Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Iraq

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

    Delivered to the U.S. House of Representatives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    But the bigger question is:

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

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

    Ron Paul is a Republican Congressman from Texas.

  • A Man-Made Tsunami – Why are There No Fundraisers for the Iraqi Dead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Top Ten War Profiteers of 2004

    AEGIS: In June, the Pentagon’s Program Management Office in Iraq awarded a $293 million contract to coordinate security operations among thousands of private contractors to Aegis, a UK firm whose founder was once investigated for illegal arms smuggling. An inquiry by the British parliament into Sandline, Aegis head Tim Spicer’s former firm, determined that the company had shipped guns to Sierra Leone in 1998 in violation of a UN arms embargo. Sandline’s position was that it had approval from the British government, although British ministers were cleared by the inquiry. Spicer resigned from Sandline in 2000 and incorporated Aegis in 2002.

    BEARING POINT: Critics find it ironic that Bearing Point, the former consulting division of KPMG, received a $240 million contract in 2003 to help develop Iraq’s “competitive private sector,” since it had a hand in the development of the contract itself. According to a March 22 report by AID’s assistant inspector general Bruce Crandlemire, “Bearing Point’s extensive involvement in the development of the Iraq economic reform program creates the appearance of unfair competitive advantage in the contract award process.”

    Bearing Point spent five months helping USAID write the job specifications and even sent some employees to Iraq to begin work before the contract was awarded, while its competitors had only a week to read the specifications and submit their own bids after final revisions were made. “No company who writes the specs for a contract should get the contract,” says Keith Ashdown, the vice president of Washington, DC-based Taxpayers for Common Sense.

    BECHTEL: Schools, hospitals, bridges, airports, water treatment plants, power plants, railroad, irrigation, electricity, etc. Bechtel was literally tasked with repairing much of Iraq’s infrastructure, a job that was critical to winning hearts and minds after the war. To accomplish this, the company hired over 90 Iraqi subcontractors for at least 100 jobs. Most of these subcontracts involved rote maintenance and repair work, however, and for sophisticated work requiring considerable hands-on knowledge of the country’s infrastructure, the company bypassed Iraqi engineers and managers.

    Although Bechtel is not entirely to blame, the company has yet to meet virtually any of the major deadlines in its original contract. According to a June GAO report, “electrical service in the country as a while has not shown a marked improvement over the immediate postwar levels of May 2003 and has worsened in some governorates.”

    BKSH & ASSOCIATES: Chairman Charlie Black, is an old Bush family friend and prominent Republican lobbyist whose firm is affiliated with Burson Marsteller, the global public relations giant. Black was a key player in the Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign and together with his wife raised $100,000 for this year’s reelection campaign.

    BKSH clients with contracts in Iraq include Fluor International (whose ex-chair Phillip Carroll was tapped to head Iraq’s oil ministry after the war, and whose board includes the wife of James Woolsey, the ex-CIA chief who was sent by Paul Wolfowitz before the war to convince European leaders of Saddam Hussein’s ties to al Qaeda). Fluor has won joint contracts worth up to $1.6 billion.

    Another client is Cummins Engine, which has managed to sell its power generators thanks to the country’s broken infrastructure.

    Most prominent among BKSH’s clients, however, is the Iraqi National Congress, whose leader Ahmed Chalabi was called the “George Washington of Iraq” by certain Pentagon neoconservatives before his fall from grace. BKSH’s K. Riva Levinson was hired to handle the INC’s U.S. public relations strategy in 1999. Hired by U.S. taxpayers, that is: Until July 2003, the company was paid $25,000 per month by the U.S. State Department to support the INC.

    CACI AND TITAN: Although members of the military police face certain prosecution for the horrific treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, so far the corporate contractors have avoided any charges. Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba reported in an internal Army report that two CACI employees “were either directly or indirectly responsible” for abuses at the prison, including the use of dogs to threaten detainees and forced sexual abuse and other threats of violence. Another internal Army report suggested that Steven Stefanowicz, one of 27 CACI interrogators working for the Army in Iraq, “clearly knew [that] his instructions” to soldiers interrogating Iraqi prisoners “equated to physical abuse.”

    “Titan’s role in Iraq is to serve as translators and interpreters for the U.S. Army,” company CEO Gene Ray said, implying that news reports had inaccurately implied the employees’ involvement in torture. “The company’s contract is for linguists, not interrogators.” But according to Joseph a. Neurauter, a GSA suspension and debarment official, CACI’s role in designing its own Abu Ghraib contract “continues to be an open issue and a potential conflict of interest.”

    Nevertheless, the GSA and other agencies conducting their own investigations have yet to find a reason to suspend the company from any new contracts. As a result, in August the Army gave CACI another $15 million no-bid contract to continue providing interrogation services for intelligence gathering in Iraq; In September, the Army awarded Titan a contract worth up to $400 million for additional translators.

    CUSTER BATTLES: At the end of September, the Defense Department suspended Custer Battles (the name comes from the company’s two principle founders – Michael Battles and Scott Custer) and 13 associated individuals and affiliated corporations from all federal contracts for fraudulent billing practices involving the use of sham corporations set up in Lebanon and the Cayman Islands. The CPA caught the company after it left a spreadsheet behind at a meeting with CPA employees. The spreadsheet revealed that the company had marked up certain expenses associated with a currency exchange contract by 162 percent.

    HALLIBURTON: In December Congressman Waxman (D-CA), announced that “a growing list of concern’s about Halliburton’s performance” on contracts that total $10.8 billion have led to multiple criminal investigations into overcharging and kickbacks. In nine different reports, government auditors have found “widespread, systemic problems with almost every aspect of Halliburton’s work in Iraq, from cost estimation and billing systems to cost control and subcontract management.” Six former employees have come forward, corroborating the auditors’ concerns.

    Another “H-bomb” dropped just before the election, when a top contracting official responsible for ensuring that the Army Corps of Engineers follows competitive contracting rules accused top Pentagon officials of improperly favoring Halliburton in an early-contract before the occupation. Bunnatine Greenhouse says that when the Pentagon awarded the company a 5-year oil-related contract worth up to $7 billion, it pressured her to withdraw her objections, actions that she said were unprecedented in her experience.

    LOCKHEED MARTIN: Lockheed Martin remains the king among war profiteers, raking in $21.9 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2003 alone. With satellites and planes, missiles and IT systems, the company has profited from just about every phase of the war except for the reconstruction. The company’s stock has tripled since 2000 to just over $60.

    Lockheed is helping Donald Rumsfeld’s global warfare system (called the Global Information Grid), a new integrated tech-heavy system that the company promises will change transform the nature of war. In fact, the large defense conglomerate’s sophistication in areas as diverse as space systems, aeronautics and information and technology will allow it to play a leading role in the development of new weapons systems for decades to come, including a planned highly-secure military Internet, a spaced-based missile defense system and next-generation warplanes such as the F-22 (currently in production) and the Joint Strike Fighter F-35.

    E.C. Aldridge Jr., the former undersecretary of defense for acquisitions and procurement, gave final approval to begin building the F-35 in 2001, a decision worth $200 billion to the company. Although he soon left the Pentagon to join Lockheed’s board, Aldridge continues to straddle the public-private divide, Donald Rumsfeld appointed him to a blue-ribbon panel studying weapons systems.

    Former Lockheed lobbyists and employees include the current secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, secretary of transportation Norm Mineta (a former Lockheed vice president) and Stephen J. Hadley, Bush’s proposed successor to Condoleeza Rice as his next national security advisor.

    Not only are Lockheed executives commonly represented on the Pentagon various advisory boards, but the company is also tied into various security think tanks, including neoconservative networks. For example, Lockheed VP Bruce Jackson (who helped draft the Republican foreign policy platform in 2000) is a key player at the neo-conservative planning bastion known as the Project for a New American Century.

