Last night we were in DC, and we got to see No End in Sight, a movie released about three weeks ago that relentlessly tracks one key aspect of the war in Iraq, namely the woeful lack of planning within the Bush administration for the administration of post-invasion Iraq.
The film notably does not delve into the US decisionmaking on the issue of whether to invade Iraq. Nor, really, does it say much at all about Iraqi politics, history, and society. It is a movie about Americans, with Iraq as the backdrop to that. For a good film about Iraq, we’ll need to go elsewhere.
What the film does, though, it does brilliantly. Charles Ferguson produced, directed, and wrote the film, which is a full-length feature. Probably more than half of what we see on the screen is interview material. He uses a technique very similar to the one Errol Morris used in his 2003 movie about Robert McNamara and Vietnam: The Fog of War. That is, Ferguson has one interview subject on the screen at a time, placed over to one side of the screen as we watch; the subject is photographed fairly close up, though sometimes we see his or her hands. We don’t see the interviewer at all, and we generally never even hear his voice, though we do hear his questions on a couple of occasions. And in between the interview segments there’s some illustrative news footage with a voice-over that helps to tell the story.
The difference is that FOW was about one man and his decisionmaking, while NEIS is much, much more of a group montage. There are about three dozen interview subjects, of whom maybe half are former officials in the Bush administration… Some of these now have very serious misgivings indeed about the job they were tasked to do implementing the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policy in Iraq.
That is, of course, both very similar to the moral tenor of the McNamara movie and somewhat different from it. Different, because the people in the NEIS movie were not as high up the totem-pole as McNamara… More like, people at the second-through-fourth echelons of policymaking.
It’s a very human movie, because you see people who took jobs where they wanted to do what they thought was “the right thing” but were prevented from doing it by the recklessly (or perhaps actually criminally) faulty decisions made by the people above them.
Most human of all, for me, was Col. Paul Hughes, who was the principal military advisor to Jay Garner right at the beginning of the occupation. (Hughes is the guy nearly at the end of this YouTube trailer who says “There are nights when I don’t sleep very well.”) He tells how in his early weeks in Baghdad he had been in touch with high officers in the still-in-hiding Iraqi army who assured him they could bring 137,000 soldiers in the Baghdad area to help keep the peace in the country… and he was all ready to start to set that process in train, ending the paroxysm of lawlessness that had taken hold of the country, when he was abruptly told by the newly arrived Bremer that the whole Iraqi army would be disbanded and all its members tossed out on the street. Just like that.
The movie has a great section where parts of the interview Hughes made on that point are intercut with pieces from an interview with Walter Slocombe, who before Bremer’s arrival in Baghdad had worked with him in Washington formulating the plan to disband the Iraqi army.
Slocombe comes out of the movie looking dishonest, ignorant, arrogant, and deeply manipulative. (Just the kind of person Bremer would get along with, I suppose.)
Ferguson does have a great, long list of people who “declined to be interviewed for the movie.” Bremer is on it. Also Rumsfeld and Cheney and Rice. If Slocombe has a little intelligence– which from the evidence, he may well not have– he is probably right now wishing he had declined as well.
The highest-ranking people who appear in the movie are Jay Garner, the first administrator of Iraq, and Rich Armitage, who was Powell’s deputy as Deputy Secretary of State. Garner comes out looking like perhaps a decent fellow, but not terrifically swift. Armitage pulls his punches a lot, repeatedly saying he doesn’t want to comment on various aspects of the affair.
As I said, what the movie does, it does very well. But I think there are things it should have had in the picture, even just to adequately tell the story it did seek to tell. For example, there is no substantive mention of the crimes and scandal of Abu Ghraib at all– even though there is one small, suggestive mention of the prison, and even though the story is taken, certainly, through to (and a little beyond) that flash-point in April-May 2004 when that scandal burst out in the middle of the battles of both Fallujah and Najaf.
Also, it truly was no “accident” that the US ended up with a ground force in Iraq that was quite insufficiently sized for the task of running an orderly occupation. Doing the invasion with a very small force had been an integral part of Rumsfeld’s planning for the war. He wanted to “prove” his (as it turned out, quite incorrect) theory that the US could indeed send its forces barging all around the world toppling opponents and transforming their countries into robustly pro-US democracies by using only very small– but agile and well-equipped– ground forces.
(Okay, that is the benign interpretation of what he was trying to do. Another interpretation is that he truly wanted Iraq to implode completely as a nation in the aftermath of the invasion– something that, certainly, many Israelis and many of the friends they had deeply embedded within Rumsfeld’s Pentagon wanted to see happen. from that point of view, I think Ferguson was dishonest to describe the Israeli scholar Amatzia Baram, who was one of his interview subjects, only as a “Historian of Iraq.” He has also long been one of Israel’s key government-advising intellectuals on the subject, too.)
