To: Michael Watkins who wrote (150690) | 11/2/2004 6:18:19 PM | From: Sun Tzu | | | >> I can't find a single Arab (of any religious belief) or Muslim in my circle of friends or acquaintances that supports Bush
I can. They hate his guts and think he is Israel's stooge and a puppet. But ultimately they don't see enough difference in Kerry to be worth giving up Bush's easy immigration stance. |
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To: Sun Tzu who wrote (150680) | 11/2/2004 6:20:30 PM | From: Michael Watkins | | | It may be like my relatives in Poland -- they report that support for the US within the country remains generally high, but I also know that this support falls off dramatically once people emigrate to the US or Canada (where most of my Polish relatives have settled).
What do "Arab liberals", indeed, Muslims and Arabs of all political persuasions, that live in North America think of Bush now?
I'm led to believe there has been a huge swing of support away from Bush. What was given to the Republican's in 2002 largely on conservative social issues, has been taken away on foreign policy issues and concerns over oppression (patriot act). |
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To: Win Smith who wrote (150689) | 11/2/2004 6:23:33 PM | From: Michael Watkins | | | he inference about US states voting for W seems quite a stretch, given the Sweden thing
Exactly.
Plus if he really wanted to convince people to vote for Nader, he'd have spelled it out. I can't imagine Bin Laden assuming that Arabic interpretations would nuance that one out for him. |
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To: TimF who wrote (150667) | 11/2/2004 6:33:55 PM | From: Michael Watkins | | | CIA Report Proves That Bush War Plan Was Deficient
If you read through the CIA Report on WMD it becomes very obvious that the Bush-approved war plan did not put any special emphasis on securing weapons of mass destruction, or their components, from falling into the hands of terrorists.
Here are but a few extracts, verbatim [except for comments inserted by me from time to time] that show a pattern of theft of materials. In many cases the CIA Iraq Survey Group confirms that materials were stolen *after* Operation Iraqi Freedom was "mission accomplished", thus confirming charges that the Bush admnistration failed to properly plan to secure the country.
I think the failure is more than a staffing issue - more than a complete under-estimation of the challenges at hand - I think the lack of adequate plans to secure WMD or suspected components suggests more than mere incompetance. Congressional Researchers - I hope you are looking at the details that we in the public do not have access to...
* ISG site visits to many locations found not only destruction resulting from Operation Iraqi Freedom, but also looting that rendered many facilities inoperable.
* All of the G&C [guidance and control] systems and related components were stored at the Al Quds Factory of the Al Karamah General Company immediately before OIF. Although some examples of this hardware were recovered, the Al Quds Factory itself has been completely looted and no items remain.
* the Al Quds Factory [Uranium conversion] itself has been completely looted and no items remain.
* The Al Tahadi site was heavily looted after Operation Iraqi Freedom, and no documents or equipment remained at the site.
* An ISG team visited the Al-Nida site in late August 2003 [after Operation Iraqi Freedom] and found that the entire plant had been systematically looted of all equipment, computers, and documents
* In April or May of 2003 [what, no precise record? what kind of specialists are these anyway???], the underground facility adjacent to the main Al-Razi facility was visited and found to have been looted, and equipment was missing. The Iraqi scientist stated that after the CVL demonstration he worked on a barium vapor laser up until Operation Iraqi Freedom. Although Al-Razi was not damaged during Operation Iraqi Freedom, it was heavily looted afterward.
* Warheads and peripheral hardware for brass and recyclable metals are still being looted. [While the ISG team is still doing its survey in 2003!]
* The disposition of the 152mm and/or the 155mm artillery projectiles after the Gulf war is unknown, although it is possible that the rounds remained at the Al Muthanna complex and were looted after OIF.
* Hazim stated that he would not be surprised if smallpox isolates were found in Iraq and identified two culture repositories where viral cultures could be maintained over extended periods of time: Al Dawrah FMDV Plant and the Baghdad CPHL. None were found by ISG. However, the CPHL seed stock repository was reported to have been systemically looted post-OIF
* [At a possible DGS laboratory in Baghdad] During the first exploitation in April 2003, the exploitation team found large quantities of liquid and dry chemicals, equipment, documents, and other materials—some of which were partially destroyed. A visit to the site in July [2003, after O.I.F.] revealed a completely looted warehouse complex with no remaining evidence of chemicals, equipment, or documentation.
And here's the smoking gun, well, one of many as it turns out, as if one is needed:
* Triggered by a series of site exploitations and detentions in March 2004, Iraq Survey Group (ISG) began investigating a network of Iraqi insurgents—referred to as the al-Abud network—who in late 2003 and early 2004 actively sought chemical weapons for use against Coalition Forces. By June 2004, ISG was able to identify and neutralize the chemical suppliers and chemists, including former regime members, who supported the al-Abud network.
It seems that US, pardon, "coalition forces" didn't start proactively start trying to prevent chemical weapons remnants from falling into terrorist hands until this year - 2004 - over a year after the start of the war!!!
Summary:
* Stated purpose of war: To prevent dangerous weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists.
* Was the goal achieved? No.
* Was there a reasonable plan in place to even achieve the goal? No.
Conclusion:
Gross incompetence on the part of war planners and/or by extension a case to start digging for evidence that the real goal of the war was not as stated.
Sources: CIA report on WMD |
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To: Neocon who wrote (150685) | 11/2/2004 6:46:15 PM | From: Win Smith | | | Yes, there's an election going on, and as near as I can tell, Nadine was trying to spin Bin Laden's statement into a Kerry endorsement. I don't exactly think that efforts of that sort are deserving of a break, today. |
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To: Proud Deplorable who wrote (150363) | 11/2/2004 6:53:00 PM | From: Brumar89 | | | America is the root of all evil for some people.
