The JvL Bi-Weekly
James van Luik
Publisher & Editor
Friday, April 30, 2003
Volume 2, No. 8
5 Articles
1.The Myth of Preemptive Self-Defense
2.The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War
3.Patriot Act II’s Attack on Citizenship
4.Blix: “US Undermined Inspectors”
5.A Kinder, Gentler Patriotism
1.THE MYTH OF PREEMPTIVE SELF-DEFENSE
BY
MARY ELLEN O’CONNELL
(If any subscriber would like the full article with all the documentation given by Mary Ellen O’Connell, please go to http://www.altavista.com/web/results?q=preemptive%2Bself-defense&kgs=0&kls=1&avkw=xytx)
In the immediate response to the first armed attack on United States territory since the adoption of the United Nation’s Charter, the United States and the British complied with the rules of international law. But less restrained action has also been urged in the weeks and months following the launch of Enduring Freedom, including a proposal to invade Iraq. One plan to take action against Iraq envisions a force of more than 200,000 troops to invade and take control of the country. Supporters argue that Iraq’s leadership must be eliminated because the Ba’ath regime has continued the development of weapons of mass destruction, and might again use those weapons against an opponent, or supply the weapons to terrorist networks. The invasion plan seeks to preempt any danger by eliminating the leaders who might authorize such attacks or assist others to do so.
The strategy is based on a conception of preemptive self-defense. Preemptive self-defense, however, is clearly unlawful under international law. Armed action in self-defense is permitted only against armed attack. Some scholars have argued over the years that preemptive self-defense should be considered lawful, but the United States as a government has consistently supported the prohibition on such preemptive use of force. The United States has taken this position for compelling reasons of national security and in light of its national values. It is joined in this position by the vast majority of the international community. Thus, the reality is that the United States has no right to use force to prevent possible, as distinct from actual, armed attacks. The further reality is that the United States does not advance its security or its moral standing in the world by doing so.
After two world wars in the first half of the 20th century, the United States was fully committed in 1945, along with its allies, to establish a broad, legal prohibition on the use of force as well as an institution to enforce that prohibition. The United Nations Charter, a binding treaty to which all but a few states of the world adhere, contains the prohibition on force in Article 2(4) and establishes the Security Council as the authority to take measures against “threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression.”
A.The General Prohibition on Force
The ban on the use of military force is established by Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, and is understood to have only certain explicit exceptions:
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
Only two exceptions to this prohibition on force appear in the Charter. The Security Council may use force to keep the peace as provided in chapter VII of the Charter. States have the right to use force in individual and collective self-defense under the terms of Article 51 of the Charter:
Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.
Reading the Charter as a whole, it is evident that the prohibition on force was intended by the drafters to be very broad, admitting of only explicit exceptions. This conclusion is confirmed by the drafting history of the Charter.
Nevertheless, a few scholars have argued over the years that Article 2(4) is not a general prohibition on force, but rather only a prohibition on force aimed at the territorial integrity and political independence of states or inconsistent with the purpose of the UN. Anthony D’Amato, for example, used such an interpretation to justify Israel’s 1981 strike against the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirik. Israel wished to prevent Iraq from developing nuclear weapons. The strike aimed at long-term Israeli security. In D’Amato’s view, the Israeli attack did not compromise the territorial integrity or political independence of Iraq nor was it inconsistent with the purposes of the UN. By this narrow view of sovereignty, D’Amato concludes that the strike did not violate the prohibition in Article 2(4). International reaction to the Israeli strike, however, was uniformly negative. The Security Council passed a unanimous resolution condemning it as a violation of the Charter. That condemnation helped solidify the general understanding that Article 2(4) is a general prohibition on force.
B.The Exception of Self-Defense
Article 51 sets out the one clear exception to the general prohibition on the unilateral use of force. States may use force ins self-defense against an armed attack. This reading is consistent with the plain words of the Article 51, with the drafting history and official government positions. It is also consistent with authoritative interpretations of Article 51 by the International Court of Justice. There are still questions concerning when an armed attack “begins” for purposes of the right of self-defense, but the Security Council and governments have clarified some issues since September 11. An attack must be underway or must have already occurred in order to trigger the right of unilateral self-defense. Any earlier response requires the approval of the Security Council. There is no self-appointed right to attack another state because of fear that the state is making plans or developing weapons usable in a hypothetical campaign.
