in national intelligence as a basis for preemptive military action without Security Council authorization. Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction in March 2003, and the evidence invoked of the existence of such weapons had begun to fall apart even before the invasion started.”22 Based on this analysis, Blix concluded: “Saddam Hussein was not a valid object for counter-proliferation. He was not an imminent or even remote threat to the United States or to Iraq’s neighbors.”23

It should be understood that even if there had been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, this alone would not have been a sufficient justification for preemptive war. The mere presence of weapons of mass destruction, absent evidence of imminent intent to use them, would be insufficient to justify a preemptive war, let alone a preventive war. If the mere presence of weapons of mass destruction were sufficient, it would mean that any country possessing weapons of mass destruction would be a legitimate target of preventive attack by a potential enemy of that country. Such logic would push all states in the direction of preventive warfare and would substantially increase both the likelihood and danger of such wars. It would allow for attacks against Israel on the basis of its secret but widely recognized nuclear weapons program, for attacks by either India or Pakistan against the other, and for attacks by any of the nuclear weapons states against one another. This is, in part, why the International Court of Justice, in its 1996 Advisory Opinion on the illegality of nuclear weapons, stated: “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”24

Following further this line of inquiry, a distinction needs to be drawn between a state possessing weapons of mass destruction and non-state extremist groups possessing the same weapons. In the former case, a country has a fixed location and is therefore far more likely to be deterred by threat of retaliation from using such weapons. On the other hand, the same weapons in the hands of extremists who are not easily locatable and who may be suicidal as well, and therefore are not subject to being deterred by threats of retaliation, present a far more dangerous threat. In the case of both states of concern – such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea – and of extremist groups, however, the best remedy is surely policies to prevent nuclear proliferation and achieve nuclear disarmament rather than a preemptive war. An aggressive war could only stand as a final barrier and one that is unacceptable and illegal unless under the mandate of the international community through authorization by the United Nations Security Council.

Given the after-the-fact findings in Iraq that there were neither weapons of mass destruction nor links to extremist organizations, there was no reasonable justification, either in legality or in legitimacy, for the US-led war against that country. US leaders continue to make the claim that previous Security Council resolutions provide the necessary justification, but this is a poor argument that is not borne out by scrutiny of the earlier resolutions and, in any event, is overridden by the fact that the Security Council had decided in Resolution 1441 to remain seized of the matter.

Costs of the War

Defenders of the Iraq War claim that the removal of Saddam Hussein by the rapidly diminishing “Coalition of the Willing” will make it possible for democracy to eventually take root in the country, and that a new Iraq will serve as a model to other countries in the region, transforming a troublesome, but oil rich, part of the world into one that is stable, peaceful and democratic. This is an unlikely scenario, given the realities that have ensued as a result of the war.

While many Iraqi citizens are pleased to see Saddam Hussein dislodged from power, the result of the Iraq War has been the deaths of some 100,000 innocent civilians, severe injury to tens of thousands more, and enormous destruction to the infrastructure of the country.25 Iraqi society has been devastated by warfare and its citizens subjected to death, injury, torture and humiliating abuses such as were revealed at Abu Ghraib prison. The price for regime change has been very high in terms of death and destruction. Iraq will now have to struggle with reestablishing itself as a sovereign state, finding its own means of governance in a post-Saddam and post-US occupation country. As part of this struggle, it will have to come to terms with its relationship to the US, which undoubtedly seeks to assure special privileges with Iraq with regard to Iraqi oil supplies and the continued presence of US troops in the region, particularly on newly established US military bases in Iraq itself.

Of course, the US has also paid a price for the war in terms of its financial costs, currently estimated at over $200 billion, the deaths and injuries of its soldiers, the spreading thin of its armed forces to levels considered dangerous by leading US military figures, and the loss of respect for and credibility of the US in the world community.

A second area of equally severe costs of the war against Iraq is its unfortunate implications for world order in the 21 st century. If the US precedent of aggressive war under false pretenses against Iraq is allowed to stand as a fait accompli without some form of international sanction against the US and its leaders, it bodes ill for the continuation of the world order system established after World War II to prevent “the scourge of war.”26 Clearly, the US is a key actor in the international system and, with its overwhelming military and economic power, it is not easy for the international community to stand up for principles of international law against US actions that violate the UN Charter. Yet, the continued viability of the Charter demands principled action by the members of the UN even in the face of US pressure. One extremely important principle of law is that no person or nation stands above the law. Law can only be respected and ultimately enforced when it applies to all, equally and alike. The US-led invasion of Iraq, under false pretenses and without UN Security Council approval, is a direct challenge to the principle of prohibition on the use of force in the UN Charter. Had the Security Council actually authorized the US attack on Iraq, it would have undermined the credibility of the United Nations itself, including its commitment to the basic principles of its own Charter.

