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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (5976)	9/9/2002 8:24:50 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

On Iraq: make law, not war September 10 2002 theage.com.au Saddam Hussein gets away with murder because of inadequate international law, writes Geoffrey Robertson. States that wage 21st century wars must not only win them on the battlefield: they are expected to win, subsequently, in the courtroom, by proving the enemy guilty of some international crime. Since this is a necessary (although not necessarily sufficient) precondition for a just war, it behoves those who urge an invasion of Iraq to explain what they propose to do to Saddam Hussein when they capture him. The problem - and it reflects the rudimentary state of international criminal law - is that the behaviour that makes Saddam most dangerous is not an offence. There is no rule, for example, against possession of nuclear weapons. In 1996, the International Court of Justice, at the urging of the United States and Britain, even refused to condemn the use of nuclear armaments "in the extreme circumstances of self-defence, in which the very survival of a state would be at stake" (this disastrous ruling might sanction their use by Iraq in self-defence against an attacker bent on "regime change"). Forty-five states still refuse to ratify the 1993 convention against the manufacture or use of chemical weapons, and some that have ratified it nonetheless refuse to allow inspections. Mandatory inspections under this and other treaties have been rejected by the Bush administration in order to protect the privacy of US pharmaceutical companies. The only reason Iraqi sovereignty can be assailed on suspicion that it is developing weapons of mass destruction derives from the unique fact that it happens to be subject to ceasefire resolutions and agreements made in 1991 to end the Gulf War. That war was caused by Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. He was, and remains, guilty of waging an aggressive war and at least that constitutes an international crime - but, incredibly, the international community has not yet managed to define it. Although the crime of aggression is formally included within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, nobody can be prosecuted until its definition is settled. Tony Blair's promised dossier on Saddam's malignancy during the inspection-free past five years is unlikely, therefore, to contain proof that could place him in the dock. It may, however, contain sufficient evidence for the United Nations Security Council to determine, under Article 39 of the UN Charter, that unless he agrees to an ultimatum to permit effective inspections, the country under his leadership constitutes a real threat to international peace and security. Having made this judgment, the Security Council may then mandate the US and its allies to use force in order to remove him. But what then? Suppose Saddam is disarming enough to surrender: is he then to be exiled in Saint Helena like Napoleon, or incarcerated in the legal limbo-land of Guantanamo Bay, or invited to form a party to contest a democratic election supervised by the UN and monitored by the European Union? He could be tried in America as a terrorist if US prosecutors could show that he was an accomplice of al Qaeda over September 11, although no credible evidence has been forthcoming. If, prior to his surrender, he orders his troops to commit war crimes, then the Security Council could direct him to be tried by the International Criminal Court, although the two most vehement opponents of this court are Saddam Hussein and George Bush. (Under legislation recently passed by Congress, the US President is empowered to attack the Netherlands in order to free any US serviceman who falls into the court's clutches at The Hague.) That leaves one last option - a prosecution of Saddam under the 1948 Genocide Convention for his attacks on the Kurds, which notoriously culminated in gassing at least 5000 of them to death at Helebja in 1988. A crime against humanity on this scale can never be forgiven, notwithstanding the Gadarene rush of Western governments afterwards to sell arms to Iraq. There could be no objection to a retrospective prosecution, since genocide was an international law crime at the time. The convention, to which the US and all its potential allies are parties, imposes a duty on them to punish all acts of genocide ordered by "constitutionally responsible rulers" and expressly envisages that an international court may be established for this purpose. On the principle of better late than never, retribution for the crime against humanity committed at Helebja would provide a legitimate war aim and one to which Germany (the country most critical of Bush) could hardly object: it was German companies that supplied Saddam with the mustard gas. But although the duty to punish genocide can justify the invasion of state sovereignty by a limited operation to capture Saddam and put him on trial, it cannot as a matter of proportionality justify an all-out war anticipated to cost many more innocent lives. For that, President Bush really does need a Security Council mandate since he cannot credibly claim that an invasion of Iraq is necessary in self-defence: there is no planned attack on the US for his "pre-emptive strike" to pre-empt. Saddam is not the only dictator whose finger itches for a nuclear trigger, and invading Iraq for failure to comply with an old ceasefire agreement is not a precedent that will discourage the others. Deterrence will only be achieved by negotiating new international agreements that make any possession of chemical and biological weapons and any further development of nuclear weaponry an international crime. Bush should make law, not war. _____________________________________________ Australian-born, London-based Geoffrey Robertson, QC, is the author of Crimes Against Humanity - The Struggle for Global Justice (second edition published last month by Penguin) and presents the Hypotheticals television specials.