The Security Council action after September 11 can be cited to support anticipatory self-defense in cases where an armed attack has occurred and convincing evidence exists that more attacks are planned, though not yet underway. By contrast, international law continues to prohibit preemptive self-defense or even anticipatory self-defense, if that is understood to be different from responding to incipient attacks or ongoing campaigns. In other words, a state may not take military action against another state when an attack is only a hypothetical possibility, and not yet in progress—even in the case of weapons of mass destruction.
Preemptive Self-Defense
The United States is justifiably worried about states that possess weapons of mass destruction, especially when their rulers are of the ilk of Saddam Hussein. But mere possession of such weapons without more does not amount to an armed attack. To be sure, Iraq has been prohibited by the Security Council from any development of nuclear weapons following its defeat in the Persian Gulf War. But the violation of a disarmament requirement does not itself amount to an armed attack. As a more general matter, the International Court of Justice held in an advisory opinion that for ordinary states the mere possession of nuclear weapons is not illegal in customary international law.
When Israeli jets bombed the nuclear reactor under construction at Osirik, Iraq in 1981, the Security Council unanimously condemned the bombing, despite the threat that nuclear weapons in the hands of Saddam Hussein could pose for Israel. The council found “the military attack by Israel in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct. Many representatives were impressed by the testimony of the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency who testified that the IAEA had found no evidence of unlawful weapons development by the Iraqi government. Not only did the IAEA find no diversion of nuclear material, but Israel put forward no evidence that an attack was imminent, let alone underway.
Inevitably some scholars and writers question the viability of any rules on the use of force. They cite states” continuing breach of Charter rules and conclude that the Charter regime and its rules are no longer viable. Thomas Franck declared that the Charter rules were dead in 1970. Michael Glennon and others renewed the claim in the 1980s and declared them dead again in 2002. The rules, according to this argument, are not viable. Even as treaty rules, they have slipped into desuetude because they are so widely ignored. But Louis Henkin has responded to Thomas Franck on this issued, using the logic of the World Court in the Nicaragua Case. As the Judges noted,
he Court does not consider that, for a rule to be established as customary, the corresponding practice must be in absolutely rigorous conformity with the rule. In order to deduce the existence of customary rules, the Court deems it sufficient that the conduct of States should, in general, be consistent with such rules, and that instances of State conduct inconsistent with a given rule should generally be treated as breaches of that rule, not as indications of the recognition of a new rules. If a State acts in a way prima facie incompatible with the recognized rule, but defends its conduct by appealing to exceptions or justifications contained within the rule itself, then whether or not the State’s conduct is in fact justifiable on that basis, the significance of that attitude is to confirm rather than to weaken the rule.
Though proponents of invading Iraq have argued that deterrence is not sufficient against non-state actors, no one in the bush administration has publicly stated Charter law is dead or that the United States is not bound by international law. Indeed, some in the Administration have made clear they understand preemptive self-defense is not the law.
The United States has consistently rejected preemptive self-defense for reasons of sound polity. This is not a right that the United States wants others to have. Gelennon has argued that circumstances have changed and that Washington should reconsider the law. Yet as examples of state practice show, international society and even the Untied States have found the standing rules adequate for dealing with the problem of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and regimes such as that controlled by Saddam Hussein. Historically, the United States has argued against a right of preemptive self-defense because it has found the UN Charter rules to be in its interest as a matter of policy and prudence.
The international law of self-defense supports the American use of force in Afghanistan. After the devastating attacks of September 11, the United States had the right to defend itself against continuing terrorist attacks mounted from Afghan territory. The United States has no right, however, to invade another state because of speculative concerns about that state’s possible future actions. The current international order does not support a special status for the United States or a singular right to exempt itself from the law. To maintain a legal order that restrains other states and to uphold the rule of law, the United States should continue its conservative commitment to limits on the unilateral use of force, and reject a reckless doctrine of preemptive self-defense.
