Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: US policy

  • Erosion of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

    I recently participated in a meeting on the Future of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, sponsored by the Middle Powers Initiative at The Carter Center in Atlanta. The Middle Powers Initiative is a coalition of eight international civil society organizations, two of which have received the Nobel Peace Prize. I represented the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at the meeting, one of the founding organizations. In addition to civil society representatives such as myself, the meeting hosted diplomats from many countries. Among the participants were Marian Hobbs, New Zealand’s Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control; Senator Douglas Roche of Canada, chair of the Middle Powers Initiative; Nobuyasu Abe, United Nations Under-Secretary General for Disarmament Affairs; Ambassador Sergio de Queiroz Duarte, Brazilian Ambassador and President-Designate of the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference; former US Ambassador Robert Grey Jr.; and Ambassador Rajab M. Sukayri of the Jordanian Foreign Ministry.

    The participants in the consultation were mindful of the recent United Nations Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The Report, issued in December 2004, indicated that “the nuclear non-proliferation regime is now at risk because of lack of compliance with existing commitments, withdrawal or threats of withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to escape those commitments, a changing international security environment and the diffusion of technology.” The Report found, “We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.”

    The Report further found that “if a simple nuclear device were detonated in a major city, the number of deaths would range from tens of thousands to more than one million. The shock to international commerce, employment and travel would amount to at least one trillion dollars. Such an attack could have further, far-reaching implications for international security, democratic governance and civil rights.” It was against this background of concern that the Atlanta meeting took place. Ambassador Duarte, who will preside over the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, said, “What we have to contend with at the 2005 Review Conference is a persistent and serious situation of erosion of confidence in the mechanisms of the NPT and on the ability of the instrument to survive the tests it has been put through.”

    Among the major issues that were discussed were the need for the Non-Proliferation Treaty to become universal by bringing in the three nuclear weapons states that are not parties to the treaty (Israel, India and Pakistan) and bringing back North Korea; for the nuclear weapons states parties to the treaty to fulfill their obligations for good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament; for more effective safeguarding of nuclear materials and inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency; and for some effective method of sanctions for violating the Treaty’s provisions.

    Former President Jimmy Carter, who spoke at the meeting, pointed out, “Prospects for this year’s discussions are not encouraging. I have heard that the [Preparatory Committee] for the forthcoming Non-Proliferation Treaty talks have so far failed even to achieve an agenda because of the deep divisions between the nuclear powers who seek to stop proliferation without meeting their own disarmament commitments, and the Non-Aligned Movement, whose demands include firm disarmament commitments and considerations of the Israeli arsenal.”

    President Carter also pointed to the contradictions in US nuclear policy. “The United States claims to be upholding Article VI,” he said, referring to the disarmament provision of the Treaty, “but yet asserts a security strategy of testing and developing new weapons [such as] Star Wars and the earth penetrating ‘bunker buster,’ and has threatened first use, even against non-nuclear states, in case of ‘surprising military developments’ and ‘unexpected contingencies.’”

    President Carter referred to another of the contradictions in the approach to nuclear non-proliferation in addressing the issue of Iran and the Middle East: “While the international community is justified in exerting strong pressure on Iran to comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, there is no public effort or comment in the United States or Europe calling for Israel to comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty or submit to any other restraints. At the same time, we fail to acknowledge what a powerful incentive this is to Iran, Syria, Egypt, and other states to join the nuclear community.”

    There was a general sense at the meeting that the non-proliferation regime, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty that is its centerpiece, is eroding, and that some measure of success at the May 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference is critical to the future of this regime. Right now the United States is choosing not to recognize the progress made at previous NPT Review Conferences on nuclear disarmament obligations. The Bush administration doesn’t want to be bound by promises made at the 1995 and 2000 NPT Review Conferences, promises that committed the nuclear weapons states to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, to make nuclear disarmament transparent and irreversible, and to an “unequivocal undertaking” to achieve complete nuclear disarmament.

    The US position is throwing the prospects for the 2005 Review Conference into disarray. There was a general sense at the meeting that unless the nuclear weapons states, including the United States, stand by their previous commitments, the prospects for assuring future efforts to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation are dim. This is where we stand three months prior to the beginning of the 2005 Review Conference.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), and a member of the International Steering Committee of the Middle Powers Initiative.

  • The Two Sides of the Nuclear Coin

    Despite George W. Bush’s repeated warnings about nuclear proliferation, he and his fellow Republicans deserve much of the blame for it. Ever since the advent of the Bush administration, it has charged that other nations are acquiring nuclear weapons. Justifying war with Iraq, the administration hammered away at that nation’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. It has also assailed North Korea and Iran for their nuclear programs. On Feb. 11, in a major policy address, President Bush called for new steps to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. The world must act, he said, to “confront these dangers and to end them.”

    At the same time, the administration has virtually scrapped the longstanding U.S. policy of nuclear disarmament — exactly the policy that, over the decades, has provided the key to halting nuclear proliferation.

    In 1965, when the U.S. and Soviet governments worried about the prospect of nuclear weapons spreading to dozens of nations, they teamed up to submit nonproliferation treaties to the UN General Assembly. Non-nuclear nations immediately objected to these proposals, arguing that they would merely restrict the nuclear club to its current members (then the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China). Alva Myrdal, Sweden’s disarmament minister, insisted that “disarmament measures should be a matter of mutual renunciation.” Willy Brandt, West Germany’s foreign minister, argued that a nonproliferation treaty was justified “only if the nuclear states regard it as a step toward restrictions of their own armaments and toward disarmament.”

    Unlike the Bush administration, U.S. and Soviet leaders of the time recognized that nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament were two sides of the same coin. As a result, the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that emerged from the United Nations was substantially broadened. Non-nuclear states pledged “not to make or acquire nuclear weapons.” And nuclear nations agreed to take “effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” Further, when it signed and ratified this treaty, the U.S. government pledged not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that had endorsed the NPT and that were not allied with a nation possessing nuclear weapons.

    With this bargain struck between the nuclear haves and have-nots, nearly all nations signed the NPT. Over the next 30 years, only one additional nation (Israel) developed nuclear weapons. To some degree, the success of this nonproliferation policy reflected citizens’ campaigns for nuclear disarmament that stigmatized nuclear weapons and encouraged the signing of nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties. But it also resulted from the mutual renunciation features of the NPT, which paired abstention from building nuclear weapons by most nations with nuclear disarmament and non-threatening behavior by the others.

    Unfortunately, the NPT began unraveling in the late 1990s. The Republican-dominated U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a landmark measure negotiated and signed by President Clinton. Given their control of Congress, the Republicans also managed to advance plans for a national missile defense system, a venture that contravened a key arms control measure, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Meanwhile, India, pointing to the failure of the nuclear powers to divest themselves of their nuclear weapons, became a nuclear nation in 1998. This act provoked Pakistan to do the same.

    After the presidential election of 2000, U.S. policy tilted sharply against nuclear disarmament and other pledges made in the NPT. Ignoring the commitments made by his Democratic and Republican predecessors, Bush pulled the United States out of the ABM treaty, ordered the deployment of a missile defense system and rejected the test ban treaty. The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review called for sustaining and modernizing nuclear weapons for at least the next half-century. The review also included contingency plans for U.S. nuclear attacks upon non-nuclear nations, among them North Korea. In the fall of 2003, the Bush administration pushed legislation through Congress to authorize the development of new, “usable” nuclear weapons.