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (5976)	9/10/2002 5:18:33 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

The Long Haul By PAUL KRUGMAN Columnist The New York Times September 10, 2002 nytimes.com Americans should be proud of their reaction to Sept. 11. They didn't respond to calls for sacrifice, because no such calls were made. But they did respond to horror with calm and tolerance. There was no panic; while there were a handful of hate crimes, there were no angry mobs attacking people who look different. The American people remained true to what America is all about. Yet a year later there is great uneasiness in this nation. Corporate scandals, dropping stocks and rising unemployment account for much of the malaise. But part of what makes us uneasy is that we still don't know how to think about what happened to us. Our leaders and much of the media tell us that we're a nation at war. But that was a bad metaphor from the start, and looks worse as time goes by. In both human and economic terms the effects of Sept. 11 itself resembled those not of a military attack but of a natural disaster. Indeed, there were almost eerie parallels between Sept. 11 and the effects of the earthquake that struck Japan in 1995. Like the terrorist attack, the Kobe earthquake killed thousands of innocent people without warning. Like the terrorist attack, the quake left a nation afflicted by nightmares and deep feelings of insecurity. And like the terrorist attack, the quake struck a nation already struggling with the aftermath of a financial bubble. Yet the Kobe earthquake had only fleeting effects on the Japanese economy, suggesting that the effects of Sept. 11 on the U.S. economy would be equally fleeting. And so it has proved. Kobe had longer-term effects on Japan's psyche, just as Sept. 11 has had on ours. But Japan has mostly moved on, and so will we. Of course there is a difference between an act of God and a deliberate atrocity. We were angry as well as shocked, determined to pursue and punish the perpetrators. It was natural to think of Sept. 11 as the moral equivalent of Pearl Harbor, and of the struggle that began that day as this generation's equivalent of World War II. But if this is war, it bears little resemblance to the wars America has won in the past. Where is the call for sacrifice, for a great national effort? How will we know when or if we've won? One doesn't have to be a military expert to realize that the struggle ahead won't involve any D-Days, nor will there ever be a V-J day. There will never be a day when we can declare terrorism stamped out for good. It will be more like fighting crime, where success is always relative and victory is never final, than like fighting a war. And the metaphor we use to describe our struggle matters: some things that are justifiable in a temporary time of war are not justifiable during a permanent fight against crime, even if the criminals are murderous fanatics. This is true even of how we deal with pedestrian matters like the federal budget. Wars are traditionally a valid reason to run budget deficits, because it makes sense for the government to borrow to cover the expense of a severe but temporary emergency. But this emergency is neither severe nor temporary. Is there any reason to expect spending on homeland security and national defense to fall back to pre-Sept.-11 levels, let alone far enough to restore budget balance, anytime in the foreseeable future? No, there isn't. So we had better figure out how to pay the government's bills on a permanent basis. Far more important, of course, is the question of law and civil liberties. Great democratic leaders have broken the rules in times of war: had Abraham Lincoln not suspended the writ of habeas corpus in 1861, there would be no United States today. But the situation was extreme, and the lapse was temporary: victory in the Civil War brought a return to normal legal procedure. Can anyone think of an event that would persuade our current leaders that they no longer need extraordinary powers? The point is that our new, threatened condition isn't temporary. We're in this for the long haul, so any measures we take to fight terrorism had better be measures that we are prepared to live with indefinitely. The real challenge now is not to stamp out terrorism; that's an unattainable goal. The challenge is to find a way to cope with the threat of terrorism without losing the freedom and prosperity that make America the great nation it is. _______________________________________ Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page and continues as Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Krugman received his B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He has taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford. At MIT he became the Ford International Professor of Economics

