Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: US foreign policy

  • Maybe We Should Take the North Koreans at Their Word

    Shortly after North Korea exploded its second nuclear device in three years on Monday morning, it released a statement explaining why. “The republic has conducted another underground nuclear testing successfully in order to strengthen our defensive nuclear deterrence.”(1) If the Obama Administration hopes to dissuade Pyongyang from the nuclear course it seems so hell bent on pursuing, Washington must understand just how adroitly nuclear arms do appear to serve North Korea’s national security. In other words, perhaps we should recognize that they mean what they say.

    From the dawn of history until the dawn of the nuclear age, it seemed rather self-evident that for virtually any state in virtually any strategic situation, the more military power one could wield relative to one’s adversaries, the more security one gained. That all changed, however, with Alamogordo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the Cold War’s long atomic arms race, it slowly dawned on “nuclear use theorists” – whom one can hardly resist acronyming as NUTS – that in the nuclear age, security did not necessarily require superiority. Security required simply an ability to retaliate after an adversary had struck, to inflict upon that opponent “unacceptable damage” in reply. If an adversary knew, no matter how much devastation it might inflict in a first strike, that the chances were good that it would receive massive damage as a consequence (even far less damage than it had inflicted as long as that damage was “unacceptable”), then, according to the logic of nuclear deterrence, that adversary would be dissuaded from striking first. What possible political benefit could outweigh the cost of the possible obliteration of, oh, a state’s capital city, and the leaders of that state themselves, and perhaps more than a million lives therein?

    Admittedly, the unassailable logic of this “unacceptable damage” model of nuclear deterrence – which we might as well call UD – failed to put the brakes on a spiraling Soviet/American nuclear arms competition that began almost immediately after the USSR acquired nuclear weapons of its own in 1949. Instead, a different model of nuclear deterrence emerged, deterrence exercised by the capability completely to wipe out the opponent’s society, “mutually assured destruction,” which soon came to be known to all as MAD. There were other scenarios of aggression – nuclear attacks on an adversary’s nuclear weapons, nuclear or conventional attacks on an adversary’s closest allies (in Western and Eastern Europe) – that nuclear weapons were supposed to deter as well. However, the Big Job of nuclear weapons was to dissuade the other side from using their nuclear weapons against one’s own cities and society, by threatening to deliver massive nuclear devastation on the opponent’s cities and society in reply. “The Department of Defense,” said an Ohio congressman in the early 1960s, with some exasperation, “has become the Department of Retaliation.”(2)

    Nevertheless, those who engaged in an effort to slow the arms race often employed the logic of UD in their attempts to do so. “Our twenty thousandth bomb,” said Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Manhattan Project that built the world’s first atomic weapons, as early as 1953, “will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two thousandth.” (3) “Deterrence does not depend on superiority,” said the great strategist Bernard Brodie in 1965.(4) “There is no foreign policy objective today that is so threatened,” said retired admiral and former CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1998, “that we would É accept the risk of receiving just one nuclear detonation in retaliation.”(5)

    Consider how directly the logic of UD applies to the contemporary international environment, to the twin nuclear challenges that have dominated the headlines during most of the past decade, and to the most immediate nuclear proliferation issues now confronting the Obama Administration. Because the most persuasive explanation for the nuclear quests on which both Iran and North Korea have embarked is, indeed, the notion that “deterrence does not depend on superiority.” Deterrence depends only an ability to strike back. Iran and North Korea appear to be seeking small nuclear arsenals in order to deter potential adversaries from launching an attack upon them – by threatening them with unacceptable damage in retaliation.

    Neither North Korea nor Iran could hope to defeat its most powerful potential adversary – the United States – in any kind of direct military confrontation. They cannot repel an actual attack upon them. They cannot shoot American planes and missiles out of the sky. Indeed, no state can.

    However, what these countries can aspire to do is to dissuade the American leviathan from launching such an attack. How? By developing the capability to instantly vaporize an American military base or three in Iraq or Qatar or South Korea or Japan, or an entire U.S. aircraft carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf or the Sea of Japan, or even an American city on one coast or the other. And by making it implicitly clear that they would respond to any kind of assault by employing that capability immediately, before it’s too late, following the venerable maxim: “Use them or lose them.” The obliteration of an entire American military base, or an entire American naval formation, or an entire American city, would clearly seem to qualify as “unacceptable damage” for the United States.

