Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Iraq

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Reflections on War and Its Consequences

    The shift of the Iraq War from what its early proponents claimed would be a cakewalk to what most current observers—including the small group of neocons who originally championed it—consider a disaster suggests that war’s consequences are not always predictable.

    Some wars, admittedly, work out fairly well—at least for the victors. In the third of the Punic Wars (149-146 B.C.), Rome’s victory against Carthage was complete, and it obliterated that rival empire from the face of the earth. For the Carthaginians, of course, the outcome was less satisfying. Rome’s victorious legions razed the city of Carthage and sowed salt in its fields, thereby ensuring that what had been a thriving metropolis would become a wasteland.

    But even the victors are not immune to some unexpected and very unpleasant consequences. World War I led to 30 million people killed or wounded and disastrous epidemics of disease, plus a multibillion dollar debt that was never repaid to U.S. creditors and, ultimately, fed into the collapse of the international financial system in 1929. The war also facilitated the rise of Communism and Fascism, two fanatical movements that added immensely to the brutality and destructiveness of the twentieth century. Certainly, World War I didn’t live up to Woodrow Wilson’s promises of a “war to end war” and a “war to make the world safe for democracy.”

    Even World War II—the “good war”—was not all it is frequently cracked up to be. Yes, it led to some very satisfying developments, most notably the destruction of the fascist governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan. But people too often forget that it had some very negative consequences. These include the killing of 50 million people, as well as the crippling, blinding, and maiming of millions more. Then, of course, there was also the genocide carried out under cover of the war, the systematic destruction of cities and civilian populations, the ruin of once-vibrant economies, the massive violations of civil liberties (e.g. the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps), the establishment of totalitarian control in Eastern Europe, the development and use of nuclear weapons, and the onset of the nuclear arms race. This grim toll leaves out the substantial number of rapes, mental breakdowns, and postwar murders unleashed by the war.

    The point here is not that World War II was “bad,” but that wars are not as clean or morally pure as they are portrayed.

    Curiously, pacifists have long been stereotyped as sentimental and naive. But haven’t the real romantics of the past century been the misty-eyed flag-wavers, convinced that the next war will build a brave new world? Particularly in a world harboring some 30,000 nuclear weapons, those who speak about war as if it consisted of two noble knights, jousting before cheering crowds, have lost all sense of reality.

    This lack of realism about the consequences of modern war is all too pervasive. During the Cuban missile crisis, it led Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to warn top U.S. national security officials against their glib proposal to bomb the Soviet missile sites. That’s not the end, he insisted. That’s just the beginning! After the crisis, President Kennedy was delighted that war with the Soviet Union had been averted—a war that he estimated would have killed 300 million people.

    How do we account for the romantic view of war that seems to overcome portions of society on a periodic basis? Certainly hawkish government officials, economic elites, and their backers in the mass media have contributed to popular feeble-mindedness when it comes to war’s consequences. And rulers of empires tend to become foolish when presented with supreme power. But it is also true that some people revel in what they assume is the romance of war as a welcome escape from their humdrum daily existence. Nor should this surprise us, for they find similar escape in romantic songs and novels, movies, spectator sports, and, sometimes, in identification with a “strong” leader.

    Of course, war might just be a bad habit—one that is difficult to break after persisting for thousands of years. Even so, people will give it up only when they confront its disastrous consequences. And this clear thinking about war might prove difficult for many of them, at least as long as they prefer romance to reality.

    Dr. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

     

    First published on the History News Network.

  • Bush Seeks Immunity for Violating War Crimes Act

    Thirty-two years ago, President Gerald Ford created a political firestorm by pardoning former President Richard Nixon of all crimes he may have committed in Watergate — and lost his election as a result. Now, President Bush, to avoid a similar public outcry, is quietly trying to pardon himself of any crimes connected with the torture and mistreatment of U.S. detainees.

    The ”pardon” is buried in Bush’s proposed legislation to create a new kind of military tribunal for cases involving top al-Qaida operatives. The ”pardon” provision has nothing to do with the tribunals. Instead, it guts the War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal law that makes it a crime, in some cases punishable by death, to mistreat detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and makes the new, weaker terms of the War Crimes Act retroactive to 9/11.

    Press accounts of the provision have described it as providing immunity for CIA interrogators. But its terms cover the president and other top officials because the act applies to any U.S. national.

    Avoiding prosecution under the War Crimes Act has been an obsession of this administration since shortly after 9/11. In a January 2002 memorandum to the president, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales pointed out the problem of prosecution for detainee mistreatment under the War Crimes Act. He notes that given the vague language of the statute, no one could predict what future ”prosecutors and independent counsels” might do if they decided to bring charges under the act. As an author of the 1978 special prosecutor statute, I know that independent counsels (who used to be called ”special prosecutors” prior to the statute’s reauthorization in 1994) aren’t for low-level government officials such as CIA interrogators, but for the president and his Cabinet. It is clear that Gonzales was concerned about top administration officials.

    Gonzales also understood that the specter of prosecution could hang over top administration officials involved in detainee mistreatment throughout their lives. Because there is no statute of limitations in cases where death resulted from the mistreatment, prosecutors far into the future, not appointed by Bush or beholden to him, would be making the decisions whether to prosecute.

    To ”reduce the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act,” Gonzales recommended that Bush not apply the Geneva Conventions to al-Qaida and the Taliban. Since the War Crimes Act carried out the Geneva Conventions, Gonzales reasoned that if the Conventions didn’t apply, neither did the War Crimes Act. Bush implemented the recommendation on Feb. 7, 2002.