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (5976)	9/10/2002 5:34:28 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Looking war in the face By James Carroll Columnist The Boston Globe 9/10/2002 SEPTEMBER 11. The heart-wrenching anniversary deserves, amid so much else, an urgent meditation on the subject of war. A nation at war, on the cusp of wider war, we are in danger of defining ourselves by war entire - all within the mystical aura of this shattering date. Are we being true to what was laid bare a year ago tomorrow? Do we rightly memorialize those who died so violently by making them patrons of more violence? War is not machines. War is not threats. War is not strategy, tactics, martial music, or the proper source of a political party's advantage. War is not a way of proving manhood. To say that war is hell, implying a realm apart, is also wrong. Wars are fought no more in hell than heaven. Wars are fought, alas, on earth. Those who carry its weight are the last to know of war's transcendent meanings. They are deaf to its music. Just war, unjust war - all the same to them because they are dead. ''As I look back over the five years of my service as secretary of war'' from 1940 to 1945, Henry L. Stimson wrote after World War II, ''I see too many stern and heart-rending decisions to be willing to pretend that war is anything else than what it is. The face of war is the face of death; death is an inevitable part of every order that a wartime leader gives.'' Do our wartime leaders know this today? The cavalier belligerence with which President Bush and Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice speak of America's impending war against Iraq raises the key question: Do they know that death is about to become our nation's purpose? Deaths of soldiers. Deaths of old men, women, and children. Deaths of Arabs, Americans, perhaps Israelis. Deaths of the many who will die in consequential violence of legitimized ''preventive war.'' Tomorrow the rebuilt Pentagon will be rededicated. The marvel of its repair in one year recalls the greater marvel of its original construction in 16 months, a feat supervised by Henry Stimson. But the building was the least of his achievements, all of which were reduced in the end to a vivid sense of the actuality of war. He had overseen the entire US campaign with unflinching resolve - even to the ordering of its nuclear conclusion. Yet war reversed itself in him. The atomic bombs, he wrote, ''made it wholly clear that we must never have another war. This is the lesson men and leaders everywhere must learn.'' A year ago tomorrow the face of death stared back at America. For a few moments, endlessly replayed, the horror of war was anything but abstract. For months afterward, the individual faces of September's lost men and women stared out from the newspaper pages that gave us their names and stories. We felt a fitting rage aimed at their murderers but knew also that rage can dishonor the dead by making them faceless victims again. Named and mourned, the September dead were our epiphany of war's actuality. The force of such death, real death, must lead - Stimson's lesson - to the reversal of what causes it. Did the world change a year ago? Claiming it did, Bush pursues war more energetically than ever. Yet is that the sign of true change? Secretary Stimson was certain that the world had changed in August 1945. For sure he had changed. In his last act as secretary of war, he made a shocking proposal to President Truman. Thinking of the bomb he had himself built and used, Stimson urged Truman to make an immediate diplomatic approach to the Soviet Union, to avoid ''a secret armament race of a rather desperate character.'' The secretary wanted a US-USSR covenant that would stop work on atomic weapons at once, impound existing bombs, renounce future use, and openly share atomic research for peaceful purposes. All of this with the notoriously unreliable Stalin? Stimson anticipated the objection. Before his service in World War II he had been secretary of war (1911-13) when guns were primed for World War I and secretary of state (1929-33) when Adolf Hitler came to power. ''The chief lesson I have learned in a long life,'' he told Truman, ''is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him.'' Stimson's radical proposal was rejected, he retired a week later, and the desperate arms race ensued. But the Stimson proposal stands as a marker both of the road not taken at that crucial juncture and of the road that yet remains open ahead of humanity. War is unnecessary death, period. Once a leader has seen its true face, the resolution of conflict by other means will be that leader's undying purpose. Henry L. Stimson haunts our choices. He made his proposal on Sept. 11, 1945. _____________________________________________ James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on 9/10/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company. boston.com