2.THE UNBEARBLY GRIM AFTERMATH OF WAR
WHAT AMERICA SAYS DOES NOT GO
BY
UZMA ASLAM KHAN
Difficult as it is to make sense of the barbaric attacks on Iraq to not try is to surrender to madness. We have to clutch at every iota of sanity we have at our disposal, and this is where history can help. To understand what’s happening in Iraq today, we have to understand American global interests, as they have been for too many hidden decades. Bush Jr. is only making naked to the world wheels that had been set in motion long before he came onto the scene. Tyrants don’t grow out of nowhere. They are products of the system that nurtures them, and allows them to grow. We in Pakistan know this well. General Zia was our worst dictator but his predecessors gifted h m many invaluable tips.
Before focusing in particular on Iraq, I want to very briefly trace the rise of American imperialism in general. America’s conquests in the last 100 years began in 1900, when American troops fought the Spanish to occupy the Philippines.
After this little-discussed invasion of the Philippines, American might around the globe did not notably accelerate till after WWW II. Between 1945 and now, the US has never stopped being at war with the world. For fifty-eight years, there has never been a single year, it has not bombed, occupied or threatened militarily another country, and in many years, it has attacked two or more countries at the same time. It attacked Korea from 1950-’53, and during the same period, also re-attacked the Philippines to stifle an indigenous leftist uprising. From 1945 to 1949, it sent half a million troops to China, again to choke off the communists. In 1946-’48, it sent a threatening battle group to the shores of Italy. In 1947-’49 it sent troops to Greece; 1949-’53 to Albania; together with the UK it attacked Iran in 1953; Guatemala also in 1953; Indonesia in 1958; Cuba 1961-’62; Thailand in 1962; Laos 1962-’73; Congo 1964; Peru 1965; Dominican Republic 1965-’66; Vietnam 1961-’73; Cambodia 1969-’70; Chile 1973; a proxy war in Afghanistan 1979-’88; Nicaragua 1981-’90; El Salvador 1980-’92; Libya 1981, 1986, 1989; Panama 1989; Grenada 1983; Persian Gulf 1984; Iraq from 1991 with air strikes repeatedly launched till the time of the latest full-scale invasion; Serbia 1997; Afghanistan and Sudan 1998; Afghanistan 2001 to date.
The list is exhausting but so is the historical weight of power behind President George W. Bush. I haven’t even touched upon America’s non-military CIA-backed interference in the governance of sovereign countries all over the world, as that would only stretch this article even further. But the military and economic aid it gives to its “allies,” especially to Israel, naturally weaves itself into this paper.
Now to focus particularly on US interventions in Iraq. In 1963, a coup assisted by the CIA ousted Iraq’s popular leader, Abdel Karim Kassem. His crime; resisting the force of Western oil monopolies. He had said, “We are fighting for the industrialization of our republic and an end to our dependence on the sale of crude oil.” This was the goal of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), an organization that Kassem had helped to form. The defiant statement gave the CIA diarrhea overnight, and the plot to assassinate him was hatched by morning. In the bloody attack that followed, thousands of Kassem’s followers were murdered along with Kassem himself. In 1968 the Baathist Party came to power. However, in 1972, the Baathists grew as defiant as Kassem had been ten years earlier, declaring that Arab oil was for the Arabs. They sought to nationalize the US-UK, and French-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company, made up of BP, Exxon, Mobil, Shell, and Partex. The US immediately accused it of supporting terrorism.
US President Jimmy Carter still considered a dove at home (if anyone still has any doubts that the Nobel Peace Prize has as little to do with peace as the UN has to do with human rights, one has only to consider Carter being awarded the prize – it is as ridiculous as Kissinger’s thirty years earlier), introduced a new intervention strategy called the Carter Doctrine, which stated that “any challenge to US access to the Middle East oil (can be met with) military force.”
American companies directly and indirectly (that is, through America’s other client states Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) sold billions of dollars worth of armament to Iraq, (for the Iran-Iraq war) some of it on credit, while purchasing increased amounts of Iraqi oil at greatly reduced rates. If the US so concerned about weapons of mass destruction, why does it keep selling them.