If you watch Ferguson’s movie, you could come away from it thinking that it was all just a horrible mistake, the fact that the post-invasion planning had been so completely dysfunctional. Partly, I think, you get that impression from the sometimes very sympathetic and anguished way that people like Paul Hughes– and even more so, the other military officers interviewed– tell their story. I mean, those are all very sympathetic people. So the fact that they had volunteered to go and work in the occupation regime means that it must at one point have been a potentially admirable venture– no?
But even more important, I think, is the way Ferguson had framed the whole movie. He could and should have raised the question as to why the planning had been so poorly done (or, from another point of view, so well done– if the outcome actually sought by Rumsfeld and Cheney was the destruction of the unitary Iraqi state… ?)
As part of the misframing, Ferguson raises yet again the old canard of criticizing the administration for the fact that the post-invasion administration of Iraq was left to the Pentagon and not given to the State Department. The reason I think that’s a canard is because actually, under international law, it is the military’s job to administer occupied territories. It is the Israeli military that has that job within the OPTs… and earlier, it was the US and Allied militaries that administered occupied Germany and Japan.
If the Bushites did make a “mistake” in setting up that administration, it was by throwing out the planning that the State Department had done for the administration of a post-invasion Iraq. But it shouldn’t have been the State Department that did that administering. That was always, rightfully, the DOD’s job. Because of course, one of the main things that needs doing in an occupied area is the assurance of public security for all the residents. The State Department couldn’t have done that. The DOD could have and should have, but notably failed to.
Anyway, those criticisms aside, I’m glad I went to the movie. I saw quite a few people I know on-camera, which is always fun (Nir Rosen, George Packer, Samantha Power, Barbara Bodeen….) And you do get this tragic sense of some well-intentioned people– among the former US government officials– having gotten dragged into working for a really ill-intentioned (and not merely “dysfunctional”) project there in Iraq…. and the disquiet or discomfort some, but not all, of them came to feel about that.
Although I’m glad I went, it was not at all an enjoyable experience. It was extremely depressing just to hear that very, very familiar story being told again, and at times I felt angrier about the Bushites than I have let myself feel for quite a while. By and large, I think anger is an extremely unhelpful (and corrosive) emotion.
Ommmm.
Author: Helena
Fasting from blogging is good for productivity…
Okay, my current blog-fast has lasted nearly five whole days. In that period I’ve wrestled with some big issues in Chapter 4 of my new book and…. just about nailed it!
The writing process is still a little intuitive here, but I think the book will have seven chapters. In other words, I’m over the hump. Yay!!!!!
Ch. 4 is about human rights. Can anyone suggest great, informative graphics that will reproduce well in black and white and which are easily procurable (i.e. no big hassle getting repro rights, no huge licensing payments, etc.) These could be informative maps, charts, or B&W photos. My mind, which found it easy to think of good ways to integrate graphics with text in the first three chapters, has drawn almost a complete blank on this one.
(One of the points I’m making here is that Economic and Social Rights are just as important as Civil and Political rights. So I suppose I could use some infographics from the HDR or someplace… )
How invading Iraq harmed Afghan stabilization
David Rohde and David Sanger have an excellent piece of reporting in today’s NYT, in which they go in some detail into exactly how, from mid-2002 on the Bushites’ decision to invade Iraq distracted resources from the much-needed effort to stabilize Afghanistan.
The NYT also has a pretty good 8-slide graphic display that tracks the degree to which what are described as “terrorist incidents” have risen in Afghanistan through every year since 2002.
The Rohde/Sanger article is titled “How a ‘good war’ in Afghanistan went bad.” Imho, no war is a “good” war. But I’ll let that go for now. (Though it does affect they way one looks at the whole question of “stabilization” in Afghanistan.)
I don’t have time to write anything lengthy here right now, about Afghanistan.
I’ll just note that Rohde and Sanger interviewed a lot of former and current Bush-era US officials connected with the Afghanistan project (though alas, no Afghans), and came up with a fairly damning indictment– from their own words:
- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the administration’s policy, saying, “I don’t buy the argument that Afghanistan was starved of resources.” Yet she said: “I don’t think the U.S. government had what it needed for reconstructing a country. We did it ad hoc in the Balkans, and then in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq.”
In interviews, three former American ambassadors to Afghanistan were more critical of Washington’s record.
“I said from the get-go that we didn’t have enough money and we didn’t have enough soldiers,” said Robert P. Finn, who was the ambassador in 2002 and 2003. “I’m saying the same thing six years later.”
Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the next ambassador and is now the United Nations ambassador, said, “I do think that state-building and nation-building, we came to that reluctantly,” adding that “I think more could have been done earlier on these issues.”
And Ronald E. Neumann, who replaced Mr. Khalilzad in Kabul, said, “The idea that we could just hunt terrorists and we didn’t have to do nation- building, and we could just leave it alone, that was a large mistake.”
Alas, no more time to write here now. Bottom line on the article: the situation– both regarding ongoing mayhem in Afghanistan and regarding past ineptitude in the Bush administration– is just as bad as I thought it was.
Darfur & the need for care in reporting casualty tolls (again)
The NYT had an informative and very thoughtful op-ed in today, by Sam Dealey, described as a writer on Africa for Time. He noted that on Wednesday, Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority had ruled against the Save Darfur Coalition there, judging that the high death tolls the SDC claims in some of its public advertising there “breached standards of truthfulness.”
Here is the ASA ruling.
It had to do with a national print ad campaign that stated, “In 2003, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir moved to crush opposition by unleashing vicious armed militias to slaughter entire villages of his own citizens. After three years, 400,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed … “.
That ad campaign has run in the US, as well as in Britain. And it hasn’t been cheap. Here in the US, I estimate it may well have cost more than half a million dollars.
In the UK, a complaint was launched by the European Sudanese Public Affairs Council against the claim made in the ad; and it was that complaint that was upheld by the ASA. The ASA ruling presented much of the evidence it considered, and concluded:
- SDC & AT [the Aegis Trust] were entitled to express their opinion about the humanitarian crisis in Darfur in strong terms, we concluded that there was a division of informed opinion about the accuracy of the figure contained in the ad and it should not have been presented in such a definitive way.
The ad breached CAP Code clauses 3.2 (Division of opinion) and 8.1 (Matters of opinion).
Action
We told SDC & AC to present the figure as opinion not fact in future. We urged them to consult the CAP Copy Advice team for help in amending their ad and we also advised them to state the source for such claims in future.
Of course, this is not the first time that Save Darfur campaigners have used unsubstantiated (and improbably high) casualty figures in order to enhance their case. In June last year I noted that Ruth Messinger had stated quite baldly in a letter to the NYT that “Half a million are dead… ” I presented some of the counter-evidence to her claim, and also pointed out the need for rights-abuse reporting always to be very careful and where necessary err on the side of caution.
In his NYT piece today, Dealey is absolutely right to note that this sloppiness with the figures has real consequences on the ground in Darfur. He writes of SDC:
- While the coalition has done an admirable job of raising awareness, it has also hampered aid-delivery groups, discredited American policy makers and diplomats and harmed efforts to respond to future humanitarian crises.
He then looks quickly at all the considerable (though not definitive) evidence that’s available, and concludes that: “Combining these estimates suggests Darfur’s death toll now hovers at 200,000 — just half of what Save Darfur claimed a year ago in its ad and still claims on its Web site.”
He adds:
- whether 200,000 or 400,000 have died, the need to resolve the conflict in Darfur is the same. But Save Darfur’s inflated estimate — used even after Dr. Hagan revised his estimate sharply downward — only frustrates peace efforts.
During debate on the House floor last month, for example, Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee claimed that “an estimated 400,000 people have been killed by the government of Sudan and its janjaweed allies.” Ms. Jackson-Lee is hardly alone in making that allegation, and catering to the Sudanese government’s sensitivities may not seem important. But the repeated error only hardens Khartoum against constructive dialogue. If diplomacy, not war, is the ultimate goal for resolving the conflict in Darfur, the United States must maintain its credibility as an honest broker.
Inaccurate data can also lead to prescriptive blunders. During the worst period of violence, for example, the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster estimated that nearly 70 percent of Darfur’s excess deaths were due not to violence but to disease and malnutrition. This suggests that policy makers should look for ways to bolster and protect relief groups — by continuing to demand that the Sudanese government not hamper the delivery of aid, to be sure, but also by putting vigorous public pressure, so far lacking, on the dozen rebel groups that routinely raid convoys.
Exaggerated death tolls also make it difficult for relief organizations to deliver their services. Khartoum considers the inflated numbers to be evidence that all groups that deliver aid to Darfur are actually adjuncts of the activist groups that the regime considers its enemies, and thus finds justification for delaying visas, refusing to allow shipments of supplies and otherwise putting obstacles in the way of aid delivery.