In fact, we didn't put Saddam in power, nor was he a puppet of ours. When he gained power the US and Iraq didn't even have diplomatic relations. And Iraq was placed on the State Department's list of terror-sponsoring nations soon after he seized power. |
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From: Win Smith | 11/2/2004 6:55:36 PM | | | | What Is a Just War? nybooks.com War
[ I found this review / essay interesting. The conclusion has a bite:
Democratic War
Perhaps the greatest service Walzer has performed is to reopen the question of competent authority for declaring war. That problem was prema-turely set aside by those who thought the nation-state had settled it. In a democracy, the people are supposed to be the ultimate authority. Should they be the judges of a war's legitimacy? Even proto-democratic thinkers like Vitoria and Suarez thought that they should, and Nuremberg principles raise the problem of popular complicity in immoral wars.[18] Walzer notes that the United States government, anticipating popular resistance to wars of choice, has tried to insulate warmaking from the democratic process. Abolishing the draft made influential citizens less concerned with service abroad. The promise of low-risk air strikes and technological "smart war" is meant to reduce the casualty rate and minimize the people's stake in whatever wars their rulers might decide on. Walzer finds it repugnant to kill others with small risk of being killed in return—that is more the role of a sniper or assassin than of a combatant.
A more serious way of keeping citizens out of the decision process is the modern cult of secrecy. We must, we are told, trust our leaders to make decisions we are not qualified to evaluate. Lyndon Johnson said that if we knew what he did, we would approve his actions in Vietnam—but we could not know. The information was "classi-fied." When a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff criticized the preparations for the Gulf War, Secretary of State James Baker said his comments should be disregarded because he was no longer cleared to read the latest intelligence reports. If a man with those credentials is dismissed, how can humble citizen I or humble citizen you have any right to an opinion? Secrecy is a shield against every other authority or challenge. When Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson was asked how he, a Catholic, could defend a war the Pope condemned, he answered: "We have much better information than the Pope about what's going on inside Iraq."
The disqualifying of challenges to authority is furthered by the claim that the President is "our commander in chief," to whom we owe a military obedience, not a citizen's responsibility. The Constitution says that the president is "commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states when called into the actual service of the United States." Putting the nation in a state of permanent war turns dissent into disloyalty and criticism into treason. The fear of being considered insufficiently deferential to the high priests of classified information leaves politicians and the public vulnerable to lies from the top. Even William Fulbright endorsed Lyndon Johnson's lies when he voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Only Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening were courageous enough to defy the President and vote against it. You would think that this experience would make senators wary of George W. Bush—but, no, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton voted to give him authority to make war in Iraq. The role of Morse and Gruening was left to Senator Bob Graham and my own state's sainted senator, Richard Durbin. Kerry later said he expected Bush to be responsible in his use of the authority given him. What on the record could have justified such an expectation?
Walzer argued in his 1977 book that much of the American intelligentsia abdicated its responsibility to challenge the assurances of the government during the Vietnam War.[19] That charge applied to experts in and outside government. Robert McNamara should have told us he had doubts when that would have affected events—not thirty years later. I suppose we can expect a similar performance from Colin Powell—the loyal enabler turning at last into the ex post facto penitent. Democrats have been so chary of challenging the President that they have allowed the Bush administration to extend secrecy on an unparalleled scale. When the Democrats still had a majority in the Senate, they would not issue subpoenas to find out who was advising Vice President Cheney on energy policy. Health care statistics were kept secret.
Anything that might be embarrassing to a president is now treated as a national security issue—weakening him, it is said, will hamper his dealings with foreign powers. Unless we treat him as infallible, foes will see him as powerless. Since democracy is impossible without accountability, and accountability is impossible if secrecy hides the acts to be held accountable, making a just war may become impossible for lack of a competent democratic authority to declare it. A president who can make a war of choice, not of necessity, at his pleasure, on the basis of privileged information, treating his critics as enemies of the state, is no longer a surreal fantasy. Walzer has moved the concerns over just war from the periphery of political theory to the very center of our democratic dilemma.
In full: ]
By Garry Wills
[ review of: Arguing About War by Michael Walzer
Yale University Press, 208 pp., $25.00 ]
Jus in Bello
The traditional theory of the just war covers three main topics—the cause of war, the conduct of war, and the consequences of war. Or, in the Scholastic tags: jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum. But most attention is given now to the middle term, the conduct of war. That is where clear offenses are most easily identified, though only occasionally reported and even more rarely punished. The two main rules of jus in bello have to do with discrimination between combatants and noncombatants, the latter to be spared as far as possible, and proportionality, so that violence is calibrated to its need for attaining the war's end. The claims of morality here are recognized with difficulty in actual combat, and disputed when recognized. Why should that be?
In Tolstoy's War and Peace, Prince Andrey is an enlightened, humane, reforming, disciplined man. He has had experience in war without becoming embittered—he was badly (almost mortally) wounded at the Battle of Aus- terlitz—and has tried to improve the military system. But by the Battle of Borodino, even this estimable man has snapped. After riding past his destroyed estate, he ruminates:
I wouldn't take prisoners. What sense is there in taking prisoners? That's chivalry. The French have destroyed my home and are coming to destroy Moscow; they have outraged and are outraging me at every second. They are my enemies, they are all criminals to my way of thinking.... Playing at war, that's what's vile; and playing at magnanimity and all the rest of it.... They plunder other people's homes, issue false money, and, worse than all, kill my children, my father, and then talk of the laws of warfare.... If there were none of this playing at generosity in warfare, we should never go to war, except for something worth facing certain death for.... The object of warfare is murder.[1]
Andrey has attained the state Clausewitz says is necessary to war—Hass, hatred for the foe. There is in all sane people a hesitation to kill, whether from timidity, disorientation, or scruple. That is why so many bullets are fired in war but not at the target, why so many bombs are dropped but not where they were supposed to be. It is the task of those in charge of war to override these hesitations, and the only sure way of doing that is to demonize the enemy, so that hating him is not only condonable but commendable.