    LORAL SATELLITE: In the buildup to the war the Pentagon bought up access to numerous commercial satellites to bolster its own orbiting space fleet. U.S. armed forces needed the extra spaced-based capacity to be able to guide its many missiles and transmit huge amounts of data to planes (including unmanned Predator drones flown remotely by pilots who may be halfway around the world), guide missiles and troops on the ground.

    Industry experts say the war on terror literally saved some satellite operators from bankruptcy. The Pentagon “is hovering up all the available capacity” to supplement its three orbiting satellite fleets, Richard DalBello, president of the Satellite Industry Association explained to the Washington Post. The industry’s other customers – broadcast networks competing for satellite time – were left to scramble for the remaining bandwidth.

    Loral Space & Communications Chairman Bernard L. Schwartz is very tight with the neoconservative hawks in the Bush administration’s foreign policy ranks, and is the principal funder of Blueprint, the newsletter of the Democratic Leadership Council.

    In the end, the profits from the war in Iraq didn’t end up being as huge for the industry as expected, and certainly weren’t enough to compensate for a sharp downturn in the commercial market. But more help may be on its way. The Pentagon announced in November that it would create a new global Intranet for the military that would take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build. Satellites, of course, will play a key part in that integrated global weapons system.

    QUALCOMM: Two CPA officials resigned this year after claiming they were pressured by John Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for technology security to change an Iraqi police radio contract to favor Qualcomm’s patented cellular technology, a move that critics say was intended to lock the technology in as the standard for the entire country. Iraq’s cellular market is potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues for the company, and potentially much more should it establish a standard for the region. Shaw’s efforts to override contracting officials delayed an emergency radio contract, depriving Iraqi police officers, firefighters, ambulance drivers and border guards of a joint communications system for months.

    Shaw says he was urged to push Qualcomm’s technology by Rep. Darrell E. Issa, a Republican whose San Diego County district includes Qualcomm’s headquarters. Issa, who received $5,000 in campaign contributions from Qualcomm employees from 2003 to 2004, sits on the House Small Business Committee, and previously tried to help the company by sponsoring a bill that would have required the military to use its CDMA technology.

    “Hundreds of thousands of American jobs depend on the success of U.S.-developed wireless technologies like CDMA,” Issa claimed in a letter to Donald Rumsfeld. But the Pentagon doesn’t seem to be buying the argument. The DoD’s inspector general has asked the FBI to investigate Shaw’s activities.

  • Rethink Missile Defense Plan

    Most Americans would agree that the country faces multiple threats.

    Osama bin Laden remains at large. North Korea is pressing ahead with its nuclear program, and Iran is likely to become the newest member of the nuclear club. In Iraq, the stubborn insurgency takes a daily toll on American forces and has stretched the Army thin.

    Refusing to set priorities in this dangerous world would qualify as the “failure of imagination” the 9/11 Commission warned about. And yet that’s what the White House and Congress are showing as they rush to deploy a faulty missile defense system against a threat that, for now, is relatively low.

    That’s not to say that missile defense is without future value or that the threat is nonexistent. Intelligence sources say North Korea may have an untested missile that could reach the United States, and in time, other countries will acquire that capability. But deploying a missile defense program before it’s proven won’t deter enemies, and it drains funds from more urgent priorities.

    Even if last week’s $85 million test of an interceptor missile had worked – which it didn’t – the White House would still fall short in its rationale for spending $11 billion a year on the system. That’s double what the Clinton administration spent on its policy of “robust research and development” of missile defense, and it comes at a time when the federal deficit is out of control.

    The system being developed would rely on interceptor missiles in California and Alaska and aboard ships to attack enemy missiles at liftoff. Airborne lasers would fire at warheads re-entering the atmosphere.

    As Ronald Reagan learned from his “Star Wars” proposal, a missile defense system wouldn’t stop a massive attack from a super power. It’s intended, instead, to stop a very small number of missiles from rogue nations such as North Korea or Iran.

    But weigh the program against other threats that compete with it for funding:

    . Loose warheads . A terrorist group obtaining nuclear warheads or chemical and biological weapons from the former Soviet Union’s tattered arsenal could strike the United States by smuggling a bomb across our porous borders. A rogue state might also prefer that method of attack since, unlike a missile, a suitcase bomb leaves no “return address.”

    . New threats . The military has a term for the new threats it faces: asymmetric warfare. Building a military with the size, speed and flexibility to defeat new enemies means restraining spending on old threats such as Cold War-era ballistic missiles.

    . Short-range missiles . The threat from short-range missiles fired by Iran or North Korea is very real, as the Israelis and Japanese well know. But the missile defense program does little to protect U.S. allies or troops stationed abroad.

    As for the ballistic missile threat from rogue nations, the potential danger is real enough to warrant continued research but not premature deployment.

    Deploying a system that repeatedly fails sends a message that missile defense is more about politics than protection. This is not the time for a lapse in imagination.

  • World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates

    A United World or a Divided World? Multiethnicity, Human Rights, Terrorism

    Statement of the 5th Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates

    Two decades ago, the world was swept with a wave of hope. Inspired by the popular movements for peace, freedom, democracy and solidarity, the nations of the world worked together to end the cold war. Yet the opportunities opened up by that historic change are slipping away. We are gravely concerned with the resurgent nuclear and conventional arms race, disrespect for international law and the failure of the world’s governments to address adequately the challenges of poverty and environmental degradation. A cult of violence is spreading globally; the opportunity to build a culture of peace, advocated by the United Nations, Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders, is receding.

    Alongside the challenges inherited from the past there are new ones, which, if not properly addressed, could cause a clash of civilizations, religions and cultures. We reject the idea of the inevitability of such a conflict. We are convinced that combating terrorism in all its forms is a task that should be pursued with determination. Only by reaffirming our shared ethical values — respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms — and by observing democratic principles, within and amongst countries, can terrorism be defeated. We must address the root causes of terrorism — poverty, ignorance and injustice — rather than responding to violence with violence.

    Unacceptable violence is occurring daily against women and children. Children remain our most important neglected treasure. Their protection, security and health should be the highest priority. Children everywhere deserve to be educated in and for peace. There is no excuse for neglecting their safety and welfare and, particularly, for their suffering in war.

    The war in Iraq has created a hotbed of dangerous instability and a breeding ground for terrorism. Credible reports of the disappearance of nuclear materials cannot be ignored. While we mourn the deaths of tens of thousands of people, none of the goals proclaimed by the coalition have been achieved.

    The challenges of security, poverty and environmental crisis can only be met successfully through multilateral efforts based on the rule of law. All nations must strictly fulfil their treaty obligations and reaffirm the indispensable role of the United Nations and the primary responsibility of the UN Security Council for maintaining peace.

    We support a speedy, peaceful resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue, including a verifiable end to North Korea ‘s nuclear weapons program, security guarantees and lifting of sanctions on North Korea . Both the six-party talks and bilateral efforts by the United States and North Korea should contribute to such an outcome.

    We welcome recent progress in the talks between Iran and Great Britain , France and Germany on the Iranian nuclear program issue and hope that the United States will join in the process to find a solution within the framework of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

    We call for the reduction of military expenditures and for conclusion of a treaty that would control arms trade and prohibit sales of arms where they could be used to violate international human rights standards and humanitarian law.

    As Nobel Laureates, we believe that the world community needs urgently to address the challenges of poverty and sustainable development. Responding to these challenges requires the political will that has been so sadly lacking.

    The undertakings pledged by states at the UN Millennium Summit, the promises of increased development assistance, fair trade, market access and debt relief for developing countries, have not been implemented. Poverty continues to be the world’s most widespread and dangerous scourge. Millions of people become victims of hunger and disease, and entire nations suffer from feelings of frustration

    and despair. This creates fertile ground for extremism and terrorism. The stability and future of the entire human community are thus jeopardized.

    Scientists are warning us that failure to solve the problems of water, energy and climate change will lead to a breakdown of order, more military conflicts and ultimately the destruction of the living systems upon which civilization depends. Therefore, we reaffirm our support for the Kyoto Protocol and the Earth Charter and endorse the rights-based approach to water, as reflected in the initiative of Green Cross International calling upon governments to negotiate a framework treaty on water.