Lastly, mortality one-upmanship by advocacy groups threatens to inure the public to both current and future catastrophes. If 400,000 becomes the de facto benchmark for action, other bloody conflicts around the globe — in Sri Lanka, Colombia, Somalia — seem to pale in comparison. Ultimately, the inflated claims fuel a death race in which aid and action are based not on facts but on which advocacy group yells the loudest.
Two-hundred thousand dead in Darfur is egregious enough. No matter how noble their intentions, there’s no need for activists to kill more Darfuris than the conflict itself already has.
I agree with nearly everything he has written there. I’ll just note that, on this page, the SDC website doesn’t say absolutely definitively that the genocide has killed 400,000. Rather, it uses the decidedly slippery formulation of saying that it “has… already claimed as many as 400,000 lives.”
“As many as… ” is not any kind of a scientific or systematic quantity. If SDC wants to be taken seriously as a good-faith participant in the discussion over Darfur, they should quit their partisan and fear-stoking exaggeration and go with the same figures that the best-informed people in the humanitarian-aid community are using. (They might also note that not all of the killing and mayhem is caused by the Government and its allies. A non-negligible part has been caused by the anti-government forces– and some of them have had their anti-government belligerence hardened by the prospect they might expect extra political help to be whipped up on their behalf by outsiders from the SDC.)
I would also note, regarding what Dealey wrote here: “If diplomacy, not war, is the ultimate goal for resolving the conflict in Darfur, the United States must maintain its credibility as an honest broker” that for the US to maintain its credibility is important in any case, not just when there’s a prospect it might be involved in some way in the Darfur peace negotiations. (Which actually, I don’t think there is, much, these days… After the Somalia debacle, I don’t think the Bush administration has much credibility as an honest broker in most of Africa.)
But we need to remember that exaggerated claims about rights abuses have also frequently been used to goad countries into wars. (Remember the Kuwaiti babies in 1990?) Waving the bloody shirt is a time-honored tactic of the war-mongers. That’s why it is always very important to stay sober, calm, and very, very close to the evidence when reporting rights abuses.
There was one small pro-Darfur organization in this country, Damanga, which last year was openly urging the US to engage in a policy of “regime change” in Sudan as a response to the suffering in Darfur. Luckily, Damanga did take that call for warmaking off its website.
Anyway, I am glad that the ASA made the ruling it did. If you read the whole ruling, and the whole of Sam Dealey’s article, you can get a fairly good idea of what the best evidence about the casualties is, and where it’s coming from.
Ignatieff– Still Getting Iraq Wrong
In the year before March 2003 when he was publicly egging on the Bushites’ rush to invade Iraq, Michael Ignatieff was still a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Then, and for quite a while after March 2003, he would write enthusiastically about “we” Americans, and “our dilemmas”, etc etc…
Sometime in 2004, he became a little bit less enthusiastic about the US presence in Iraq. Not necessarily about the fact of the invasion and subsequent occupation, but more about the way it had been done.
I should note that in all his lengthy, very self-referential, and no doubt handsomely paid-for articles, in the NYT magazine and elsewhere, Ignatieff still referred wholeheartedly to “our” dilemmas as US citizens.
Then in late 2005, something happened. He quit Harvard, returned to his birth-country, Canada, and ran for and won a seat in the Canadian parliament. When asked by Canadians about all that US “we” talk, he said he had just been using it to try to make his arguments in our US public discourse more convincing.
Thanks a lot, Michael.
Now, he is deputy leader of Canada’s venerable Liberal Party, and apparently trying to think himself into the position of a national leader. As what seems like another step in his lengthy saga of self-reinvention, last Sunday he published this essay in the NYT mag, under the title “Getting Iraq Wrong.”
Well, he still is, as you’ll see if you read the piece carefully. Which I have just found time to do, this afternoon. So I am happy to give you, after the jump here– the annotated “Ignatieff Getting Iraq Wrong”
Just before we go there, though, I’d like to note that this lengthy discussion on ‘liberal hawks’, from JWN in mid-May of this year, is also quite relevant to M. Ignatieff.
Anyway, now you can go and read the annotated text.
US congress about to increase ‘Subsidies of Mass Destruction’?
H’mmm, I’ve recently been writing about the numbers of people killed by Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction back in the 1980s. I guess it was around 25,000 people at the time– though many of the 100,000 Iranians contaminated by the Iraqi CW suffered mightily over the years that followed (and until today.)
The number of women, men, and children who die quite avoidable deaths in low-income countries every few months because of the completely unfair (and under WTO rules, most probably actually illegal) subsidies that the US and other rich countries give to their agricultural producers is almost certainly higher than that.
Therefore I think we ought to get used to calling them Subsidies of Mass Destruction (SMD’s.)