    Given this repudiation of NPT commitments, it’s not surprising that North Korea has pulled out of the NPT and, perhaps, has begun building nuclear weapons. Nor is it surprising that a number of other nations might be working to develop a nuclear weapons capability. If the nuclear powers cling to their nuclear weapons and threaten their use, then other nations will inevitably try to join the nuclear club.

    As Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has observed: “We all have to be moving away from nuclear weapons. It can’t be just a mandate from the United States that everybody goes in one direction while we go in another.” But this is exactly what the Bush administration — in yet another example of its go-it-alone foreign policy — is pressing for.

    Nuclear proliferation cannot be halted without nuclear disarmament. As the old song goes: “You can’t have one without the other!”
    *Mr. Wittner teaches history at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press). He is a writer for the History News Service.

  • Armageddon Back on the Table

    U.S. ratchets up debate on `usable’ nuclear weapons
    Critics fear fallout from Bush cadre’s pro-nuke strategy

    Originally Published by the Toronto Star

    Since nuclear bombs exploded on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the possibility of an atomic Armageddon has made the use of such cataclysmic weapons unthinkable.

    But after the election of President George W. Bush, and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the word “nuclear” has been creeping back into the vocabulary of American policy, reaching for a respectability that until recently was thought gone for good.

    Lobbying Congress for funds to research and develop new nuclear weapons, Bush has opened the back door to the doctrine of a “fightable” nuclear war, one in which the use of small or limited nuclear weapons would be possible or even desirable to defeat ruthless and unconventional enemies.

    “Nuclear programs are a cornerstone of U.S. national security posture,” said Congress’ Armed Services Committee, which recently backed the allocation of $400 billion (all figures U.S.) for national defence in the coming year.

    Both critics and supporters of developing “usable” nuclear weapons agree that the path from the laboratory to the launching pad is a long and difficult one.

    But since the Bush administration presented its radical “Nuclear Posture Review” in March, 2002, pro-nuclear officials have been pushing steadily ahead toward developing weapons that will cross the line that separates conventional from unconventional warfare, threatening half a century of disarmament negotiations, treaties and taboos.

    This month, the Senate endorsed an Energy and Water Appropriations Bill allocating $7.5 million to research on nuclear “bunker-buster” bombs and $10.8 million to plans for nuclear “pit” facilities to produce triggers for new nuclear bombs. Both sums were reduced from totals originally requested by Bush officials.

    A final environmental study is being prepared to determine how and where the pits should be manufactured.

    Crucial to the administration’s hopes for developing a new generation of nukes was the repeal in May of a 1993 ban on research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons — those with a force of less than 5 kilotons, or 5,000 tonnes of TNT.

    The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, by comparison, was approximately 15 kilotons.

    “A one-kiloton nuclear weapon detonated 20 to 50 feet underground would dig a crater the size of Ground Zero in New York and eject one million cubic feet of radioactive debris into the air,” says California Senator Diane Feinstein, an opponent of usable nuclear weapons.

    The development of any new nuclear arms would require testing. And as early as June, 2001, Bush also signalled that he might consider ending an 11-year moratorium on underground nuclear blasts.

    He called for a scientific review of the Nevada test site that resulted in shortening the time it would take to restart nuclear test explosions from 36 months to no more than 18 months from the time an order to resume nuclear testing is given.

    And although the Bush administration has so far made little progress in promoting the development of “mini nukes” that could be used against enemy forces, the influential Defence Science Board that advises the Pentagon has thrown its weight behind them.

    In a leaked report, due to be tabled in the next few months, the board urges the development of lower-yield weapons that would have more battlefield “credibility” than the more powerful current nuclear bombs.

    The rationale of the pro-nuclear supporters is clear: After Sept. 11, America is fighting an unpredictable enemy that must be attacked and eradicated by any possible means.

    “As seen in Afghanistan, conventional weapons are not always able to destroy underground targets,” said the Armed Services Committee, which backed the new nuclear policy.

    “The United States may need nuclear earth penetrators (bunker-busters) to destroy underground facilities where rogue nations have stored chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.”

    Keith Payne, the Pentagon’s civilian liaison with the U.S. Strategic Command, which plans how a nuclear war could be fought, has for a decade promoted the idea of usable nukes.

    Payne believes the lessons of the 1991 Gulf War included the discovery that Scud missiles might elude attack. In a 1999 paper on the future of American nuclear weapons, he wrote: “If the locations of dispersed mobile launchers cannot be determined with enough precision to permit pinpoint strikes, suspected deployment areas might be subjected to multiple nuclear strikes.”

    Other pro-nuclear theorists say a new generation of fightable nukes might have a deterrent effect on the kind of enemies America now faces: guerrilla groups and unpredictable terrorists.

    “All we have left is nuclear use and pre-emption, so that something a little bigger, with a little more bite, does not emerge as the next threat against our security and values,” says Barry Zellen, publisher of the electronic security bulletin, SecureFrontiers.com.

    “Our willingness to go beyond deterrence to a more pro-active strategy of nuclear use might just end up achieving what we wanted in the beginning: successful deterrence of further aggression and terror against us, now and in the future.”

    Opponents of nuclear weapons fiercely disagree. They shudder at the thought of crossing the line between fighting a conventional and nuclear war, once considered unthinkable. And they argue that such a move would promote, rather than deter terrorism.

    One of the most troubling aspects, critics say, is the “creeping respectability” of arms that have been considered beyond the pale of defence policy.

    “It creates the image of `clean’ nuclear weapons,” says Brice Smith of the Maryland-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.

    “We can use them without all the old Cold War anxieties about total destruction. A lot of psychology is involved here and it includes the very powerful idea of being able to defeat attempts to use chemical and biological weapons against us.”

    However, experts say, usable nukes would be far from environmentally safe. Bunker-busting bombs would explode close to the surface of their targets, spreading radioactivity through an explosion of dust and causing the death of tens of thousands of people if dropped on urban areas.

    It is also likely, says Smith, that the explosions would spread deadly chemicals or bioagents, rather than destroying them.

    And, critics argue, the political fallout from threatening to use, let alone using, such weapons would be dangerous to the United States and its Western allies.

    Apart from inciting terrorism, such a policy would create deeper cynicism about Washington’s disregard for international treaties on nuclear weapons, convincing countries like Iran and North Korea that Washington is applying double standards when it insists they halt efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

    The Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists, which monitors nuclear peril worldwide, last year moved its Doomsday Clock forward two minutes, to seven minutes to midnight, citing the Bush administration’s failure to change its Cold War nuclear-alert practices while authorizing its weapons labs to work on the design of new nuclear arms.

    “Terrorist efforts to acquire and use nuclear and biological weapons present a great danger,” concluded George Lopez, the Bulletin’s board chairman.

    “But the U.S. preference for the use of pre-emptive force rather than diplomacy could be equally dangerous.”

    Historian and Kennedy-era political adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr., put it more flamboyantly.

    “Looking back over the 40 years of the Cold War,” he wrote in The New York Review Of Books, “we can be everlastingly grateful that the loonies on both sides were powerless. In 2003, however, they run the Pentagon, and preventive war — the Bush doctrine — is now official policy.”

    Those who follow the progress of the new nuclear doctrine say its resurgence signals the comeback of its backers, a pro-nuclear cadre that has for years urged a more aggressive approach to both domestic and military nuclear policy.

    The cadre includes Vice-President Dick Cheney, who urged planning for nuclear strikes against Third World “enemy” countries as secretary of defence in the first Bush administration; Payne, who wrote a doctrine of fightable nuclear war; and Pentagon threat-reduction chief Stephen Younger, a director of the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory and one of the first scientists to promote the use of low-yield nuclear weapons.

