I’ve been thinking a little more about what it would really mean if we were all serious about saying (as the Founding Fathers of the US said) that all “men”– for which, read “all humans”– are created equal, and are endowed equally with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I was just reading the 2005 edition of the UN development Program’s Human Development Report. Table 14 at the back there tells us that the annual Gross Domestic Product of the whole world is US$36.06 trillion– or,if you count something called “Purchasing Power Parity dollars”it comes to PPP$51.15 trillion. (These are figures for 2003.)
Given a world population of just over 6.3 billion souls, the global GDP per capita comes to US$5,801, or PPP$8,229. That is the value of all the goods and services produced in the world in a year (now, not changed much from 2003.)
So if your household’s income is less than PPP$8,229 per capita, then you’re getting the short end of the economic stick, globally speaking. If it is more, then you’re a person of privilege.
Okay, I’m a person of privilege.
In 2003, the GDP per capita in the US came to PPP$37,562. Of course, we know it is very unevenly distributed within the US. (Indeed, Table 15 tells us that the richest 10% of Americans enjoy 29.9% of the nation’s income or consumption; and the proportion between the income enjoyed by the richest 10% to that enjoyed by the poorest 10% is 15.9 to 1, by far the highest for any of the OECD countries.)
By contrast, the average GDP per capita in the 32 countries listed in the Report as being of “Low human development”– and I hope to heck there’s no-one out there reading this who takes this to be a moral judgment??– is just PPP$1,046. That is, just 2.78% of the per-capita PPP GDP within the US.
So, let’s go back 13 years, to 1990. That year, according to the 1993 Human Development Report, the real GDP per capita in the US was PPP$21,449 (Table 1). In the countries described as “least developed” it was PPP$740, or 3.45% of what it was in the US.
Clearly, gaps are getting wider.
Clearly, too, these gaps in income, which accumulate year after year after year into ever larger gaps in wealth, leave the US and other rich countries– some of which, I should note, have a slightly higher per-capita GDP than the US, though these are much smaller countries– but the ever accumulating gaps in wealth between the uber-rich and the uber-poor leave the rich countries much, much more capable of intervening economically in the affairs of the poorest countries… And they (we) do this in many ways, including by keep the international trade rules firmly stacked against poor-country producers of most primary goods.
In terms of the “ability to intervene economically”, too, I think the “raw” US$ figures of per-capita GDP in any country are a stronger indicator of their relative susceptibility to US intervention than the PPPS figures. For example, if a gringo goes into any of the many low-income countries where the cost of living is relatively low (in dollar terms), then he or she can exert a lot more influence by waving $100 around there than s/he could get by doing the same in a (much more expensive) West European country.
… Well, deeply embedded and continuing economic inequalities are only dimension of the present inequalities among the world’s peoples. But I’ve been thinking about human equality/inequlity quite a lot over recent months (okay, most of my life, to be truthful.) Some years ago, when I was toying with the idea of doing a Ph.D. in philosophical ethics, I took a course that involved a lot of close reading in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Rawls, who died a couple of years ago, was a leading icon of US political philosophy. He was a longtime Harvard prof, and Theory of Justice was his best-known work by far.
Back when I was reading it 8 years or so ago, I found it intriguing, but I disagreed fairly strongly with some of his general dispositions; mostly, I should say, with his ontology. His view of “the human condition” was very much in the tradition of the English empiricists, those dear old (always unmarried) Anglican clergymen like Locke, Hobbes etc who viewed “men”– for such was the subject of their enquiry– as quintessentially individualistic, self-generating, and self-sufficient beings. (I guess they never stopped to speculate about the ontological standing of the women who must have washed their socks for them, and fed them– let alone the mothers whose tireless labor had raised them from infancy and endowed them with all the basic tools of the language by which they later made their living… Oh well.)
Myself, I always was much more of a feminist communitarian. I love Seyla Ben-Habib’s takedowns of Hobbes and Locke; Margaret Walker, Sara Ruddick, and all those other feminist philosophers whose works are notably NOT taught in philsophy departments dominated by a rigidly “analytical” approach.