And right now, the US Congress is considering provisions in the 2007-2012 Farm Bill that are set not just to keep the US’s agricultural subsidies in place, but also to increase them. The House of Representatives passed its version of the five-year Farm Bill on July 27. This PDF info sheet from the House Ag Committee tells us “proudly” that the bill preserves and increases subsidies paid on 25 different commodities, including those two “Kings” of the traditional US plantation/slavery system, cotton and rice, which still are “Kings” in this Farm Bill.
Oh, also, shock, horror. This bill is going to put a “hard cap” on the income of anyone who’s eligible for getting the subsidies. It’s as low (irony alert) as one million dollars per person…
So you can really see that these subsidies are not really about “preserving the small American family farmer”, at all. They’re about massive taxpayer handouts to Big Agribusiness.
Oxfam has done a lot of solid research over the past few years into how the US cotton subsidies destroy the livelihoods of miliions of farmers in low-income countries around the world.
For example, this press release from September 2002. It said:
- US subsidies to cotton producers are contributing to mass poverty in some of the world’s poorest countries, according to a report published today by the international development agency Oxfam.
Government support to the 25,000 domestic cotton producers in the US totals $3.9 billion annually, more than three times the US foreign assistance to Africa’s 500 million people.
“The US is the world’s strongest proponent of free trade, but when poor cotton farmers in Mali try to trade on the world market, they must compete against massively subsidized American cotton,” says Phil Twyford. “This makes a mockery of the idea of a level playing field. The rules are rigged against the poor.”
American cotton subsidies are highly targeted to benefit the largest farming operations. The largest 10 per cent of American cotton agro-businesses received three-quarters of the total subsidies.
The Government of Brazil is launching a complaint with the World Trade Organization, claiming that US cotton support constitutes an unfair trade practice.
More than 10 million people in Central and West Africa depend directly on cotton. It is a major source of revenue for countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso and Benin. The amount of money America spends on cotton is more than the entire GDP of Burkina Faso, where 2 million people depend on cotton and half of who live below the poverty line.
Oxfam says that Africa is losing $300 million a year, based on estimates from the International Cotton Advisory Council, and that the withdrawal of US subsidies would raise the world price of cotton by 11 cents a pound.
World cotton prices have sunk to as low now as any time since the Great Depression. The US subsidies are pushing prices even further into collapse…
Well, in March 2005 the Brazilians did win the “case” against the US cotton subsidies that they’d lodged with the WTO’s Dispute Resolution Mechanism… Do you think that put an end to the US cotton subsidies??
Short answer: No.
Today, I found a handful of great online resources about the nature of the US cotton subsidies, and the industry that has grown up around them.
First of all, I found this totally awesome online database, that’s produced by an outfit called the Environmental Working Group. The EWG’s doughty researchers used FOIA applications to the US Dept of Agriculture to free up some much-needed public information about the structure of the subsidies. That page there shows you how strongly receipt of the subsidies was concentrated into a few hands in 2005. If you noodle around that database a little bit you can find out all kinds of information about the recipients of the subsidies, too.
On this page, fairly low down, I found out that in 2005, cotton subsidies totaled $3.3 billion. Ah, and here is the cotton page itself. More great figures there.
But here was one of my greatest online finds of today: A brilliantly researched and written investigative piece about the whole cotton subsidy phenomenon written by CNN-Money reporter G. Pascal Zachary in December 2005.
His whole article is well worth reading by anyone interested in this whole crazy/lethal enterprise of US cotton subsidies.
Here are my highlights:
Continue reading “US congress about to increase ‘Subsidies of Mass Destruction’?”
More on the US’s nuclear-use posture
This is additional info on whether the US has or doesn’t have a meaningful “no-first-use” posture regarding the use of nuclear weapons, a topic I wrote about briefly here, earlier today.
A good friend sent me this link, which is to a page on the Nuclearfiles.org website dated April 1995, that presents the nuclear-use posture of all five of the recognized nuclear-weapons states. For the US it says this:
- The United States reaffirms that it will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapons States parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons except in the case of an invasion or any other attack on the United States, its territories, its armed forces or any other troops, its allies or States towards which it has a security commitment, carried out or sustained by such a non-nuclear-weapon State, in association or alliance with a nuclear-weapon State.
This is not an unqualified No First Use statement, though it goes some way to providing the negative security assurances (to non-nuclear states) that are required as part of the NPT’s “Grand Bargain.”
On that web-page, the positions presented by Russia, the UK, and France all look very similar to that one.
China’s NFU position is, by contrast, far less hedged-about and equivocal. It is this:
- China undertakes not to be the first to use nuclear weapons at any time or under any circumstances. China undertakes not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear-weapons states or nuclear-weapon-free zones at any time or under any circumstances.