    With an influential group of lobbyists working closely with the White House, it appears highly likely that plans to produce a new generation of nuclear weapons would go forward if Bush wins a second term.

    However, there is trepidation in the ranks of both Republican and Democratic parties about such a development.

    Congress has so far made sure that funding is limited to the exploratory stages of the project and that millions rather than billions of dollars have been allocated

    “By seeking to develop new nuclear weapons,” says Senator Feinstein, “the United States sends the message that nuclear weapons have a future battlefield role and utility. That is the wrong direction and, in my view, will only cause America to be placed in greater jeopardy in the future.”

    The opposition is unlikely to weaken the pro-nuclear cadre’s resolve, however.

    “What you’re seeing is a thoughtless strategy being pursued under cover of the war on terrorism, by people who always wanted to do this,” says arms-control expert William Arkin of Johns Hopkins University’s Institute of Advanced International Studies.

    “Now, they’re in a position to seize their chance.”

    Critics say a new arms race is on the horizon and they predict the effect on global security to be gloomy, as resentment escalates toward the United States for its double standard of developing nuclear weapons, while insisting that others desist.

    In the United States, says Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, “there is a creeping respectability of nuclear weapons.”What Bush has done is emphasize that there are not only bad weapons out there, but bad people with bad weapons.

    “Then, the line becomes blurred, because he’s implying that responsible states are entitled to possess and even use the same kinds of weapons.

    “In fact, these are all weapons of mass terror, and we should never forget that.”

    Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited

  • Then and Now

    PLOTLINE: A small network of ideologues in positions of power beyond their due are intent upon reshaping the world on their terms. Their existence revolves around a black and white reality; a world of perfect days ever threatened by perfect storms. Frustrated with intelligence experts who forecast partly cloudy skies in the atmosphere of international relations, they conjure rogue intelligence to justify stormy international arrogance. They flood media with propaganda. Winds of fear shift the public mood. Hearts of nations harden. Conflicts simmer. Military budgets explode.

    Sound familiar? While the plot and the actors are the same, the stage is different. In late 1975, a small group of conservatives across the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government were convinced that America’s military strength was falling behind the Soviet war machine. Out of this group — known as “the cabal” — came the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a group of like-minded ideologues who contended that CIA analysts had chronically understated the threat posed by the Soviet Union, and thus that U.S. military spending levels were dangerously low.

    At the request of then-CIA chief George H.W. Bush, the Committee was brought in to develop an alternative assessment of the CIA’s raw intelligence. The resulting report — known as the Team B assessment — wildly overestimated Soviet military capability, and led to dire warnings to U.S. policymakers and the public. President Ford’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger condemned the report.

    But one of the assessment’s primary promoters acquired what he needed. That man was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the same Rumsfeld who championed the war on Iraq nearly 30 years later based upon overblown conclusions from his rogue Office of Special Plans. Saying back then that “no doubt exists about the capabilities of the Soviet armed forces” Rumsfeld and his allies used the report to undercut nuclear arms control negotiations for years to come, and to lay the groundwork for procurement of a wide range of new weapons systems, including the MX missile.

    MX was designed to thwart the first-strike threat of the Soviet Union. It called for a basing system in which hundreds of missiles — each one capable of destroying scores of Soviet cities and vaporizing millions of human beings — would be transported continuously on tracks crisscrossing my home state of Utah and other surrounding states. It was called the “shell game” basing system: by employing thousands more decoys on the same tracks, it was thought, the Russians would not be able to wipe out the real missiles. In the view of its champions, the MX missile system might also have served the purpose of focusing Soviet nuclear firepower into the heart of the West, away from the more populated East.
    To realize this crazy scheme, some astonishing feats of engineering would have been required: more concrete than was used to create the entire U.S. interstate highway system; rivers, reservoirs and aquifers watering five states would have been tapped; some of the world’s most beautiful national parks would have been destroyed, and sacred American Indian lands violated.

    In short, Rumsfeld’s MX would have destroyed America’s West in a twisted effort to save it, transforming an oasis of ancient natural beauty into the biggest labyrinthine wasteland, by far, of the many wastelands our children now inherit from their fearful, militaristic ancestors.

    But today’s growing opposition to Rumsfeld’s obscene vision of international policy can take heart: my father, along with scores of other citizens across the West, mounted a grass-roots campaign 25 years ago. They brought the MX battle into the streets, synagogues, churches and schools. Students, teachers, parents, bishops, workers, cowboys and sisters took the debate to neighbors and news stations across the West. And after four years of fighting, they brought down Rumsfeld’s monster, and the insanity of policy by brass was revealed.

    As we witness the same old cold warriors regurgitate the same old insanities, as they shred international accord while cheerleading international democracy, as they spark nuclear arms races while decrying nuclear proliferation, we can take heart: true power always remains with the people willing to exercise it, and ordinary people have beaten back powerful barbarians in the past.

    If students, teachers, parents, bishops, workers, cowboys and sisters — and those few politicians who remember their responsibilities — remember the power granted them by the founders of this great nation, we can and will do so again in 2004.

    *Joseph P. Firmage is Chairman & CEO of The ManyOne Network

  • Vietnam and Iraq Have More Similarities Than Differences

    CHICAGO — To my immense surprise, I recently ran into the American scholar who, for many correspondents in Vietnam, offered the most fair-minded analysis of the war.

    Suddenly, there was Gerald “Gerry” Hickey at the Chicago Public Library, a little grayer after 35 years, but still much the same, with a big smile on his face and a welcome “Hello!”

    I remembered well how Gerry, then the Rand Corp.’s top man in Vietnam, had meticulously explained for us the cultures and behavior of highland tribes such as the Montagnards, but also the Viet Cong and the “pro-American” Saigon government.

    “And now we’re doing the same thing all over again,” he said as we talked about Iraq. “First, we suffer from the same invincible ignorance about Iraq that we suffered over Vietnamese culture. Second, in Vietnam we set the military impact with no concern about our effect on South Vietnamese culture. By the time we left in 1975, they were just exhausted. They were just tired out — and so was I.

    “It is so sad now that I can see the same mistakes being made in Iraq. The GIs busting down the doors, breaking into homes, doing everything wrong. But, you know something,” he went on, sadness outlining his voice, “I’m shocked at much of what we are seeing in Iraq: The Americans are much crueler than they were in Vietnam. Remember, when American correspondents found American troops burning down houses — that was remarkable then; today it’s the norm.”

    Gerry and I talked a long time that day, mulling over our common experiences, wondering primarily why the United States can’t ever pause to analyze a country correctly, and above all comparing the two conflicts.

    Despite the myriad voices in the press insisting, “Iraq is not a Vietnam!” the indisputable fact is that, if you consider the passions and principles applied there, it really IS another Vietnam. Among the causes for the war are obscurantist theories about foreign threats that have little basis in reality; civilians at the top who play with the soldiers they have never been; and the underlying lies that give credence to special interests (the Bay of Tonkin pretense in Vietnam, the supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq).
    In Vietnam, we were following the bizarre notion of the “domino theory,” the idea that a communist Vietnam would mean that all of Southeast Asia would fall to communism. The Johnson administration refused to realize that it was a colonial war, and that in colonial wars, people fight forever.

    With Iraq, the second Bush administration accepted the idea, perfervidly pushed by civilian neoconservatives, that Iraq was the center of terrorism, the cause of 9/11 and an immediate threat, ignoring the Greek chorus of voices warning against such intellectual, military and moral folly.

    Curiosly, in both cases it was civilian ideological fanatics in the Pentagon, enamored of American technology and with no knowledge of history or culture, and not the U.S. military, who pressed for the wars. (It was Robert McNamara and his “whiz kids” then; now it’s Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and others.)