    When the Supreme Court recently decided that the Conventions did apply to al-Qaida and Taliban detainees, the possibility of criminal liability for high-level administration officials reared its ugly head again.

    What to do? The administration has apparently decided to secure immunity from prosecution through legislation. Under cover of the controversy involving the military tribunals and whether they could use hearsay or coerced evidence, the administration is trying to pardon itself, hoping that no one will notice. The urgent timetable has to do more than anything with the possibility that the next Congress may be controlled by Democrats, who will not permit such a provision to be adopted.

    Creating immunity retroactively for violating the law sets a terrible precedent. The president takes an oath of office to uphold the Constitution; that document requires him to obey the laws, not violate them. A president who knowingly and deliberately violates U.S. criminal laws should not be able to use stealth tactics to immunize himself from liability, and Congress should not go along.

    Elizabeth Holtzman, a former New York congresswoman, is co-author with Cynthia L. Cooper of The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens.

  • The Middle East and the World Five Years After 9/11

    This is an excellent moment to evaluate what has happened since September 11, 2001. Five years have passed since the dramatic attacks on the highly symbolic American targets, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The US Government has launched wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. A third war, with likely graver consequences, is threatened in the months ahead against Iran. In a speech given in Atlanta, Georgia in early September, President Bush declared that “America is safer” than it was five years ago, “and America is winning the war on terror.” Bush also insisted that this is not only a war against Islamic extremism, but is also “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” a struggle that “threatens all civilized nations.” The American president claimed that “today the civilized world stands together to defend our freedom..to defeat the terrorists” and thereby “secure the peace for generations to come.” A sober appraisal of the facts do not support the American president on any of these contentions.

    Much of the world, including the peoples of the Middle East and countries long allied do not share such a self-congratulatory interpretation of the American role in the post-9/11 world. According to independent polls taken in a variety of countries the Bush approach to world order is not popular elsewhere. When asked if they approved of the American ‘global war on terror,’84% in Egypt, 77% in Turkey, and 74% in Jordan responded ‘No.’ Similar results were found among America’s traditional allies. 76% of those polled in Spain and 57% in France expressed their overall disapproval of the American response to September 11th. A reliable survey of world opinion also found that in recent years that far more people fear the role of the United States in the world than that of al Qaeda.

    What has troubled thoughtful observers more than anything else has been the stubborn American insistence that the only viable response to the 9/11 attacks was to declare ‘war’ on a violent adversary such as al Qaeda, a shadowy transnational network without either a distinct territorial base or allegiance to any specific state. This mistake was further compounded by extending the orbit of the war far beyond al Qaeda to encompass all forms of non-state violence within the operative definition of the ‘terrorist’ threat. Such an extension of the conflict by the US Government encouraged such countries as Israel, Russia, and China to treat self-determination movements within and near their borders as belonging to the war against terror. Both the futility and injustice of treating the Palestinians, the Chechens, and the people of Xingiang as part of the same struggle as that unleashed by the 9/11 attacks was to distort and deflect a more genuine and focused pursuit of security for the United States, as well as give governments around the world an unconditional mandate to engage in uncontrolled violence and oppression against non-state movements seeking human rights and self-determination.

    Additionally, two closely linked counter-terrorist policies were enunciated by President Bush that further escalated and spread the war zone: states that ‘harbored’ terrorists within their borders would be held as responsible as the terrorists, and would be regarded as legitimate targets for attack; and if a state does not join the US in the counter-terrorist war, then it will be viewed as an enemy (“You are either with us or you are with the terrorists). This logic was initially applied, with some plausibility, to justify attacking Afghanistan, and overthrowing its Taliban government. This seemed reasonable to many moderate oberservers at the time, although stretching the limits of international law, because Afghanistan did seem to provide a safe haven for the leadership of al Qaeda, as well as providing the site for extensive terrorist training facilities that led more or less directly to the 9/11 attacks. It did seem necessary at the time to destroy this al Qaeda base of operations to lessen the prospect of future attacks. Waging war against Afghanistan as a whole was always more problematic, especially if considered a precedent for future wars. It is true that the Kabul government had few friends among governments, and the Taliban regime had surely committed some severe Crimes Against Humanity that shocked the world. The American claim that it was rescuing the people of the country from oppression and famine seems much shakier after five years than it did at first. The latest reports indicate the highest ever production rates of narcotic drugs, a revival of the Taliban and armed struggle, and much evidence of corruption and warlordism arising from the American-led occupation. Beyond this, the main rationale for the war was the opportunity to capture the al Qaeda leadership so that it could not plan and carry out further terrorist attacks, a mission pursued so incompetently as to ensure failure. Five years later al Qaeda is still a potent force, although its operational base has mutated in some respects, relying on likeminded extremist groups around the world, and Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri are still at large.