    Moreover, to deter an American attack, Iran and North Korea do not need thousands of nuclear warheads. They just need a couple of dozen, well hidden and well protected. American military planners might be almost certain that they could take out all the nuclear weapons in these countries in some kind of a dramatic lightning “surgical strike.” However, with nuclear weapons, “almost” is not good enough. Even the barest possibility that such a strike would fail, and that just one or two nuclear weapons would make it into the air, detonate over targets, and result in massive “unacceptable damage” for the United States, would in virtually any conceivable circumstance serve to dissuade Washington from undertaking such a strike.

    In addition, it is crucial to recognize that Iran and North Korea would not intend for their nascent nuclear arsenals to deter only nuclear attacks upon them. If the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States disappeared tomorrow morning, but America’s conventional military superiority remained, it still would be the case that the only possible military asset that these states could acquire, to effectively deter an American military assault, would be the nuclear asset.

    The “Korean Committee for Solidarity with World Peoples,” a mouthpiece for the North Korean government, captured Pyongyang’s logic quite plainly just weeks after the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. “The Iraqi war taught the lesson that ‘the security of the nation can be protected only when a country has a physical deterrent force’”(6) Similarly, a few weeks earlier, just before the Iraq invasion began, a North Korean general was asked to defend his country’s nuclear weapons program, and with refreshing candor replied, “We see what you are getting ready to do with Iraq. And you are not going to do it to us.”(7)

    It really is quite a remarkable development. North Korea today is one of the most desperate countries in the world. Most of its citizens are either languishing in gulags or chronically starving. And yet – in contrast to all the debate that has taken place in recent years about whether the United States and/or Israel ought to launch a preemptive strike on Iran – no one seems to be proposing any kind of military strike on North Korea. Why not? Because of the mere possibility that North Korea could impose unacceptable damage upon us in reply.

    Perhaps the most remarkable thing about UD is that it seems every bit as effective as MAD. North Korea today possesses no more than a handful of nuclear warheads, and maintains nothing like a “mutual” nuclear balance with the United States. In addition, the retaliation that North Korea can threaten cannot promise anything like a complete “assured destruction.” To vaporize an American carrier group in the Sea of Japan, or a vast American military base in South Korea or Japan, or even an American city, would not be at all the same thing as the “destruction” of the entire American nation – as the USSR was able to threaten under MAD.

    And yet, MAD and UD, it seems, exercise deterrence in precisely the same way. Astonishingly, it seems that Washington finds itself every bit as thoroughly deterred by a North Korea with probably fewer than 10 nuclear weapons as it did by a Soviet Union with 10,000. Although UD hardly contains the rich acronymphomaniacal irony wrought by MAD, it appears that both North Korea and Iran intend now to base their national security strategies solidly upon it.

    There is very little reason to suppose that other states will not soon follow their lead.

    President Obama, of course, to his great credit, has not only made a nuclear weapon-free Iran and North Korea one of his central foreign policy priorities, he has begun to chart a course toward a nuclear weapon-free world. In a groundbreaking speech before a huge outdoor rally in Prague on April 5th, he said, “Today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” (Unfortunately, he followed that with the statement that nuclear weapons abolition would not “be achieved quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime,” suggesting that neither he nor the nuclear policy officials in his administration fully appreciate the magnitude and immediacy of the nuclear peril. Do they really think the human race can retain nuclear weapons for another half century or so, yet manage to dodge the bullet of nuclear accident, or nuclear terror, or a nuclear crisis spinning out of control every single time?)

    The one thing we can probably say for sure about the prospects for universal nuclear disarmament is that no state will agree either to abjure or to dismantle nuclear weapons unless it believes that such a course is the best course for its own national security. To persuade states like North Korea and Iran to climb aboard the train to abolition would probably require simultaneous initiatives on three parallel tracks. One track would deliver foreign and defense policies that assure weaker states that we do not intend to attack them, that just as we expect them to abide by the world rule of law they can expect the same from us, that the weak need not cower in fear before the strong. Another track would deliver diplomatic overtures that convince weaker states that on balance, overall, their national security will better be served in a world where no one possesses nuclear weapons, rather than in a world where they do-but so too do many others. And another track still would deliver nuclear weapons policies that directly address the long-simmering resentments around the world about the long-standing nuclear double standard, that directly acknowledge our legacy of nuclear hypocrisy, and that directly connect nuclear non-proliferation to nuclear disarmament.

    The power decisively to adjust all those variables, of course, does not reside in Pyongyang or Tehran. It resides instead in Washington.

    ——-

    (1) The Washington Post, May 25, 2009.

