17 December 2004Znet
It goes without saying that what happens in the US has an enormous impact on the rest of the world – and conversely: what happens in the rest of the world cannot fail to have an impact on the US, in several ways. First, it sets constraints on what even the most powerful state can do. And second, it influences the domestic US component of "the second superpower," as the New York Times ruefully described world public opinion after the huge protests before the Iraq invasion. Those protests were a critically important historical event, not only because of their unprecedented scale, but also because it was the first time in hundreds of years of the history of Europe and its North American offshoots that a war was massively protested even before it was officially launched. We may recall, by comparison, the war against South Vietnam launched by JFK in 1962, brutal and barbaric from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve out the civilian support for the indigenous resistance, programs to drive millions of people to virtual concentration camps or urban slums to eliminate its popular base. By the time protests reached a substantial scale, the highly respected and quite hawkish Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall wondered whether "Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity" would escape "extinction" as "the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size" – particularly South Vietnam, always the main target of the US assault. And when protest did finally develop, many years too late, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes: the extension of the war against the South to the rest of Indochina – hideous crimes, but lesser ones.
It's quite important to remember how much the world has changed since then – as almost always, not as a result of gifts from benevolent leaders, but through deeply committed popular struggle, far too late in developing, but ultimately effective. One consequence was that the US government could not declare a national emergency, which should have been healthy for the economy, as during World War II when public support was very high. Johnson had to fight a "guns-and-butter" war, buying off an unwilling population, harming the economy, ultimately leading the business classes to turn against the war as too costly, after the Tet Offensive of January 1968 showed that it would go on a long time. The memoirs of Hitler's economic Czar Albert Speer describe a similar problem. The Nazis could not trust their population, and therefore could not fight as disciplined a war as their democratic enemies, possibly affecting the outcome seriously, given their technological lead. There were also concerns among US elites about rising social and political consciousness stimulated by the activism of the '60s, much of it reaction to the miserable crimes in Indochina, then at last arousing popular indignation. We learn from the last sections of the Pentagon Papers that after the Tet offensive, the military command was reluctant to agree to the President's call for further troop deployments, wanting to be sure that "sufficient forces would still be available for civil disorder control" in the US, and fearing that escalation might run the risk of "provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions."
The Reagan administration – the current administration or their immediate mentors -- assumed that the problem of an independent aroused population had been overcome, and apparently planned to follow the Kennedy model of the early 1960s in Central America. But they backed off in the face of unanticipated public protest, turning instead to "clandestine war" employing murderous security forces and a huge international terror network. The consequences were terrible, but not as bad as B-52s and mass murder operations of the kind that were peaking when John Kerry was deep in the Mekong Delta in the South, by then largely devastated. The popular reaction to even the "clandestine war," so called, broke entirely new ground. The solidarity movements for Central America, now in many parts of the world, are again something new in Western history.
State managers cannot fail to pay attention to such matters. Routinely, a newly elected President requests an intelligence evaluation of the world situation. In 1989, when Bush I took office, a part was leaked. It warned that when attacking "much weaker enemies" – the only sensible target – the US must win "decisively and rapidly." Delay might "undercut political support," recognized to be thin, a great change since the Kennedy-Johnson years when the attack on Indochina, while never popular, aroused little reaction for many years.
The world is pretty awful today, but it is far better than yesterday, not only with regard to unwillingness to tolerate aggression, but also in many other ways, which we now tend to take for granted. There are very important lessons here, which should always be uppermost in our minds – for the same reason they are suppressed in the elite culture.
