I am one whom the vile blows and buffets of the world Hath so incensed that I am reckless what I do to spite the world. --Macbeth
In typical, duplicitous fashion, John McCain's republican convention has decided to define itself with a lie. "Country First" is the improbable theme of McCain's republican coronation as his republican boosters work to obscure his obsession with almost every other country's affairs than our own.
If there is one theme which has dominated McCain's terminally negative campaign against his Democratic rival, it's his repeated promises to push the nations of the world (even further than Bush's imperialistic meddling abroad) to bend to his career-long campaign to dominate them and assuage his paranoia of their sovereignty and independence by waving the heavy hand of the U.S. military.
From Iraq to Russia, from Afghanistan to Iran, McCain is determined to continue and perpetuate the unbridled militarism of the Bush administration and commit our nation and its defenders to more of the same paternalistic bullying which has fostered and escalated the animosity around the world to Bush's arrogant aggression that he's exercised and supported across sovereign borders, with impunity.
On a conference call with reporters just now, senior Obama foreign policy adviser Susan Rice argued that there is "a pattern here of recklessness" when it comes to McCain's approach to various national security issues. She pointed out that McCain reacted too quickly with "aggressive and bellicose" rhetoric on the Russia-Georgia crisis, and contrasted that with Obama's measured response to the dust-up.
"There's something to be said for letting facts drive judgment," Rice said, also referring to McCain's desire to target Iraq right after 9/11.
Obama adviser (and former Senior Director at the NSC for Presidents Clinton & Bush, in charge of Counter-Terrorism) Richard Clarke, was also in on the call and described McCain as "reckless, trigger happy, and discredited."
"When I look at all this it is a little surprising and amazing to me. If you just take the name John McCain off and describe him and what he said, and if I don't tell you it's John McCain and if you look at what he said consistently over the last 8 or 9 years and most of us would impartially say that person who I just described in terms of their views was reckless, trigger happy, was discredited was part of the group that got us into the war," Clarke said.
Clarke said that McCain wanted a war with Iraq before 9/11,"He was before 9/11 calling for doing something militarily about Iraq. Right after 9/11 when the issue was still up in the air when the Bush administration had not yet decided what to do about Iraq. He was part of the group that was pushing the Bush administration hard to go to war in Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11...They were pushing for Ahmed Chalabi to be put in charge of Iraq, even though the CIA was telling anybody would listen that Ahmed Chalabi was a trickster."
He also said that McCain was wrong on Afghanistan, "The fact of the matter is his judgment which is clearly documented on the record about what to do in Iraq was wrong, and it was wrong when he said that we would have a fairly easy victory in Iraq, and linked to that he was wrong about Afghanistan. He says today that Obama is opposed to the surge that will succeed in Afghanistan. Excuse me. It was Obama who suggested that we put more troops into Afghanistan, and he did that on August 7th not of this year, but of last year, and McCain didn't come around to that view until rather recently. In fact, McCain had the exact opposite view. He said in 2003, "Nobody in Afghanistan threatens the United States." Is that the judgment of a foreign policy expert? Is that the record of somebody who has good judgment on these issues?"
Clarke characterized McCain as somebody who is always looking to react with military force, "I think he has consistently been quick draw McCain. On every issue his first instinct is to rattle sabers and look for a military solution. That's just not somebody who should be questioning anybody's judgment on national security in my view."
Indeed, McCain has made no secret of his willingness to threaten countries he disagrees with or fears by posturing as if our nation's military and our nation's defenders were at his disposal to flail around the globe at his mere whim and initiative. During the height of Bush's own bullying of Iraq's neighbors, McCain chose to sing 'Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,' to the tune of Barbara Ann for the press and public, as if to underscore the blithe way he regards the consequences of America's opportunistic military aggression abroad.
Out-bullying Bush in his failed 2000 run for the presidency, McCain touted his plans for a "rogue-state rollback" in which he outlined his nation-building ambitions for America. McCain's plan was to establish an 'international' coalition of like-interests which would bypass the objections of the United Nations (which McCain once insisted didn't exist), and conduct their own military crusades without the consent of rival nations who might object to 'international' initiatives and coercion based solely on whatever the U.S. decides is in their interests. McCain's "League of Democracies" would strike out with their own assembled mercenaries to intimidate and roll over anyone who stood in the way of their decidedly unilateral agenda.
McCain's plans actually resemble what Bush has done on his own as he's taken advantage of Congress' timidity in confronting and limiting his unpopular military expansionism and is well in line with the ultimate approval the UN eventually acceded to Bush's invasion and occupation which the UN General Secretary Annan had called illegal at its inception.
Ron Fullwood, is an activist from Columbia, Md. and the author of the book 'Power of Mischief' : Military Industry Executives are Making Bush Policy and the Country is Paying the Price
The United States and the Principle of Self-Exclusion
SELF-EXCLUSION
In one of many outraged comments on the justification of torture provided by Justice Department lawyers, Dean Harold Koh of Yale Law School - who as assistant secretary of state had presented Washington's denunciation of all forms of torture to the international community - 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 same legal advisors should have little difficulty arguing that the president does indeed have that right, so recent practise suggests.