The Need for Accountability

Throughout the world, there have been an ongoing series of inquiries into international crimes committed by US and Coalition leaders in initiating and conducting the war against Iraq in the form of international people’s tribunals.27 These tribunals, in the spirit of the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunals during the Vietnam War, are amassing evidence of international crimes and will be reporting these to the public throughout the world. This is an important initiative of civil society, and it promises to help educate people and governments about the dangers and criminal nature of wars of aggression as well as crimes committed in the conduct of the war. Something more is needed, however, than leaving this matter to be dealt with only by civil society. The UN, for the health and integrity of the organization, also needs to initiate its own inquiry into the nature of the US war against Iraq. This could be done either in the General Assembly or by a committee of selected representative members of the UN and brought back to the General Assembly and, through it, to the people of the world. If the facts bear out the circumvention of the UN Charter by the US in direct defiance of the Security Council, at a minimum, the US should be censured for its actions. Further recommendations by the General Assembly could include a call for reparations to the Iraqi people, prohibitions on the US profiting from its aggression, the disgorgement of profits already obtained, and the trial and punishment of responsible US and coalition leaders for their actions.

An early act of the Bush administration was to “unsign” the treaty establishing an International Criminal Court (ICC).28 Under the Bush administration, the US has been hostile to the ICC, arguing that it did not want to subject US military personnel to the dictates of this international court. In light of the US circumvention of international law in its initiation of an aggressive war against Iraq, it becomes clearer that US leaders were seeking to give themselves greater degrees of freedom to commit serious violations of international criminal law without being subjected to the jurisdiction of the court.

No country, even the most powerful, should be immune from international law. The United Nations owes it to itself and the principles for which the organization stands not to allow the law to be violated without, at a minimum, drawing public attention to the violations. While a report by the UN on illegal actions by a member state might upset the government of that state, it would also help to draw the attention of the people of that country to illegal acts being committed in their name. This would bear some resemblance at the international level to the truth aspect of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was successfully used in South Africa after apartheid ended and Nelson Mandela was released from prison to become president of that country.29 It would be useful for a UN committee examining the violations of international law in the US-led war against Iraq to also look carefully into the more than a decade of sanctions imposed upon Iraq and the results of those sanctions in terms of human life and suffering of innocent parties.

The Iraq War and Weapons of Mass Destruction

At the heart of world conditions that provided the ostensible reason that the US went into Iraq are the extreme threats posed by weapons of mass destruction. Many countries are now concerned about the incendiary mix that lies at the intersection of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. The need is greater today than ever before to bring weapons of mass destruction under effective international control, and many countries have voiced their concern that more must be done to keep weapons of mass destruction from proliferating to states of concern and non-state extremist organizations. Mr. Bush has spoken out on the importance of preventing nuclear terrorism. His plans involve attempting to keep what he refers to as the world’s most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world’s most dangerous states and extremist organizations. Mr. Bush has organized a Proliferation Security Initiative that seeks to prevent the further proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction to other states and to terrorist groups.30 To accomplish this, cooperating countries are tightening export controls, criminalizing transfers of weapons of mass destruction and the materials to create them, and making arrangements to board and inspect ships at sea suspected of transporting contraband materials.

Bush has noted the “loophole” in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that allows states to develop peaceful nuclear programs that could be converted to nuclear weapons programs.31 He has called for closing this “loophole,” although the treaty itself calls the peaceful uses of nuclear energy an “inalienable right.”32 Additionally, he has called for tighter controls on nuclear materials by the International Atomic Energy Agency and particularly international controls on the technologies to reprocess plutonium and enrich uranium. Bush has not raised, however, the key obligation of the nuclear weapons states in the treaty, the Article VI obligation to engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament, which, more than any other single act, could limit the possibilities of nuclear weapons or the materials to make them falling into the hands of terrorists.33

A major problem in the international system related to preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is the double standard on nuclear weapons that the permanent members of the UN Security Council continue attempting to uphold individually and collectively. While these states continue to maintain nuclear arsenals, all seek also to prevent other states from developing these weapons. In the end, such double standards cannot be maintained. It is not likely, for example, that the US would have initiated its aggressive war against Iraq if it truly believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that it was prepared to use. A consequence of the Iraq War is that it demonstrated to non-nuclear weapon states that there are advantages to possessing these weapons if only to deter a stronger power, such as the US, from an unprovoked and illegal attack. This message does not seem to be lost on either North Korea, which announced that it has developed nuclear weapons, or on Iran, a country that appears to be pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

