BRING HEALING for 9-11, ASKING QUESTIONS
We
must weigh and consider our options most carefully before rushing into
a war against Iran
Unintended Consequences
John Tirman
All wars have unintended consequences. No matter how cautious generals and political leaders are, war sets in motion waves of change that can alter the currents of history. More often, generals and political leaders are not troubled by long-term side effects; they are sharply focused on achieving a victory and war's aims. The result is that the unseen and unintended occur, at times as a bitter riptide which overwhelms the original rationales for engaging in armed combat.
This unpredictable cycle of action and reaction has thwarted U.S. policy in southwestern Asia for 50 years. It began with attempts to contain the Soviet Union and control the oil-rich fields of the Persian Gulf, and continues today in the popular assault in Afghanistan to destroy the al-Qa'ida terrorist network. In that half century, nearly every major initiative led to an unexpected and sometimes catastrophic reaction, for which new military remedies were devised, only again to stir unforeseen problems. The cycle, regrettably, may be repeating again.
Our limited contacts with the rest of the world created a situation in which Americans were tremendously surprised and shocked by the events of 9-11.
It
has been easy to blame the terrorists for the events of
9-11 without asking what we might have contributed to their angers, hurts
and hatreds.
This in no way absolves the terrorists of their guilt for their unconsciounable acts. But we must consider the context within which their acts took place.
Tiernan briefly summarizes the history of the US involvement in the Middle East, suggesting that our policy has been focused on securing Western access to oil. The methods employed by the US have been less than successful in stabilizing the ruling governments, and has not achieved our aims of assuring our oil supplies.
Tiernan asks,
What will be next in this series of haunting mistakes? If this 50-year history teaches us anything, it is that aggressive military actions surely will earn a violent reaction, and that the pattern consistently displays three characteristics: large-scale human misery; the "involvement" of neighboring countries; and the amplification of militant Islamic sentiment around the world. In just a matter of weeks, all characteristics are now visible in the "war on terrorism..."
Tiernan suggests that we cannot pursue an aggressive policy in the Middle East without creating a backlash that will generate even more terrorism.
(John Tirman is program director at the Social Science
Research Council, and author of "Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's
Arms Trade.")
We are using up world supplies of oil and other natural resources at rates that cannot be sustained in the long run.
Our reliance on Middle East oil leads us to consider policies that are destructive to the environment - including land, water, air and living resources.
From AlterNet
October 24, 2001
More
Open Letter To UN Security Council
Ramsey Clark - Speaking against going to war in
Iran
The following letter by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has been sent to all members of the UN Security Council, with copies to the UN General Assembly. Please circulate.
September 20, 2002
Secretary General Kofi Annan
United Nations
New York, NY
Dear Secretary General Annan,
George Bush will invade Iraq unless restrained by the United Nations. Other international organizations - including the European Union, the African Union, the OAS, the Arab League, stalwart nations courageous enough to speak out against superpower aggression, international peace movements, political leadership, and public opinion within the United States--must do their part for peace. If the United Nations, above all, fails to oppose a U.S. invasion of Iraq, it will forfeit its honor, integrity and raison d'etre. A military attack on Iraq is obviously criminal; completely inconsistent with urgent needs of the Peoples of the United Nations; unjustifiable on any legal or moral ground; irrational in light of the known facts; out of proportion to other existing threats of war and violence; and a dangerous adventure risking continuing conflict throughout the region and far beyond for years to come. The most careful analysis must be made as to why the world is subjected to such threats of violence by its only superpower, which could so safely and importantly lead us on the road to peace, and how the UN can avoid the human tragedy of yet another major assault on Iraq and the powerful stimulus for retaliatory terrorism it would create.
1. President George Bush Came to Office Determined
to Attack Iraq and Change its Government.
George Bush is moving apace to make his war unstoppable and soon...
2. George Bush Is Leading the United States
and Taking the UN and All Nations Toward a Lawless World of Endless Wars.
George Bush in his "War on Terrorism" has asserted
his right to attack any country, organization, or people first, without
warning in his sole discretion. He and members of his administration have
proclaimed the old restraints that law sought to impose on aggression
by governments and repression of their people, no longer consistent with
national security. Terrorism is such a danger, they say, that necessity
compels the U.S. to strike first to destroy the potential for terrorist
acts from abroad and to make arbitrary arrests, detentions, interrogations,
controls and treatment of people abroad and within the U.S. Law has become
the enemy of public safety...
3. The United States, Not Iraq, Is the Greatest
Single Threat to the Independence and Purpose of the United Nations.