    Perhaps the old American maxim of civilian control of the military might be changed, with what we are seeing, to military control of the civilians.

    Other comparisons of the two wars:

    Today, one hears a doublespeak that almost echoes the communists of the old days. In Vietnam, it was, “We had to destroy the village to save it.” With Iraq, it is President Bush’s statement of last week that “the more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react!”

    Today, it’s called “Iraqization.” In Vietnam, it was called “Vietnamization” — late-hour attempts to make everything look as though it’s working. As military historian William Lind wryly remarked to me of Iraqization, “It presumes that because you pay someone, he’s yours.”

    In 1967 in Vietnam, I spent a lot of time interviewing officers and troops all over the country, and I wrote a series of articles that my paper, the Chicago Daily News, headlined with: “The GI Who Asks ‘Why?’” Today’s GIs are beginning to ask that same question.

    America needs to look seriously at these two wars and analyze why it repeatedly gets involved in painful and costly faraway conflicts. Why, when we could with little effort be a great example for mankind, do we allow the driven and arrogant technocrats of the Vietnam era and the cynical and extremist Jacobins today to carry us to war after useless war?

  • Mistakes of Vietnam repeated with Iraq

    “Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn’t go when you had the chance.”

    The president of the United States decides to go to war against a nation led by a brutal dictator supported by one-party rule. That dictator has made war on his neighbors. The president decides this is a threat to the United States.

    In his campaign for president he gives no indication of wanting to go to war. In fact, he decries the overextension of American military might and says other nations must do more. However, unbeknownst to the American public, the president’s own Pentagon advisers have already cooked up a plan to go to war. All they are looking for is an excuse.

    Based on faulty intelligence, cherry-picked information is fed to Congress and the American people. The president goes on national television to make the case for war, using as part of the rationale an incident that never happened. Congress buys the bait — hook, line and sinker — and passes a resolution giving the president the authority to use “all necessary means” to prosecute the war.

    The war is started with an air and ground attack. Initially there is optimism. The president says we are winning. The cocky, self-assured secretary of defense says we are winning. As a matter of fact, the secretary of defense promises the troops will be home soon.

    However, the truth on the ground that the soldiers face in the war is different than the political policy that sent them there. They face increased opposition from a determined enemy. They are surprised by terrorist attacks, village assassinations, increasing casualties and growing anti-American sentiment. They find themselves bogged down in a guerrilla land war, unable to move forward and unable to disengage because there are no allies to turn the war over to.

    There is no plan B. There is no exit strategy. Military morale declines. The president’s popularity sinks and the American people are increasingly frustrated by the cost of blood and treasure poured into a never-ending war.

    Sound familiar? It does to me.

    The president was Lyndon Johnson. The cocky, self-assured secretary of defense was Robert McNamara. The congressional resolution was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The war was the war that I, U.S. Sens. John Kerry, Chuck Hagel and John McCain and 3 1/2 million other Americans of our generation were caught up in. It was the scene of America’s longest war. It was also the locale of the most frustrating outcome of any war this nation has ever fought.

    Unfortunately, the people who drove the engine to get into the war in Iraq never served in Vietnam. Not the president. Not the vice president. Not the secretary of defense. Not the deputy secretary of defense. Too bad. They could have learned some lessons:

    Don’t underestimate the enemy. The enemy always has one option you cannot control. He always has the option to die. This is especially true if you are dealing with true believers and guerillas fighting for their version of reality, whether political or religious. They are what Tom Friedman of The New York Times calls the “non-deterrables.” If those non-deterrables are already in their country, they will be able to wait you out until you go home.

    If the enemy adopts a “hit-and-run” strategy designed to inflict maximum casualties on you, you may win every battle, but (as Walter Lippman once said about Vietnam) you can’t win the war.

    If you adopt a strategy of not just pre-emptive strike but also pre-emptive war, you own the aftermath. You better plan for it. You better have an exit strategy because you cannot stay there indefinitely unless you make it the 51st state.

    If you do stay an extended period of time, you then become an occupier, not a liberator. That feeds the enemy against you.

    . If you adopt the strategy of pre-emptive war, your intelligence must be not just “darn good,” as the president has said; it must be “bulletproof,” as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed the administration’s was against Saddam Hussein. Anything short of that saps credibility.

    If you want to know what is really going on in the war, ask the troops on the ground, not the policy-makers in Washington.

    In a democracy, instead of truth being the first casualty in war, it should be the first cause of war. It is the only way the Congress and the American people can cope with getting through it. As credibility is strained, support for the war and support for the troops go downhill. Continued loss of credibility drains troop morale, the media become more suspicious, the public becomes more incredulous and Congress is reduced to hearings and investigations.

    Instead of learning the lessons of Vietnam, where all of the above happened, the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense and the deputy secretary of defense have gotten this country into a disaster in the desert.

    They attacked a country that had not attacked us. They did so on intelligence that was faulty, misrepresented and highly questionable.

    A key piece of that intelligence was an outright lie that the White House put into the president’s State of the Union speech. These officials have overextended the American military, including the National Guard and the Reserve, and have expanded the U.S. Army to the breaking point.

    A quarter of a million troops are committed to the Iraq war theater, most of them bogged down in Baghdad. Morale is declining and casualties continue to increase. In addition to the human cost, the war in dollars costs $1 billion a week, adding to the additional burden of an already depressed economy.

    The president has declared “major combat over” and sent a message to every terrorist, “Bring them on.” As a result, he has lost more people in his war than his father did in his and there is no end in sight.

    Military commanders are left with extended tours of duty for servicemen and women who were told long ago they were going home. We are keeping American forces on the ground, where they have become sitting ducks in a shooting gallery for every terrorist in the Middle East.

    –Max Cleland, former U.S. senator, was head of the Veterans Administration in the Carter administration. He teaches at American University in Washington.

  • We Stand Our Ground

    Originally published by truthout.org

    I must begin by saying that standing here before you is, simply, one of the greatest honors of my life. I have never served in the armed forces in any capacity. My father, however, did. He volunteered for service in Vietnam in 1969. The changes that war wrought upon him have affected, for both good and ill, every single day of my life. Vietnam did not only affect the generation that served there. It affected the children of those who served there, and the families of those who served there. That war is an American heirloom, great and terrible simultaneously, handed down from father to son and from mother to daughter, from father to daughter and from mother to son. The lessons learned there speak to us today, almost thirty years hence.

    Let me tell you a quick story about my father. His call to the freedom bird came while he was still out in the field. He arrived at Dulles Airport to meet my mother still dressed in his bush greens, still wearing the moustache, with the mud of Vietnam still under his fingernails and stuck inside the waffle of his boot sole.

    A few days earlier, he had come across a beautiful old French rifle. It was given to him by a Vietnamese friend, a former teacher with three children who had been conscripted permanently into the military. My father managed to bring this rifle home with him, and sent it on the flight in the baggage hold along with his duffel.

    My father and my mother stood waiting at the baggage claim for his things to come down. The people there – and this was 1970, remember – backed away from him as if he was radioactive. They knew where he had just come from. If the greens were not a giveaway, the standard issue muddy tan he and all the vets wore upon return from Vietnam was. When the rifle came down the belt, not in a package or a box, just laying there in all its reality, the crowd was appalled and horrified. My mother and father looked at each other and wondered what these people were thinking. What did they think was happening over there? What did they think it is that soldiers do? Did they even begin to understand this war, and what it meant, what it was doing to American soldiers, to the Vietnamese soldiers like my father’s friend, and to the civilians caught in the crossfire?