Clausewitz says that war is fueled by emotion (Gefühl), which always outruns intent (Absicht). And once this begins there is a constant ratcheting-up (Wechselwirkung) of hatred. Hate produces atrocities, which provoke answering atrocities from the other side, and so on in a reciprocal upward spiral. This means, says Clausewitz, that war by its basic nature drives onward to extremes. Shakespeare was almost scientifically accurate when he had his Antony "let slip the dogs of war"—to outrun expectations and control.
Other students of war have their own versions of Clausewitz's Wechselwirkung. Here is Thucydides:
War, depriving people of their expected resources, is a tutor of violence, hardening men to match the conditions they face.... Suspicion of prior atrocities drives men to surpass report in their own cruel innovations, either by subtlety of assault or extravagance of reprisal.
Abraham Lincoln's version (predicting, in 1854, what would happen if the North and South went to war): "One side will provoke; the other resent. The one will taunt, the other defy; one aggresses, the other retaliates."[2]
In war, the raping and robbing of civilians, the brutalizing and killing of prisoners, are not anomalies. War propaganda excites such extremes, with its emphasis on the vileness of the foe. That is why President Bush presents his war as a battle against evil itself. Hate is too valuable to be renounced. Often it is the only antidote to other emotions like cowardice or humanitarianism. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were, like Claude Rains in Casablanca, "shocked, shocked" at the idea that Americans could commit atrocities. But governments usually look the other way when their own provocations produce their natural result. When I was a high school student in the ROTC, the veteran sergeant instructing us, a man who had fought at the Battle of the Bulge, remembered being told by superiors to get rid of prisoners if they inconvenienced his own activity ("just pull the pin of a hand grenade and tell them to split it up among themselves"). In this atmosphere, what chance do reflections on justice have of prevailing?
Abraham Lincoln would not have been shocked to hear that Americans commit atrocities. He described, in the year of Gettysburg, the immoralities of the very war he was directing:
Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. And all this, as before said, may be among honest men only. But this is not all. Every foul bird comes abroad, and every dirty reptile rises up. These add crime to confusion. Strong measures, deemed indispensable but harsh at best, such men make worse by mal-administration. Murders for old grudges, and murders for pelf, proceed under any cloak that will best cover for the occasion.[3]
Admittedly there are some checks on savagery, but these are less frequently moral than pragmatic. Mistreating the other side's prisoners can lead to the mistreatment of one's own prisoners. Calculation of that sort underlies the Geneva Conventions. But this reflects the "realism" that just war theory is supposed to improve on. So how useful are the arguments of jus in bello when one is actually in bello? Jus ad Bellum
If war, once embarked on, will of itself drive toward extremes, overriding concern with justice, then the real use of just war theory must rest mainly on the decision whether to go to war in the first place. The traditional norms for such a discussion are said to be competent authority for declaring war, as well as just cause, proper intent, last resort, and expectable success. When the norms were framed in the Middle Ages, most discussion turned on the authority for declaring war, since there were many competitors for that office—popes, bishops, feudal lords, kings, margraves, etc. With the rise of the nation-state, that debate faded away, since it was assumed that national leaders had the power to initiate war. This left the emphasis mainly on the just cause for war. But how useful was that norm in determining whether a just war was launched in Iraq?
The Vatican, reputed to be a principal custodian of the just war tradition, said repeatedly and emphatically that such a war would be unjust so long as inspections were still taking place under the aegis of the United Nations. John Allen, the Vatican correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter, writes that "the Holy See opposed the US-led war in Iraq with a ferocity that few issues in the recent past have aroused."[4] Vatican publications, Church diplomats, religious congregation heads, and the Pope himself all said that just war theory forbade the Iraq war. John Paul II sent Cardinal Pio Laghi, his personal peace representative, to make a last-minute appeal to President Bush on March 5, 2003.
But right-wing Catholics in America were certain that just war theory called for war. Michael Novak, of the American Enterprise Institute, said the war was not only defensible but mandatory. He went to Rome, summoned by the United States ambassador to the Vatican, James Nichollson, to convince the hierarchy of the need for war. When he failed to change the Vatican's mind, Novak blamed this on "anti-Americanism." A group of Catholics who are normally subservient to the Pope— Novak, Jean Bethke Elshtain, John Richard Neuhaus, George Weigel— became the defenders of a "just war tradition" they felt the Vatican had abandoned.[5] It was even said that the Pope had turned pacifist—though the Vatican approved of the intervention in Kosovo and the invasion of Afghanistan. One may well ask, what use is just war theory if people supposedly steeped in it could reach such positive conclusions on opposite sides of the Iraq invasion? In truth, the criteria of a just war—the product mainly of late Scholasticism—have little power to determine an outcome. In fact, solemn talk of a just war "tradition" is misleading, since its history is full of anachronisms and contradictions. "The Tradition"
The great names invoked in the tradition are Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. But Augustine never wrote systematically about war, his ad hoc comments were severely limited by the issue or person he was addressing, and his comments have been widely distorted.[6] He began from the gospel texts against returning violence for violence, and denied the right that many make the very basis of just war argument—the right of personal self-defense.[7] That would be an act of self-love, which is always evil in Augustine. But if one sees one's fellows threatened by violence, one can defend them out of love—so long as one loves the aggressors, too.[8] The latter condition means that any war driven by Clausewitzian Hass is unjust for Augustine. Also, even when defending others, one cannot act "on one's own hook," which might also come from selfish motives. One must wait for legitimate authority to command the action, and then one must not kill the innocent, or torture or kill prisoners.[9]
Augustine's most extended discussion of war is in five long paragraphs of his Answer to Faustus. There, in opposition to Manichaean attacks on the Jewish patriarchs, he defends the morality of Mosaic and other wars by saying that they were directly ordered by God. One must obey a command from God, even if one does not understand it—as Abraham obeyed the command to kill his son.[10] In today's circumstances this teaching is better fitted to the jihadist "other side"—to those who wage holy war.