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (5976)	9/10/2002 6:03:24 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Bin Laden: a Known Monster Before 9/11 By Robert Scheer Columnist The Los Angeles Times September 10, 2002 Sometimes the truth can be so banal it hurts. Cut through the hogwash of a year's worth of lofty Sept. 11 postmortems and dire warnings that the world is out to get us and one is left with the reality that the day of infamy could easily have been avoided. The uniquely clear and overt terrorist threat of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization to the U.S., its bloody track record in attacking U.S. targets overseas and even the exact location of its base of operations were all known by both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Tragically, however, for embarrassingly petty bureaucratic and political reasons, both presidents were unwilling or unable to take the monster out. The lavish budgets of our intelligence agencies allowed them to read the license plates of vehicles in Al Qaeda's training camps from space and even caught snapshots of the bearded one from cameras mounted on CIA Predator drones. Our contacts on the ground knew all about Bin Laden's terror operation because his Afghanistan and Pakistan government sponsors were originally organized, financed and trained by the CIA to wage the first U.S.-sponsored Islamic "holy war" against the Soviets. It was bad enough that through our Cold War actions in the Muslim world we helped create the "Islamic threat"--an epithet now commonly employed to slander one of the world's great religions. Rubbing salt in the wound, though, the CIA ignored the boomerang effect until that infamous day when it turned into our worst nightmare. At home, FBI honchos dismissed field operatives' warnings of the amateurish invasion of U.S. flight schools by Bin Laden's operatives. The FBI claimed that it had insufficient manpower to track down these terrifying leads. Yet during that same period, the bureau squandered tens of thousands of agent hours obsessively shadowing and interrogating Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos scientist who was never charged with spying. Speaking of obsessions, Saddam Hussein, dead or alive, had nothing to do with Sept. 11, much as we'd like to find an excuse for going to war with Iraq. No, Bin Laden was the enemy, with links to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, not Baghdad; we knew where he lived and did nothing about it. After the murder of hundreds of civilians at U.S. embassies in Africa and the killings of U.S. service personnel in Saudi Arabia and on the U.S. destroyer Cole, the United States' response was lethargic, distracted and ineffective. President Clinton did order a missile attack on Bin Laden's infamous training camp in 1998, but having barely missed the target he shunned further direct action, partly deterred by outraged Republicans who accused him of "wagging the dog" to distract us all from the all-important Monica Lewinsky scandal. In any case, Clinton failed to complete the job, his administration contenting itself to give the incoming Bush team some alarming briefings on the Bin Laden operation. However, Bush, who in debates with Al Gore had lambasted foreign intervention as "nation building," was building his foreign policy around the drug war, diplomatic isolationism and the elimination of the landmark Antiballistic Missile Treaty, so we could pursue our quixotic attempt to build a missile shield over North America. Further, neither administration seemed to grasp that Bin Laden and the Taliban had become one and the same. Both administrations ignored such evidence as a comment that came out of the U.S.-supported talks between a Saudi prince and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in September 1998. Omar definitively rejected betraying the Taliban's "hero"--Bin Laden--and told the Saudi prince that Bin Laden would never be expelled from Afghanistan. Soon after these talks, 17 U.S. service personnel died on the Cole while it was docked in Yemen, an Al Qaeda redoubt. Stunningly, five weeks after the Bush administration expressed gratitude to the Taliban for eradicating Afghanistan's poppy crop and simultaneously announced that it was funneling new aid to the country through the United Nations, the president's reading-to-kids photo op was interrupted by the Sept. 11 devastation. Some have suggested that the Bush administration was starting to wake up to the threat of Al Qaeda, but we'll never know now. What we do know is that in the last year the deaths of Sept. 11 have been used over and over again as a rationale for eroding the Constitution, reorganizing the federal government and launching a preemptive, unilateral strike against a nation not implicated in the attacks. Far more effective in preventing terrorism, however, and engendering far fewer risks, would be for our leaders and intelligence agencies to simply do their jobs, and do them well. ______________________________________________ Robert Scheer writes a syndicated column. latimes.com