    The looks on those people’s faces there said enough. The answer was no. They didn’t know, and apparently didn’t want to know. Now, thirty three years later, we are back in that same place again, fighting a war few understand that is affecting soldiers and civilians in ways only those soldiers and civilians can truly know. Ignorance, it seems, is also an American heirloom to be passed down again and again and again.

    Many of you know, far better than I do, what my father felt that day in Dulles. That is why I am honored to speak to you tonight. If the American people fully knew what this war in Iraq was really about, if they fully knew what it means today to be a soldier in that part of the world, they would tear the White House apart brick by brick. If the people had but a taste of the horror and the lies, they would repudiate this administration and all it stands for. The don’t know, because they have been fed a glutton’s diet of misinformation and fraud. Changing that is why we are here.

    The first of August saw a very interesting article published in the Washington Post. The title was, “US Shifts Rhetoric On its Goals in Iraq.” The story quotes an unnamed administration source – I will bet you all the money in my wallet that this “source” was a man named Richard Perle – who outlined the newest reasons for our war over there. “That goal is to see the spread of our values,” said this aide, “and to understand that our values and our security are inextricably linked.”

    Our values. That’s an interesting concept coming from a member of this administration. We make much of the greatness and high moral standing of the United States of America, and there is much to be proud of. The advertising, however, has lately failed completely to match up with the product.

    Is it part of our value system to remain on a permanent war footing since World War II, shunting money desperately needed for human services and education into a military machine whose very size and expense demands the fighting of wars to justify its existence?

    Is it part of our value system to lie to the American people, to lie deeply and broadly and with no shame at all, about why we fight in Iraq?

    Is it part of our value system to sacrifice nearly three hundred American soldiers on the altar of those lies, to sacrifice thousands and thousands and thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq on the altar of those lies?

    Is it part of our value system to use the horror of September 11 to terrify the American people into an unnecessary war, into the ruination of their civil rights, into the annihilation of the Constitution?

    Is it part of our value system to use that terrible day against those American people who felt most personally the awful blow of that attack?

    Is striking first part of our value system?

    Is living in fear part of our value system?

    It is not part of my value system. It never will be.

    This new justification for our war in Iraq is yet another lie, an accent in a symphony of lies. The values this administration represents play no part in the common morality of the American people, play no part in the legal and constitutional system we adore and defend. One of the worst things ever to happen to this country was allowing the people within this administration to use words like “freedom” and “justice” and “democracy” and “patriotism,” for those good and noble words become the foulest of lies when passing their lips.

    For the record, the justification for war on Iraq was:

    The procurement by Iraq of uranium from Niger for use in a nuclear weapons program, plus 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agents – 500 tons, for those without calculators, is one million pounds – almost 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several mobile biological weapons labs, and connections between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda that led directly to the attacks of September 11.

    None of these weapons have been found. The mobile weapons labs – termed “Winnebagoes of Death” by Colin Powell – turned out to be weather balloon platforms sold to Iraq by the British in the 1980s. The infamous Iraq-al Qaeda connection has been shot to pieces by the recently released September 11 report. And the Niger uranium claim was based upon forgeries so laughable that America stands embarrassed and ashamed before the judgment of the world. This is all featured on the White House’s website on a page called ‘Disarming Saddam.’ The Niger claims, specifically, have yet to be removed.

    Lies. Lies. All lies.

    That Washington Post story, however, reveals a deeper truth here. Now that the original and terrifying claims to justify this war have been proven to be utterly and completely phony – Niger recently asked for an apology, by the way – the administration is falling back upon the justification for war that these men have been formulating for years and years and years.

    They call it Pax Americana, a plan to invade Iraq, take it over, create a permanent military presence there, and use the oil revenues to fund further wars against virtually every nation in that region. This we call bringing our “values” over there. Norman Podhoretz, one of the ideological fathers of this group of neoconservatives who now control the foreign policy of this nation, described the process as “The reformation and modernization of Islam.” That’s a pretty fancy phrase. I am a Catholic, and can therefore call it by its simpler name: Crusade. We know all about those.

    This is the Project for a New American Century, the product of a right-wing think tank that, in 1997, was considered so far out there that no one ever thought its members would ever come within ten miles of setting American policy. One broken election, however, vaulted these men into positions of unspeakable power. Their white papers, their dreams of empire at the point of the sword, have become our national nightmare, and the nightmare of the world. I speak of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Lewis Libby, and the rest of these New American Century men who have taken our beloved country and all it stands for it and thrown it down into the mud.

    You will note that I did not name George W. Bush, for blaming Bush for the gross misadministration of this government is like blaming Mickey Mouse when Disney screws up. He is not in charge. Truman said “The buck stops here,” and so we point to Bush as a symbol of all that has gone wrong. But he is not in charge. These other men, these New American Century men, have delivered us to this wretched estate, and by God in Heaven, there will be a reckoning for it.

    But is it all ideology for these men? Of course not. There is the payout. Have you ever heard of a company called United Defense, out of Arlington, Virginia? Let me introduce you. United Defense provides Combat Vehicle Systems, Fire Support, Combat Support Vehicle Systems, Weapons Delivery Systems, Amphibious Assault Vehicles, and Combat Support Services. Some of United Defense’s current programs include:

    The Bradley Family of Fighting Vehicles, the M113 Family of Fighting Vehicles, the M88A2 Recovery Vehicle, the Grizzly, the M9 ACE, the Composite Armored Vehicle, the M6 Linebacker, the M4 Command and Control Vehicle, the Battle Command Vehicle, the Paladin, the Future Scout and Cavalry System, the Crusader, Electric Gun Technology/Pulse Power, Advanced Simulations and Training Systems, and Fleet Management. This list goes on and on, and includes virtually everything an eternal war might need.

    Who owns United Defense? Why, the Carlyle Group, which bought United Defense in October of 1997. For those not in the know, the Carlyle Group is a private global investment firm. Carlyle is the eleventh largest defense contractor in the US because of its ownership of companies making tanks, aircraft wings and other equipment. Carlyle has ownership stakes in 164 companies which generated $16 billion in revenues in the year 2000 alone. The Carlyle Group does not provide investment or other services to the general public.

    Who works for the Carlyle Group? George Herbert Walker Bush works for the Carlyle Group, has been a senior consultant for Carlyle for some years now, and sits on the Board of Directors. This company is profiting wildly from this war in Iraq, a tidy gift from son to father.

    And then, of course, there is Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, profiting in the millions from the oil in Iraq. Halliburton subsidiary, Brown & Root, is also in Iraq. Their stock in trade is the building of permanent military bases. Here is your permanent military presence in Iraq, and all for an incredible fee. Cheney still draws a one million dollar annual check from Halliburton, what they call a ‘deferred retirement benefit.’ In Boston, we call that a paycheck.

    Pax Americana. That which President Kennedy spoke so eloquently and specifically against when he said, “What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced upon the world by our weapons of war.” This is now the rule of law for this nation. It must be stopped, and we must be the ones to stop it.

    This is America. At bottom, America is a dream, an idea. You can take away all our roads, our crops, our people, our cities, our armies – you can take all of that away, and the idea will still be there as pure and great as anything conceived by the human mind. I do very much believe that the idea that is America stands as the last, best hope for this world. When used properly, it can work wonders.

    That idea, that dream, is in mortal peril. You can still have all our roads, our crops, our people, our cities, our armies – you can have all of that, but if you murder the idea that is America, you have murdered America itself in a way that ten thousand September 11ths could never do. The men and women within this current administration are murdering the idea that is America with their Patriot Acts, their destruction of civil liberties, their lies, their daily undermining of even the most basic tenets of decency and freedom and justice that we have tried to live up to for 227 years.