    (2) Quoted in Daniel Lang, An Inquiry Into Enoughness: Of Bombs and Men and Staying Alive (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 167.

    (3) Quoted in Ibid., p. 38.

    (4) Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971 – first published in 1965), p. 274, quoted in Sarah J. Diehl and James Clay Moltz, Nuclear Weapons and Nonproliferation: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2002), p. 34.

    (5) Quoted in The Nation, Special Issue Containing Jonathan Schell’s interviews with several nuclear policy professionals and intellectuals, February 2/9, 1998, p. 40.

    (6) Quoted in Securing Our Survival: The Case for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, Tilman Ruff and John Loretz, eds. (Boston: IPPNW, 2007), p. 37.

    (7) Don Oberdorfer, PBS, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, October 9, 2006, quoted in Jonathan Schell, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), p. 141.

    Tad Daley is the Writing Fellow with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the Nobel Peace Laureate disarmament advocacy organization. His first book, Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World, is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in January 2010.

  • North Korea’s Nuclear Test: Turning Crisis into Opportunity

    David KriegerThe North Korean nuclear test will surely be viewed as one of the major foreign policy failures of the Bush administration. There were many warnings from North Korea that this test was coming. As far back as 1993, North Korea announced that it would leave the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but later suspended its withdrawal. The Clinton administration tried to resolve the issue by working out a deal with North Korea to give them two nuclear power plants in exchange for North Korea freezing and eventually dismantling its nuclear weapons program.

    When the Bush administration came into office, however, it scrapped the deal worked out by the Clinton administration and began talking tough to North Korea. In 2001, Mr. Bush told North Korea that it would be “held accountable” if it develops weapons of mass destruction. In his State of the Union Address the following year, Mr. Bush labeled North Korea as part of the Axis of Evil, along with Iraq and Iran.

    North Korea all along was asking Washington to meet with them in one-to-one discussions, and made clear that their objectives were to receive security assurances, including normalizing post-Korean War relations with the US, and development assistance. The Bush administration opted instead for six-party talks that also included China, Japan, South Korea and Russia, but not before the North Koreans had withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003.

    To gain perspective on the North Korean nuclear test on October 9th, a global overview is helpful. Globally, there have been more than 2,000 nuclear tests since the inception of the Nuclear Age. The United States has conducted 1054 nuclear weapons tests, including 331 atmospheric tests. India and Pakistan joined the nuclear club in 1998 with multiple nuclear tests, and received much international condemnation. Today, however, the Bush administration wants to change the US non-proliferation laws as well as international agreements in order to provide India with nuclear technology and materials. The Bush administration is also silent on Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

    Clearly, the Bush administration does not treat nuclear weapons as the problem, but rather specific regimes that might possess them – acceptable for some countries, but not for others. In adopting this posture, the US promotes an untenable nuclear double standard. Countries like North Korea and Iran, having been branded as part of the “Axis of Evil” and having seen what happened to the regime in Iraq at the hands of the US, are encouraged to develop nuclear weapons if only to prevent US aggression against them.

    Mr. Bush has condemned the North Korean test as a “provocative act,” but stated that “[t]he United States remains committed to diplomacy.” If the North Korean test is taken as a significant warning sign of the potential for increased nuclear proliferation and increased danger to humanity that can only be countered by diplomacy, the crisis could be turned to opportunity.

    Three steps need to be urgently undertaken to reduce nuclear dangers in the aftermath of the North Korean test. First, the United States should engage in direct negotiations with North Korea to achieve a nuclear weapons-free Korean Peninsula in exchange for US security assurances and development assistance to North Korea. Second, the countries of Northeast Asia, along with the nuclear weapons states with a presence in the region, need to negotiate the creation of a Northeast Asia Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone, prohibiting all nuclear weapons in the region. This treaty would be a reasonable outcome of the Six-Nation Nuclear Talks between North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the US that have been going on since 2003. Third, the United Nations should convene a Global Conference for Nuclear Disarmament to negotiate a treaty for the phased and verifiable elimination of all nuclear weapons as required under international law.

    Whether or not such steps are taken will depend almost entirely on US leadership. If they are not taken, we can anticipate a deepening nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula, in Northeast Asia and throughout the world. If they are taken, we could emerge from this crisis in a far better position to end the nuclear threat that is the greatest terror faced by our nation and the world.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a leader in the global effort for a world free of nuclear weapons.