    But worse than Afghanistan, in many respects, was Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was undertaken despite the absence of a connection with the perpetrators of 9/11, a conclusion now even acknowledged by US governmental investigations. The argument that Iraq under Saddam Hussein posed an intolerable threat because of its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction never convinced either the UN Security Council, world public opinion, or most of America’s most trusted allies, and yet the invasion of this country went ahead. The attack on Iraq was widely regarded as illegal, immoral, and imprudent in the extreme. This impression was reinforced by the subsequent failure of the invaders to find any weapons of mass destruction, despite pre-invasions claims of hard evidence that such arsenals existed. Criticism of the Iraq undertaking also mounted as the brutality and incompetence of the occupation became unmistakably clear. Instead of liberation, what ensued under the American-led occupation seemed crudely abusive of the Iraqi people and their culture. Rather than diminish 9/11 kinds of activities, the Iraq experience has significantly strengthened anti-American violent extremism in the region. Three years after the invasion, Iraq remains ravaged and war torn, caught in an escalating spiral of violence that threatens to spill over its borders, dangerously agitating relations throughout the region between Sunnis and Shi’ias. In going forward with its Iraq policy, and refusing to acknowledge the failure of the occupation, the United States has damaged its credibility as a global leader, as well as weakened the authority of the United Nations and of international law generally. The precedent of recourse to war in a situation other than self-defense fundamentally rewrites the Charter restrictions on aggressive war that were such a central aspect of the laudable effort to construct a world order after 1945 that was less prone to war. This resolve to prevent future wars was led by American diplomacy after World War II, which also featured the punishment of surviving German leaders at Nuremberg for their role in planning and waging aggressive war.

    Most regrettable is the missed opportunity to react in a constructive fashion to the 9/11 attacks. Immediately after these attacks there was a world display of solidarity with the United States, including even demonstrations of support in Tehran and the Palestinian Territories. Had the United States taken advantage of this climate of opinion it could have pursued those charged with violent acts, including those of 9/11 by reliance on greatly enhanced law enforcement, sustained by much improved transnational framework of police and paramilitary cooperation. Looking back on the five years, most of the success in weakening al Qaeda, and preventing further terrorist attacks, has resulted from police and intelligence efforts. In contrast, the war paradigm has proved dysfunctional, wasting enormous resources and lives, undermining the legitimacy of the struggle, and inducing many young persons to opt for political extremism.

    The recently concluded Lebanon War gives added weight to this set of conclusions. Israel launched an aggressive war against Lebanon, implicitly relying on the American doctrine that a territorial state will henceforth be held fully responsible and punished for the acts of non-state actors that operate within its borders. The real adversary of Israel was supposedly Hezbollah, which was historically a resistance movement dedicated to the removal of the Israeli presence from Lebanese territory. It should be recalled that Hezbollah was formed in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and its refusal to withdraw from the southern part of the country. As the 2006 war demonstrated anew, military superiority often cannot be translated into political outcomes when the adversary, as was the case with Hezbollah, was a well-entrenched, indigenous political movement, with a strong base of popular support. Israel managed to cause much destruction and suffering, but in the end Hezbollah was not defeated. It emerged stronger, and Israel’s military credibility was weakened. American support for Israel’s war, and its role in neutralizing efforts to obtain an early ceasefire in the UNSC added a vivid new justification to those forces opposing the post-9/11 tactics adopted by the United States, and now imitated by Israel with American backing.

    The tactics relied upon in Lebanon represent more than practical failures. They represent a long step backward with respect to international law and morality. What Israel claimed it was entitled to do was to launch a full-scale war against a relatively defenseless state on the basis of a routine border incident. Because of the difficulty of using war as an instrument against armed resistance forces, the Israel/American policy relies on disproportionate and indiscriminate force to intimidate an adversary, inflicting massive doses of collective punishment on civilian societies. This is essentially a terrorist logic: inflicting so much suffering on the government and people of Lebanon that it will be compelled to decide on the basis of its self-interest that it must surrender to Israeli demands with respect to Hezbollah. But the logic backfired, and the political leverage of Hezbollah within Lebanon is probably greater than it was before the war began.

    My main argument is that war and excessive force have been ineffective in achieving their goals and dangerously destructive of world order. The United States and Israel have persisted with such an approach in the Middle East since 9/11 despite this record of unsuccess. There are three main explanations. The first explanation has to do with the outlook of political leaders. Major states are governed by individuals with a military mentality who are not sensitive to the limits of power when dealing with the sorts of conflicts that exist in the contemporary world. Because of this constricted imagination, the more military efforts prove unable to reach their anticipated goals, the more ardent will be their pursuit. Instead of adjusting to the failure, and switching to more effective political means and police efforts, the tendency as in Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza is to intensify the military approach, and expand the war zone.

    The second explanation is the unwillingness of the leadership in Washington to address the legitimate grievances that give rise to political extremism. Far more expedient than attacking countries, would be exerting pressure on Israel to reach a fair outcome of the conflict with the Palestinian people. Ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, as agreed unanimously in the Security Council almost forty years ago, would diminish the appeal of extremism in the region, and greatly reduce the resentment of the American role that is so widely felt by the people of the Islamic world.

    The third explanation is the most important, yet difficult to document. The response to 9/11 established a political climate that allowed the neoconservative foreign policy advisors of President Bush to implement their long advocated grand strategy in the Middle East in conjunction with the conduct of the global war on terror. This grand strategy pre-existed 9/11, and focused on the shift from Europe to the Middle East as the main strategic battleground to shape the future of the world. This outlook led to giving the highest foreign policy priority to gaining hegemonic authority in the region to safeguard control over its energy resources, to guide its ideological evolution, and to prevent anti-Western political behavior by its leading governments. Neoconservatives, in collaboration with right-wing Israelis, had believed for many years that their long-term interests in the region could only be protected by achieving ‘regime change’ through military intervention in a series of countries they regarded as problematic including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and most of all, Iran. 9/11 created the political mandate that had been previously lacking. Among the problems with this approach was an over-estimation on the role of military superiority, and the tension between a successful counter-terrorist policy and the grand strategy objective of controlling the region. But despite the setbacks in Iraq and Lebanon, this policy has not been abandoned by the Bush administration, and underlies the intensifying confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program.