We might tarry for a moment to recall Canada's role in the Indochina wars, some of the worst crimes of the last century. Canada was a member of the International Control Commission for Indochina, theoretically neutral, in fact spying for the aggressors. We learn from recently released Canadian archives that Canada felt "some misgivings about some specific USA military measures against [North Vietnam]," but "supports purposes and objectives of USA policy" in opposing North Vietnamese "aggression of [a] special type." This Vietnamese aggression against Vietnam must not be allowed to succeed, not only because of the possible consequences in Vietnam, still not facing the threat of "extinction" at this time, but also because if Vietnam survives "as a viable cultural and historic entity," the aggression of the Vietnamese might set a precedent "for other so-called liberation wars." The concept of Vietnamese aggression in Vietnam against the American defenders of the country has interesting precedents, which out of politeness I will not mention. It is particularly striking because the Canadian observers surely were aware that at the time there were more US mercenaries in South Vietnam as part of the invading US army than there were North Vietnamese – even if we assume that somehow North Vietnamese are not allowed in Vietnam. And the US mercenaries, along with the far greater US army, were threatening South Vietnam with "extinction" by mass terror operations right at the heart of the country, while the North Vietnamese "aggressors" were at the periphery, mainly trying to draw the invading forces to the borders, at a time when North Vietnam too was being bombed. That remained true, according to the Pentagon, until many years after these Canadian government reports.
The diplomatic historians who have explored the Canadian archives have not reported any misgivings about the attack against South Vietnam, which by the time of these internal communications, was demolishing the country. The distinguished statesman Lester Pearson had gone far beyond. He informed the House of Commons in the early 1950s that "aggression" by the Vietnamese against France in Vietnam is only one element of worldwide "communist aggression," and that "Soviet colonial authority in Indochina" appeared to be stronger than that of France – that's when France was attempting (with US support) to reconquer its former Indochinese colonies, with not a Russian anywhere in the neighborhood, and not even any contacts, as the CIA had to concede after a desperate effort to find them. One has to search pretty far to find more fervent devotion to imperial crimes than Pearson's declarations.
Without forgetting the very significant progress towards more civilized societies in past years, and the reasons for it, let's focus nevertheless on the present, and on the notions of imperial sovereignty now being crafted. It is not surprising that as the population becomes more civilized, power systems become more extreme in their efforts to control the "great beast" (as the Founding Fathers called the people). And the great beast is indeed frightening: I'll return to majority views on major issues, which are so far to the left of the spectrum of elite commentary and the electoral arena that they cannot even be reported – another fact that teaches important lessons to those who do not like what is being done in their names.
The conception of presidential sovereignty crafted by the radical statist reactionaries of the Bush administration is so extreme that it has drawn unprecedented criticism in the most sober and respected establishment circles. These ideas were transmitted to the President by the newly appointed Attorney-General, Alberto Gonzales – who is depicted as a moderate in the press. They are discussed by the respected constitutional law professor Sanford Levinson in the current issue of the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Levinson writes that the conception is based on the principle that "There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos." The quote, Levinson comments, is from Carl Schmitt, the leading German philosopher of law during the Nazi period, who Levinson describes as "the true éminence grise of the Bush administration." The administration, advised by Gonzales, has articulated "a view of presidential authority that is all too close to the power that Schmitt was willing to accord his own Führer," Levinson writes.
One rarely hears such words from the heart of the establishment.
The same issue of the journal carries an article by two prominent strategic analysts on the "transformation of the military," a central component of the new doctrines of imperial sovereignty: the rapid expansion of offensive weaponry, including militarization of space – joined apparently by Canada -- and other measures designed to place the entire world at risk of instant annihilation. These have already elicited the anticipated reactions by Russia and recently China. The analysts conclude that these US programs may lead to "ultimate doom." They express their hope that a coalition of peace-loving states will coalesce as a counter to US militarism and aggressiveness, led by – China. We've come to a pretty pass when such sentiments are voiced in sober respectable circles not given to hyperbole. And when faith in American democracy is so slight that they look to China to save us from marching towards ultimate doom. It's up to the second superpower to decide whether that contempt for the great beast is warranted.
Going back to Gonzales, he transmitted to the President the conclusions of the Justice Dept that the President has the authority to rescind the Geneva Conventions -- the supreme law of the land, the foundation of modern international humanitarian law. And Gonzales, who was then Bush's legal counsel, advised him that this would be a good idea, because rescinding the Conventions "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution [of administration officials] under the War Crimes Act" of 1996, which carries the death penalty for "grave breaches" of Geneva Conventions.
We can see right on today's front pages why the Justice Department was right to be concerned that the President and his advisers might be subject to death penalty under the laws passed by the Republican Congress in 1996 – and of course under the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, if anyone took them seriously.