Thomas Aquinas is not much more helpful. He has three main norms for permissible war—declaration by competent authority, just cause, and proper intent.[11] The last is defined as acting "to promote good or prevent evil"—a thing that can justify war as a tool of social engineering (e.g., to spread democracy and rebuff tyranny). It is not surprising then that Aquinas approved of the social engineering of his day, the Crusades (to spread Christianity and rebuff Muslimism)—which again is more useful to current jihad than to a secular democracy.[12]
The most relevant of the just war theorists is less cited than Augustine or Thomas since he is less known— Francisco de Vitoria (1486–1546), a Spanish Dominican who bravely protested his countrymen's conquest of the Americas. It was he who focused especially on discrimination and proportionality.[13] But even when he is counted in the "tradition," there is little more than a checklist of items to be ticked off, with some items as broad and vague as any warmaker could wish. That is why the tradition has had so little impact on the actual waging of war. Is just war theory, then, a meaningless exercise? Not if one is to believe Michael Walzer and the arguments of his new work. Walzer
Walzer avoids a checklist approach to the so-called tradition, ticking off the items on a fixed program. In fact, in his 1977 book, Just and Unjust Wars, as well as in his new work, Arguing About War, he denies the universal validity of some of the most revered items on the list. Concerning the Gulf War he writes:
The move [toward pacifism] involves a new stress upon two maxims of the [just war] theory: first, that war must be a "last resort," and second, that its anticipated costs to soldiers and civilians alike must not be disproportionate to (greater than) the value of its ends. I do not think that either maxim helps much in making the moral distinctions that we need to make.
If he quarrels with the tradition, why does he bother with it at all? He says that his protest against the Vietnam War made him realize that a way had to be found to object to actions as basically immoral, not just ineffective in terms of "realism." This meant asking basic questions all over again, including Augustine's initial one—when (if ever) is it permissible to kill other human beings?
Walzer is, in a perhaps unconscious way, very Augustinian in his belief that no theory of justice can free warriors from guilt. They may have to kill, but they give rein to atrocities all the same, since even a just war is a fountain of evil. Augustine puts it this way:
Anyone who looks with anguish on evils so great, so repulsive, so savage, must acknowledge the tragedy of it all; and if anyone experiences them or even looks on at them without anguish, his condition is even more tragic, since he remains serene by losing his humanity.
Walzer, in similar vein, says that all war overrides certain moral rules; but even when they have to be overridden, they remain moral rules: "Overriding the rules leaves guilt behind as a recognition of the enormity of what we have done." "The tradition" often implies that belligerent acts in a just war are themselves moral—which is the basis of triumphalism and patriotic smugness. Walzer denies the right to such self-congratulation. Even a just war, he says, "invites—and then only insofar as it also requires—an immoral response: we do what we must (every legitimate alternative having been exhausted)." Paradoxically, then, a person who tries to act morally in war sees his own immorality.
Is this an impossible ideal to expect? One might think so but for the example of Lincoln. While most war leaders ratchet up hatred, he tried to ratchet it down, in recognition of the evil being done on both sides. That was the theme of his Fast Day proclamations, asking people to wage a repenting war, "in sorrowful remembrance of our own faults and crimes."[14] During the Vietnam War, Senator Mark Hatfield introduced a resolution calling on the nation to repent its own war crimes. He was attacked as unpatriotic, as treasonously giving aid and comfort to the enemy—till he revealed that he had been directly quoting Lincoln.
Walzer's moral sensitivities have one special source (among others). Though he says that he wrote his 1977 book on just war in response to the immoral acts committed in Vietnam (napalm, Agent Orange, etc.), he was also disturbed by the Israelis' increasing need to use force. He weighs the rationales offered for the raid on Khibye (1953), for the Six-Day War (1967), for the attack on Beirut's airport (1968) and on Entebbe (1976). He found all but Khibye justified, but he clearly saw the dangers of moral obtuseness in the others.[15] In his new book, he condemns Israeli overreaction to the first intifada:
As even Yitzhak Rabin has recognized, it is not terrorist in character. The youngsters who do the everyday work of the uprising are not a specially trained cadre of killers. They are everyone's children, and they are supported by a full-scale popular movement and by an extraordinary network of local committees.... Terrorists cannot claim a right to self-determination; a popular movement can, and the Palestinians have finally produced a popular movement.... Israelis of roughly my age remember throwing stones at British soldiers. It is a useful, if also a disturbing, memory.
Walzer says that Israel, instead of using the sense of pride bred in Palestinians to work with a popular movement, felt humiliated by having children as enemies and "aimed not only to defeat the uprising but to force the Palestinians to acknowledge defeat— 'to wipe the smile off the Palestinian face.'" Israelis preferred to dictate a peace rather than negotiate it—which made it harder for them to get negotiations when they wanted them.