The torture convention is unusual in that it was ratified, though amended by the Senate. Few international conventions on human right are even ratified, and those few are commonly accompanied by reservations rendering them inapplicable to the United States. They are deemed to be "non-self-executing," or subject to RUDs ""reservations, understandings, and declarations"). This includes the Genocide Convention, which the United States finally ratified forty years after it was drafted, but with the usual reservations. The matter reached the World Court in the context of NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. When an international tribunal was established to try war crimes in the Balkan wars, a group of international lawyers requested the tribunal to investigate NATO crimes during the Serbian bombing campaign, presenting documentary evidence recorded by the major international human rights organizations, along with revealing admissions by the NATO command. The prosecutors rejected the request without investigation, in violation of the statutes of the tribunal, stating that they accepted NATO assurances of good faith. Yugoslavia then brought charges to the World Court, invoking the Genocide Convention. The US government excused itself, on grounds of its self-exclusion from charges of genocide. The court, keeping to its statutes, accepted this argument.
There are other examples of self-exemption from core principles of international law, also of crucial contemporary relevance. One arose in the case brought to the World Court by Nicaragua against the United States. Part of Nicaragua's case, presented by Harvard University law professor and former legal advisor to the State Department Abram Chayes, was rejected by the court on the grounds that in accepting World Court jurisdiction in 1946, the United States had entered a reservation excluding itself from prosecution under multilateral treaties, including the UN Charter and the OAS Charter. The court therefore restricted its deliberations to customary international law and a bilateral US-Nicaragua treaty. Even on these very narrow grounds, the court charged Washington with "unlawful use of force" - in lay language, international terrorism - and ordered it to terminate the crimes and pay substantial reparations, which would go far beyond paying off the huge debt that is strangling Nicaragua. We return to the bitter aftermath. The relevant point here is that the court correctly recognized that the United States is self-exempted from the fundamental principles of world order that it played the primary role in formulating and enacting.
It would seem to follow that Washington is entitled to commit aggression as well as genocide. Aggression, in the wording of the Nuremburg Tribunal, is "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" - all the evil in the tortured land of Iraq that flowed from the US and UK invasion, for example. That includes Abu Ghraib, Falluja, and everything else that happened in the "truly horrible and brutal [years] for hapless Iraq" since the invasion. And if, as seems reasonable, we take the "accumulated evil" to include effects outside Iraq itself, the accounting is still more grim, leading right to the "inescapable question" [of shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?].
The concept of aggression was defined clearly enough by Justice Robert Jackson, chief of counsel for the United States at Nuremburg, and was restated in an authoritative General Assembly resolution. An "aggressor", Jackson proposed to the tribunal in his opening statement, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as "Invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State," or "Provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another State, or refusal, notwithstanding the request of the invaded State, to take in its own territory, all the measures in its power to deprive those bands of all assistance or protection." The second provision clearly applies to the US war against Nicaragua, though giving the Reaganites the benefit of the doubt, one might consider them to be guilty only of the lesser crime of international terrorism on a scale without precedent. The first applies to the US and UK invasion of Iraq, unless we avail ourselves of the more imaginative devices of defense attorneys, for example, the proposal by one respected legal scholar that the United States and UK were acting in accord with the UN Charter under a "communitarian interpretation" of its provisions: they were carrying out the will of the international community, in a mission implicitly delegated to them because they alone had the power to carry it out. It is irrelevant that the international community vociferously objected - even more strongly if people are included within the international community.
Also irrelevant are Justice Jackson's eloqent words at Nuremburg on the principle of universality: "If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us." And elsewhere: "We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well."
The Vienna Convention was proposed by the United States in 1963 and ratified in 1969. The United States was the first country to invoke it before the World Court, successfully, in its suit against Iran after the 1979 hostage taking. International law and court judgements are fine, but only when they come out the right way. Anything else is "inappropriate for the United States."
The basic problem with the World Court and the world, so we learn from [former] UN ambassador John Bolton, is that they misinterpret international law. One of the administration's legal specialists, Bolton writes that "in the rest of the world, international law and its 'binding' obligations are taken for granted." But no such binding obligation can apply to the United States. That follows from the fact that the "accumulating force" of international law interferes with Washington's freedom to act as it chooses and "will even more dramatically impede us in the future." Treaties are not "legal" obligations for the United States, but at most "political" commitments.
The reasoning throughout is straightforward, and is in full accord with what Bush calls "new thinking in the law of war," which takes international laws and treaties to be "private contractual rules" that the more powerful party "is free to apply or disregard as it sees fit": sternly enforced to ensure a safer world for investors, but quaint and obsolete when they constrain Washington's resort to aggression and other crimes.
Reflecting on the Iraq invasion, prominent strategic analyst Michael MccGwire writes:
There were many reasons - political, military, legal, ethical and economic - for concluding before the event that the decision to wage war on Iraq was fundamentally flawed. But in the longer term, by far the most important was that such an operation (and the reasoning that led to the decision to undertake it) threatened to undermine the very fabric of international relations. That decision repudiated a century of slow, intermittent and often painful progress towards an international system based on cooperative security, multilateral decision-making, collective action, agreed norms of behaviour and a steadily growing fabric of law
- which is being torn to shreds by the world's most powerful state, now a self-declared "outlaw state," taking perilous steps toward "ultimate doom."
From Noam Chomsky's "Failed States", 2006
by
dotmafia (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 68 comments)
on Thursday, August 21, 2008 at 4:44:22 PM
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