    As Nobel Peace Prize Laureates we believe that to benefit from humankind’s new, unprecedented opportunities and to counter the dangers confronting us there is a need for better global governance. Therefore, we support strengthening and reforming the United Nations and its institutions.

    As immediate specific tasks, we commit to work for:

    – Genuine efforts to resolve the Middle East crisis. This is both a key to the problem of terrorism and a chance to avoid a dangerous clash of civilizations. A solution is possible if the right of all nations in the region to secure, viable statehood is respected and if the Middle East is integrated in all global processes while respecting the unique culture of the peoples of that region.

    – Preserving and strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. We reject double standards and emphasize the legal responsibility of nuclear weapons states to work to eliminate nuclear weapons. We call for continuation of the moratorium on nuclear testing pending entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and for accelerating the process of verifiable and irreversible nuclear arms reduction. We are gravely alarmed by the creation of new, usable nuclear weapons and call for rejection of doctrines that view nuclear weapons as legitimate means of war-fighting and threat pre-emption.

    – Effectively realizing the initiative of the UN Secretary General to convene a high-level conference in 2005 to give an impetus to the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals. We pledge to work to create an atmosphere of public accountability to help accomplish these vitally important tasks.

    We believe that to solve the problems that challenge the world today politicians need to interact with an empowered civil society and strong mass movements. This is the way toward a globalization with a human face and a new international order that rejects brute force, respects ethnic, cultural and political diversity and affirms justice, compassion and human solidarity.

    We, the Nobel Peace Laureates and Laureate organizations, pledge to work for the realization of these goals and are calling on governments and people everywhere to join us.

    Mikhail Gorbachev, Kim Dae-Jung, Lech Walesa, Joseph Rotblat, Jose Ramos-Horta, Betty Williams, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, and Rigoaberta Menchu Tum; and, United Nations Children’s Fund, Pugwash Conferences, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, International Peace Bureau, Institut de Droit International, American Friends Service Committee, Médicins sans Frontières, Amnesty International, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, International Labour Organization, International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, United Nations.

  • In Search of Security: Finding An Alternative To Nuclear Deterrence

    According to the President just elected, nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism represent the single most important threat to US and global security.

    I wrote that sentence three weeks ago, well before the election results were known, and yet I knew it would be true – because it was one of the key issues on which Senator Kerry and President Bush – and, for that matter, most other world leaders – agreed.

    That said, fundamental differences of opinion remain on how to deal with this ever growing menace to our survival. Should we opt for diplomacy or for preemption? What are the relative merits of collective versus unilateral action? Is it more effective to pursue a policy of containment or one based on inclusiveness?

    These are not new questions, by any measure. But they have taken on renewed urgency as nations struggle, both regionally and globally, to cope with an extended array of conflicts, highly sophisticated forms of terrorism, and a growing threat of weapons of mass destruction.

    The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) remains the global anchor for humanity’s efforts to curb nuclear proliferation and move towards nuclear disarmament. There is no doubt that the implementation of the NPT continues to provide important security benefits – by providing assurance that, in the great majority of non-nuclear-weapon States, nuclear energy is not being misused for weapon purposes. The NPT is also the only binding agreement in which all five of the nuclear-weapon States have committed themselves to move forward towards nuclear disarmament.

    Still, for all of us who have been intimately associated with the implementation of the Treaty for over three decades, it is clear that recent events have placed the NPT and the regime supporting it under unprecedented stress, exposing some of its inherent limitations and pointing to areas that need to be adjusted. Today I would like to discuss some of the lessons that can be taken from recent experience, and a number of possible ways for moving forward.

    The Iraq Experience: What Can We Learn?

    Of all the recent actions to address nuclear proliferation and other security concerns, the most dramatic have taken place in Iraq. Naturally, it remains too early to judge the final outcome of the Iraq War, but I believe there are some insights to be gained already from the events that led up to the war and those that have transpired since.

    The first point to be made is that the inspections were working. The nuclear inspection process – while requiring time and patience – can be effective even when the country under inspection is providing less than active cooperation. When international inspectors are provided adequate authority, aided by all available information, backed by a credible compliance mechanism, and supported by international consensus, the verification system works. The report recently issued by the Iraq Survey Group confirmed the conclusions the IAEA was providing to the United Nations Security Council before the war – when we said we had found no evidence to suggest that Iraq had reconstituted any element of its former nuclear weapon programme.

    But inspections are only of value when the results are accepted in good faith and taken into account in future action. Unfortunately, the Iraq inspection process was not given the time required, nor were its findings given due recognition. It is true that the record and mode of behaviour of Saddam Hussein´s regime did not inspire much confidence; but it is also true that we had not seen any clear and present danger involving weapons of mass destruction, after months of intrusive inspection.

    The second point to be made is that we need to exercise maximum restraint before resorting to military force. In 1841, the US Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, characterized preemptive military action as being justified only when the prospect of an attack made clear that “the necessity of that self-defence is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” Naturally, times have changed, but the exhortation for restraint expressed in those words remains valid. The Iraq experience should tell us that unless extreme conditions exist to justify preemptive action against a suspected weapons of mass destruction programme, diplomacy in all its forms, including maximum pressure, coupled with credible verification, should be the primary avenue of choice. In my view, loosely defining what justifies pre-emptive action by individual nations could become an invitation for all countries to use force in a garden variety of situations, and render a severe setback to the UN Charter effort to limit the use of force to cases of self-defence of the type Webster described, and to enforcement actions authorized by the Security Council. And in this context, I should recall Henry Kissinger´s remark: “It is not in the American national interest to establish preemption as a universal principle available to every nation.”

    The third point to be made is that no one gains when we are divided on crucial issues such as the use of force. Like the international community as a whole, the Security Council was deeply divided in its views in the run-up to the Iraq War – and, after years of collective decisions on Iraq, the Council’s role and authority was set aside by the decision of the Coalition to take military action. But one lesson has been made very clear by the Iraq experience: when the international community and the Security Council are divided on matters of war and peace, everyone loses. The Coalition lost in credibility in some people’s eyes by proceeding to use force without the endorsement of the Security Council. The United Nations lost in credibility as the body driving the action against Iraq on behalf of international legitimacy, and as a result has come to be perceived in some quarters – particularly by many in Iraq – as an adjunct of the Coalition force, and not as an independent and impartial institution. And perhaps it is the Iraqi people who have lost the most; after years of suffering under a brutal dictatorship, and after enduring the hardships brought on through an extended period of sanctions, they have had still more misery brought on by the ravages of war and the unforeseen and extended period of insurgency and civil disorder.

    Other Lessons From Recent Verification Experience

    Of course, the Iraq experience is the most glaring recent case relevant to nuclear proliferation and security, but unfortunately not the only one. The IAEA´s efforts to verify undeclared nuclear programmes in Iran, Libya and the Democratic People´s Republic of Korea have also provided considerable insights and a number of lessons.

    The first lesson is that, for nuclear verification to be successful, IAEA inspectors must have adequate authority. The “any time, any place” authority granted by the Security Council in the case of Iraq was extraordinary, and it is not likely that countries would voluntarily grant the IAEA such blanket rights of inspection. Moreover, the IAEA´s authority under the NPT is limited to verifying that nuclear material has not been diverted for non-peaceful uses – and we have no clear-cut mandate to search for weaponization activities, per se, unless we have reason to believe that nuclear material has actually been diverted to those activities.

    Nonetheless, within the NPT framework, adequate authority can be achieved in those countries that accept the so-called “additional protocol” as a supplement to their NPT safeguards agreement. The additional protocol provides the Agency with significant additional authority with regard to both information and physical access. As illustrated by the IAEA’s experience in Iraq before the first Gulf War, without the authority provided by the protocol, our ability to verify nuclear activities is mostly limited to the nuclear material already declared – with little authority to verify the absence of undeclared, or clandestine, nuclear material or activities. By contrast, our recent efforts in Iran and elsewhere have made clear how much can be uncovered when the protocol is applied.