    From these perspectives, there never should have been a global war on terror, and there certainly should not have been an American/Israeli partnership to reconfigure by force of arms the internal political governing arrangements in a series of countries perceived as hostile. Unfortunately, the region and the world are more dangerous than five years ago, and future prospects are not encouraging. Whether internal political change in the United States can generate a more constructive approach will determine whether the decline in global security of the past five years can be reversed in the next five.

     

    Richard Falk is the Board Chair of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

  • Appeal for Support for Lt. Ehren Watada

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Thank you.

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

  • Britain’s Nuclear-Weapons Fix

    The determination of Britain’s political elite to maintain the country as a nuclear-weapons state is rooted in a half-century of military planning to which the possibility of tactical and first use of nuclear weapons is central. In just five words, Gordon Brown, the United Kingdom’s chancellor of the exchequer and would-be successor to Tony Blair, has intentionally reignited the debate over the future of Britain’s nuclear weapons. In a wide-ranging speech on 21 June 2006 focusing on global markets, financial services and economic policy, he included as part of his prognosis for UK security in the 21st century the commitment to “retaining our independent nuclear deterrent”.
    As so often with New Labour, the way the entire speech was “spun” by Brown’s aides was revealing. This element was, they indicated, key among all the topics the chancellor covered. As Andrew Rawnsley commented: “It has enraged the left of the Labour Party. It was contrived to do just that. It was unashamedly designed – Mr Brown’s acolytes make no pretence otherwise – to try to make the Chancellor a more appealing figure to Middle England” (see “Why Gordon Brown decided it was the time to go nuclear”, Observer, 25 June 2006).
    In the coming weeks and months there may well be a debate on plans to replace Trident – Britain’s submarine-carrying ballistic nuclear-weapons system – and it is probable that Labour will, in due course, make its decision. There could be some discussion in parliament and there might even be a vote, though few doubt the outcome. “Middle England” will no doubt remain comforted by Britain preserving its civilised, semi-great-power status by retaining the capacity to kill tens of millions of people.
    The wider point, though, is that there is a vigorous attempt to confine the debate to the limited theme of a “deterrent”. Indeed, the entire debate is constructed along the very narrow premise that Britain’s nuclear weapons offer, and have always offered, nothing more than a last-ditch deterrent protection against a would-be enemy threatening the country with annihilation.
    During the forty-five-year cold war, that enemy was seen to be the Soviet Union. This now presents some difficulties in that the much-missed “evil empire” has disappeared, removing the original point of possessing the bomb. It isn’t clear, for example, how Trident could have prevented the London bombings of 7 July 2005. After all, nuking the home towns of the young bombers – Leeds and Dewsbury – in retaliation would have been a bit excessive, even for New Labour.
    Still, George W Bush has neatly constructed an “axis of evil” to replace the late, lamented Soviet Union. This offers his closest ally Tony Blair (and his successor as British prime minister) the opportunity to argue that Trident’s successor is designed to deter threats from those Islamofascists in Tehran, the world-conquering James Bond-hating hordes of North Korea, the Taliban when they take over Pakistan, the Naxalites when New Delhi finally falls and, of course, that historic enemy – the French.
    Every part of this construct, however, is still underpinned by the doctrine of “deterrence”. Middle England must rest secure in the knowledge that our nuclear weapons are “good” nuclear weapons and would only ever be used as weapons of final response – after, perhaps, not just Middle England but also the furthest bits of Wales, Scotland and even Northern Ireland had been turned to radioactive dust.
    The problem with this is that it is one of the great myths of the nuclear age. Ever since the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki performed the same destructive tasks that had previously required thousand-bomber raids (such as the devastating fire-bombing of Tokyo), the nuclear age has been replete with the idea that nuclear weapons are usable as weapons of war. This has been central to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato’s) nuclear planning, as well as to the Warsaw Pact (and now Russia).
    Nato as an alliance, and Britain as a state, have long planned to fight nuclear wars at levels falling far short of a cataclysmic central nuclear exchange. This also means that Nato and Britain have had, and still maintain, policies that can envisage “first use” of nuclear weapons.
    On the eve of what could possibly be a period of open debate about the role of Britain’s nuclear weapons, it might be useful to trace this somewhat hidden history. This could serve the purpose of revealing matters that successive governments prefer to avoid discussing in public, and thus help ensure a more interesting debate.
    This debate must consider two distinct issues: Nato as an alliance of which Britain is a prominent member, and Britain’s long-term pursuit of policies for nuclear first use outside the Nato area.
    The early days
    Britain commenced its nuclear-weapons programme shortly after the end of the second world war. It tested a fission (atomic) bomb in October 1952 and a crude fusion (hydrogen) bomb in May 1957. By the end of the 1950s Britain had developed a strategic nuclear force based on the V-bomber medium-range jet bombers: the Valiant, Victor and Vulcan.
    From the mid-1960s, Britain began to develop a force of ballistic-missile submarines capable of deploying the United States’s Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM). The first such submarine, Resolution, started to patrol in June 1968, and control of the UK strategic nuclear force passed to the Royal Navy in July 1969.
    Britain also developed a range of tactical nuclear weapons, principally bombs, deployed on a number of land-based and carrier-based strike aircraft from the late-1950s onwards. These included the Scimitar, Buccaneer, Jaguar and Sea Harrier, and the Lynx and Sea King helicopters. US-made nuclear depth-bombs were carried by Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft and US-made Lance missiles; in addition, nuclear warheads, and nuclear artillery shells, were deployed with the British Army.
    At its peak, in the early 1980s, Britain deployed some 400 of its own nuclear weapons together with several scores of US nuclear weapons. With the ending of the cold war, most of the types of nuclear weapons declined fairly rapidly, but two major types of British nuclear weapon remained in service until the late 1990s: the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile and the WE-177 tactical nuclear bomb.
    In the 1990s, these were replaced by Trident, another submarine-launched missile. This is deployed with two warheads, a powerful strategic warhead many times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb, and a “sub-strategic” or tactical warhead that has around half the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb.
    Since the 1950s onwards, Britain has operated a twin-track policy of committing nuclear forces to Nato and having them available for independent deployment and possible use.
    Nato’s nuclear planning
    Although the early nuclear weapons of the 1940s and early 1950s were essentially strategic – intended for use against the core assets of an opposing state – the development of nuclear weapons intended for tactical use within particular war-zones was an early feature of the east-west nuclear confrontation. By the late 1950s, both the United States and the Soviet Union were developing relatively low-yield freefall bombs as well as early forms of nuclear-capable artillery. Over the next twenty-five years, a remarkable array of tactical nuclear weapons was developed and deployed, covering almost every type of military posture.