The subsequent US president, after Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and his Vice President George H. Bush played their part as well. Reagan authorized the CIA to go to Baghdad to “advise the military” (read arm and train) of the Iraq President Saddam Hussein. We now know that the CIA was simultaneously “advising the military” of Iran. The strategy devised by Kissinger was to foment war between Iran and Iraq in the hopes that they would destroy each other.
As for nuclear weapons: No UN nuclear arms inspector have ever been allowed to enter Israel. The arms inspectors who were in Iraq in the 90s had long before declared that Iraq had no nuclear weapons. Israel is by far the strongest military power in the Arab Middle East and the only country there with nuclear armaments. So the claim that this state is a land surrounded by lions capable of destroying it is absolutely facetious.
If we consider the rise of American imperialism in general, and, in particular, in the middle east, and if we weigh all the possible reasons for the current crisis, what choice do we ordinary people have left to counterbalance the looming force?
Our only choice really is to resist imperialism, in will and in action. Just yesterday, the Iraqi Vice President issued a statement dismissing the Arab League’s criticism of American force, asking, “Why do you condemn aggression on the one hand, and on the other hand, continue to sell oil to the aggressor? Why do you open your airspace and seaports and military bases to the invaders?” It’s an important question. The complicity of the Arab states over the years is shameful and sickening, and this needs to be said every time we condemn the war. The notion that there is such a thing as the Muslim Ummah or Brotherhood has gone from being a bad joke to a nightmare that we somehow have to wake up from. The massive demonstrations world-wide show that people in the West are waking up. I personally know of Americans who have never questioned US foreign policy who are beginning to do so now.
This is also the first time since the end of the Cold War that many other governments, including Security Council members France and Russia, are challenging US hegemony – another hopeful sign in an other wise overwhelmingly dark horizon. Frances’s strong words of opposition to the US along with those of major religious authorities like the Pope should encourage smaller, weaker countries such as Cuba to stand their ground and resist US hegemony. We must fight peacefully for the trying of the responsible culprits, in a world court, for repeatedly violating human rights. These culprits are the US and UK Governments, not ordinary Americans, not ordinary British, not Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or Jews. The US has been at war with Latin America for decades and its people are overwhelmingly Christian. Nor was it a war against Buddhism when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuclear bombed.
3.PATRIOT ACT II’s ATTACK ON CITIZENSHIP
DENATIONALIZATION AS PUNISHMENT
BY
JOANNE MARINER
A basic principle of American democracy is that members of government serve at the behest of the citizenry, and not vice-versa. The people can use their votes to “throw the bastards out,” even though the government has no reciprocal power to jettison disfavored citizens.
Our leadership may distrust or despise certain people, but it cannot strip them of their citizenship.
Yet with the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, informally known as Patriot II, this basic rules is under attack. The draft legislation, a proposed sequel to the 2001 USA Patriot Act drafted by the Justice Department, was recently made public after being leaked to the Center for Public Integrity. This bill would go well beyond its predecessor in threatening essential civil liberties.
Among Patriot II’s most worrying provisions are those affecting citizenship. Section 501 of the bill, deceptively titled “Expatriation of Terrorists,” would allow the presumptive denationalization of American citizens who support the activities of organizations that the executive branch has deemed “terrorist.” While it is already illegal to provide material support to such groups, even for their lawful activities, such support is grounds only for criminal prosecution, not for the loss of citizenship.
CITIZENSHIP AS A “CONSTITUTIONAL BIRTHRIGHT”
The Supreme Court’s current jurisprudence gives Americans robust protections against involuntary loss of citizenship. But it was not always so. The current rule that citizenship can only be relinquished voluntarily – was established in a landmark 1967 case.
Just a decade earlier, the government’s power to strip citizens of their citizenship seemed quite secure. In 1940 and again in 1954, the government had passed statutes containing several grounds for loss of citizenship. A person could be denationalized for, among other things, advocating the overthrow of the government by force or violence.