So anyway, I had a bunch of criticisms of Rawls that I argued out in various forms at the time. But now, looking back, I think maybe it’s time to reconnect with a couple of his key insights, and try to bring them more to life within the US discourse.
He centers his argument about the nature of “justice” around a clever educational device that he calls the “veil of ignorance.” Basically, he says that if you try to imagine what a just social order might look like, you should imagine that all the people in the world encounter each other in an initial deliberation in which they don’t know the details of their own social situation. So since you don’t know, in this thought experiment, whether you might be male or female, rich or poor, black-skinned or white-skinned, able-bodied or disabled, you would want to minimize your chances of getting “the short end of the stick” by legislating some kind of social order in which, regardless of your condition, your interests would not be totally ignored… and on this basis, a generally “fair” and perhaps even somewhat “caring” social order would emerge.
Nearly all of this argument was set within a national community. I don’t recall whether he stated this, or whether it was strongly implied, instead. Toward the very end of his life, Rawls wrote a book called, I think, “The Law of Nations” in which he attempted to use a similar device to construct some form of a “world order”. But I don’t think anyone took that latter work, which was really poorly argued and disorganized, very seriously.
Maybe we could do a Rawlsian thought experiment at the global level, though? Not– as Rawls had done in the Law of Nations, by considering the basic “negotiating unit” to be each nation, but taking it as being each person in the world…. If you had a real chance that, after the removal of the “veil of ignarance” you might indeed find yourself to be a Guatemalan subsistence farmer or a disabled Congolese child… then how would you order the world and its priorities?
I wonder how people in rich, secure western countries would respond when invited seriously to take part in such a thought experiment. I know Oxfam and similar organizations do things like dinners where people are randomly assigned a heaping plate, or a half-empty plate, or a plate with just a few grains of old rice on it, and then they use that to start talking about global economic inequalities…
But I think it’s probably still true that most westerners (a) don’t really like to think much about things like that, (b) don’t even know that much about the lives of people in low-income countries that they could start to really even imagine what it would be like to be one of them, and (c) might have at the back of their minds some version of the Calvinist view that people who have a lot of worldly goods somehow “deserve” to have them, while people who do not, somehow “deserve” not to.
.. Well, I realize I’m not coming to any answers here. But still, I think it’s really important as we approach the next phase of global affairs, to start thinking about what a world order truly based on the principle of human equality would or should look like. There are so many dimensions of this issue! Stay tuned…
Author: Helena
Gulf of Tonkin redux, redux
Today, I received an email from Tom Cleaver of “That’s Another Fine Mess” who had wanted to post a comment on my Oct. 31 post about the emergence of new evidence about the exaggeration or downright faking of the (second) of the 1964 “incidents” in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Tom was an on-watch Petty Officer on the admiral’s staff aboard the “Pine Island” when the USS Maddox reported it had been fired on that night…
The software here closes down the Comments boards after some period of time. So Tom couldn’t post his comment. I’ll paste it in in full, just below.
But before I move over to the intriguing contents of his email, I’ll tell you that the (non-governmental) National Security Archive organization has a fine new portal to the Gulf-of-Tonkin-related documents that have finally been declassified over the past few days. If you go there, you can even read the previously classified article on SIGINT aspects of the GoT story, written by the intel agencies’ in-house historian Robert Hanyok. So now you can read Hanyok’s article, read Tom Cleaver’s criticism of his work, and decide for yourself…
Here, anyway, was Tom’s email:
- I was just referred to your site where you comment about the Tonkin Gulf incident and the NSA historian saying the “intelligence was flawed.”
I was going to post the following there, but it wasn’t allowed. I thought you might be interested with this information.
Tom Cleaver
Not only was there not an attack on August 4, there were no attacks on the Maddox ever in August 1964. The Tonkin Gulf “incident” never happened.