I was disapppointed that that web-page did not give any sources or links for these statements. So I did a little more online research and came up with these resources, which considerably enrich (and substantially change) the picture:
1. Global Security has, on their website, excerpts from a leaked copy of the Nuclear Posture Review of 2001-2002 that was presented to Congress on 31 December 2001 by Secdef Donald Rumsfeld. Given the stature and reputation of Global Security, I am assuming these are accurate excerpts from the document in question, which has never been made fully public.
It includes the following quotes:
- — p.7: “Nuclear weapons play a critical role in the defense capabilities of the United States, its allies and friends. They provide credible military options to deter a wide range of threats, including WMD and large-scale conventional military force. These nuclear capabilities possess unique properties that give the United States options to hold at risk classes of targets [that are] important to achieve strategic and political objectives.”
— pp.12-13: “Composed of both non-nuclear systems and nuclear weapons, the strike element of the New Triad can provide greater flexibility in the design and conduct of military campaigns to defeat opponents decisively. Non-nuclear strike capabilities may be particularly useful to limit collateral damage and conflict escalation. Nuclear weapons could be employed against targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack, (for example, deep underground bunkers or bio-weapon facilities).”
I will note the following:
- a. He was stating explicitly that the US nuclear force could be used to deter threats from non-nuclear forces, including both CW or BW threats as well as “large-scale” non-WMD forces. I.e., the US under President George W. Bush does NOT have anything resembling a “no first use” policy.
b. He was saying the US could even use nukes against “political” objectives. What does that mean??
c. Planning to use nuclear weapons as part of broader military operations aimed at defeating an enemy is considerably different than planning to use nuclear weapons only as a deterrent against other country’s use of nuclear– or even non-nuclear– weapons.
2. The Joint Chiefs of Staff’s ‘Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations’ of March 2005(advanced draft.) This document was originally scheduled for publication in October 2003, but it became repeatedly delayed. In around September 2005, the people at the Nuclear Information Project got hold of an advanced draft dated March2005. So did the WaPo’s Walter Pincus, and Hans Kristenson of Arms Control Today.
After Pincus and Kristenson wrote about the DJNO document– which called for the first time for the use of US nuclear weapons in a pre-emptive strike (i.e., in line with Bush’s National Security Strategy of September 2002)– the Senate Armed Services Committee called a hearing on the matter, and publication of the final version of the document was abruptly cancelled.
As the Nuclear Information Project people wrote, though,
- Does the cancellation mean that U.S. nuclear policy has changed? No. The decision to cancel the documents simply removes controversial documents from the public domain and from the Pentagon’s internal reading list. The White House and Pentagon guidance that directs the use of nuclear weapons remains unchanged by the cancellation.
3. Retired US arms control negotiator Jack Mendelsohn’s mid-2002 analysis of the 2001-2002 Nuclear Posture Review is also really useful.
He writes:
- The document… singles out five countries that could be involved in “immediate, potential or unexpected” contingencies [i.e., requiring some form of US nuclear operations]: North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya. North Korea and Iraq are characterised as “chronic military concerns.” All five are considered to “sponsor or harbor terrorists, and all have active WMD and missile programs.”
In addition, the NPR lists China as a country that could be involved in an “immediate or potential” contingency and, while a nuclear strike contingency involving Russia “is not expected,” Russian nuclear forces and programs “remain a concern.” Carrying forward the arguments of the Clinton administration for it’s ‘hedge’ force, the NPR cautions that in “the event that US relations with Russia significantly worsen in the future, the United States may need to revise its nuclear force levels and posture.”
Keeping open the option to use nuclear weapons in other than a deterrent or retaliatory role is not new. Since at least the Gulf War and during the Clinton administration, the United States has embraced a dual and contradictory policy on nuclear weapons use. The President, through the Secretary of State, declared in 1978 and reaffirmed in 1995 in connection with the review and extension of the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), that the United States – joined by the other four declared nuclear powers – would not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states party to the NPT unless they are allied with a nuclear state in an attack against the United States or its allies.