    The second lesson is that international efforts to limit the spread of technology through the use of export controls have left much to be desired. The most disturbing insight to emerge from our work in Iran and Libya has been the revelation of an extensive illicit market for the supply of nuclear items. The relative ease with which a multinational illicit network could be set up and operated demonstrates the inadequacy of the present export control system. The fact that so many companies and individuals could be involved (more than two dozen, by last count) – and that, in most cases, this could occur apparently without the knowledge of their own governments – points to the shortcomings of national systems for oversight of sensitive equipment and technology. It also points to the limitations of existing international cooperation on export controls, which relies on informal arrangements, does not include many countries with growing industrial capacity, and does not include sufficient sharing of export information with the IAEA.

    But more importantly, it is time to change our assumptions regarding the inaccessibility of nuclear technology. In a modern society characterized by electronic information exchange, interlinked financial systems, and global trade, the control of access to nuclear weapons technology has grown increasingly difficult. The technical barriers to mastering the essential steps of uranium enrichment – and to designing weapons – have eroded over time. Much of the hardware in question is “dual use”, and the sheer diversity of technology has made it much more difficult to control or even track procurement and sales.

    The only reasonable conclusion is that the control of technology is not, in itself, a sufficient barrier against further proliferation. For an increasing number of countries with a highly developed industrial infrastructure – and in some cases access to high enriched uranium or plutonium – the international community must rely primarily on a continuing perception of security as the basis for the adherence of these countries to their non-proliferation commitments. And security perceptions can rapidly change.

    In fact, a country might choose to hedge its options by developing a civilian nuclear fuel cycle – legally permissible under the NPT – not only because of its civilian use but also because of the “latent nuclear deterrent” value that such a programme could have, both intrinsically and in terms of the signal it sends to neighboring and other countries. The unspoken security posture could be summarized as follows: “We have no nuclear weapons programme today, because we do not see the need for one. But we should be prepared to launch one, should our security perception change. And for this, we should have the required capacity to produce the fissile material, as well as the other technologies that would enable us to produce a weapon in a matter of months.” Obviously, the narrow margin of security this situation affords is worrisome.

    The third lesson, as amply illustrated by the North Korean situation, is that the international community cannot afford not to act in a timely manner in cases of non-compliance, and before available options are narrowed. Beginning in the mid-1980s, North Korea took seven years to fulfill its obligations under the NPT to conclude a safeguards agreement with the Agency. In 1992, shortly after this agreement was concluded and the IAEA began inspections, we sounded the alarm that North Korea had not reported its total production of plutonium. From that time forward, despite the Agreed Framework concluded with the United States, North Korea has been in continuous non-compliance with its NPT obligations, and has not allowed the IAEA to fully verify its nuclear programme. At the end of 2002, North Korea capped that non-compliance by ordering IAEA inspectors out of the country, dismantling the monitoring cameras, breaking IAEA seals and, a few weeks later, declaring its withdrawal from the NPT.

    Naturally, all of these actions were promptly reported by the Agency to the Security Council – but with little to no response. This lack of timely action may have complicated finding a solution, and may have conveyed the message that breaking the non-proliferation norms with impunity is a doable proposition – or worse, that acquiring a nuclear deterrent will bring with it a special treatment.

    Lesson four: insecurity breeds proliferation. It is instructive that nearly all nuclear proliferation concerns arise in regions of longstanding tension. In other words, nuclear proliferation is a symptom , and these symptoms will continue to persist and worsen as long as we leave unaddressed the underlying causes of insecurity and instability – such as chronic disputes which continue to fester, the persistent lack of good governance and basic freedoms, a growing divide between rich and poor, and newly perceived schisms based on ethnic or religious differences.

    It is in this context that I have begun to stress not only the value but also the limitations of the IAEA´s role. While the Agency can use verification effectively to bring to closure questions of compliance with legal and technical requirements, the long term value of these efforts can only be realized to the extent that they are reinforced by all other components of the non-proliferation regime, and followed by the necessary political dialogue among concerned States to address underlying issues of insecurity, and to build confidence and trust. I should note that verification, supported by diplomacy, has been an important part of the success so far in Iran and Libya, and in that sense I can only hope that the continuation of the six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear programme will yield results that will include, inter alia, full IAEA verification.

    Exploiting the Window of Opportunity

    Clearly, the world has changed. The key features of the international security landscape have been altered significantly over the past two decades. Whatever value the concept of nuclear deterrence may have served during the Cold War, as the volatile currency on which the standoff between two superpowers was balanced, they have now become the ultimate “elephant in the parlor”. For the five countries recognized as nuclear-weapon States under the NPT, their nuclear arsenals are increasingly becoming either a focal point for resentment or cynicism among the nuclear “have-nots”, or, worse, a model for emulation for States that wish to pursue clandestine WMD programmes, hoping that this will bring them security and status.

    It is the height of irony that, in today´s security environment, the only actors who presumably would find the world’s most powerful weapons useful – and would deploy them without hesitation – would be an extremist group. A nuclear deterrent is absolutely ineffective against such groups; they have no cities that can be bombed in response, nor are they focused on self-preservation. But even as we take urgent measures to protect against nuclear terrorism, we remain sluggish and unconvinced about the need to rapidly rid ourselves of nuclear weapons.

    Why? The answer, in my view, is that the international community has not been successful to date in creating a viable alternative to the doctrine of nuclear deterrence as the basis for international security. Nuclear weapons will not go away until a reliable collective security framework exists to fill the vacuum. The aftermath of the Cold War should have served as the logical lead-in to such an effort. The resulting changes to the international security landscape have been obvious; it is only that we have not acted to adapt to these changes.

    If there is any silver lining to this dark cloud, it is that the window of opportunity is still open. The efforts to counteract Iraq´s phantom weapons of mass destruction, to unveil a clandestine nuclear weapon programmes in Libya, to understand the extent and nature of Iran´s undeclared nuclear programme, to bring North Korea back to the NPT regime and dismantle any nuclear programme they may have, and to prevent nuclear terrorism have all brought worldwide attention to bear on issues of nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear security. That energy is ours to harness. If we are ever to build a global security culture based on human solidarity and shared human values – a collective security framework that will serve the interests of all countries equally, and make reliance on nuclear weapons obsolete – the time is now.

    The Responsibility For Action

    The question remains, how? Whose responsibility is it to create this collective security framework? Is this an initiative for policy makers? The UN Security Council? The scientific community?

    The answer, of course, is that it will take all of us. Progress must be made on all fronts – political, scientific and societal. We must all take the responsibility for action.

    Sidney Drell comes to this problem as a physicist, and I come to it as a lawyer and diplomat, but we have arrived at the same basic conclusion: that reliance on nuclear weapons is a recipe for self-destruction. I find it encouraging that people from all sectors of society have been coming forward with proposals on how to address the challenges of nuclear proliferation and nuclear arms control.

    In my view, this could be the beginning of a much needed discussion on security – and we should do all we can to stimulate this dialogue, move it forward, and keep it in public focus. I would like to spend my remaining minutes outlining what I see as the types of actions that must be taken.

    Creating the Framework: the Political and Policy Front

    Let me first turn to the political and policy front. In this area, leadership must be focused on restoring and strengthening the credibility of multilateral approaches to resolving conflicts and threats to international security – conflicts and threats ranging from preserving the environment to ensuring respect for human rights, working for sustainable development, and controlling weapons of mass destruction – which, in our globalized world, can only be resolved through a collective and multilateral approach, in which competing interests and powers can be contained and harmonized. The system of collective security hoped for in the United Nations Charter has never been made fully functional and effective. This must be our starting point.

    For some years now, efforts to achieve Security Council reform have been mostly focused on the question of whether additional countries should be given a permanent seat. In my view, such a change would be helpful in making the Council more representative of today’s global realities, and in removing the current correlation – in that the same five countries recognized under the NPT as nuclear weapon States hold the five permanent seats on the Security Council.