But sympathy for the first or children's intifada does not affect Walzer's harsh condemnation of Palestinians' later terror tactics, like suicide bombing. In fact, he argues that terrorism— the killing of innocent people as a way of making a political statement—is never justified. Yet he sees as well the danger in fighting terror with terror, turning a nation into the mirror image of its foes. "First oppression is made into an excuse for terrorism, and then terrorism is made into an excuse for oppression. The first is the excuse of the far left; the second is the excuse of the neoconservative right."
Discriminating and painful honesty like this has made Walzer a respected judge of moral issues when it comes to war. That is why many people were looking to him for guidance as the Bush administration considered the invasion of Iraq. It was not clear beforehand what he would say. His first book had been considered "permissive" by some. George W. Bush was talking about a preemptive war, and Walzer had supported the preemptive Six-Day War of 1967 and Israel's pre-emptive strike against Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981. He condemns pacifism as an abrogation of moral responsibilities. He supported the Gulf War and the Kosovo intervention. He signed a letter drafted by Jean Bethe Elshtain and the Catholic just war proponents defending the invasion of Afghanistan. Why, then, would he balk at a war many friends of Israel thought would be in their interest?
But balk he did. In five important lecture-essays written as the crisis unfolded—the culminating section of Arguing About War—he condemned the war while it was still in the offing, as it was being conducted, and after the occupation began. The United States conduct was, he concluded, injustum ad bellum, injustum in bello, injustum post bellum.
1. Ad bellum. Walzer is as critical as any Republicans have been of France and the Clinton administration for their weak policies toward Iraq during the 1990s. The time to threaten war, and to wage it if necessary, was when Clinton and the French let Saddam defy and, in effect, expel the weapons inspectors, who had found and destroyed many weapons. That course would have strengthened the UN's mandate, rather than undermined it. But the "good guys" blinked. The way to repair that blunder was with sanctions, the no-fly zones, and demands for new inspections backed by force. This approach was working when inspectors were readmitted in 2002, and the combined pressures made it impossible for Saddam to deploy any threats he might have had in mind. Increased (though targeted) sanctions, and a no-fly zone over the entire country, combined with insistence that the inspections continue unimpeded, were obvious alternatives to the ultimate step of military attack. "For whether or not the inspectors find and destroy weapons of mass destruction (some of these are very easy to hide), they themselves are a barrier to any deployment of such weapons."
But members of the Bush team did not want to support inspections. They ridiculed Hans Blix. They had decided, without adequate sources on the ground, that weapons of mass destruction existed, and did not want certainty to be questioned or undermined. They were looking for an excuse to adopt an anticipatory war strategy for dealing with terrorists everywhere. They misquoted Daniel Webster in order to justify preemptive war, citing a passage Walzer had carefully analyzed in his first book on just wars.[16] Walzer rightly distinguishes preemptive from preventive war, and says Bush was adopting the latter (where a threat is not imminent) while talking of the former.[17]
Even humanitarian intervention was not justified in Saddam's case, since his major human rights violations, against the Kurds and after the 1991 war, were over, not ongoing, and invasion to punish rather than prevent atrocities is very hard to justify. If Saddam had resumed his mass killings in the presence of inspectors and in defiance of flyovers, this would have provided a genuine casus belli. Walzer has condemned the lack (or the listlessness) of intervention to stop such killing in Rwanda and Haiti (and he would now add, no doubt, Darfur). But these cases do not offer true parallels to the Iraq war, where Bush made humanitarian motives the casus belli only after weapons of mass destruction failed to turn up:
Now that a zone of (relative) safety has been carved out for the Kurds in the North, there is no compelling case to be made for humanitarian intervention in Iraq. The Baghdad regime is brutally repressive and morally repugnant, certainly; but it is not engaged in mass murder or ethnic cleansing; there are governments as bad (well, almost as bad) all over the world.
Walzer wrote that in September 2002, before the inspectors were readmitted. Once they did reenter the country, his argument was obviously even stronger. He was unequivocal in saying that war at that time would be unjust:
If the dithering and delay go on and on—if the inspectors don't return or if they return but can't work effectively; if the threat of enforcement is not made credible; and if our allies are unwilling to act— then many of us will probably end up, very reluctantly, supporting the war the Bush administration seems so eager to fight. Right now, however, there are other things to do, and there is still time to do them. The administration's war is neither just nor necessary.
2. In bello. On the very eve of war (March 7, 2003), Walzer already saw what many people would recognize only much later, that "the administration seems to have no exit strategy, no contingency plans to stop the march" to war. When the war began, he could say firmly, "America's war is unjust.... A war fought before its time is not a just war."
3. Post bellum. "Surely occupying powers are morally bound to think seriously about what they are going to do in someone else's country. That moral test we have obviously failed to meet." "A just occupation costs money; it does not make money." Admittedly, war always has its peripheral scavengers, its opportunistic camp followers.
In the Iraqi case, however, President Bush and his advisers seem committed to profiteering at the center. They claim to be bringing democracy to Iraq, and we all have to hope that they succeed. But with much greater speed and effectiveness, they have brought to Iraq the crony capitalism that now prevails in Washington....
The distribution of contracts to politically connected American companies is a scandal.... An international agency of proven impartiality would be best [in awarding contracts], but even American regulators, under congressional mandate, would be an improvement over no regulators at all.
On the other hand, Walzer says, a conquering nation is responsible for the chaos it has introduced into a conquered nation, and cannot leave when it suits the conqueror's convenience. That would be adding a crowning injustice to all the prior injustices.