    As well as freefall bombs, short-range battlefield missiles were developed along with nuclear-tipped anti-aircraft missiles and several types of nuclear artillery and mortars. Nuclear landmines known as atomic demolition munitions were developed that could be emplaced to destroy major bridges or tunnels or even block mountain passes. At sea, submarines were equipped with nuclear-tipped torpedoes, surface ships carried anti-submarine nuclear depth-bombs which could be delivered by missile or helicopter, and aircraft carriers could fly off strike aircraft carrying several kinds of nuclear bomb. There were even air-to-air missiles such as the US Genie, that were nuclear-armed.
    By the 1980s, there were around 20,000 tactical nuclear weapons deployed by the United States and the Soviet Union, based in more than fifteen countries and on warships and submarines throughout the world. In the great majority of cases, the presumption was that if such weapons were used, they would not necessarily involve an escalation to an all-out nuclear war. In other words, nuclear war-fighting could be controlled. In Europe, perhaps the tensest region of the cold-war nuclear confrontation, both alliances had policies of the first use of nuclear weapons in response to conventional attack. (For a full discussion, see the relevant chapter, “Learning from the Cold War”, in Paul Rogers, Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century, Pluto Press, 2002).
    For Nato in the 1950s – before the Soviet Union had developed a large arsenal of nuclear weapons, the posture was codified in a military document MC14/2, colloquially termed the “tripwire” posture. Any Soviet attack against Nato would be met with a massive nuclear retaliation, including the use of US strategic nuclear forces; this assumed that the US could destroy the Soviet Union’s nuclear forces and its wider military potential without suffering unacceptable damage itself.
    By the early 1960s, the Soviet Union was developing many classes of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons, making it less vulnerable to a US nuclear attack. In such circumstances, MC14/2 became far less acceptable to western military planners, who consequently sought to develop a more flexible nuclear posture for Nato. This became known as “flexible response”. It involved the ability to respond to Soviet military actions with a wide range of military forces, but also with the provision that nuclear weapons could be used first in such a way as to force the Soviet Union to halt any aggression and withdraw. Once again, it embodied the belief that a nuclear war could be fought and won.
    The new flexible-response doctrine was progressively accepted by Nato member-states in 1967 and 1968. It was codified in a document entitled Overall Strategic Concept for the Defence of the NATO Area, or MC14/3. It was a posture with one particular advantage for the United States: that it might avoid nuclear weapons being used against its own territory.
    A US army colonel expressed this rather candidly at the time, writing that the strategy: “recognizes the need for a capability to cope with situations short of general nuclear war and undertakes to maintain a forward posture designed to keep such situations as far away from the United States as possible” (see Walter Beinke, “Flexible Response in Perspective”, Military Review, November 1968).
    Flexible response was to remain in operation for most of the last quarter century of the cold war, including periods of considerable tension in the early 1980s. Operational plans for nuclear use were (and are) developed by the nuclear activities branch of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (Shape) near Mons in Belgium, operating in conjunction with the US joint strategic target planning staff responsible for the SIOP strategic nuclear posture from its base in Omaha, Nebraska.
    By the early 1970s, flexible response was well established under Nato’s nuclear operations plan which embraced two levels of the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Soviet forces: selective options and general response. Selective options involved a variety of plans, many of them assuming first use of nuclear weapons against Warsaw Pact conventional forces.
    At the smallest level, these could include up to five small air-burst nuclear detonations intended as warning shots to demonstrate Nato’s intent. At a rather higher level of use were the so-called pre-packaged options involving up to 100 nuclear weapons. The US army field manual at the time defined such a package as: “a group of nuclear weapons of specific yields for use in a specific area and within a limited time to support a specific tactical goal … Each package must contain nuclear weapons sufficient to alter the tactical situation decisively and to accomplish the mission” (see Operations: FM 100-5, US Department of the Army, 1982).
    While these different levels of selective use were thought to be possible ways of winning a nuclear war, the possibility remained that this would fail, and a more general nuclear exchange would result. This was the second level of use of tactical nuclear weapons; it was termed a general nuclear response in which Nato nuclear forces in Europe would be used on a massive scale along with US strategic forces.
    Thus, by the end of the 1970s, Nato had developed a flexible-response strategy that involved detailed planning for the selective first use of nuclear weapons in the belief that a limited nuclear war could be won. By the early 1980s, with highly accurate fast ballistic missiles such as the Pershing 2 being deployed by the United States, there were indications that Nato was even moving to a policy of early first use of nuclear weapons.
    One indication of this came in a remarkably candid interview given by the Nato supreme commander, General Bernard W Rogers. He said that his orders were: “Before you lose the cohesiveness of the alliance – that is, before you are subject to (conventional Soviet military) penetration on a fairly broad scale – you will request, not you may, but you will request the use of nuclear weapons…[emphasis in the original].” (International Defense Review, February 1986).
    The long-standing Nato policy of the first use of nuclear weapons was not promoted widely in public, where all the emphasis was placed on nuclear weapons as an ultimate deterrent. Even so, the policy was made clear on relatively rare occasions. One example is evidence from the UK’s ministry of defence to a parliamentary select committee in 1988: “The fundamental objective of maintaining the capability for selective sub-strategic use of theatre weapons is political – to demonstrate in advance that NATO has the capability and will to use nuclear weapons in a deliberate, politically-controlled way with the objective of restoring deterrence by inducing the aggressor to terminate his aggression and withdraw.”
    With the ending of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, there was some easing of Nato nuclear policy. This included the withdrawal of a substantial proportion of Nato nuclear weapons from western Europe as the Soviet Union withdrew from its former satellites in east-central Europe. The possibility of first use was considered increasingly unlikely, but not abandoned as a facet of Nato policy.
    Although the Soviet Union is no more, Nato nuclear planning still involves a policy of first use, British nuclear weapons remain committed to Nato and the United States still maintains tactical nuclear bombs at one of its remaining bases in the UK, Lakenheath in Suffolk, eastern England.
    Britain’s independent targeting
    Since the 1950s, Britain has deployed nuclear weapons on many occasions outside the immediate Nato area of western and southern Europe and the north Atlantic. This included the basing of RAF nuclear-capable strike aircraft in Cyprus in the 1960s and 1970s, regular detachments of V-bombers to RAF Tengah in Singapore in the mid-1960s, and the deployment of Scimitar and Buccaneer nuclear-capable strike aircraft on the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers from 1962 to 1978. Nuclear weapons were also carried on four task-force ships during the Falklands/Malvinas war of 1982.