    But more importantly, for the Security Council to take the leadership role for which it was designed, its reform must be focused on more than issues of membership. The Council must be able and ready to engage swiftly and decisively in both preventive diplomacy and enforcement measures, with the tools and methods in place necessary to cope with existing and emerging threats to international peace and security. This should include mechanisms for preventive diplomacy to settle emerging disputes within and among nations. The genocide in Rwanda and the appalling situation in Darfur, where 10 000 people are dying every month, are two prime examples of the lack of early and decisive intervention by the Security Council.

    The Security Council should also have, at the ready, “smart” sanctions that can target a government without adding misery to its helpless citizens, as we have seen in Iraq. The Council should have adequate forces to intervene in the foreseeable range of situations – from maintaining law and order, to monitoring borders, to combating aggression. And yes – in my view, the Security Council should be able to authorize collective pre-emptive military action when the imminence and gravity of the threat merit such action.

    Increasing the effectiveness and relevance of the Security Council is an essential step towards a functional system for collective security. Such a system is the only alternative to the reliance that some nations, including nuclear weapon States and their allies, now place on nuclear deterrence – in a “good guys versus bad guys” approach that inevitably leaves some nations seeking to achieve parity. A functional system for collective security is the only alternative to the current hodge-podge of approaches to addressing security issues – ranging from inaction or late action on the part of the international community, to unilateral and “self-help” solutions on the part of individual States or groups of States.

    With a viable system of collective security in place, policy makers and political leaders may find it easier to make progress on the nuclear arms control front, such as bringing into force the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and negotiating an internationally verifiable Fissile Material (Cut-Off) Treaty.

    In my view, every effort should be made, starting at the 2005 NPT Review Conference and continuing in other venues, to agree on benchmarks for non-proliferation and disarmament. These benchmarks should include: urging all States to bring the additional protocol to IAEA safeguards agreements into force; tightening and formalizing the controls over the export of nuclear materials and technology; working towards multilateral control over the sensitive parts of the nuclear fuel cycle – enrichment, reprocessing, and the management and disposal of spent fuel; and ensuring that States cannot withdraw from the NPT without clear consequences, including prompt review and appropriate action by the Security Council. The international community should also work rapidly to reduce the stockpiles of high enriched uranium and plutonium around the globe, and to strengthen the protection of existing nuclear material and facilities.

    An essential benchmark will be that a concrete roadmap for verified, irreversible nuclear disarmament, complete with a timetable, and involving not only the NPT nuclear weapon States but also India, Pakistan and Israel, is at last put in place.

    Just over a month ago, the foreign ministers of Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden spoke out jointly, saying: “Nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament are two sides of the same coin, and both must be energetically pursued.” Thirty years after the enactment of the NPT, with the Cold War ended and over 30 000 nuclear weapons still available for use, it should be understandable that many non-nuclear-weapon States are no longer willing to accept as credible the commitment of nuclear-weapon States to their NPT disarmament obligations.

    In my view, we have come to a fork in the road: either there must be a demonstrated commitment to move toward nuclear disarmament, or we should resign ourselves to the fact that other countries will pursue a more dangerous parity through proliferation. The difficulty of achieving our ultimate objective – the elimination of all nuclear weapons – should by no means be underestimated. But at the same time, it should not be used as a pretext for failing to start the process of drastic reductions in existing nuclear arsenals, and simultaneously to explore the development of collective response mechanisms that will be needed against any future clandestine nuclear proliferation efforts.

    The Scientific Front: Roles for Researchers and Inventors

    I would also like to emphasize the role of scientists in advancing non-proliferation and disarmament objectives, and the responsibility for action that lies with the scientific community. Science brought us the atom bomb. And if we are to rid ourselves of nuclear weapons, we will need an equally intensive effort on the part of scientific researchers – to develop innovative tools for nuclear verification and mechanisms for reducing the proliferation potential of nuclear material and technology.

    In the area of nuclear verification, for example, advances in environmental sampling and analysis techniques are enabling IAEA inspectors to determine, with far greater precision, the nature and origin of individual particles of uranium – and thereby to help us detect undeclared activities. Satellite imagery technology and advanced information analysis techniques have also broadened the range of inspection capabilities. And in the long run, science may be able to develop additional innovative ways and means to neutralize the impact of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

    The Responsibility of Concerned Citizens

    The proliferation of nuclear weapons – “The Gravest Danger” , in the words of Sidney Drell and James Goodby – is a legacy we all share, and ultimately, every concerned citizen also shares the responsibility for action. In countries ranging from the most powerful to some of the least developed, the voice of the citizen is increasingly a force in the political debate. It is vital that we engage individuals from all sectors of society in a public dialogue on international security – to remind them of the continued danger of nuclear war, to explain to them possible alternatives, and to offer avenues for involvement. We must continue to develop and refine proposals for action, to bring them to the attention of governments and opinion leaders, and to promote public discourse on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament that will become too forceful to be ignored.

    And here I am pleased to recognize the important role played by CISAC as a force in the field of international security and cooperation. Your efforts to develop proposals that aim to move us away from a reliance on nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence has never been more urgent or more relevant.

    Conclusion

    For centuries, perhaps for millennia, security strategies have been based on boundaries: city walls, border patrols, and the use of racial and religious groupings or other categories to separate friend from foe. Those strategies no longer work. The global community has become interdependent, with the constant movement of people, ideas and goods. Many aspects of modern life – global warming, Internet communication, the global marketplace, and yes, the war on terrorism – point to the fact that the human race has walked through a door that cannot be re-entered.

    Yet with all the strides we have made to connect on many levels, we continue to think disconnectedly on others. We think globally in terms of trade, but we continue to think locally in terms of security. We cherish our connectivity on the Web, but turn away from solidarity in matters of extreme poverty. James Morris, Executive Director of the World Food Programme, recently pointed out, “There are about 800 million hungry people in the world today, about half of them children” – yet the governments of the world spent $900 billion on armaments last year. Could it be that our priorities are skewed?

    This is a mindset we must change. In this century, in this generation, we must develop a new approach to security capable of transcending borders – an inclusive approach that is centred on the value of every human life. The sooner we can make that transition, the sooner we will achieve our goal of a planet with peace and justice as its hallmark.

    by IAEA Director General Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • If America were Iraq, What would it be Like?

    President Bush said Tuesday that the Iraqis are refuting the pessimists and implied that things are improving in that country.

    What would America look like if it were in Iraq ‘s current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.

    Thus, violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, the equivalent proportionately of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were Iraq, it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll.

    And what if those deaths occurred all over the country, including in the capital of Washington, DC, but mainly above the Mason Dixon line, in Boston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco?

    What if the grounds of the White House and the government buildings near the Mall were constantly taking mortar fire? What if almost nobody in the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the White House, or the Pentagon dared venture out of their buildings, and considered it dangerous to go over to Crystal City or Alexandria?

    What if all the reporters for all the major television and print media were trapped in five-star hotels in Washington, DC and New York, unable to move more than a few blocks safely, and dependent on stringers to know what was happening in Oklahoma City and St. Louis? What if the only time they ventured into the Midwest was if they could be embedded in Army or National Guard units?

    There are estimated to be some 25,000 guerrillas in Iraq engaged in concerted acts of violence. What if there were private armies totalling 275,000 men, armed with machine guns, assault rifles (legal again!), rocket-propelled grenades, and mortar launchers, hiding out in dangerous urban areas of cities all over the country? What if they completely controlled Seattle , Portland , San Francisco , Salt Lake City , Las Vegas , Denver and Omaha , such that local police and Federal troops could not go into those cities?

    What if, during the past year, the Secretary of State (Aqilah Hashemi), the President (Izzedine Salim), and the Attorney General (Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim) had all been assassinated?

    What if all the cities in the US were wracked by a crime wave, with thousands of murders, kidnappings, burglaries, and carjackings in every major city every year?

    What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target “safe houses” of “criminal gangs”, but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies?