  • Human Rights and the US/UK Illegal Attack on Iraq

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Middle East Expert Visits the Foundation

    Professor Farzeen Nasri, a long-time consultant to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF), recently gave a talk entitled “American Policy in the Middle East: Who Does it Benefit?” at a special NAPF Luncheon Dialogue. A native of Iran, Prof. Nasri currently serves as Director of the International Studies program at Ventura College and teaches political science and economics courses. At the luncheon, he offered his thoughts on the critical role of the media in constructing the public’s perception of threat, the realities of divergent Muslim groups, and the consequences of American foreign policy in the Middle East.

    Prof. Nasri began by stating that individuals and states act on perceptions, and the observer is the key translator who turns facts into a reality. He asserted that we must overcome cognitive dissonance (the tendency to disregard opposing data in search of information that is instead supportive of our preconceived beliefs) for successful international problem solving. The global level requires actors to see each other’s perspectives; one party must essentially become the “other.”

    Nasri went on to describe how terrorism is perceptual: those considered “freedom fighters” or “founding fathers” by some are seen as “terrorists” by others. It is important to remember that many “terrorists” are relatively affluent, educated youth who are not against the United States but rather its invasive foreign policy.

    The media is supposed to present accurate perceptions of the parties involved in a conflict. But according to Prof. Nasri, the American media has failed in its responsibility to turn fact into reality, leading him to conclude that it is “the most important threat to American democracy.” BBC has recently stated that the American media, which is very one-sided, especially in issues of foreign concern, has lost any credibility it once had after its coverage of Iraq. Advertisers have the power to decide what is presented through American media, an issue of increasing concern with the Federal Communications Commission’s recent vote to ease restrictions on media consolidation. Furthermore, U.S. corporate control of the media is not contained in this country alone: Fox’s role in Israel has led to the demise of BBC there, and Rupert Murdock owns media in England, China, Australia, and Israel, in addition to his expanding ownership of U.S. media.

    What can American citizens do to confront the failure of their country’s mainstream media? Prof. Nasri suggested that they follow the example of other countries in having media classes as a part of general education. In such classes, students are instructed on how to read the news and distinguish news from propaganda.

    Focusing in on the politics on the Middle East, Prof. Nasri reminded the luncheon’s participants that Arabs make up less than one-third of the world’s total Muslim population and that not all Muslim countries have religious rulers. All religions have both fanatics and moderates, and Islam is no exception. Prof. Nasri identifies four major groups of Muslims:

    1. Fundamentalists, who insist on rigid adherence to the words and acts of Mohammed, often take direct and aggressive political action.

    2. Traditionalists, consisting largely of Islamic scholars, teacher, and apolitical individuals, have allowed recent events to influence their religious practice.

    3. Modernists, who seek tolerance and social justice through a religion that incorporates science, reject governments ruled by clergy.

    4. Pragmatists, often discredited by the other three groups, do not necessarily follow religious directives. Influenced by secular education, their ideal system consists of modernization, lay Muslim rulers, a secular government, and a combination of socialism and capitalism.

    Prof. Nasri noted that current U.S. policy makers, and to a large extent U.S. citizens, ignore the differences between Islamic belief systems, subscribing instead to a “Clash of Civilizations” mentality.

    American policy in the Middle East is described by Prof. Nasri as a “new imperialism,” protecting U.S. interests abroad and attempting to control oil and fresh water in the region. Through its actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has earned a reputation for being “strong on destruction; weak on construction.” Among the international community, America is now known as a nation of lawbreakers.

    Prof. Nasri revealed several negative domestic results from American policy towards the Middle East in addition to the changes in the international perception of the United States: The media has lost its credibility. Students from the Middle East are discouraged from coming to the U.S., meaning a loss in the brainpower and the cultural perspective in American universities and firms. There is militarization of American culture. And the economy has been weakened as tourism and sale of American products abroad has declined.

    Prof. Nasri concluded by sharing his insights on how American policy in the Middle East has influenced the world system: It has weakened NATO while encouraging a “might is right” attitude. It has legitimized the idea of using non-governmental organizations and supranational actors only when they are in accordance with particular agendas. And it has disregarded years of work towards global cooperation.

    American foreign policy in the Middle East, as seen by Prof. Nasri, is hurting American relations in the region and damaging the United States’ reputation in the world. In order for this to change, Americans must become better informed: about who the media really is, who Muslims really are, and how U.S. foreign policy is actually affecting the world in which we live.
    * Jui Shah, a student at the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University, is a Lena Cheng Intern at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.