    That, and that alone, should be enough to get you on your feet with your fist in the air, whether or not you believe we have any chance of stopping all this. We may not win, but we damned well have to fight them. If we don’t, we are the traitors some would say we are.

    When you stare into the obsidian darkness of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, it stares back at you. The stone of the monument is jet black, but polished so that you must face your own reflected eyes should you dare to read the names inscribed there. You are not alone in that place.

    You stand shoulder to shoulder with the dead, and when those names shine out around and above and below the person you see in that stone, you become their graveyard. Your responsibility to those names, simply, is to remember.

    Remember what that dream, that idea that is America, is supposed to be. Never forget it. Never let your children forget. Hand it down, generation after generation, because it is the most valuable heirloom we all possess. If we lose it, we have lost everything.

    When all else fails, I fall back on the words of the extraordinary anti-war activist, Daniel Berrigan. A friend of Berrigan’s, Mitchell Snyder, was for years an advocate and activist for the homeless in Washington DC. Snyder became despondent over the fact that his government could spend billions on bombs and planes and guns, but could not seem to find the money to help the homeless. Snyder became so despondent that he committed suicide. Daniel Berrigan penned these lines in memory of Snyder, and it is in these lines that I find my hope and strength when the darkness creeps too close.

    Some stood up once, and sat down Some walked a mile, and walked away Some stood up twice, then sat down, “I’ve had it” they said, Some walked two miles, then walked away. “It’s too much,” they cried. Some stood and stood and stood. They were taken for fools, They were taken for being taken in. Some walked and walked and walked. They walked the earth, They walked the waters, They walked the air. “Why do you stand,” they were asked, “and why do you walk?” “Because of the children,” they said, “And because of the heart, “And because of the bread,” “Because the cause is the heart’s beat, And the children born And the risen bread.”

    The cause is the heart’s beat. This cause is my heart’s beat. It is yours. May it be there for all time, until that day comes when we can, once again, stand in awe and pride before our flag and our government and our nation, when we can once again revel in the rescued dream that is America.

    Until then we are at the barricades, and on the streets, and in the faces of all those who would spend the precious blood of our men and women on lies and profit and greed. The obsidian darkness of that memorial demands this of us. The golden ideals of this nation demand this of us. The laws of our forefathers demand this of us. Most importantly, we demand this of ourselves.

    They can take nothing from us that we are not willing to give, and we are not willing to give this great nation up. Let them be warned. We stand our ground.

  • Lying to Provoke a War, Not a New Issue in Washington

    “The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons. The Iraqi regime is building the facilities necessary to make more biological and chemical weapons.” President George W. Bush.

    -Rose Garden Sept. 26, 2002

    “Sending Americans into battle is the most profound decision a President can make…If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means — sparing, in every way we can, the innocent. And if war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States military — and we will prevail. ”

    -President George W. Bush State of the Union, January 2003

    “The cup of forbearance has been exhausted. After reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil.”

    -President James Polk, Declaration of War with Mexico, May 11, 1846

    Deceit and treachery is nothing new in politics. The actual confrontation of facts of the real causes for the Iraqi war reminds me of Abraham Lincoln’s attacks on President Polk and his party over the origins of the war with Mexico. Specifically, the young congressman from Illinois demanded among other points “That the President of the United States be respectfully requested to inform this House – Whether the spot on which the blood of our citizens was shed, as in his messages declared, was or was not within the territory of Spain, at least after the treaty of 1819 until the Mexican revolution.”

    Years later, Stephen A. Douglas reminded him of them in the Senatorial campaign in 1858, saying Lincoln had distinguished himself by “taking the side of the common enemy against his own country.”

    The maneuvers of the Polk administration to have a casus belli with his neighbors from the South were numerous and ingenious even so the CIA or other “Intelligence” agencies were not yet formed.

    Many voices of great stature were raised in 1846 opposing these tactics. Former President John Quincy Adams denounced the policy long pursued towards Mexico and dared to vote against the Mexican war. A few weeks before his death Mr. Adams voted for a resolution withdrawing the American troops from Mexico and relinquishing all claims for the expenses of the war. For that, the press and government officials accused him of “treason ” and “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” We can compare here the cases of some personalities in our time like Martin Sheen, Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore and the Dixie Chicks who dared to express their opposition to the aggressive policies of Mr. Bush and for that reason have been harassed and even threatened to lose their livelihood.

    Many more, like Adams, believed that the United States had stung Mexico into defense of her rightful possessions. Ulysses S. Grant, the victorious General of the Civil War and twice president of the U.S., was a second Lieutenant in the “army of observation” of Zachary Taylor. Grant thought the armed march to Mexico was “unholy.” In his “Personal Memoirs” he stated “and to this day I regard the Mexican war as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.” Grant also regrets for having “lacked moral courage enough to resign.” I wonder if Secretary Colin Powell has ever read Grant’s memoirs.

    Henry Thoreau made his own protest against the war by refusing to pay his state poll tax. He passed a brief time in jail and after his aunt paid the tax he wrote in his cabin on Walden Pond “Essay on Civil Disobedience,” one of the best-known pieces of American literature.

    In his State of the Union Address in January 2003, President Bush solemnly declared, “We seek peace. We strive for peace. And sometimes peace must be defended. A future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all. If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means — sparing, in every way we can, the innocent.”

    President Polk stated something similar, assuring the people of Mexico they had nothing to fear from the American invading forces because they were there to “protect them and help them to get rid of their bad government.” No mention, of course, of his lust for Mexican territory.

    In 1847 the American forces commanded by General Winfield Scott bombarded and destroyed the port of Veracruz. During that battle a young Captain, Robert E. Lee, another future personality of the Civil War, wrote in one of his letters ” The fire was terrific and the shells thrown from our battery were constant and regular discharges, so beautiful in their flight and so destructive in their fall. It was awful! My heart bled for the inhabitants. The soldiers I did not care so much for, but it was terrible to think of the women and children.” (A Biography of Robert Lee by General Fitzhugh Lee, 1989) So much for the “protection and help” from President Polk.

    In 1848, a great abolitionist, William Jay wrote one of the most critical books regarding that unjust conflict. In “Review of the Mexican War” Jay asserts, “We have been taught to ring our bells, and illuminate our windows and let off fireworks as manifestation of our joy, when we have heard of great ruin and devastation, and misery, and death, inflicted by our troops upon a people who never injured us, who never fired a shot on our soil, and who were utterly incapable of acting on the offensive against us”

    The Mexican war has been the most beneficial to the United States. The annexation of Texas was secured and what now are New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and part of Wyoming became the golden West.

    On Veterans Day this productive war is not mentioned at all, ignoring the thousands of Americans who perished following the Manifest Destiny doctrine, perhaps because it was a simple war of conquest.

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

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

    In the end, from 1846 to 2003, nothing much has changed.

  • Economic Justice for All

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

    These revolutionary words from the Declaration of Independence are worth reflecting upon in light of the current struggle for economic justice in America. The government of the United States, the richest and most powerful country in the world, is perpetuating economic injustice within the United States and throughout the world. While the government seems to have unlimited funds for missiles and munitions, it is failing to provide health care, housing or education for large segments of the US population.

    Millions of Americans, including working Americans, live below the poverty line. There are more than 40 million Americans without health insurance with little or no access to basic medical care. There are tens of millions of Americans without homes, and home ownership is becoming an impossible dream for most young Americans. The possibilities of a college education are also receding for young Americans, as the funds provided for education diminish. The truth is that we have no economic justice in this country and the situation is growing rapidly worse under the Bush administration.