President Bush's claim that Iraq is a threat justifying war is false.
Eighty percent of Iraq's military capacity was destroyed in 1991 according
to the Pentagon. Ninety percent of materials and equipment required to
manufacture weapons of mass destruction was destroyed by UN inspectors
during more than eight years of inspections. Iraq was powerful, compared
to most of its neighbors, in 1990. Today it is weak...
The UN role in the sanctions against Iraq compromise and stain the UN's integrity and honor. This makes it all the more important for the UN now to resist this war. Inspections were used as an excuse to continue sanctions for eight years while thousands of Iraqi children and elderly died each month. Iraq is the victim of criminal sanctions that should have been lifted in 1991. For every person killed by terrorist acts in the U.S. on 9/11, five hundred people have died in Iraq from sanctions...
4. Why Has George Bush Decided The U.S. Must
Attack Iraq Now?
There is no rational basis to believe Iraq is a threat to the United States,
or any other country. The reason to attack Iraq must be found elsewhere...
His motives may include to save a failing Presidency which has converted
a healthy economy and treasury surplus into multi-trillion dollar losses;
to fulfill the dream, which will become a nightmare, of a new world order
to serve special interests in the U.S.; to settle a family grudge against
Iraq; to weaken the Arab nation, one people at a time; to strike a Muslim
nation to weaken Islam; to protect Israel, or make its position more dominant
in the region; to secure control of Iraq's oil to enrich U.S. Interests,
further dominate oil in the region and control oil prices. Aggression
against Iraq for any of these purposes is criminal and a violation of
a great many international conventions and laws including the General
Assembly Resolution on the Definition of Aggression of December 14, 1974.
5. A Rational Policy Intended to Reduce the
Threat of Weapons of MassDestruction in The Middle East Must Include Israel.
A UN or U.S. policy of selecting enemies of the U.S. for attack is criminal
and can only heighten hatred, division, terrorism and lead to war... Israel
has a stockpile of hundreds of nuclear warheads derived from the United
States, sophisticated rockets capable of accurate delivery at distances
of several thousand kilometers, and contracts with the U.S. for joint
development of more sophisticated rocketry and other arms with theU.S.
Possession of weapons of mass destruction by a single nation in a region
with a history of hostility promotes a race for proliferation and war.
The UN must act to reduce and eliminate all weapons of mass destruction,
not submit to demands to punish areas of evil and enemies of the superpower
that possesses the majority of all such weapons and capacity for their
delivery...
6. The Choice Is War Or Peace.
The UN and the U.S. must seek peace, not war. An attack on Iraq may open
a Pandora's box that will condemn the world to decades of spreading violence.
Peace is not only possible; it is essential, considering the heights to
which science and technology have raised the human art of planetary and
self-destruction. If George Bush is permitted to attack Iraq with or without
the approval of the UN, he will become Public Enemy Number One--and the
UN itself worse than useless, an accomplice in the wars it was created
to end. The Peoples of the World then will have to find some way to begin
again if they hope to end the scourge of war. This is a defining moment
for the United Nations. Will it stand strong, independent and true to
its Charter, international law and the reasons for its being, or will
it submit to the coercion of a superpower leading us toward a lawless
world and condone war against the cradle of civilization?
Do not let this happen.
Sincerely,
Ramsey Clark
From: International Action Center September 20, 2002
More
From
Noam Chomsky
September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better
pay much closer attention to what the US government does in the world
and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that
were not on the agenda before. That's all to the good.
It is also the merest sanity, if we hope to reduce the likelihood of future atrocities. It may be comforting to pretend that our enemies "hate our freedoms," as President Bush stated, but it is hardly wise to ignore the real world, which conveys different lessons.
The president is not the first to ask: "Why do they hate us?" In a staff discussion 44 years ago, President Eisenhower described "the campaign of hatred against us [in the Arab world], not by the governments but by the people". His National Security Council outlined the basic reasons: the US supports corrupt and oppressive governments and is "opposing political or economic progress" because of its interest in controlling the oil resources of the region.
Post-September 11 surveys in the Arab world reveal that the same reasons hold today, compounded with resentment over specific policies. Strikingly, that is even true of privileged, western-oriented sectors in the region.
To cite just one recent example: in the August 1 issue of Far Eastern Economic Review, the internationally recognised regional specialist Ahmed Rashid writes that in Pakistan "there is growing anger that US support is allowing [Musharraf's] military regime to delay the promise of democracy".