The initiation of warfare to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by a state possessing weapons of mass destruction reflects the ultimate double standard in the current international system. It is a standard that ultimately cannot hold, and in the end will bring the current international order tumbling down. In a sense, the nuclear weapons states are holding the world hostage to this double standard by failing to fulfill their obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Projecting into the future a continuation of the effort to maintain these double standards, despite long-standing obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, suggests the possibility that aggressive “wars of choice” may increase and become a regular occurrence in relations among countries. Such a future will also increase the likelihood of the use of weapons of mass destruction, either preemptively by a nuclear weapons state, or by extremist organizations intent on inflicting maximum damage on powerful states in the only way they are capable of damaging them, that is, by attacks on innocent civilians.

Need for Action by the United Nations

The world continues to stand at a crossroads. In one direction is a continuation of the status quo based on double standards related to weapons of mass destruction; in the other direction is a world in which international law applies to all countries, even the most powerful. The world’s countries, acting through the United Nations, must find a way to end double standards relating to weapons of mass destruction and, at the same time, to fulfill the promise of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to achieve total nuclear disarmament through the phased elimination of all nuclear arsenals. Prohibitions already exist on chemical and biological weapons, but the international community must find a way to assure the viability of these prohibitions through robust inspection and verification mechanisms.

In the short run, the war against Iraq has alerted the world to the dangers of a breakdown of accepted international norms and prohibitions against aggressive war. In the longer run, however, the resolution of this problem will require the strengthening of the UN itself and the ending of current double standards applied to the possession of weapons of mass destruction. The starting point for addressing this problem is for the UN to take responsibility for reviewing and evaluating what happened leading to the war against Iraq and to draw attention to violations of the UN Charter that occurred when the US and its coalition partners proceeded to invade and occupy Iraq without authorization by the Security Council. In doing so, it is likely that the conclusion will be inescapable that the US-led war was neither legal nor legitimate.

Some Final Questions

Finally, let us consider some remaining questions that might be raised about the Iraq War. Was it a defining moment for international law? If it was a defining moment, it was so only in calling for a clear response from the international community that no state, including the most powerful, stands above the law. Otherwise, the Iraq War represents aggressive warfare of a type that has occurred throughout history. Nonetheless, we might inquire about the right of states, individually or collectively, to remove from power a dictator that has a long record of violating international law and committing crimes against his own people. Certainly the international community has some responsibility in such a case, but it is a responsibility that must be exercised with proper authorization of the UN Security Council. Absent such authorization, there is no right under the law for a state to proceed to forcefully intervene in the internal affairs of another sovereign state.

Was the Security Council’s refusal to authorize war a triumphant moment for it, as some would argue, or was it an abdication of responsibility as others, particularly the US, would argue? If it was a triumphant moment, it was certainly a hollow one, for although the Security Council, to its credit, did not authorize the use of force in violation of the UN Charter, it was unable to prevent its most powerful member from acting without its authorization. Thus, although the Security Council may have been right, its authority was weakened by the noncompliance of the United States in acting without UN authority, and thereby illegally, in a spirit of exceptionalism.

Should the legal norm of non-intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states be abandoned? This norm deserves review by the Security Council in an attempt to better delineate under what circumstances this norm should be set aside by the Security Council. Examples of overriding circumstances could include when genocides or crimes against humanity are occurring or are believed, based on sufficient evidence, to be imminent. A strong case can be made for establishing a UN Emergency Peace Service, a well-trained force composed of international volunteers, which would be available for rapid deployment upon authorization of the Security Council to prevent genocide or crimes against humanity.34 In relation to genocide and crimes against humanity, it would be appropriate to place limits on the veto power of the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Does the Iraq War provide a model for future instances of controlling weapons of mass destruction? It is a very poor model for this purpose. Wars to control weapons of mass destruction are costly in terms of life and treasure, and sometimes, as in the case of Iraq, the wars may be based on faulty information, manipulated intelligence, false premises, misrepresentations and deceptions. The control of weapons of mass destruction can only be achieved in the end by doing away with double standards and placing all weapons of mass destruction and the materials to make them under verifiable international control while they are being dismantled and destroyed. This will require strengthening the chemical, biological and nuclear non-proliferation regimes; and this, in turn, will require a much higher level of political will by the states currently possessing such weapons of mass destruction.