    This long history of “out-of-area” deployments of nuclear weapons by Britain is matched by a number of indications of a willingness to use them in limited conflicts. In one of the few published studies of British tactical nuclear targeting, Milan Rai wrote in his 1994 paper Tactical Trident (Drava Papers): “Sir John Slessor, Marshall of the RAF in the 1950s, and one of the most influential military theorists of the period, believed that ‘In most of the possible theatres of limited war . it must be accepted that it is at least improbable that we would be able to meet a major communist offensive in one of these areas without resorting to tactical nuclear weapons’.” This statement was made by a senior military figure rather than a politician, but similar comments did come from more official government sources. In 1955, the then defence minister (and later prime minister) Harold Macmillan stated in the house of commons: “.the power of interdiction upon invading columns by nuclear weapons gives a new aspect altogether to strategy, both in the Middle East and the Far East. It affords a breathing space, an interval, a short but perhaps vital opportunity for the assembly, during the battle for air supremacy, of larger conventional forces than can normally be stationed in those areas.”
    Such an idea of a small nuclear war was further expressed during the 1957 defence debate by Macmillan’s successor as defence minister, Duncan Sandys: “one must distinguish between major global war, involving a head-on clash between the great Powers, and minor conflicts which can be localised and which do not bring the great Powers into direct collision. Limited and localised acts of aggression, for example, by a satellite Communist State could, no doubt, be resisted with conventional arms, or, at worst, with tactical nuclear weapons, the use of which could be confined to the battle area.”
    This historical context raises the question as to whether the smaller sub-strategic Trident warheads, or indeed the more powerful strategic versions, might be used independently of Nato. Britain reserves this right, and one of the more detailed assessments of the range of options for sub-strategic Trident warheads was made in the authoritative military journal International Defence Review in 1994: “At what might be called the ‘upper end’ of the usage spectrum, they could be used in a conflict involving large-scale forces (including British ground and air forces), such as the 1990-91 Gulf War, to reply to an enemy nuclear strike. Secondly, they could be used in a similar setting, but to reply to enemy use of weapons of mass destruction, such as bacteriological or chemical weapons, for which the British possess no like-for-like retaliatory capability. Thirdly, they could be used in a demonstrative role: i.e. aimed at a non-critical uninhabited area, with the message that if the country concerned continued on its present course of action, nuclear weapons would be aimed at a high-priority target. Finally, there is the punitive role, where a country has committed an act, despite specific warnings that to do so would incur a nuclear strike (see David Miller, “Britain Ponders Single Warhead Option”, International Defence Review, September 1994).
    It is worth noting that three of the four circumstances envisaged involve the first use of nuclear weapons by Britain.
    Such issues rarely surface in the public arena, but concern has been expressed in parliament that the government has not been sufficiently clear about the circumstances under which British nuclear weapons would be used in post-cold-war circumstances. For example, the house of commons defence select committee noted in 1998: “We regret that there has been no restatement of nuclear policy since the speech of the then Secretary of State in 1993; the SDR [Strategic Defence Review] does not provide a new statement of the government’s nuclear deterrent posture in the present strategic situation within which the sub-strategic role of Trident could be clarified. We recommend the clarification of both the UK’s strategic and sub-strategic policy.”
    This was, in part, in response to comments made to the committee by the then secretary of state for defence, George (now Lord) Robertson. He had told the committee that the sub-strategic option was “an option available that is other than guaranteed to lead to a full scale nuclear exchange”. He envisaged that a nuclear-armed country might wish to “…use a sub-strategic weapon, making it clear that it is sub-strategic in order to show that … if the attack continues [the country] would then go to the full strategic strike,” and that this would give a chance to “stop the escalation on the lower point of the ladder”.
    This statement indicated that “a country”, such as Britain, could consider using nuclear weapons without initiating an all-out nuclear war, and that the government therefore appeared to accept the view that a limited nuclear war could be fought and won. It was evidently not the clear statement that the committee sought, and it did not indicate the circumstances in which such weapons might be used. In particular, it did not appear to relate to whether Britain or British forces had already been attacked with nuclear weapons, or whether nuclear weapons would be used first in response to other circumstances.
    The Iraq wars
    At the same time, there had been no evidence to suggest that Britain had moved away from the nuclear posture of the cold-war era that included the possibility of using nuclear weapons first. Indeed, just as the cold war was winding down, the first Iraq war in early 1991 was one occasion when British nuclear use might have been considered. As the UK forces embarked for the Gulf in September 1990, the Observer reported that Britain was prepared to retaliate to an Iraqi chemical attack with nuclear weapons: “A senior officer attached to Britain’s 7th Armoured Brigade, which began to leave for the Gulf yesterday, claims that if UK forces are attacked with chemical gas by Iraqi troops, they will retaliate with battlefield nuclear weapons. The Ministry of Defence refused to confirm this last night, but it is the first unofficial indication that British troops might be authorised to use nuclear weapons to defend themselves if attacked” (see Observer, 30 September 1990, front page).
    More than a decade later and prior to the start of the second Iraq war in 2003, the then secretary of state for defense, Geoff Hoon, was questioned by members of the select committee and appeared to indicate that Britain maintained this policy. In relation to a state such as Iraq he said: “They can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons.”
    This exchange did not make clear whether this would be in response to a nuclear attack initiated by a state such as Iraq. Hoon was questioned on this point on 24 March 2002 on the Jonathan Dimbleby programme on ITV. He was asked whether nuclear use might be in response to non-nuclear weapons such as chemical or biological weapons. He replied: “Let me make it clear the long-standing British government policy that if our forces or our people were threatened by weapons of mass destruction we would reserve the right to use appropriate proportionate responses which might … might in extreme circumstances include the use of nuclear weapons.”
    Later in the exchange, Hoon made it clear that he could envisage circumstances in which British nuclear weapons were used in response to chemical or biological weapons. He was later asked by Dimbleby: “But you would only use Britain’s weapon of mass destruction after an attack by Saddam Hussein using weapons of mass destruction?” Hoon replied: “Clearly if there were strong evidence of an imminent attack if we knew that an attack was about to occur and we could use our weapons to protect against it.”
    The implication of this is clear – that there are circumstances where Britain would consider using nuclear weapons in response to a non-nuclear attack involving chemical or biological weapons and would even consider using nuclear weapons to pre-empt such an attack.
    A time for air
    Britain has deployed nuclear forces for almost fifty years. For most of that time, they have been primarily committed to Nato, which has maintained a nuclear-targeting posture that includes the first use of nuclear weapons. Britain also retains the capability to use nuclear weapons independently.
    Although the publicly acknowledged “declaratory” policy remains one of “last resort” use of nuclear weapons, the “deployment” policy involves the idea of nuclear war-fighting that falls far short of responding to a nuclear attack on Britain. This is the long-standing reality. It could certainly liven up the forthcoming debate on replacing Trident if this enduring feature of British nuclear-weapons policy got a really thorough airing.