Today we do ourselves few favours by choosing to believe that "they hate us" and "hate our freedoms". On the contrary, these are attitudes of people who like Americans and admire much about the US, including its freedoms. What they hate is official policies that deny them the freedoms to which they too aspire.
For such reasons, the post-September 11 rantings of Osama bin Laden - for example, about US support for corrupt and brutal regimes, or about the US "invasion" of Saudi Arabia - have a certain resonance, even among those who despise and fear him. From resentment, anger and frustration, terrorist bands hope to draw support and recruits.
We should also be aware that much of the world regards Washington as a terrorist regime. In recent years, the US has taken or backed actions in Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama, Sudan and Turkey, to name a few, that meet official US definitions of "terrorism" - that is, when Americans apply the term to enemies.
In the most sober establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington wrote in 1999: "While the US regularly denounces various countries as 'rogue states,' in the eyes of many countries it is becoming the rogue superpower ... the single greatest external threat to their societies."
Such perceptions are not changed by the fact that, on September 11, for the first time, a western country was subjected on home soil to a horrendous terrorist attack of a kind all too familiar to victims of western power. The attack goes far beyond what's sometimes called the "retail terror" of the IRA, FLN or Red Brigades.
The September 11 terrorism elicited harsh condemnation throughout the world and an outpouring of sympathy for the innocent victims. But with qualifications.
An international Gallup poll in late September found little support for "a military attack" by the US in Afghanistan. In Latin America, the region with the most experience of US intervention, support ranged from 2% in Mexico to 16% in Panama.
The current "campaign of hatred" in the Arab world is, of course, also fuelled by US policies toward Israel-Palestine and Iraq. The US has provided the crucial support for Israel's harsh military occupation, now in its 35th year.
One way for the US to lessen Israeli-Palestinian tensions would be to stop refusing to join the long-standing international consensus that calls for recognition of the right of all states in the region to live in peace and security, including a Palestinian state in the currently occupied territories (perhaps with minor and mutual border adjustments).
In Iraq, a decade of harsh sanctions under US pressure has strengthened Saddam Hussein while leading to the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis - perhaps more people "than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history", military analysts John and Karl Mueller wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1999.
Washington's present justifications to attack Iraq have far less credibility than when President Bush Sr was welcoming Saddam as an ally and a trading partner after he had committed his worst brutalities - as in Halabja, where Iraq attacked Kurds with poison gas in 1988. At the time, the murderer Saddam was more dangerous than he is today.
As for a US attack against Iraq, no one, including Donald Rumsfeld, can realistically guess the possible costs and consequences. Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.
They presumably also welcome the "Bush doctrine" that proclaims the right of attack against potential threats, which are virtually limitless. The president has announced: "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland." That's true.
Threats are everywhere, even at home. The prescription for endless war poses a far greater danger to Americans than perceived enemies do, for reasons the terrorist organisations understand very well.
Twenty years ago, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, Yehoshaphat Harkabi, also a leading Arabist, made a point that still holds true. "To offer an honourable solution to the Palestinians respecting their right to self-determination: that is the solution of the problem of terrorism," he said. "When the swamp disappears, there will be no more mosquitoes."
At the time, Israel enjoyed the virtual immunity from retaliation within the occupied territories that lasted until very recently. But Harkabi's warning was apt, and the lesson applies more generally.
Well before September 11 it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will lose their near monopoly of the means of violence and can expect to suffer atrocities on home soil.
If we insist on creating more swamps, there will be more mosquitoes, with awesome capacity for destruction.
If we devote our resources to draining the swamps, addressing the roots of the "campaigns of hatred", we can not only reduce the threats we face but also live up to ideals that we profess and that are not beyond reach if we choose to take them seriously.
© Noam
Chomsky, The Guardian, Monday September
9, 2002
Noam Chomsky is professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and author of the US bestseller 9-11
chomsky@MIT.edu
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,788508,00.html
Further articles suggesting
war in Iraq is a poor choice
TEN REASONS
WHY MANY GULF WAR VETERANS OPPOSE RE-INVADING IRAQ
Anonymous, AlterNet
The opinions of combat vets should be heard before troops
deploy for battle -- not after they have returned wounded,
ill or in body bags.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14067
THE CHICKEN HAWK FACTOR
Jim Lobe, AlterNet
The army of media pundits, cabinet members, and military
experts arrayed in favor of an attack on Iraq have one
startling fact in common. Not one of them has a shred of
wartime experience.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14070
Next - Healing to understand "others"