    State budgets are running in the red, and that means that their services to the people are diminishing. In 2002, states cut $49 billion in health care, welfare benefits, education and other public services. They plan to cut another $25.7 billion in 2003. State budget cuts this year and last year will be nearly equivalent to the initial amounts requested by Mr. Bush and allocated by Congress for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Rather than help the states in meeting their budgets, and thereby support the American people, Mr. Bush has squandered our federal funds on an illegal foreign war.

    In spite of these shortfalls, Mr. Bush pressed for tax cuts of over $700 billion over a ten year period, tax relief that would go largely to the wealthiest Americans. Congress ended up passing tax cuts of $330 billion, less than half of the Bush request. While some $20 billion will go back to the states, the bulk of the relief will benefit the very rich, including Mr. Bush and many in his cabinet. Most Americans will receive a few hundred dollars or less, and the poorest Americans will receive nothing or next to nothing. By contrast, the richest Americans will receive tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax relief.

    This means that those at the top of the economic pyramid will have more money to contribute to the candidates of their choice, who in turn will help them to get a larger share of the economic pie. The rest of us predictably will get a smaller share of the pie, and there are far more of us to compete for these leftovers.

    In America, if you are rich, it is very likely that the president and the Congress will be working for your interests, by providing tax cuts and other benefits. If you are poor, who will be representing you in our democracy? It is not likely to be the present incumbent of the White House. Nor is it likely to be your member of Congress, when many in Congress are indebted to corporate interests.

    If you are poor and not well educated in America, you may be able to work for minimum wage. That will probably be enough to keep you struggling below the poverty line, particularly if you have children, and your children will be forced to join you in poverty. Further, if these children do not receive a decent education, the cycle will go on and will likely be perpetuated to their children.

    If you are poor in America and you are young, you may be able to join the military. We couldn’t have a voluntary military without high levels of poverty. And without a voluntary military, we couldn’t have perpetual wars because then the politicians and their financial supporters would have to send their own sons and daughters to fight. They wouldn’t be any more likely to do this than they would be to volunteer to go themselves to fight. They far prefer to send your sons and daughters to kill and die in foreign lands. In actuality, only one member of Congress had a child fighting in Iraq.

    The war against Iraq is likely to cost the American taxpayer at least $100 billion and possibly much more. Those who profit will certainly include the Defense Contractors, those who provide the munitions and other material expended in the war. Other profiteers from the war will be those contracted to rebuild what we have destroyed in Iraq and, of course, the multinational oil companies.

    Corporate names such as Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old company, and Bechtel will be among the winners from this war. Lockheed Martin, Ratheon, the Carlyle Group and other giant defense contractors will undoubtedly also be among the winners. The poor and middle class in America, as well as the people of Iraq, will be among the losers.

    We are now spending some $400 billion a year on our military forces, not including the special expenditures for the war in Iraq. This is approximately one-half of the money that Congress has discretion to allocate each year. The money that goes to the military cannot go to social programs that would lead to economic justice in our country. Money that goes to the military cannot even defend America as 9/11 demonstrated so dramatically.

    Four hundred billion dollars a year on the military is over $1.1 billion dollars a day. It works out to $45.5 million per hour, $761,000 per minute. Imagine all of the important social programs that will go unfunded or underfunded to pay that $400 billion per year for a military that cannot defend us.

    Some 500 billionaires on this planet, mostly Americans, have the equivalent assets of half of the world’s population. Three billion people on our planet live on less that $2 per day. More than one billion people live on less than $1 dollar per day. Over a billion people lack access to clean water, and over 2.5 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation. Millions of people die annually throughout the developing world due to water-borne diseases and inadequate sanitation.

    On our planet over one billion people are illiterate, and some 100 million children are denied access to primary education. For a small portion of what the US government spends on its military, it could be saving lives and building friendships by humanitarian assistance in food, health care, education and sanitation.

    Secretary of State Colin Powell has called for battling against poverty in the war against terrorism. “We have to go after poverty,” he said. “We have to go after despair. We have to go after hopelessness.”

    Of course, Secretary Powell is right about this, but it isn’t what our country has done historically, and Powell’s clarion call will not likely be heard in the White House. The US remains last among industrialized countries in the amount of its gross domestic product that it allocates for international development at 0.11 percent. The US is spending more on its plans to research, develop and deploy missile defenses ($7.8 billion) than it for its international humanitarian and development assistance ($7.6 billion). We are not seriously “going after poverty,” as Mr. Powell advised, but rather going after bombs, wars and missile shields.

    Our failure to make a serious effort to stem poverty and injustice in the world is leading to resentment, anger and aggression toward America and innocent Americans. Pumping large amounts of money into the military is not an answer to these problems and makes the situation even less secure for the average American. We need to change our policies both at home and abroad to bolster economic and social justice. We need to fund bread rather than bombs.

    If we want economic justice in America, we are going to have to change our direction. We are going to have to share the resources of the country with its people, not only the wealthy few, and also be more generous abroad. The United States is not meant to be a country “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.” It is a country, we are taught, “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” We are the People and, for the good of ourselves and the world, we had better reclaim our country and reallocate our resources.

    This means a far greater involvement of the people in our democratic processes. It means throwing out the politicians of both political parties who serve the interests of the corporations over the interests of the People. It means reallocating resources away from the militarization of America toward meeting the social needs of the poorest among us and allowing all Americans to live a better life.

    The American dream is being squandered by a small group of extremist ideologues who are both greedy and myopic. Let us reclaim our land from these extremists. Let us strive to be a great country because we care for each other, particularly the least among us, and for the world in which we live. The implications of restoring economic justice are profound. They lie at the heart of environmental devastation of our planet and the suffering of large portions of humanity. Economic justice may prove to be a far more important factor in quelling terrorism than military force.

    We can begin by empowering ourselves to bring about the changes necessary to achieve economic justice in our country and in the world. We can start by speaking out and urging our members of Congress to oppose tax cuts and instead allocate this money to support health care, housing and education. Let us also urge our members of Congress to vote to cut back on obscene military expenditures and transfer these funds instead to meeting human needs, in the United States and throughout the world. The next step should be to work through the electoral process to replace those political leaders who remain indebted to corporate interests and committed to the militarization of America. By taking these steps, by our engagement, we can move toward restoring dignity and economic justice at home and abroad.
    * David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is the co-author of Choose Hope, and the editor of Hope in a Dark Time, Reflections on Humanity’s Future.
    Readers Comments

    If you’d like to send us your comments please e-mail us at: letters@napf.org
    (Please include the name of the article in the subject line)

    America needs to seperate itself from the imperilist Corporate giants who drive the economy and our government.I think the first thing we could do is start to elect officials that are not so easily corrupted and lust after money,I think the first Question that should be asked any new candidate for any political office should be “Do you wish to partake in or put a stop to the plunder of the American People?”We need men who are strong willed and moraly driven not profit driven if we abide by Gods law we will prosper without manipulating markets and enslaving poor third world economys with high interest loans taken under deress and with conditions that are impossible to meet That would be the Imf and its buisness practices.

    –Stephen, USA

    Timely comments. In my opinion the current Bush tax cut proposal amounts to a radical departure from sound principles not only of economic justice but also of fiscal management — aided and abetted by what Alan Greenspan refers to as “the deafening silence” of Congress. This proposal is merely the latest in a series of measures thinly disguised as economic stimulants but cynically calculated to divide our society further into two economic spheres and to consolidate political power in the hands of the wealthy few. As you suggest, this plutocratic system (let’s not call it “democracy”) builds upon itself — as money influences our political processes, the moneyed interests are able to expand their control over those processes and eventually come to dominate all policy. Having consolidated their control and governed in their own interests, they then denounce any dissenters as fomenters of “class division.” The question is, how may we free our politics from the grip of money and thus approach “Democracy in America?”