Two weeks ago, the NY Times featured a front-page story reporting the conquest of the Falluja General Hospital. It reported that "Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs." An accompanying photograph depicted the scene. That was presented as an important achievement. "The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties." And these "inflated" figures – inflated because our Dear Leader so declares – were "inflaming opinion throughout the country" and the region, driving up "the political costs of the conflict." The word "conflict" is a common euphemism for US aggression, as when we read on the same pages that the US must now rebuild "what the conflict just destroyed": just "the conflict," with no agent, like a hurricane.
Let's go back to the picture and story about the closing of the "propaganda weapon." There are some relevant documents, including the Geneva Conventions, which state: "Fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the Medical Service may in no circumstances be attacked, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict." So page one of the world's leading newspaper is cheerfully depicting war crimes for which the political leadership could be sentenced to death under US law. No wonder the new moderate Attorney-General warned the President that he should use the constitutional authority concocted by the Justice Department to rescind the supreme law of the land, adopting the concept of presidential sovereignty devised by Hitler's primary legal adviser, "the true éminence grise of the Bush administration," according to a distinguished conservative authority on constitutional law, writing in perhaps the most respectable and sober journal in the country.
The world's greatest newspaper also tells us that the US military "achieved nearly all their objectives well ahead of schedule," leaving "much of the city in smoking ruins." But it was not a complete success. There is little evidence of dead "packrats" in their "warrens" or the streets, which remains "an enduring mystery." The embedded reporters did find a body of a dead woman, though it is "not known whether she was an Iraqi or a foreigner," apparently the only question that comes to mind.
The front-page account quotes a Marine commander who says that "It ought to go down in the history books." Perhaps it should. If so, we know on just what page of history it will go down, and who will be right beside it, along with those who praise or for that matter even tolerate it. At least, we know that if we are capable of honesty.
One might mention at least some of the recent counterparts that immediately come to mind, like the Russian destruction of Grozny 10 years ago, a city of about the same size. Or Srebrenica, almost universally described as "genocide" in the West. In that case, as we know in detail from the Dutch government report and other sources, the Muslim enclave in Serb territory, inadequately protected, was used as a base for attacks against Serb villages, and when the anticipated reaction took place, it was horrendous. The Serbs drove out all but military age men, and then moved in to kill them. There are differences with Falluja. Women and children were not bombed out of Srebrenica, but trucked out, and there will be no extensive efforts to exhume the last corpse of the packrats in their warrens in Falluja. There are other differences, arguably unfair to the Serbs.
It could be argued that all this is irrelevant. The Nuremberg Tribunal, spelling out the UN Charter, declared that initiation of a war of aggression is "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" – hence the war crimes in Falluja and Abu Ghraib, the doubling of acute malnutrition among children since the invasion (now at the level of Burundi, far higher than Haiti or Uganda), and all the rest of the atrocities. Those judged to have played any role in the supreme crime -- for example, the German Foreign Minister – were sentenced to death by hanging. The Tokyo Tribunal was far more severe. There is a very important book on the topic by Canadian international lawyer Michael Mandel, who reviews in convincing detail how the powerful are self-immunized from international law.
In fact, the Nuremberg Tribunal itself established this principle. To bring the Nazi criminals to justice, it was necessary to devise definitions of "war crime" and "crime against humanity." How this was done is explained by Telford Taylor, chief counsel for the prosecution and a distinguished international lawyer and historian:
Since both sides in World War II had played the terrible game of urban destruction – the Allies far more successfully – there was no basis for criminal charges against Germans or Japanese, and in fact no such charges were brought... Aerial bombardment had been used so extensively and ruthlessly on the Allied side as well as the Axis side that neither at Nuremberg nor Tokyo was the issue made a part of the trials.
The operative definition of "crime" is: "Crime that you carried out but we did not." To underscore the fact, Nazi war criminals were absolved if the defense could show that their US counterparts carried out the same crimes.