    What if, from time to time, the US Army besieged Virginia Beach , killing hundreds of armed members of the Christian Soldiers? What if entire platoons of the Christian Soldiers militia holed up in Arlington National Cemetery , and were bombarded by US Air Force warplanes daily, destroying thousands of graves and even pulverizing the Vietnam Memorial over on the Mall? What if the National Council of Churches had to call for a popular march of thousands of believers to converge on the National Cathedral to stop the US Army from demolishing it to get at a rogue band of the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Brigades?

    What if there were virtually no commercial air traffic in the country? What if many roads were highly dangerous, especially Interstate 95 from Richmond to Washington, DC, and I-95 and I-91 up to Boston? If you got on I-95 anywhere along that over 500-mile stretch, you would risk being carjacked, kidnapped, or having your car sprayed with machine gun fire.

    What if no one had electricity for much more than 10 hours a day, and often less? What if it went off at unpredictable times, causing factories to grind to a halt and air conditioning to fail in the middle of the summer in Houston and Miami? What if the Alaska pipeline were bombed and disabled at least monthly? What if unemployment hovered around 40%?

    What if veterans of militia actions at Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing were brought in to run the government on the theory that you need a tough guy in these times of crisis?

    What if municipal elections were cancelled and cliques close to the new “president” quietly installed in the statehouses as “governors?” What if several of these governors (especially of Montana and Wyoming ) were assassinated soon after taking office or resigned when their children were taken hostage by guerrillas?

    What if the leader of the European Union maintained that the citizens of the United States are, under these conditions, refuting pessimism and that freedom and democracy are just around the corner?

    Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

  • 21st Annual Evening for Peace: Broadcasting Peace: A Conversation with Walter Cronkite

    The following is a transcript of the live interview conducted by Sam Donaldson with Walter Cronkite, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2004 Distinguished Peace Leader.

    Sam Donaldson with Walter Cronkite at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 21st Evening for Peace

    Donaldson: I must tell you that for many of us, without meaning any disrespect to the people now doing the CBS Evening News, it will always be the Cronkite Show. Here was the leader with a bunch of correspondents that couldn’t be touched, I know because we tried to compete against him, and Robert Pierpoint who was here earlier tonight. He was one of the great horsemen that Walter depended upon on that show. Let’s get down to business. I hear people say that this is the most important election of our lifetime. Is it? What do you make of its importance?

    Cronkite: I think it’s more important than our lifetime. I would think that this election is perhaps the most important in the last century, going back to perhaps the Civil War.

    Donaldson: You have to explain that. Why?

    Cronkite: I expect to. Why is because we have taken a 180 degree turn in our policy and foreign policy. We have adopted this incredible decision as announced by the president in his announcement of our policy future, which is a compulsory thing they have to do every couple of years. And he announced the system of preemption. With this preemption and the unilateral nature of it, as practiced by the administration very shortly thereafter, we have established a foreign policy that is unsustainable in a world that we hope will be governed by peace rather than war. As a consequence, we are on a very, very dangerous course for not only the United States but for civilization. The suggestion that one should take preemptive action if that nation believes that it is threatened by a neighbor, for heaven’s sakes, that may sound possible to sustain if you are a dominant nation such as the United States . But what do you do if you translate that same program to one of the African neighbor nations, to one of the Middle Eastern neighbor nations? As soon as you sense that you are endangered by your neighbor, you are therefore entitled, because the United States has established this wonderful concept, you are therefore entitled to go to war. What kind of a future is that for the world? It is incredibly impossible to sustain that kind of a foreign policy around the world among all the nations of the world that are entitled because of our leadership, to say, well, the United States does it, why can’t we do it?

    Donaldson: Well, the president says it’s us against them, that we live in a dangerous world, we must defend ourselves and we’re gonna divide the world up between those who support our policy and those who don’t. Those who support us will be our allies, and those who don’t will pay the piper.

    Cronkite: I’d say that’s one hell of a way to behave to those who believe with us, to tell them that either you’re with us or against us – either you accept what we say we will do or you cannot be part of the game. That hardly seems to me to be a foreign policy that is very practical of long endurance. It may suffice for a moment, but it’s not going to live very long in the history of our universe.

    Donaldson: Walter, do you think we are safer or less safe because our strike against Iraq ?

    Cronkite: Far less safe.

    Donaldson: Why?

    Cronkite: Because as we read every day in the press and occasionally hear on television-

    Donaldson: We’ll get to that.

    Cronkite: I thought you would, so I thought I’d preempt you. The problem quite clearly is that we have excited the Arab world, the Muslim world, to take up arms against us, far beyond what was being done by Al-Qaeda and others, of the terrorist groups. We have created a new body of importance in the terrorist groups who are coalescing around the Iraqi situation.

    Donaldson: The president said in that famous State of the Union message in which he described the axis of evil that the United States would not stand idly by and permit nations to acquire weapons of mass destruction that threaten us, which suggests that maybe if the president maintains political power that we will then have to move against Iran. Maybe North Korea . What do you think?

    Walter Cronkite at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 21st Evening for Peace

    Cronkite: That is precisely the course that he has set. Actually, the truth of the matter is we do not have the military strength to take on Iran and North Korea simultaneously or even separately at this point. We have committed nearly all of the forces we have available to this enterprise in Iraq . For heaven’s sakes. This argument about a draft. That this administration would dare to assert that there is no draft in their thinking. That’s got to be an absolutely straight out lie, one of many that they have made. We cannot continue the Iraq war as it is quite clearly going to continue for quite a while and expect to be prepared to move on Iran , to move on North Korea , to even have this vaunted security and safety at home without a draft. We don’t have that kind of power in our military today. And we are being lied to when we are being told there is no thought of a draft in the Pentagon.

    Donaldson: Well, it won’t be the first time we’ve been lied to by various presidents, now, Walter. It’s nothing new.

    Cronkite: Well, yes, but do we really have time to go into that?

    Donaldson: No. I’m not asking for a litany of lies. All right. How could the administration have so badly miscalculated after we got to Baghdad in less than three and a half weeks, militarily, from the standpoint of trying to then move forward to do something in Iraq that would bring it out all right? How come they didn’t know anything about the Middle East ?

    Cronkite: I wish the hell I knew the answer to that. That’s one of the questions we have every right to ask and you’re just the guy to ask it.

    Donaldson: Well, it’s easy to ask questions. But a lot of people say, fine, if they thought they wanted to do this, they did not prepare. I’m borrowing a Kerry line, I suppose. Or maybe he stole it from you. They did not prepare for the peace. They had no plan after that. They made miscalculations, did they not? And so at the point we’re at now, answer the fundamental question: We’re hip deep in the big muddy once again, as Lyndon Johnson’s time showed: how do we get out?

    Cronkite: The program that I have proposed through the Democrats-I say that with, I hope everybody understands, my tongue in my cheek. I’m working both sides. My tongue is in both cheeks. I wrote a column about it and it didn’t get printed anywhere, but it was a great column. I proposed what I would like to hear the Democratic candidate say. My proposal was that he would say that one of the first steps he would take upon moving into the Oval Office, besides changing the furniture around a bit, would be to organize a panel of retired generals who have come out during the various discussions of the Iraq War against what has been going on in Iraq, the entire lack of planning, inadequate number of troops, all of the things that these retired generals have come on television to report on. He would organize this panel and would tell them he wanted their plan for us to get out of Iraq with honor, to get our troops home and to have them do this within the next six months. I can imagine, I would say if I were the candidate, what would happen in America as those boys and girls came home. Every Broadway, every Main Street would be festooned with American flags. We would welcome those boys and girls back in every town and community of America . They would be honored as they’ve never been honored before. But more than that, we’d be sure that everyone of those people would be entitled to an education that we would pay for to help pay them back for their service. Furthermore, we would supply a fund so that every professional person serving in the reserve, in the National Guard, who was called up and lost his practice in the law or dentistry or whatever would get financial help to restore that practice he had when he went away. Every businessman, every single small businessman who lost his business because he was called up and kept there longer than he should have been kept anyway, that individual would get financial help. I would put these people back on their feet because they’re entitled to it.