    —Rob, USA

  • Iraq War, “Unprovoked Invasion of A Sovereign Nation”

    Truth has a way of asserting itself despite all attempts to obscure it. Distortion only serves to derail it for a time. No matter to what lengths we humans may go to obfuscate facts or delude our fellows, truth has a way of squeezing out through the cracks, eventually.

    But the danger is that at some point it may no longer matter. The danger is that damage is done before the truth is widely realized. The reality is that, sometimes, it is easier to ignore uncomfortable facts and go along with whatever distortion is currently in vogue. We see a lot of this today in politics. I see a lot of it – – more than I would ever have believed – – right on this Senate Floor.

    Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing International law, under false premises.

    There is ample evidence that the horrific events of September 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda who masterminded the September 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not. The run up to our invasion of Iraq featured the President and members of his cabinet invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germ laden death in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy dose of overstatement concerning Saddam Hussein and his direct threat to our freedoms. The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation still suffering from a combination of post traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the attacks of 911. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo for the anger.

    Since the war’s end, every subsequent revelation which has seemed to refute the previous dire claims of the Bush Administration has been brushed aside. Instead of addressing the contradictory evidence, the White House deftly changes the subject. No weapons of mass destruction have yet turned up, but we are told that they will in time. Perhaps they yet will. But, our costly and destructive bunker busting attack on Iraq seems to have proven, in the main, precisely the opposite of what we were told was the urgent reason to go in. It seems also to have, for the present, verified the assertions of Hans Blix and the inspection team he led, which President Bush and company so derided. As Blix always said, a lot of time will be needed to find such weapons, if they do, indeed, exist. Meanwhile Bin Laden is still on the loose and Saddam Hussein has come up missing.

    The Administration assured the U.S. public and the world, over and over again, that an attack was necessary to protect our people and the world from terrorism. It assiduously worked to alarm the public and blur the faces of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden until they virtually became one.

    What has become painfully clear in the aftermath of war is that Iraq was no immediate threat to the U.S. Ravaged by years of sanctions, Iraq did not even lift an airplane against us. Iraq’s threatening death-dealing fleet of unmanned drones about which we heard so much morphed into one prototype made of plywood and string. Their missiles proved to be outdated and of limited range. Their army was quickly overwhelmed by our technology and our well trained troops.

    Presently our loyal military personnel continue their mission of diligently searching for WMD. They have so far turned up only fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool. They are misused on such a mission and they continue to be at grave risk. But, the Bush team’s extensive hype of WMD in Iraq as justification for a preemptive invasion has become more than embarrassing. It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power. Were our troops needlessly put at risk? Were countless Iraqi civilians killed and maimed when war was not really necessary? Was the American public deliberately misled? Was the world?

    What makes me cringe even more is the continued claim that we are “liberators.” The facts don’t seem to support the label we have so euphemistically attached to ourselves. True, we have unseated a brutal, despicable despot, but “liberation” implies the follow up of freedom, self-determination and a better life for the common people. In fact, if the situation in Iraq is the result of “liberation,” we may have set the cause of freedom back 200 years.

    Despite our high-blown claims of a better life for the Iraqi people, water is scarce, and often foul, electricity is a sometime thing, food is in short supply, hospitals are stacked with the wounded and maimed, historic treasures of the region and of the Iraqi people have been looted, and nuclear material may have been disseminated to heaven knows where, while U.S. troops, on orders, looked on and guarded the oil supply.

    Meanwhile, lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure and refurbish its oil industry are awarded to Administration cronies, without benefit of competitive bidding, and the U.S. steadfastly resists offers of U.N. assistance to participate. Is there any wonder that the real motives of the U.S. government are the subject of worldwide speculation and mistrust?

    And in what may be the most damaging development, the U.S. appears to be pushing off Iraq’s clamor for self-government. Jay Garner has been summarily replaced, and it is becoming all too clear that the smiling face of the U.S. as liberator is quickly assuming the scowl of an occupier. The image of the boot on the throat has replaced the beckoning hand of freedom. Chaos and rioting only exacerbate that image, as U.S. soldiers try to sustain order in a land ravaged by poverty and disease. “Regime change” in Iraq has so far meant anarchy, curbed only by an occupying military force and a U.S. administrative presence that is evasive about if and when it intends to depart.

    Democracy and Freedom cannot be force fed at the point of an occupier’s gun. To think otherwise is folly. One has to stop and ponder. How could we have been so impossibly naive? How could we expect to easily plant a clone of U.S. culture, values, and government in a country so riven with religious, territorial, and tribal rivalries, so suspicious of U.S. motives, and so at odds with the galloping materialism which drives the western-style economies? As so many warned this Administration before it launched its misguided war on Iraq, there is evidence that our crack down in Iraq is likely to convince 1,000 new Bin Ladens to plan other horrors of the type we have seen in the past several days. Instead of damaging the terrorists, we have given them new fuel for their fury. We did not complete our mission in Afghanistan because we were so eager to attack Iraq. Now it appears that Al Queda is back with a vengeance. We have returned to orange alert in the U.S., and we may well have destabilized the Mideast region, a region we have never fully understood. We have alienated friends around the globe with our dissembling and our haughty insistence on punishing former friends who may not see things quite our way. The path of diplomacy and reason have gone out the window to be replaced by force, unilateralism, and punishment for transgressions. I read most recently with amazement our harsh castigation of Turkey, our longtime friend and strategic ally. It is astonishing that our government is berating the new Turkish government for conducting its affairs in accordance with its own Constitution and its democratic institutions.

    Indeed, we may have sparked a new international arms race as countries move ahead to develop WMD as a last ditch attempt to ward off a possible preemptive strike from a newly belligerent U.S. which claims the right to hit where it wants. In fact, there is little to constrain this President. This Congress, in what will go down in history as its most unfortunate act, gave away its power to declare war for the foreseeable future and empowered this President to wage war at will.

    As if that were not bad enough, members of Congress are reluctant to ask questions which are begging to be asked. How long will we occupy Iraq? We have already heard disputes on the numbers of troops which will be needed to retain order. What is the truth? How costly will the occupation and rebuilding be? No one has given a straight answer. How will we afford this long-term massive commitment, fight terrorism at home, address a serious crisis in domestic healthcare, afford behemoth military spending and give away billions in tax cuts amidst a deficit which has climbed to over $340 billion for this year alone? If the President’s tax cut passes it will be $400 billion. We cower in the shadows while false statements proliferate. We accept soft answers and shaky explanations because to demand the truth is hard, or unpopular, or may be politically costly.

    But, I contend that, through it all, the people know. The American people unfortunately are used to political shading, spin, and the usual chicanery they hear from public officials. They patiently tolerate it up to a point. But there is a line. It may seem to be drawn in invisible ink for a time, but eventually it will appear in dark colors, tinged with anger. When it comes to shedding American blood – – when it comes to wrecking havoc on civilians, on innocent men, women, and children, callous dissembling is not acceptable. Nothing is worth that kind of lie – – not oil, not revenge, not reelection, not somebody’s grand pipedream of a democratic domino theory.

    And mark my words, the calculated intimidation which we see so often of late by the “powers that be” will only keep the loyal opposition quiet for just so long. Because eventually, like it always does, the truth will emerge. And when it does, this house of cards, built of deceit, will fall.