Walzer made very good arguments against the justice of the war's commencement, conduct, and conclusion. But he was no more successful in his opposition than was the Vatican. So are his arguments as useless as those of the tradition? I hope not. We are not exempted from pressing moral claims even by defeat, and he supplies us with better moral claims than we have experienced in the past. Besides, his arguments over war go to many other concerns with democracy in the centralized modern state. Democratic War
Perhaps the greatest service Walzer has performed is to reopen the question of competent authority for declaring war. That problem was prema-turely set aside by those who thought the nation-state had settled it. In a democracy, the people are supposed to be the ultimate authority. Should they be the judges of a war's legitimacy? Even proto-democratic thinkers like Vitoria and Suarez thought that they should, and Nuremberg principles raise the problem of popular complicity in immoral wars.[18] Walzer notes that the United States government, anticipating popular resistance to wars of choice, has tried to insulate warmaking from the democratic process. Abolishing the draft made influential citizens less concerned with service abroad. The promise of low-risk air strikes and technological "smart war" is meant to reduce the casualty rate and minimize the people's stake in whatever wars their rulers might decide on. Walzer finds it repugnant to kill others with small risk of being killed in return—that is more the role of a sniper or assassin than of a combatant.
A more serious way of keeping citizens out of the decision process is the modern cult of secrecy. We must, we are told, trust our leaders to make decisions we are not qualified to evaluate. Lyndon Johnson said that if we knew what he did, we would approve his actions in Vietnam—but we could not know. The information was "classi-fied." When a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff criticized the preparations for the Gulf War, Secretary of State James Baker said his comments should be disregarded because he was no longer cleared to read the latest intelligence reports. If a man with those credentials is dismissed, how can humble citizen I or humble citizen you have any right to an opinion? Secrecy is a shield against every other authority or challenge. When Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson was asked how he, a Catholic, could defend a war the Pope condemned, he answered: "We have much better information than the Pope about what's going on inside Iraq."
The disqualifying of challenges to authority is furthered by the claim that the President is "our commander in chief," to whom we owe a military obedience, not a citizen's responsibility. The Constitution says that the president is "commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states when called into the actual service of the United States." Putting the nation in a state of permanent war turns dissent into disloyalty and criticism into treason. The fear of being considered insufficiently deferential to the high priests of classified information leaves politicians and the public vulnerable to lies from the top. Even William Fulbright endorsed Lyndon Johnson's lies when he voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Only Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening were courageous enough to defy the President and vote against it. You would think that this experience would make senators wary of George W. Bush—but, no, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton voted to give him authority to make war in Iraq. The role of Morse and Gruening was left to Senator Bob Graham and my own state's sainted senator, Richard Durbin. Kerry later said he expected Bush to be responsible in his use of the authority given him. What on the record could have justified such an expectation?
Walzer argued in his 1977 book that much of the American intelligentsia abdicated its responsibility to challenge the assurances of the government during the Vietnam War.[19] That charge applied to experts in and outside government. Robert McNamara should have told us he had doubts when that would have affected events—not thirty years later. I suppose we can expect a similar performance from Colin Powell—the loyal enabler turning at last into the ex post facto penitent. Democrats have been so chary of challenging the President that they have allowed the Bush administration to extend secrecy on an unparalleled scale. When the Democrats still had a majority in the Senate, they would not issue subpoenas to find out who was advising Vice President Cheney on energy policy. Health care statistics were kept secret.
Anything that might be embarrassing to a president is now treated as a national security issue—weakening him, it is said, will hamper his dealings with foreign powers. Unless we treat him as infallible, foes will see him as powerless. Since democracy is impossible without accountability, and accountability is impossible if secrecy hides the acts to be held accountable, making a just war may become impossible for lack of a competent democratic authority to declare it. A president who can make a war of choice, not of necessity, at his pleasure, on the basis of privileged information, treating his critics as enemies of the state, is no longer a surreal fantasy. Walzer has moved the concerns over just war from the periphery of political theory to the very center of our democratic dilemma. Notes
[1] Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Constance Garnett (Modern Library, 1994), pp. 885–886.
[2] Abraham Lincoln, speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, October 16, 1854, in Speeches and Writings, edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher (Library of America, 1989), Vol. 1, p. 335.
[3] Abraham Lincoln, letter to Charles D. Drake and others, October 5, 1863, in Fehrenbacher, Speeches and Writings, Vol. 2, p. 523.
[4] John L. Allen Jr, All the Pope's Men: The Inside Story of How the Vatican Really Thinks (Doubleday, 2004), p. 372. Allen assembles (pp. 313–378) an impressive chronology of Vatican statements opposing the war in Iraq. Sample: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, asked if this could be a just war, answered: "In this situation, certainly not."
[5] See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (Basic Books, 2003).
[6] For the ad hoc nature of Augustine's comments on war, and the mistake of making them the foundation for a "tradition," see R.A. Marcus, "Saint Augustine's Views on the 'Just War,'" in The Church and War, edited by W.J. Sheils (Blackwell, 1983); Marie-François Berrouard, "Bellum," in Augustinus-Lexikon, edited by Cornelius Meyer et al. (Schwabe, 1986); Frederick H. Russell, "War," in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, edited by Allan D. Fitzgerald et al. (Eerdmans, 1999).
[7] Augustine, On Free Will 1.5; Epistles 47.5; Answer to Faustus the Manichaean 22.70; The City of God 1.21.
[8] Augustine, Epistles 138.14.
[9] Augustine, The City of God 1.21; Epistles 189, 220, 229. Letter 229 has his famous statement, "Better to slay war with words than men with swords."