    But we would go further than that, of course. We would then begin to put together the codicil for peace that this nation would follow in the future. And that codicil for peace would be a vastly different thing than our present foreign policy. The very first thing we would do would be to reverse 180 degrees our attitude towards the United Nations. We would put our full force behind the United Nations. We would do everything we can to bring the United Nations into the position of power that it should have. We are going to have to someday in the attempt to make an international organization of this kind work. Our only real hope of establishing a lasting peace is that such an organization will work. That would mean the United Nations would have legislative power, judicial power and military power to say this is the road to peace and we will hold peace. Now that is going to require-I see your tongue moving toward your check.

    Donaldson: Towards my mouth, my lips.

    Cronkite: But let me say what that requires. I know what it requires and you know what it requires, and you’re about to hang me with it. What this requires is an understanding of the American people that we can only assure world peace through an international organization if we are willing to surrender some of our sovereignty.

    Donaldson: You’re right, Walter, you guessed my question. Both candidates, not just President Bush, but Senator Kerry, say in almost the same words, “I will never give another nation veto power over the security of the United States.” And the crowds cheer. So how are you going to convince the American people that we should in fact obey the rule of international law?

    Cronkite: As with almost everything else to be solved with our national being and for world peace, it’s going to require a lot of education. We begin with that. We’ve got to improve our educational system to the degree that we have a literate society to which you can appeal with a reasonable argument rather than the passion of the moment or the passion of the past that has to be preserved. That won’t work. We have to have a revolutionary change. You know, Tom Jefferson, old Tom said at one time that the nation that expects to be ignorant and free, expects what never can and never will be. We are on the precipice of being so ignorant that we cannot function well as a democracy.

    Donaldson: And that is a terrific segue to our business. We have distinguished members of the educational community here with great universities and all that. But our business, the news business, tap into it. Are we helping in this process that you describe today?

    Cronkite: No. We’re not participating in it at all.

    Donaldson: What happened to us?

    Cronkite: Well, what happened was cable. Not actually what the cable people are doing, but the fact that there is such a profusion today of various cable channels and cable stations that they have drastically reduced the audience for the traditional networks, that is, the old timers NBC, ABC, CBS. They have so reduced their income that they do not dare to do anything except the cheapest kind of entertainment programming. And they will not give an adequate amount of time or consideration in any other way to informing the American people of the problems of our time. They’re not helping to educate the people in any way. Now, that is in parallel, if you will, with the failure of our educational system. We have now wasted so much money with cutting the tax rates of the rich in this country that we do not have enough money left to be sure that no child is left behind. We’ve got so many children left behind today, it’s unbelievable. We’re not able to build the schoolhouses that are needed, but most of all we’re not able to pay our teachers what they deserve. These are the people we have employed to raise this educational level of the American people to the degree that we do not fall to Thomas Jefferson’s forecast; that we are an intelligent people that can understand the issues of the day and vote accordingly. We are in a position today that we cannot do that job. We literally cannot pay teachers what they’re worth. Now, where do we go from here? I hope you’re not going to ask me the next question, where do we go from here?

    Donaldson: Where do we go from here, Walter? Where do we go from here, Walter? Answer the question!

    Cronkite: Well, God knows. And unfortunately, since only God knows, that means only Bush knows.

    Donaldson: Remember this. Someone once said, God takes care of fools, drunks and the United States of America .

    Cronkite: And perhaps the Democratic party.

    Donaldson: Well, let’s cover that point. You wrote earlier this year in a column about the political campaign, and you said religion ought not to be an issue in the political campaign.

    Cronkite: Absolutely.

    Donaldson: But it is.

    Cronkite: Of course it is. It’s being exploited very successfully, I’m afraid, by the Republican party, and the group of evangelicals who have helped finance this effort to make religion an issue in the campaign, in the election.

    Donaldson: You don’t think God favors one party over the other, that God gets into the tax code? Maybe he has an exemption there, who know?

    Cronkite: I used to think that God took part in contests at one time or another, until the Boston team won a couple of nights ago.

    Sam Donaldson at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 21st Evening for Peace

    Donaldson: David Krieger said that our job is to tell the truth, bring the truth to people. But when we attempt to do that by fact checking ads, by fact checking what candidates say, we’re accused of being partisan, we’re accused of getting into the contest. What do you think our job is? How should we handle a political contest like what’s going on today?

    Cronkite: I think you’ll agree with me almost immediately. I dodge the question in a sense. We are never going to be able to do it unless the networks, and I’m talking about our traditional networks again, give us enough time to devote to information transmission to the people. Those half-hour evening news programs, as you know only too well, are vastly inadequate. After the commercials, the lead-ins, the lead-outs and all that, we’ve got something like 16 or 17 minutes at the most. We’ve got one of the most complicated nations in the world with our vast numbers of special interests across our broad nation. We are presumably a great leader of a world that is incredibly complex today, more than probably any time in recent history at any rate. And to think that we can tell just the essentials that happen in that world, that domestic world, that international world, in 16 minutes is ridiculous. We can’t do it. Now then, you and I for all of our careers with our networks have hoped for prime time. We are in this mixed time, evening time from 6:00 to 6:30. We all wished for years for prime time in which to do news or documentaries. We finally got it three or four years ago. So what do we do with these magazine shows? Sex, crime, the oddball events of the world. Nothing serious in those programs. What would happen if our networks would devote those magazine prime time magazine hours that they do to instant documentaries? Suppose that you have got the headlines at 6:30 and you came up with 60 Minutes Wednesday night for an hour and at that time, by golly, you saw a documentary and a panel of experts and so forth that would explore the problem that we revealed at 6:30. We would advise this nation, we would educate this nation in a manner in which it has never been educated before. We would use television the way people dreamed that television would be used when we first had the tubes on the market.

    Donaldson: I’m with you, Walter, but you know what would happen is the bottom line network bosses, the people who own us now, would say, “We can’t put that on because we won’t get a mass audience. Someone over here has gotten hold of the Paris Hilton tape and put it on and that’s where all the eyeballs are.”

    Cronkite: That’s exactly what they’d say.

    Donaldson: That’s exactly what they are saying.

    Cronkite: Not only would they say it, they’d do it.

    Donaldson: But you’re talking about the evening news. I remember where in the fall of 1972, you did two long Watergate stories two nights in a row, 7, 8, 9 minutes apiece. That doesn’t happen anymore. Why not?

    Cronkite: Well, that gets into a more difficult problem. I don’t know the why not because it could be done. We did those two programs, one on Friday night and one on Monday night and, actually, they were even longer than 6 or 7 minutes each. They were 17 minutes, one of them, the first one, Friday night. This was my concept. This was just before the election of that year and Watergate had been in all the headlines for three or four months and then it had suddenly died out because that’s the way stories work for the press. We had told all of it. The Washington Post team had not come up with any new revelations. Deep Throat, if there was one (I won’t start that argument), hadn’t come up with anything. As a consequence, as things work in the press, the story moved from the front page to page 3 to page 7 to page 9 to the comic page with a two liner, and I was determined that we were going to remind the American people of the Watergate story before we went to the polls a couple of months later. So we put together this review of Watergate and we went deep into the documentary type stuff. We put together and made a pretty good piece out of it. The problem was, of course, that we put it out on a Friday and practically before we were off the air, the White House – the group who had done all of this, Nixon’s group – was on the phone to Bill Paley, the chairman and owner of CBS, and was demanding that we abandon the Monday piece and, a matter of fact, they wanted a special done to correct the mistakes we had made in the piece we had done. Paley, of course, panicked, I would say, for the moment and called Dick Salant, the head of CBS News who was a brilliant man.

    Donaldson: Lawyer, good lawyer.