A Step Backward for International Law

The Iraq War has been a step backward for international law, has harmed the authority of the UN Security Council and has undermined the credibility of the United States in the eyes of the world. The United Nations is faced with the dilemma of reasserting the post-World War II emphasis on ending the “scourge of war” in the face of a disturbing pattern of unilateralism, exceptionalism and disregard for international law displayed by the United States. The international community, acting through the United Nations, needs to establish effective limitations on unilateral action by all states and censure and apply sanctions to any country, including the most powerful, that defies the dictates of international law. At a minimum, the UN General Assembly should conduct a thorough review of the circumstances leading to the initiation of war against Iraq, and determine authoritatively whether that war was conducted legally with reference to international law.

This matter cannot be left in the hands of the UN Security Council since the US, as a permanent member, would exercise its veto power to prevent such a review from going forward. If the General Assembly deems it appropriate, it can turn to the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on the matter. The UN report or advisory opinion of the Court should be made public and widely disseminated. Proposals should be made by the General Assembly on preventing aggressive wars in the future and on the circumstances under which humanitarian interventions are appropriate. Were the United Nations to thoroughly review the matter and issue a strong report, it is possible that the international community could learn from what has happened and attempt to more effectively control such unauthorized and costly interventions in the future.

David Krieger is the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a leader in the global effort to abolish nuclear weapons and is the author of many studies of peace in the Nuclear Age, including Nuclear Weapons and the World Court.

*This paper has been submitted for inclusion in the book The Iraq Crisis and World Order: Structural and Normative Challenges, Ramesh Thakur and Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, editors, to be published by United Nations University Press, Tokyo (www.unu.edu/unupress).
1. See, for example, Albright, Madeleine, “Medallion Speaker Address” (Commonwealth Club), 12 February 2004, http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/04/04-02albright-speech.html. Albright states, “Because although the war in Iraq was a war of choice, not necessity, winning the peace is a necessity, not a choice.”
2. “ US Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses UN Security Council,” 5 February 2003, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030205-1.html.
3. General Assembly Resolution 95(1), 11 December 1946.
4. Quoted in Taylor, Telford, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials. New York: Alfred A. Knopf: 1992, p. 168.
5. Quoted in Tusa, Ann and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial. New York: The Notable Trials Library, 1990, p. 81.
6. United Nations Charter, entered into force 24 October 1945, http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter.
7. . bid.
8. Ibid.
9. Security Council Resolution 1441, 8 November 2002, 42 ILM 250 (2003).
10. Security Council Resolution 678, 29 November 1990, 29 ILM 1565 (1990).
11. Security Council Resolution 687, 3 April 1991, 30 ILM 846 (1991).
12. Taft IV, William H. and Todd F. Buchwald, “Preemption, Iraq and International Law,” American Journal of International Law, Vol. 97, No. 3, July 2003, p. 559. (The authors work for the US State Department. Mr. Taft is Legal Adviser to the US State Department, and Mr. Buchwald is Assistant Legal Adviser for Political-Military Affairs.)
13. Taft and Buchwald, op.cit., pp. 560-561.
14. Security Council Resolution 1441, operative paragraph 2 states: “Decides, while acknowledging paragraph 1 above, to afford Iraq, by this resolution, a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations under relevant resolutions of the Council; and accordingly decides to set up an enhanced inspection regime with the aim of bringing to full and verified completion the disarmament process established by resolution 687 (1991) and subsequent resolutions of the Council.”
15. “US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Address to the UN Security Council,” 5 February 2003, can be found on the White House website under the heading, “Iraq, Denial and Deception,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030205-1.html. Powell was later reported to have “told The Washington Post that he doesn’t know whether he would have recommended the invasion of Iraq if he had been told at the time that there were no stockpiles of banned weapons.” See “The Man Who Knew,” 4 February 2004, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/14/60II/main577975.shtml.
16. Security Council Resolution 1441, operative paragraph 14 states: “”Decides to remain seized of the matter.”
17. Bush, George W., “State of the Union Address,” 20 January 2004, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040120-7.html.
18. See MacAskill, Ewen and Julian Borger, “Iraq War was Illegal and Breached UN Charter, Says Annan,” Guardian, 16 September 2004, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0916-01.htm.
19. United Nations Charter, http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter.
20. Ibid.
21. Excerpts from the classified Nuclear Posture Review, submitted to Congress on 31 December 2001, can be found at http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/policy/dod/npr.htm.
22. Blix, Hans, “The Importance of Inspections.” Proliferation Brief (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), Vol. 7, No. 11, 2004, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1591.
23. Ibid.
24. “Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons,” General Assembly document A/51/218, 15 October 1996, p. 37.
25. Rosenthal, Elisabeth, “Study puts civilian toll in Iraq at over 100,000,” International Herald Tribune, 30 October 2004.
26. United Nations Charter, http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter.
27. See, for example, “World Tribunal on Iraq, Platform Document, 29 October 2003, http://www.brusselstribunal.org/wti_platform_text.htm.
28. The Treaty Establishing an International Criminal Court, entered into force on July 1, 2002. The treaty was signed by President Clinton on December 31, 2000. President Bush took the unprecedented step of “unsigning” the treaty in May 2002.
29. See Tutu, Desmond, No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday, 1999.
30. On the Proliferation Security Initiative see: Bolton, John, “The Proliferation Security Initiative: A Vision Becomes a Reality,” 31 May 2004, http://www.state.gov/t/us/rm/33046.htm. For a more critical perspective, see “The Proliferation Security Initiative: Naval Interception Bush-Style,” Center for Defense Information, 25 August 2003, http://www.cdi.org/friendlyversion/printversion.cfm?documentID=1667.
31. See Milbank, Dana and Peter Slevin, “Bush Details Plans to Curb Nuclear Arms,” Washington Post, 12 February 2004.
32. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, entered into force on March 5, 1970, http://www.armscontrol.org/documents/npt.asp. Article IV(1) of the Treaty states: “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop, research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with articles I and II of this Treaty.” This clause may be viewed as an obstacle to achieving the non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament goals of the Treaty.
33. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, http://www.armscontrol.org/documents/npt.asp. Article VI of the Treaty states: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” This critical element of the nuclear non-proliferation/disarmament bargain has been largely ignored by the nuclear weapons states.
34. See Wang, Justine, “A Symposium on Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity: The Challenge of Prevention and Enforcement,” 8 January 2004, https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/articles/2004/01/08_wang_symposium.htm.
March 15, 2005
What the Rest of the World Watched on Inauguration Day