[10] Augustine cites Cicero in one place (Quaestionum in Heptateuchum 6.10) as saying that wars are "usually" (solent) justified as "avenging wrongs" (ulcisci injurias). This is often falsely cited as Augustine's own summary teaching on the matter, though it is just the first step in an a fortiori argument saying that wars are surely more justified if they are commanded by God, "with whom there is no iniquity, and who knows what is owing to each party—in which war the people conducting armies are not to be considered as initiators of the war themselves but as his agents."
[11] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II 40.
[12] Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II 188.3. For Thomas's approval of the Crusades' papal authorization, of crusader vows and of crusader indulgences, see Scriptum super Sententiarum 4.32, 38; Quaestiones de Quolibet II 8.2, V 7.
[13] Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, edited by Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 314–326. There are seeds of Nuremberg law in Vitoria when he says that aggressors can be punished for the wrongs they have done.
[14] Abraham Lincoln, proclamation of a National Fast Day, August 12, 1861, in Fehrenbacher, Speeches and Writings, Vol. 2, p. 264.
[15] He did not discuss the raid on Iraq's nuclear reactor, since it had not then occurred, but he justifies it in the new book.
[16] Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, third edition (Basic Books, 2000), pp. 74–75.
[17] Vitoria condemned preventive war: "It is quite unacceptable that a person should be killed for a sin he has yet to commit." See Vitoria, Political Writings, pp. 315–316.
[18] See Vitoria, Political Writings, p. 307: "If the war seems patently unjust to the subject, he must not fight, even if he is ordered to do so by the prince."
[19] Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 287–303. |
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To: Brumar89 who wrote (150699) | 11/2/2004 6:58:04 PM | From: Proud Deplorable | | | How west helped Saddam gain power and decimate the Iraqi elite By Mohamoud A Shaikh
Iraqis have always suspected that the 1963 military coup that set Saddam Husain on the road to absolute power had been masterminded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). New evidence just published reveals that the agency not only engineered the putsch but also supplied the list of people to be eliminated once power was secured - a monstrous stratagem that led to the decimation of Iraq's professional class.
The overthrow of president Abdul Karim Kassim on February 8, 1963 was not, of course, the first intervention in the region by the agency, but it was the bloodiest - far bloodier than the coup it orchestrated in 1953 to restore the shah of Iran to power. Just how gory, and how deep the CIA's involvement in it, is demonstrated in a new book by Said Aburish, a writer on Arab political affairs.
The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (1997), sets out the details not only of how the CIA closely controlled the planning stages but also how it played a central role in the subsequent purge of suspected leftists after the coup.
The author reckons that 5,000 were killed, giving the names of 600 of them - including many doctors, lawyers, teachers and professors who formed Iraq's educated elite. The massacre was carried out on the basis of death lists provided by the CIA.
The lists were compiled in CIA stations throughout the Middle East with the assistance of Iraqi exiles like Saddam, who was based in Egypt. An Egyptian intelligence officer, who obtained a good deal of his information from Saddam, helped the Cairo CIA station draw up its list. According to Aburish, however, the American agent who produced the longest list was William McHale, who operated under the cover of a news correspondent for the Beirut bureau of Time magazine.
The butchery began as soon as the lists reached Baghdad. No-one was spared. Even pregnant women and elderly men were killed. Some were tortured in front of their children. According to the author, Saddam who 'had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo to join the victors, was personally involved in the torture of leftists in the separate detention centres for fellaheen [peasants] and the Muthaqafeen or educated classes.'
King Hussain of Jordan, who maintained close links with the CIA, says the death lists were relayed by radio to Baghdad from Kuwait, the foreign base for the Iraqi coup. According to him, a secret radio broadcast was made from Kuwait on the day of the coup, February 8, 'that relayed to those carrying out the coup the names and addresses of communists there, so they could be seized and executed.'
The CIA's royal collaborator also gives an insight into how closely the Ba'athist party and American intelligence operators worked together during the planning stages. 'Many meetings were held between the Ba'ath party and American intelligence - the most critical ones in Kuwait,' he says.
At the time the Ba'ath party was a small nationalist movement with only 850 members. But the CIA decided to use it because of its close relations with the army. One of its members tried to assassinate Kassim as early as 1959. Saddam, then 22, was wounded in the leg, later fleeing the country.
According to Aburish, the Ba'ath party leaders - in return for CIA support - agreed to 'undertake a cleansing programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist allies.' Hani Fkaiki, a Ba'ath party leader, says that the party's contact man who orchestrated the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad.
One of the coup leaders, colonel Saleh Mahdi Ammash, former Iraqi assistant military attache in Washington, was in fact arrested for being in touch with Lakeland in Baghdad. His arrest caused the conspirators to move earlier than they had planned.
Aburish's book shows that the Ba'ath leaders did not deny plotting with the CIA ro overthrow Kassim. When Syrian Ba'ath party officials demanded to know why they were in cahoots with the US agency, the Iraqis tried to justify it in terms of ideology comparing their collusion to 'Lenin arriving in a German train to carry out his revolution.' Ali Saleh, the minister of interior of the regime which had replaced Kassim, said: 'We came to power on a CIA train.'
It should not come as a surprise that the Americans were so eager to overthrow Kassim or so willing to cause such a blood bath to achieve their objective. At the height of the cold war, they were causing similar mayhem in Latin America and Indo-China overthrowing any leaders that dared show the slighest degree of independence.
Kassim was a prime target for US aggression and arrogance. After taking power in 1958, he took Iraq out of the Baghdad Pact, the US-backed anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East, and in 1961 he dared nationalise part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum company and resurrected a long-standing Iraqi claim to Kuwait ( the regime which succeeded him immediately dropped the claim to Kuwait).
