The Vision Thing
"This week President Bush wiped out eight years of effort on a protocol to
enforce the 1972 treaty. At a negotiating session in Geneva, the American
delegate rejected a draft text that all others had accepted."
By ANTHONY LEWIS
From The New York Times
In 1969 President Nixon renounced the
development or use of biological
weapons. It was an act of enlightened
self-interest. He understood that the wealth
and power of the United States could not
protect us from weapons that are cheap to
make and terrifyingly deadly, so safety lay in
persuading the world to eschew them. He then led the way to a 1972 treaty
banning the development, production or possession of biological weapons.
This week President Bush wiped out eight years of effort on a protocol to
enforce the 1972 treaty. At a negotiating session in Geneva, the American
delegate rejected a draft text that all others had accepted.
The Bush administration could have called for further negotiations to improve
the draft protocol. But the U.S. negotiator, Donald A. Mahley, said the
administration did not think it could be fixed. That effectively killed the
project.
The protocol called for limited international inspection of sites suspected of
involvement in biological weaponry. The Bush administration made two
arguments against it: that the system would not be effective, and that it would
give foreigners too much access to U.S. bio-defense installations and
pharmaceutical plants.
The second argument sent a dangerous signal to the rest of the world — that
despite American ratification of the 1972 treaty there are still people in the
U.S. Defense Department working on ideas for biological warfare. That can
only encourage others to think about new biological weapons.
Administration officials told correspondents that they were looking for other
ways to strengthen the 1972 treaty. One idea they mentioned was to toughen
export controls on the sale of sophisticated germ-producing equipment. But
experts dismissed that notion as laughable, because toxins arise in nature and
can be produced without sophisticated equipment.
In any event, there is no sign that the Bush administration is actually working
on alternatives in a serious way. The attempt to make sure that the biological
genie stays in the bottle is essentially dead for now. Without U.S.
participation, nothing meaningful can happen.
That he is working on a better way of accomplishing the objective after
denouncing an international agreement has become a familiar claim from Mr.
Bush. He took exactly that line after rejecting the Kyoto agreement on global
warming.
"Our nation will come up with a strategy," Mr. Bush said on the global
warming issue last week. "We're in the process of developing one. I can't be
any more sincere than I have been in saying that we need to reduce
greenhouse gases, and we'll work on a plan to do so."
But in fact alternative ways of dealing with global warming are not under
active study at the higher reaches of the Bush administration. Reports from
Washington say there is no pressure from the top for urgent action.
Mr. Bush's position against the biological warfare protocol was familiar in
another respect. Once again, under his presidency, the United States was all
alone on a global issue. So it was, also, last week on an effort to negotiate
limits on small-arms sales that feed civil wars and terrorism. On the Kyoto
treaty, The New York Timesheadline nicely summed it up: "178 Nations
Reach a Climate Accord; U.S. Only Looks On."
Underlying Mr. Bush's response on these matters there is a failure of vision.
He takes a parochial view, driven by ideology and a narrow sense of where
American interests lie. But in today's close-knit world our interests cannot be
so easily separated from global needs.
Thus on global warming Mr. Bush says that he cannot accept controls that
might burden the American economy. But it is the very nature of the problem
that it cannot be solved unless the most productive economies reorder their
use of energy and their emission of greenhouse gasses. An economy free of
measures to reduce warming effects will not give us much joy, decades from
now, if New York and Boston are under water.
On biological weapons, similarly, parochial interests of low-level Defense
Department and pharmaceutical company officials were allowed to make the
running. (Nor, to be fair, did President Clinton provide high-level leadership
on the issue.) On sales of small arms, the Bush administration simply bowed
to the National Rifle Association. There was no broader vision of our
interests in a world less beset by AK-47's and their ilk.
"Where there is no vision," the Bible says, "the people perish." Perhaps
literally.
nytimes.com |