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

But that was not their lead story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been thinking about that one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2005 The National Catholic Reporter

January 28, 2005
A Man-Made Tsunami – Why are There No Fundraisers for the Iraqi Dead?

I am bewildered by the world reaction to the tsunami tragedy. Why are newspapers, television and politicians making such a fuss? Why has the British public forked out more than £100m to help the survivors, and why is Tony Blair now promising “hundreds of millions of pounds”? Why has Australia pledged £435m and Germany £360m? And why has Mr Bush pledged £187m?

Of course it’s wonderful to see the human race rallying to the aid of disaster victims, but it’s the inconsistency that has me foxed. Nobody is making this sort of fuss about all the people killed in Iraq, and yet it’s a human catastrophe of comparable dimensions.

According to the only scientific estimate attempted, Iraqi deaths since the war began number more than 100,000. The tsunami death toll is in the region of 150,000. Yet in the case of Iraq, the media seems reluctant to impress on the public the scale of the carnage.

I haven’t seen many TV reporters standing in the ruins of Falluja, breathlessly describing how, in 30 years of reporting, they’ve never seen a human tragedy on this scale. The Pope hasn’t appealed for everyone to remember the Iraqi dead in their prayers, and MTV hasn’t gone silent in their memory.

Nor are Blair and Bush falling over each other to show they recognise the scale of the disaster in Iraq. On the contrary, they have been doing their best to conceal the numbers killed.

When the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated the figure of 100,000 killed in Iraq and published their findings in one of the world’s leading scientific journals, the Lancet, Downing Street questioned their methodology, saying “the researchers used an extrapolation technique, which they considered inappropriate, rather than a detailed body count”. Of course “a detailed body count” is the one thing the US military will not allow anyone to do.

What is so odd is the way in which so much of the media has fallen into line, downplaying the only authoritative estimate of casualties in Iraq with the same unanimity with which they have impressed upon us the death toll of the tsunami.

One of the authors of the forenamed report, Dr Gilbert Burnham, said: “Our data have been back and forth between many reviewers at the Lancet and here in the school, so we have the scientific strength to say what we have said with great certainty.”

So, are deaths caused by bombs and gunfire less worthy of our pity than deaths caused by a giant wave? Or are Iraqi lives less worth counting than Indonesian, Thai, Indian and Swedish?

Why aren’t our TV companies and newspapers running fundraisers to help Iraqis whose lives have been wrecked by the invasion? Why aren’t they screaming with outrage at the man-made tsunami that we have created in the Middle East? It truly is baffling.

· Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python. His book Terry Jones’s War on the War on Terror is published this month by the Nation.

January 11, 2005