     

    Paul Rogers is a professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. Paul Rogers has continued to focus on trends in international conflict, developing an analysis of the linkages between socio-economic divisions, environmental constraints and international insecurity.

  • America’s Blinders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • An Alternative to Iraq Delusions

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

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

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

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

    A time of radical uncertainty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The echo of Vietnam

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

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

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

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

  • What Would J.F.K. Have Done?

    What did we not hear from President Bush when he spoke last week at the United States Naval Academy about his strategy for victory in Iraq?

    We did not hear that the war in Iraq, already one of the costliest wars in American history, is a running sore. We did not hear that it has taken more than 2,000 precious American lives and countless – because we do not count them – Iraqi civilian lives. We did not hear that the struggle has dragged on longer than our involvement in either World War I or the Spanish-American War, or that by next spring it will be even longer than the Korean War.

    And we did not hear how or when the president plans to bring our forces back home – no facts, no numbers on America troop withdrawals, no dates, no reference to our dwindling coalition, no reversal of his disdain for the United Nations, whose help he still expects.

    Neither our military, our economy nor our nation can take that kind of endless and remorseless drain for an only vaguely defined military and political mission. If we leave early, the president said, catastrophe might follow. But what of the catastrophe that we are prolonging and worsening by our continued presence, including our continued, unforgivable mistreatment of detainees?

    Each month that America continues its occupation facilitates Al Qaeda’s recruitment of young Islamic men and women as suicide bombers, the one weapon against which our open society has no sure defense. The president says we should support our troops by staying the course; but who is truly willing to support our troops by bringing them safely home?