In Perez v. Brownell, a 1958 case, the Court rejected a constitutional challenge to a provision of the 1940 law that denationalized American citizens for voting in foreign elections. Justice Felix Frankfurter, who wrote the majority opinion, ruled that Congress’s power to conduct foreign affairs included an implied power of denationalization.
In a famous dissent, Chief Justice Earl Warren directly challenged this view. Under his reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, citizenship is “the constitutional birthright of every person born in this country.” Although citizenship could be voluntarily relinquished, in his opinion, it could not be take away.
Warren’s conception of citizenship was grounded in a strong view of popular sovereignty. As he explained: “This Government was born of its citizens, it maintains itself in a continuing relationship with them, and, in my judgment, it is without power to sever the relationship that gives rise to its existence.”
It was in Afroyim v. Rusk, a 1967 case, that the Supreme Court adopted Warren’s view, explicitly overruling its previous holding in Perez. In Afroyim, the Court affirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment establishes “a citizenship which a citizen keeps unless he voluntarily relinquishes it. Once acquired, this Fourteenth Amendment citizenship was not to be shifted, canceled, or diluted at the will of the Federal Government, the States, or any other governmental unit.”
VOLUNTARY EXPATRIATION OR INVOLUNTARY DENATIONALIZATION?
In the wake of Afroyim, Congress passed a number of amendments to the denationalization statute, including in 1976, 1978, and 1986, that codified Chief Justice Warren’s view by tightening the legal rules on the loss of citizenship. If passed, Patriot II would be Congress’s first step back from this trend, and toward a more expansive view of the government’s power to denationalize its citizens.
Patriot II attempts to loosen both the substantive and procedural protections on the right to citizenship. Under patriot II, as described in the Justice Department’s official summary of the bill, a U.S. citizen may be expatriated “if, with the intent to relinquish his nationality, he becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United States had designated as a ‘terrorist organization,’ if that group is engaged in hostilities against the United States.”
Existing law establishes seven possible “expatriating acts” whose performance, together with the requisite intent, provides the grounds for loss of citizenship. On its face, the draft legislation simply adds another possibility to this list of expatriating acts. Notably, however, the act of providing “material support” to an organization deemed terrorist is qualitatively different from the other acts listed in the loss of citizenship statute.
All of the existing acts, albeit to varying degrees, bear a strong intuitive relation to voluntary expatriation. That is, they all tend to indicate a person’s voluntary desire to relinquish his or her nationality.
Four of the existing acts, for example, point toward a transfer of allegiance to another country: obtaining naturalization in another country, serving in another country’s armed forces, etc. An additional two acts involve a citizen’s formal and explicit renunciation of citizenship. While the most problematic of the existing expatriation provisions, in terms of the voluntary nature of the expatriation, is that involving the attempted overthrow or destruction of the government, it is obvious, at least, that someone committing such acts has a profound hostility toward the United States.
Consider, in contrast, Patriot II’s new ground for the loss of citizenship. Patriot II extends to a citizen’s support of even the legal activities of an organization that the executive branch has deemed terrorist.
In other words, if you help fund an orphanage administered by one of the three Chechen separatist groups that the government has labeled as terrorist, or if you give pharmaceutical supplies to a medical outpost run by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or if you are on the wrong side of any of a number of other political conflicts in the world, you may be vulnerable to losing your citizenship.
Considering the almost non-existent due process safeguards of the laws on labeling terrorist organizations, the political uses of the terrorist label, and its inherent malleability, this is dangerously broad. Nor does the requirement that the terrorist group be engaged in hostilities against the U.S. provide much protections, given that the government claims to be engaged in a general war on terrorism, and maintains that groups officially listed as foreign terrorist organizations are by definition a threat to U.S. interests.
It is far from obvious that supporting a group that the government has deemed terrorist indicates a desire to rid oneself of American citizenship. While the government may be able to punish such support using the criminal law, citizenship is an entirely different sphere. Chief Justice Warren, in a ruling that helped pave the way for the Afroyim decision, emphasized this point. As he insisted: “The deprivation of citizenship is not a weapon that the Government may use to express its displeasure at a citizen’s conduct, however reprehensible that conduct may be.”