Taylor concludes that "to punish the foe – especially the vanquished foe – for conduct in which the enforcer nation has engaged, would be so grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws themselves." That is correct, but the operative definition also discredits the laws themselves, along with all subsequent tribunals. Taylor provides this background as part of his explanation of why US bombing in Vietnam was not a war crime. His argument is plausible, further discrediting the laws themselves. Some of the subsequent judicial inquiries are discredited in perhaps even more extreme ways, such as the Yugoslavia vs. NATO case now being adjudicated by the International Court of Justice. The US was excused, correctly, on the basis of its argument that it is not subject to the jurisdiction of the Court in this case. The reason is that when the US finally signed the Genocide Convention (which is at issue here) after 40 years, it did so with a reservation stating that it is inapplicable to the United States.
In an outraged comment on the efforts of Justice Department lawyers to demonstrate that the President has the right to authorize torture, Yale Law School Dean Howard Koh said that "The notion that the president has the constitutional power to permit torture is like saying he has the constitutional power to commit genocide." The President's legal advisers, and the new Attorney-General, should have little difficulty arguing that the President does indeed have that right – if the second superpower permits him to exercise it.
The sacred doctrine of self-immunization is sure to hold of the trial of Saddam Hussein, if it is ever held. We see that every time that Bush, Blair, and other worthies in government and commentary lament over the terrible crimes of Saddam Hussein, always bravely omitting the words: "with our help, because we did not care." Surely no tribunal will be permitted to address the fact that US presidents from Kennedy until today, along with French presidents and British Prime Ministers, and Western business, have been complicit in Saddam's crimes, sometimes in horrendous ways, including current incumbents and their mentors. In setting up the Saddam tribunal, the State Department consulted US legal expert Prof. Charif Bassiouni, recently quoted as saying: "All efforts are being made to have a tribunal whose judiciary is not independent but controlled, and by controlled I mean that the political manipulators of the tribunal have to make sure the US and other western powers are not brought in cause. This makes it look like victor's vengeance: it makes it seem targeted, selected, unfair. It's a subterfuge." We hardly need to be told.
The pretext for US-UK aggression in Iraq is what is called the right of "anticipatory self-defense," now sometimes called "preemptive war" in a radical perversion of that concept. The right of anticipatory self-defense was affirmed officially in the Bush administration National Security Strategy of September 2002, declaring Washington's right to resort to force to eliminate any potential challenge to its global dominance. The NSS was widely criticized among the foreign policy elite, beginning with an article right away in the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs, warning that "the new imperial grand strategy" could be very dangerous. Criticism continued, again at an unprecedented level, but on narrow grounds: not that the doctrine itself was wrong, but rather its style and manner of presentation. Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright summed the criticism up accurately, also in FA. She pointed out that every President has such a doctrine in his back pocket, but it is simply foolish to smash people in the face with it and to implement it in a manner that will infuriate even allies. That is threatening to US interests, and therefore wrong.
Albright knew, of course, that Clinton had a similar doctrine. The Clinton doctrine advocated "unilateral use of military power" to defend vital interests, such as "ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources," without even the pretexts that Bush and Blair devised. Taken literally, the Clinton doctrine is more expansive than Bush's NSS. But the more expansive Clinton doctrine was barely even reported. It was presented with the right style, and implemented less brazenly.
Henry Kissinger described the Bush doctrine as "revolutionary," pointing out that it undermines the 17th century Westphalian system of international order, and of course the UN Charter and international law. He approved of the doctrine but with reservations about style and tactics, and with a crucial qualification: it cannot be "a universal principle available to every nation." Rather, the right of aggression must be reserved to the US, perhaps delegated to chosen clients. We must forcefully reject the principle of universality: that we apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others, more stringent ones if we are serious. Kissinger is to be praised for his honesty in forthrightly articulating prevailing doctrine, usually concealed in professions of virtuous intent and tortured legalisms. And he understands his educated audience. As he doubtless expected, there was no reaction.