The National Security Council (NSC) and the Defense Department, on the other hand, believing that deterrence is strengthened by ambiguity, have for some time taken the position that “no options are ruled out” in response to an attack by any weapon of mass destruction. In 1996, NSC official Robert Bell, in conjunction with the US signature of the Protocols to the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone (ANWFZ) Treaty, announced that US adherence “will not limit options available to the United States in response to an attack by an ANWFZ party using weapons of mass destruction.” In late 1998, Walter Slocombe, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, stated that retaining the option to use nuclear weapons against an attack with chemical and/or biological weapons “is simply an issue of making sure that we continue to maintain a high level of uncertainty or high level of concern, if you will, at what the potential aggressor would face if he used [CBW] or indeed took other aggressive acts…”
The latest round in this policy tango occurred earlier this year when in February Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton called into question the utility of and administration support for the US pledge not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.22 Questioned about Bolton’s comments, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher reiterated the most recent version of the negative security commitment (1995) and then added: “We will do whatever is necessary to deter the use of WMD against the United States, its allies, and its interests. If a WMD is used against the United States or its allies, we will not rule out any specific type of military response.”
So I guess I still stand substantially by what I wrote earlier this morning. The US has never been prepared to adopt a clear and unequivocal “no first use” policy (though the declaration of 1995 was a partial step in the right direction.)
These days, of the “Recognized Nuclear Five”, it looks as if only China has an unequivocal NFU policy.
- Update, 9:57 p.m.:
More resources, adduced here because said good friend did refer specifically to Robert McNamara:
4. Robert McNamara writing in Foreign Policy mag, May/June 2005:
- The United States has never endorsed the policy of “no first use,” not during my seven years as secretary [of Defense] or since. We have been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons—by the decision of one person, the president—against either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so.
5. Robert McNamara, “Defense Arrangements of the North Atlantic Community,” Department of State Bulletin 47 (July 9, 1962), pp. 64-70. Republished here:
- We shall continue to maintain powerful nuclear forces for the alliance as a whole. As the President [JFK] has said, “Only through such strength can we be certain of deterring a nuclear strike, or an overwhelming ground attack, upon our forces and allies.”
Etc., etc.
Hillary Clinton’s irresponsible hawkishness on nukes
Hillary Clinton yesterday outdid herself in trying to appear “tough” on foreign affairs when she refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against Osama Bin Laden or other terrorist leaders in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
The WaPo’s Anne Kornblut wrote there that,
- Clinton’s comments came in response to Obama’s remarks earlier in the day that nuclear weapons are “not on the table” in dealing with ungoverned territories in the two countries, and they continued a steady tug of war among the Democratic presidential candidates over foreign policy.
“I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance” in Afghanistan or Pakistan, Obama said. He then added that he would not use such weapons in situations “involving civilians.”
“Let me scratch that,” he said. “There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.”
Obama (Ill.) was responding to a question by the Associated Press about whether there was any circumstance in which he would be prepared or willing to use nuclear weapons in Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat terrorism and bin Laden.
“There’s been no discussion of using nuclear weapons, and that’s not a hypothetical that I’m going to discuss,” Obama said. When asked whether his answer also applied to the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons, he said it did.
By the afternoon, Clinton (N.Y.) had responded with an implicit rebuke. “Presidents should be careful at all times in discussing the use and nonuse of nuclear weapons,” she said, adding that she would not answer hypothetical questions about the use of nuclear force.
“Presidents since the Cold War have used nuclear deterrents to keep the peace, and I don’t believe any president should make blanket statements with the regard to use or nonuse,” Clinton said.
It is well known that– ever since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, almost exactly 62 years ago today– the US has never been prepared to state openly that it would “not be the first to use” nuclear weapons. Russia, and before that the Soviet Union, did have an explicit “no first use” stance.
The US’s stance therefore leaves open– or, as US pols like to say, “on the table”– the possibility that the US might use nuclear weapons in response to somebody else’s non-nuclear attack.
But to leave “on the table” the possibility that the US might use nuclear weapons against terrorists??? This is even more shocking, and seems to reveal that neither Hillary Clinton nor any of the other pols who adopt the same, striving-to-be-tough stance, basically have no idea about the nature of nuclear weapons or the consequences of their use.
The use of even what the US calls “tactical” nuclear weapons would be devastating for a wide area around the detonation site. And upon using any nuclear weapon in such circumstances, the US would also immediately lose just about all credibility as a leader of any moral standing in the world.
Barrack Obama is quite right to say that the use of nukes should not be on the table in the discussion of combating Al-Qaeda or other terrorists.
Body blow to Iraq’s Potemkin Government?
I’ve been locking myself down writing my new book. (Two chapters almost finished!) But I couldn’t help noticing the reports (e.g. here) about the (mainly Sunni) Iraqi Accord Front having now left Iraq’s Potemkin Government.
‘Potemkin’, because it doesn’t actually do anything that governments by definition do, such as provide solid basic services to the citizenry– especially public security. This body is, however, occasionally pulled out of hiding to “appear” to be doing something. For example, we were told on NPR today that President Bush had a lengthy discussion with “Prime Minister” Maliki by videolink, in which they discussed affairs of state together.