But the cold war does not by itself explain Uncle Sam's propensity to violence. When president George Bush bombed Iraq to smithereens, killing thousands of civilians, the cold war was over. Clinton cannot cite the cold war for insisting that the brutal regime of sanctions imposed on the country should stay.
In fact the brutal, blood-stained nature of Uncle Sam goes back all the way to the so-called 'Founding Fathers,' who made no attempt to conceal it. As long ago as 1818, John Quincy Adams hailed the 'salutary efficacy' of terror in dealing with 'mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes.' He was defending Andrew Jackson's frenzied operations in Florida which virtually wiped out the indigenous population and left the Spanish province under US control. Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues were not above professing to be impressed by the wisdom of his words.
Muslimedia: August 16-31, 1997 --------------------------
Here again is the age-old story of the U.S. being willing to back all manner of bloody thugs as long as they were anti-communist....
By Richard Sale UPI Intelligence Correspondent From the International Desk Published 4/10/2003 7:30 PM
Source: upi.com
U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.
United Press International has interviewed almost a dozen former U.S. diplomats, British scholars and former U.S. intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment on the report.
While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al- Karim Qasim.
In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former U.S. diplomat, who asked not to be identified, described as "a horrible orgy of bloodshed."
According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.
Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that "freaked everybody out" according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.
Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of "real power," according to this official. The domestic instability of the country prompted CIA Director Allan Dulles to say publicly that Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in the world."
In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, told UPI the CIA had enjoyed "close ties" with Qasim's ruling Baath Party, just as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Abd Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party "as its instrument."
According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements.
Adel Darwish, Middle East expert and author of "Unholy Babylon," said the move was done "with full knowledge of the CIA," and that Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. U.S. officials separately confirmed Darwish's account.
Darwish said that Saddam's paymaster was Capt. Abdel Maquid Farid, the assistant military attaché at the Egyptian Embassy who paid for the apartment from his own personal account. Three former senior U.S. officials have confirmed that this is accurate.
The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched. Accounts differ. One former CIA official said that the 22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and began firing too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm. Darwish told UPI that one of the assassins had bullets that did not fit his gun and that another had a hand grenade that got stuck in the lining of his coat.
"It bordered on farce," a former senior U.S. intelligence official said. But Qasim, hiding on the floor of his car, escaped death, and Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents, several U.S. government officials said.
Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut, according to Darwish and former senior CIA officials. While Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam's apartment and put him through a brief training course, former CIA officials said. The agency then helped him get to Cairo, they said.
One former U.S. government official, who knew Saddam at the time, said that even then Saddam "was known as having no class. He was a thug -- a cutthroat."
In Cairo, Saddam was installed in an apartment in the upper class neighborhood of Dukki and spent his time playing dominos in the Indiana Café, watched over by CIA and Egyptian intelligence operatives, according to Darwish and former U.S. intelligence officials.
One former senior U.S. government official said: "In Cairo, I often went to Groppie Café at Emad Eldine Pasha Street, which was very posh, very upper class. Saddam would not have fit in there. The Indiana was your basic dive."
But during this time Saddam was making frequent visits to the American Embassy where CIA specialists such as Miles Copeland and CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger were in residence and knew Saddam, former U.S. intelligence officials said.
Saddam's U.S. handlers even pushed Saddam to get his Egyptian handlers to raise his monthly allowance, a gesture not appreciated by Egyptian officials since they knew of Saddam's American connection, according to Darwish. His assertion was confirmed by former U.S. diplomat in Egypt at the time.
In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Morris claimed recently that the CIA was behind the coup, which was sanctioned by President John F. Kennedy, but a former very senior CIA official strongly denied this.
"We were absolutely stunned. We had guys running around asking what the hell had happened," this official said.
But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq's communist, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former U.S. intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions.
Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.
A former senior U.S. State Department official told UPI: "We were frankly glad to be rid of them. You ask that they get a fair trial? You have to get kidding. This was serious business."
A former senior CIA official said: "It was a bit like the mysterious killings of Iran's communists just after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. All 4,000 of his communists suddenly got killed."
British scholar Con Coughlin, author of "Saddam: King of Terror," quotes Jim Critchfield, then a senior Middle East agency official, as saying the killing of Qasim and the communists was regarded "as a great victory." A former long-time covert U.S. intelligence operative and friend of Critchfield said: "Jim was an old Middle East hand. He wasn't sorry to see the communists go at all. Hey, we were playing for keeps."
Saddam, in the meantime, became head of al-Jihaz a- Khas, the secret intelligence apparatus of the Baath Party.
The CIA/Defense Intelligence Agency relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq's armed forces, according to a former DIA official, part of a U.S. interagency intelligence group.
This former official said that he personally had signed off on a document that shared U.S. satellite intelligence with both Iraq and Iran in an attempt to produce a military stalemate. "When I signed it, I thought I was losing my mind," the former official told UPI.
A former CIA official said that Saddam had assigned a top team of three senior officers from the Estikhbarat, Iraq's military intelligence, to meet with the Americans.
According to Darwish, the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam's ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days.
The Saddam-U.S. intelligence alliance of convenience came to an end at 2 a.m. Aug. 2, 1990, when 100,000 Iraqi troops, backed by 300 tanks, invaded its neighbor, Kuwait. America's one-time ally had become its bitterest enemy.
Copyright © 2001-2003 United Press International
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.) Is this what spreading "democracy" is supposed to be about?
Let's break this cycle with Impeachment.
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