    The responsibility for devising an exit plan rests primarily not with the war’s opponents, but with the president who hastily launched a pre-emptive invasion without enough troops to secure Iraq’s borders and arsenals, without enough armor to protect our forces, without enough allied support and without adequate plans for either a secure occupation or a timely exit.

    As we listened to Mr. Bush’s speech, our thoughts raced back four decades to another president, John F. Kennedy. In 1963, the last year of his life, we watched from front-row seats as Kennedy tried to figure out how best to extricate American military advisers and instructors from Vietnam.

    Although neither of us had direct responsibility on Vietnam decision-making, we each saw enough of the president to sense his growing frustration. In typical Kennedy fashion, he would lean back, in his Oval Office rocker, tick off all his options and then critique them:

    Renege on the previous Eisenhower commitment, which Kennedy had initially reinforced, to help the beleaguered government of South Vietnam with American military instructors and advisers?

    No, he knew that the American people would not permit him to do that.

    Americanize the Vietnam civil war, as the military recommended and as his successor Lyndon Johnson sought ultimately to do, by sending in American combat units?

    No, having learned from his experiences with Cuba and elsewhere that conflicts essentially political in nature did not lend themselves to a military solution, Kennedy knew that the United States could not prevail in a struggle against a Vietnamese people determined to oust, at last, all foreign troops from their country.

    Moreover, he knew firsthand from his World War II service in the South Pacific the horrors of war and had declared at American University in June 1963: “This generation of Americans has had enough – more than enough – of war.”

    Declare “victory and get out,” as George Aiken, the Republican senator from Vermont, would famously suggest years later?

    No, in 1963 in Vietnam, despite assurances from field commanders, there was no more semblance of “victory” than there was in 2004 in Iraq when the president gave his “mission accomplished” speech on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

    Explore, as was always his preference, a negotiated solution?

    No, he was unable to identify in the ranks of the disorganized Vietcong a leader capable of negotiating enforceable and mutually agreeable terms of withdrawal.

    Insist that the South Vietnamese government improve its chances of survival by genuinely adopting the array of political, economic, land and administrative reforms necessary to win popular support?

    No, Kennedy increasingly realized that the corrupt family and landlords propping up the dictatorship in South Vietnam would never accept or enforce such reforms.

    Eventually he began to understand that withdrawal was the viable option. From the spring of 1963 on, he began to articulate the elements of a three-part exit strategy, one that his assassination would prevent him from pursuing. The three components of Kennedy’s exit strategy – well-suited for Iraq after the passage of a new constitution and the coming election – can be summarized as follows:

    Make clear that we’re going to get out. At a press conference on Nov. 14, 1963, the president did just that, stating, “That is our object, to bring Americans home.”

    Request an invitation to leave. Arrange for the host government to request the phased withdrawal of all American military personnel – surely not a difficult step in Iraq, especially after the clan statement last month calling for foreign forces to leave. In a May 1963 press conference, Kennedy declared that if the South Vietnamese government suggested it, “we would have some troops on their way home” the next day.

    Bring the troops home gradually. Initiate a phased American withdrawal over an unannounced period, beginning immediately, while intensifying the training of local security personnel, bearing in mind that with our increased troop mobility and airlift capacity, American forces are available without being stationed in hazardous areas. In September 1963, Kennedy said of the South Vietnamese: “In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it.” A month later, he said, “It would be our hope to lessen the number of Americans” in Vietnam by the end of the year.

    President Kennedy had no guarantee that any of these three components would succeed. In the “fog of war,” there are no guarantees; but an exit plan without guarantees is better than none at all.

    If we leave Iraq at its own government’s request, our withdrawal will be neither abandonment nor retreat. Law-abiding Iraqis may face more clan violence, Balkanization and foreign incursions if we leave; but they may face more clan violence, Balkanization and foreign incursions if we stay. The president has said we will not leave Iraq to the terrorists. Let us leave Iraq to the Iraqis, who have survived centuries of civil war, tyranny and attempted foreign domination.

    Once American troops are out of Iraq, people around the world will rejoice that we have recovered our senses. What’s more, the killing of Americans and the global loss of American credibility will diminish. As Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican and Vietnam veteran, said, “The longer we stay, the more problems we’re going to have.” Defeatist? The real defeatists are those who say we are stuck there for the next decade of death and destruction.

    In a memorandum to President Kennedy, roughly three months after his inauguration, one of us wrote with respect to Vietnam, “There is no clearer example of a country that cannot be saved unless it saves itself.” Today, Iraq is an even clearer example.

    Theodore C. Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were, respectively, special counsel and special assistant to President John F. Kennedy.

    Originally published by the New York Times.

  • This is Not the Country That I Once Knew

    Former President Jimmy Carter believes that a warring America is abandoning its fundamental values.

    In recent years, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.

    These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.

    Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.

    At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organisations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements, including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.

    Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of ‘pre-emptive war’, an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavoury regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.

    Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by US leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world. These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation’s tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of ‘you are either with us or against us’ has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.

    Another disturbing realisation is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimise public awareness of casualties.

    Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act.

    Of even greater concern is that the US has repudiated the Geneva accords and supported the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition programme. It is embarrassing to see the President and Vice President insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate ‘cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment’ on people in US custody.

    Instead of reducing America’s reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them and, therefore, abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms-control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of ‘first use’ of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.

    Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation’s global environmental policies.

    Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favours to the rich, while neglecting America’s working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialised nations).

    I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.

    As the world’s only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights. Our country should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to people in need.

    It is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have promoted during the last 230 years.

    Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the United States. His latest book, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, is published this month by Simon & Schuster.

    This article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times.