But the fact that the IAF pulled out of the Potemkin Government at the very same time Sec of State Rice and Sec of Defense Gates have been visiting Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries, urging them to give a bit of support to the said “government”, shows the degree of ineffectual chaos into which the US’s Iraq policy has fallen.
It is quite clear that no-one in the Bush administration has the foggiest idea of how to identify and pursue any policy in Iraq that has any chance of “winning”. Actually it is far too late for that now. There is no such policy any more.
But still, the exit from Iraq can be managed with either a greater or lesser degree of intelligence, and therefore of orderliness and predictability for everyone concerned– Americans, Iraqis, and neighbors of Iraq. And the way this administration is lurching around the region these days, it seems less and less likely that they will be able to manage even a drawdown/withdrawal of forces without making major blunders.
I think “lurch” will have to be one of the major ways in which the historians of the future describe the tenor of the Bushites’ whole engagement with Iraq. They lurch like cognitively impaired drunkards from one side to another, with no stable center of understanding, realism, or political principle to steady them or help pull them forward. They arm the Shiites, then they arm the Sunnis. They blame the Iranians, then they blame the Saudis. They publicly scold the Saudis for failures in Iraq– and then within hours of that they say they’ll be relying on them to help give political legitimacy to Maliki’s Potemkin Government.
The one constant through all their lurchings around the Middle East? Their propensity to look at every problem as a military problem, and at every relationship as one that can easily be strengthened or manipulated through arms transfers. Hence, their main legacy in the region thus far is one of distrust, tensions, anti-Americanism– and also, massive arming.
Oh well, I need to get back to my book. But before I do that, I’ll just note that, on reflection, it may well be that, inasmuch as the Maliki government is only a Potemkin Government, not the real thing– and certainly not one that controls any functioning levers of state power!– then whether the IAF leaves it or stays in may not actually make any difference. Not because the IAF isn’t important, but because the Maliki government is not the real thing.
Meet the Evangelical Zionists
This is a brilliant short video by Max Blumenthal, shot during the recent big meeting held in Washington DC by a big Evangelical organization called Christians United for Israel (CUFI).
Blumenthal, who’s Jewish, goes to the conference in the role of naive reporter. He gets some great footage of an interview with recently disgraced GOP Speaker of the House of Representatives Tom DeLay, and of him (MB) questioning CUFI head “Pastor” John Hagee about whether he really thinks– as written in one of his books– that the Jews have only themselves to blame for all the times they’ve been persecuted.
The “vox pop” discussions with CUFI members in the hotel lobby are really revealing… Also, the extremely scary parts where you see a large roomful of people swaying and dancing– one even doing a cheerleading-type hop– with Israeli and US flags clasped to their breasts… And we see two uniformed soldiers, one in US camo and the other in Israeli camo and a prayer shawl, come up to the front and salute each other. Religion, ecstasy, and militarism all tied up together in one big package.
I believe that use of a US forces uniform in such a context is actually illegal?
And yes, the vox pop people do talk a bit about how “the Muslims” are “the enemy.”
Then– Joe Lieberman!! I had read some of the disturbingly fawning remarks he made there about Hagee, before. But to see him make them on the video… Well, I am almost speechless.
I think it’s been the case for a while now that the Christian Zionists– who have very, very long roots in this country– have been a stronger base of support for Israel here than the Jewish-American Zionists. And of course, given that the beliefs of many of these Evangelical Zionists are that at the time of “Armageddon” all the Jews will either become converted to Christianity or get consumed by fire, there are many Jewish Americans who are still fairly wary about the Evangelicals’ strong support for Israel.
The game plan for these Evangelicals (as also laid out lovingly in their extremely well-selling though in practice almost unreadable novels about “the End Time”) is that first, the Jewish people all need to be “ingathered” into Israel, and then soon after there will be “Armageddon” and the “Second Coming.” And along the way there, there’ll be great fighting against “Babylon” (or Baghdad) and perhaps even some nuclear war…
But it’s all– from these people’s very scary point of view– in a good cause.
I want to note that I know that not all Evangelical Christians in the US are like these ones. I have a number of Evangelical friends who are deeply committed to social-justice causes including to the pursuit of just peace between Palestinians and Israelis. However, sadly, so far it seems to be the well-organized Christian Zionists among them who seem much stronger than the other lot.
Meanwhile, huge kudos to Max Blumenthal and his videographer Thomas Shomaker for making this great and informative little piece of live-reporting video. (Did I tell you they got kicked out of the conference toward the end of the movie. I wonder what they missed? No matter. What they got was excellent.)