INFERRING INTENT TO RELINQUISH CITIZENSHIP
But one may object, the loss of citizenship is possible only if someone commits the wrongful act with the intent to relinquish his or her citizenship. Isn’t this intent requirement an important safeguard that nullifies any worries one would otherwise have about the substantive breadth of the proposed law?
That brings us to the procedural side of Patriot II’s proposed citizenship-stripping provision. The question is, however, how stringently the courts will interpret this requirement in practice.
On this point, as well, Patriot II gives grounds for concern. Although the draft law’s reference to intent reflects the constitutional rule, it does so with an important caveat.
The law specifies that a person’s intent to relinquish his or her citizenship can be inferred from conduct. Indeed, the same conduct that constitutes the “expatriating act” for example, the act of funding the orphanage could provide a sufficient basis for concluding that the person intended to give up his or her citizenship. Although the person might try to challenge this determination in court, he or she would not necessarily succeed.
The prospect of a court simply inferring intent from disfavored conduct seems especially likely when considered in light of the judiciary’s inconsistent record of protecting rights from government encroachment in the “war on terrorism.”
CITIZENS, FOREIGNERS, AND ENEMY COMBATANTS
If the government is free to incarcerate American supporters of terrorist groups, why would it even want to strip them of their citizenship? One can only speculate. But perhaps by expelling these people from the national community, the government believes that it can banish them from public concern.
It may be, in fact, that Patriot II’s citizenship-stripping provision are the Bush Administration’s “imaginative” response to the criticism it has faced for its treatment of Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi. Padilla and Hamdi, as you’ll recall, are the two American citizens that the government currently holds in incommunicado detention as “enemy combatants.” The detention of Padilla and Hamdi has raised far more public outcry than that of all the 600 foreign Guantanamo prisoners combined. The government would no doubt prefer that Padilla and Hamdi had no claim to U.S. citizenship. But the government should not be given the power to pick and choose among its citizens for denationalization.
4.BLIX: “US UNDERMINED INSPECTORS”
(In An Interview with the BBC, April 21st, 2003)
-- American officials tried to discredit the work of inspectors in Iraq to further their own case for war, the chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has charged. --
In an interview with the BBC, Mr. Blix said American officials leaked suggestions that UN inspectors had deliberately suppressed information to the media in an attempt by the American administration to undermine their work in Iraq.
Excerpts of the interview were released just before Mr. Blix was due to address the Security Council later on Tuesday in a meeting that could begin to determine whether he and his team are ever to return to Iraq.
His team was withdrawn shortly before the US launched a war to topple Saddam Hussein, whom Washington insists possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The US has since deployed its own teams to look for weapons, which it cited as the key reason for launching war, but so far none are reported to have been found.
Many nations on the Security Council say UN inspectors should be the ones to verify any new discoveries, and Mr. Blix says his team could return to Iraq within two weeks if he was told to do so.
‘DISTURBING’
Mr. Blix said that in the run-up to war, the US had seized on his alleged failure to include details of a drone and cluster bomb found in Iraq in his oral presentations to the Council.
WHERE ARE BANNED WEAPONS/
“The US was very eager to sway the votes in the Security Council, and they felt that stories about these things would be useful to have, and they let it out,” he said.
“And thereby they tried to hurt us a bit and say that we had suppressed this.
“It was not the case, and it was a bit unfair, and hurt us. [We} felt a little displeased about it”
He also reiterated his disquiet of how documents the International Atomic Energy Agency “had no great difficulty finding out where fake” managed to get through US and UK intelligence analysis.
Also disturbing, he said, was the question of who was responsible for the falsification.
US UNENTHUSIASTIC
Washington has so far shown little interest in the return of UN inspectors to Iraq.
On Monday officials repeated that they saw “no immediate rôle for Dr. Blix and his inspection teams”.
Although no decision is likely to be made soon, correspondents say Tuesday’s meeting could be the start of a diplomatic initiative aimed at persuading the Bush administration of the benefits to be gained from allowing the UN inspectors back..
The argument from many on the council is that independent UN verification that the weapons have been destroyed would help to win international support for the swift lifting of economic sanctions against Iraq.