His understanding of his audience was illustrated again, rather dramatically, last May, when Kissinger-Nixon tapes were released, over Kissinger's strong objections. There was a report in the world's leading newspaper. It mentioned in passing the orders to bomb Cambodia that Kissinger transmitted from Nixon to the military commanders. In Kissinger's words, "A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves." It is rare for a call for horrendous war crimes – what we would not hesitate to call "genocide" if others were responsible – to be so stark and explicit. It may be more than rare; it would be interesting to see if there is anything like it in archival records. The publication elicited no reaction, refuting Dean Koh. Apparently, it is taken for granted in the elite culture that the President and his National Security Adviser do have the right to order genocide.
Imagine the reaction if the prosecutors at the Milosevic Tribunal could find anything remotely similar. They would be overjoyed, the trial would be over, Milosevic would receive several life sentences, the death penalty if the Tribunal adhered to US law. But that is them, not us. The distinction is a core principle of the elite intellectual culture in the West – and in fact, throughout history quite generally.
The principle of universality is the most elementary of moral truisms. It is the foundation of "Just War theory" and in fact of every system of morality deserving of anything but contempt. Rejection of such moral truisms is so deeply rooted in the intellectual culture as to be invisible. To illustrate again how deeply entrenched it is, let's return to the principle of "anticipatory self-defense," adopted as legitimate by both political organizations in the US, and across virtually the entire spectrum of articulate opinion, apart from the usual margins. The principle has some immediate corollaries. If the US is granted the right of "anticipatory self-defense" against terror, then, certainly, Cuba, Nicaragua, and a host of others have long been entitled to carry out terrorist acts within the US because there is no doubt of its involvement in very serious terrorist attacks against them, extensively documented in impeccable sources, and in the case of Nicaragua, even condemned by the World Court and the Security Council (in two resolutions that the US vetoed, with Britain loyally abstaining). The conclusion that Cuba and Nicaragua, among many others, have long had the right to carry out terrorist atrocities in the US is of course utterly outrageous, and advocated by no one. And thanks to our self-determined immunity from moral truisms, there is no fear that anyone will draw the outrageous conclusions.
There are still more outrageous ones. No one, for example, celebrates Pearl Harbor day by applauding the fascist leaders of Imperial Japan. But by our standards, the bombing of military bases in the US colonies of Hawaii and the Philippines seems rather innocuous. The Japanese leaders knew that B-17 Flying Fortresses were coming off the Boeing production lines, and were surely familiar with the public discussions in the US explaining how they could be used to incinerate Japan's wooden cities in a war of extermination, flying from Hawaiian and Philippine bases -- "to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bombing attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps," as retired Air Force General Chennault recommended in 1940, a proposal that "simply delighted" President Roosevelt. That's a far more powerful justification for anticipatory self-defense than anything conjured up by Bush-Blair and their associates -- and accepted, with tactical reservations, throughout the mainstream of articulate opinion.
Fortunately, we are once again protected from such politically incorrect conclusions by the principled rejection of elementary moral truisms.
Examples can be enumerated virtually at random. To add one last one, consider the most recent act of NATO aggression prior to the US-UK invasion of Iraq: the bombing of Serbia in 1999. The justification is supposed to be that there were no diplomatic options and that it was necessary to stop ongoing genocide. It is not hard to evaluate these claims.
As for diplomatic options, when the bombing began, there were two proposals on the table, a NATO and a Serbian proposal, and after 78 days of bombing a compromise was reached between them – formally at least: it was immediately undermined by NATO. All of this quickly vanished into the mists of unacceptable history, to the limited extent that it was ever reported.
What about ongoing genocide – to use the term that appeared hundreds of times in the press as NATO geared up for war? That is unusually easy to investigate. There are two major documentary studies by the State Department, offered to justify the bombing, along with extensive documentary records from the OSCE, NATO, and other Western sources, and a detailed British Parliamentary Inquiry All agree on the basic facts: the atrocities followed the bombing; they were not its cause. Furthermore, that was predicted by the NATO command, as General Wesley Clark informed the press right away, and confirmed in more detail in his memoirs. The Milosevic indictment, issued during the bombing -- surely as a propaganda weapon, despite implausible denials -- and relying on US-UK intelligence as announced at once, yields the same conclusion: virtually all the charges are post-bombing. Such annoyances are handled quite easily: the Western documentation is commonly expunged i