    Cronkite: Oh, terrific, terrific. He had to listen to Paley, of course, and Paley was saying you have to do something about this, the White House is on us, it’s very difficult, you can’t do that Monday piece. Salant was saying, well, I’ll work on it, I’ll work on it. Meanwhile Frank Stanton was calling and others were calling. The pressure was on. Salant, being as brilliant as he was, when he came to us, he came to us from the counsel’s office at CBS. Eric Severeid and all of us practically were going to quit because we thought that the management was sending in this lawyer who was going to suppress us and only be the spokesman for management. He turned out to be the greatest journalist I’d ever known in his sense of honesty, integrity and telling the full story regardless of where the chips fell. He was a tremendous man.

    Donaldson: So even though you had to cut it down, you did run the second piece?

    Cronkite: What happened was that Salant was smart enough to compromise and he called Paley and he said we’ve taken care of it, Mr. Paley. We’re gonna cut the length of the piece on Monday. Well, we did. We cut a few minutes out of a long piece, but Paley was satisfied with that and was able to answer the White House by saying, “We’re cutting it down on Monday.” That didn’t please the White House, of course. They kept insisting that we had to cancel it. But Paley stood firm on that one.

    Donaldson: I just remember that. Walter, you could spend all evening doing it, but very quickly, handicap the next nine days and if you care to make a predication about who’s going to win, make it.

    Cronkite: I really am not prepared to. I don’t know. I think it’s that close. I can’t remember an election in which I didn’t think I could call it in advance until this year.

    Donaldson: Why is it this close?

    Cronkite: I think it’s this close because there is a huge body of people who would wear the “Anybody but Bush” pin who, at the same time, are not intrigued by Kerry. I don’t think he has made the impression that he needs to make to assure a victory. He’s managed in these three debates to bring himself back to even, almost even, but not overwhelmingly in the lead. I have been disappointed myself in his candidacy. You know, you and I made a lot of comments. I remember some of yours and if I don’t remember them, I’m making them up anyway.

    Donaldson: I’ve made a lot of dumb predictions, if that’s what you mean.

    Cronkite: Not predictions, but we made fun of the fact that we ourselves were talking about charisma being a feature of presidential elections since television came in, that television had changed the whole balance of election campaigning because it injected this feature of charisma.

    Donaldson: Well, it has, hasn’t it?

    Cronkite: It has. And that’s what I was going to say, that we have to invoke that name, that charisma identification in the case of the Democratic candidate. He does not have charisma. That is a difficult thing to overcome and meanwhile, without the charisma that he needs, he has, I think, not done a very good job of campaigning. It took him too long to get away from the litany of mistakes that this administration has made and get down to the program that he himself would substitute. I think that’s what people want to hear. What would he do? And we really still haven’t gotten a very clear picture of the program with which he would come in to the White House.

    Donaldson: But we know the President’s program. Is it a case of better the devil we know than the devil we don’t know, for some people? We know what George W. Bush will do. More of the same.

    Cronkite: I know and I find it hard to believe that there’s anybody that would vote for that.

    Donaldson: Half the country . And with that, would you do something for us that I think everyone in the room would love to have you do one more time. Will you sign off! With your famous sign off!

    Cronkite: And that’s the way it is, Saturday, October 23, 2004. Goodnight.

  • Truths Worth Telling

    Kensington, California – On a tape recording made in the Oval Office on June 14, 1971, H. R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, can be heard citing Donald Rumsfeld, then a White House aide, on the effect of the Pentagon Papers, news of which had been published on the front page of that morning’s newspaper:

    “Rumsfeld was making this point this morning,” Haldeman says. “To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say, and you can’t rely on their judgment. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the president can be wrong.”

    He got it exactly right. But it’s a lesson that each generation of voters and each new set of leaders have to learn for themselves. Perhaps Mr. Rumsfeld – now secretary of defense, of course – has reflected on this truth recently as he has contemplated the deteriorating conditions in Iraq. According to the government’s own reporting, the situation there is far bleaker than Mr. Rumsfeld has recognized or President Bush has acknowledged on the campaign trail.

    Understandably, the American people are reluctant to believe that their president has made errors of judgment that have cost American lives. To convince them otherwise, there is no substitute for hard evidence: documents, photographs, transcripts. Often the only way for the public to get such evidence is if a dedicated public servant decides to release it without permission.

    Such a leak occurred recently with the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was prepared in July. Reports of the estimate’s existence and overall pessimism – but not its actual conclusions – have prompted a long-overdue debate on the realities and prospects of the war. But its judgments of the relative likelihood and the strength of evidence pointing to the worst possibilities remain undisclosed. Since the White House has refused to release the full report, someone else should do so.

    Leakers are often accused of being partisan, and undoubtedly many of them are. But the measure of their patriotism should be the accuracy and the importance of the information they reveal. It would be a great public service to reveal a true picture of the administration’s plans for Iraq – especially before this week’s debate on foreign policy between Mr. Bush and Senator John Kerry.

    The military’s real estimates of the projected costs – in manpower, money and casualties – of various long-term plans for Iraq should be made public, in addition to the more immediate costs in American and Iraqi lives of the planned offensive against resistant cities in Iraq that appears scheduled for November. If military or intelligence experts within the government predict disastrous political consequences in Iraq from such urban attacks, these judgments should not remain secret.

    Leaks on the timing of this offensive – and on possible call-up of reserves just after the election – take me back to Election Day 1964, which I spent in an interagency working group in the State Department. The purpose of our meeting was to examine plans to expand the war – precisely the policy that voters soundly rejected at the polls that day.

    We couldn’t wait until the next day to hold our meeting because the plan for the bombing of North Vietnam had to be ready as soon as possible. But we couldn’t have held our meeting the day before because news of it might have been leaked – not by me, I’m sorry to say. And President Lyndon Johnson might not have won in a landslide had voters known he was lying when he said that his administration sought “no wider war.”

    Seven years and almost 50,000 American deaths later, after I had leaked the Pentagon Papers, I had a conversation with Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, one of the two senators who had voted against the Tonkin Gulf resolution in August 1964. If I had leaked the documents then, he said, the resolution never would have passed.

    That was hard to hear. But in 1964 it hadn’t occurred to me to break my vow of secrecy. Though I knew that the war was a mistake, my loyalties then were to the secretary of defense and the president. It took five years of war before I recognized the higher loyalty all officials owe to the Constitution, the rule of law, the soldiers in harm’s way or their fellow citizens.

    Like Robert McNamara, under whom I served, Mr. Rumsfeld appears to inspire great loyalty among his aides. As the scandal at Abu Ghraib shows, however, there are more important principles. Mr. Rumsfeld might not have seen the damning photographs and the report of Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba as soon as he did – just as he would never have seen the Pentagon Papers 33 years ago – if some anonymous people in his own department had not bypassed the chain of command and disclosed them, without authorization, to the news media. And without public awareness of the scandal, reforms would be less likely.

    A federal judge has ordered the administration to issue a list of all documents relating to the scandal by Oct. 15. Will Mr. Rumsfeld release the remaining photos, which depict treatment that he has described as even worse? It’s highly unlikely, especially before Nov. 2. Meanwhile, the full Taguba report remains classified, and the findings of several other inquiries into military interrogation and detention practices have yet to be released.

    All administrations classify far more information than is justifiable in a democracy – and the Bush administration has been especially secretive. Information should never be classified as secret merely because it is embarrassing or incriminating. But in practice, in this as in any administration, no information is guarded more closely.

    Surely there are officials in the present administration who recognize that the United States has been misled into a war in Iraq, but who have so far kept their silence – as I long did about the war in Vietnam. To them I have a personal message: don’t repeat my mistakes. Don’t wait until more troops are sent, and thousands more have died, before telling truths that could end a war and save lives. Do what I wish I had done in 1964: go to the press, to Congress, and document your claims.

    Technology may make it easier to tell your story, but the decision to do so will be no less difficult. The personal risks of making disclosures embarrassing to your superiors are real. If you are identified as the source, your career will be over; friendships will be lost; you may even be prosecuted. But some 140,000 Americans are risking their lives every day in Iraq. Our nation is in urgent need of comparable moral courage from its public officials.

    Daniel Ellsberg is the author of “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers” and a member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Advisory Council.

    Originally published by the New York Times.