5.A KINDER, GENTLER PATRIOTISM
BY
HOWARD ZINN
At some point soon the United States will declare a military victory in Iraq. As a patriot, I will not celebrate. I will mourn the dead – the American GIs, and also the Iraqi dead, of which there will be many, many more. I will mourn the Iraqi children who may not die, but who will be blinded, crippled, disfigured, or traumatized, like the bombed children of Afghanistan who, as reported by American visitors, lost their power of speech.
We will get precise figures for the American dead, but not for the Iraqis. Recall Colin Powell after the first Gulf War, when he reported the “small” number of US dead and when asked about the Iraqi dead, Powell replied: “That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in.”
As a patriot, contemplating the dead GIs, should I comfort myself (as, understandably, their families do) with the thought: “They died for their country?” But I would be lying to myself. Those who die in this war will not die for their country. They will die for their government.
The distinction between dying for our country and dying for your government is crucial in understanding what I believe to be the definition of patriotism in a democracy. According to the Declaration of Independence – the fundamental document of democracy – governments are artificial creations, established by the people, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”, and charged by the people to ensure the equal right of all to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Furthermore, as the Declaration says, “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”
When a government recklessly expends the lives of its young for crass motives of profit and power always claiming that its motives are pure and moral (“Operation Just Cause” was the invasion of Panama, and “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in the present instance) it is violating its promise to the country. It is the country that is primary – the people, the ideals of the sanctity of human life and the promotion of liberty. War is almost always (one might find rare instances of true self defense) a breaking of those promises. It does not enable the pursuit of happiness but brings despair and grief.
Mark Twain, having been called a “traitor” for criticizing the US invasion of the Philippines, derided what he called “monarchical patriotism.” He said: “The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: ‘The King can do no wrong.’ We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had: the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about the grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.”
If patriotism in the best sense (not in the monarchical sense) is loyalty to the principles of democracy, then who was the true patriot, Theodore Roosevelt, who applauded a massacre by American soldiers of 600 Filipino men, women and children on a remote Philippine island, or Mark Twain, who denounced it?
With the war in Iraq won, shall we revel in American military power and – against the history of modern empires – insist that the American empire will be beneficent?
Our own history shows something different. It begins with what was called, in our high school history classes, “westward expansion” – a euphemism for the annihilation or expulsion of the Indian tribes inhabiting the content – all in the name of “progress” and “civilization.” It continues with the expansion of American power into the Caribbean in the turn of the century, then into the Philippines, and then repeated marine invasions of Central America and long military occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
After World War II, Henry Luce, owner of Time, Life and Fortune, spoke of “the American Century”, in which this country would organize the world “as we see fit.” Indeed, the expansion of American power continued, too often supporting military dictatorships in Asia, Africa, Latin America, The Middle East, because they were friendly to American corporations and the American government.
The American record does not justify confidence in its boast that it will bring democracy to Iraq. It will be painful to acknowledge that our GIs in Iraq were fighting not for democracy but for the expansion of the American empire, for the greed of the cartels, for the political ambitions of the president. And when they come home, they will find that their veterans’ benefits have been cut to pay for the machines of war. They will find the military budget growing at the expense of health, education and the needs of children. The Bush budget even proposes cutting the number of free school lunches.
I suggest that patriotic Americans who care for their country might act on behalf of a different vision. Do we want to be feared for our military might or respected for our dedication to human rights? With the war in Iraq over, if indeed it is really over, we need to ask what kind of a country will be? Is it important that we be a military superpower? Is it not exactly that that makes us a target for terrorism? Perhaps we could become instead a humanitarian superpower.
Should we not begin to redefine patriotism? We need to expand it beyond that narrow nationalism which has caused so much death and suffering. If national boundaries should not be obstacles to trade – we call it globalization – should they also not be obstacles to compassion and generosity?
Should we not begin to consider all children, everywhere, as our own? In that case, war, which in our time is always an assault on children, would be unacceptable as a solution to the problems of the world. Human ingenuity would have to search for other ways.
Tom Paine used the word “patriot” to describe the rebels resisting imperial rule. He also enlarged the idea of patriotism when he said: “My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind.”