In 1966, the former Chief Sonarman of the Maddox told an officer I served with on the staff of Commander Patrol Forces 7th Fleet (the operational command of the Maddox and Turner Joy) that “there were never any torpedoes in the water on the first night.” It happens that, while whales and schools of fish in particular formations can be mistaken for submarines, there is no “natural” sound in the water like a torpedo. It is unmistakeable. There were no North Vietnamese torpedo boats anywhere near the Maddox, which was actually there to perform fire support for a South Vietnamese “34-Alpha” commando raid on Hon Me Island (a bit of geography that is always conveniently not shown on any US maps of the “incident”).
On August 4, the Maddox and Turner Joy only managed to not sink each other when a Fire Controlman 3rd class in the control tower of the Maddox refused to open fire on the grounds that “the only target I have is the Turner Joy.” He was later court-martialed for “failure to obey a direct order” and reduced in rank. Lt (jg) Fred Gardner, the assistant gunnery officer on the Turner Joy (and later one of the founders of the GI antiwar movement), managed to convince his commanding officer that the only target they had was the Maddox. Had a junior officer and a junior enlisted man not stuck to their guns, so the guns remained stuck in the non-firing position, one would have sunk the other (if not mutually) and things would have been very different.
The entire Tonkin Gulf “incident” was a lie from beginning to end, and if some moron “historian” from the NSA is too stupid to figure out that August 2 was as phony as August 4, then it’s no wonder the only “historian” work he could get was this “job.”
I say all this because I was there as a member of the staff of the drunken old fool of an “Admiral” who was supposed to be in charge of this.
Another lousy war over a bunch of made-up accusations, eh?
(At lunch today, George Packer said one of the differences between the US in Vietnam and the US in Iraq is that actually, in Vietnam, the stakes turned out not to be so huge. “The US was able to walk away and lick its wounds, and not suffer too much.” But in Iraq, he argued, the stakes are much higher– “because Iraq is a much more important country on the global scene than Vietnam.” I agree with that. I agree too with the implication of what George was arguing, namely that in withdrawing from Iraq the US won’t simply be able to walk away and lick its wounds and act as if nothing too big had happened… Indeed not. In the aftermath of a US withdrawal from Iraq, we need to recognize that the whole structure of the relationship between the US and the other 96% of the world’s people has to be radically restructured. We should not carry on as if it’ll be “US hegemony, as usual” the day after the withdrawal… Anyway, why would we want that?)
Around town here
So okay, George Packer was here in Charlottesville today. I had lunch with him. Also miriam cooke. I had a good talk over coffee with her this afternoon.
I hadn’t met miriam before, though she and I have scads of friends in common. We swapped various tales about Oxford, Beirut in the “good old days”, Lebanese former husbands, etc etc.
And yesterday, on the peace demo, I met a new couple who’ve just moved to town. The male portion there is David Swanson. (He wrote about the peace demo here. Nice signs, huh? David’s right in what he writes there: we did get some great honking– again!– yesterday, including from some trash hauliers, several city buses, and a police cruiser…)
So okay, at the lunch today, it’s true that someone talked about “You know, the war that some people call the Civil War and some people call the War Between the States.” It’s true that one of the fellow lunchers was the former Inspector General of the CIA.
But in my book, all these things make the city a really interesting place to live.
Iraq in US politics
I’m just back from a lunch here in Charlottesville with George Packer, the thoughtful and well-informed author of a new book on the US engagement in Iraq called The Assassins’ Gate. (He’s spent quite a bit of time in Iraq since the invasion, publishing several good pieces of reportage in the New Yorker along the way.)
There were around two dozen people at the lunch. At one point, one of those present recounted that he had been in DC recently, meeting “the (Republican) chairman of a powerful congressional committee” (un-named)…
- And the chairman said something along these lines: “We told George Bush: ‘You’re not running for election any more. We are. In 2006 and again in 2008. What’s happening in Iraq is hurting us, badly. What will our party’s situation look like nationwide in summer 2006? You have to get serious numbers of our troops out before then. Hold the elections there on December 15! Declare them a victory! Then leave.'”
George, whose book is a careful accounting of many of the shenanigans, uses of double-think, and political acrobatics that had preceded the launching of the war, looked shocked. And said:
- You mean they would be that cynical?
I mean, this is the party that used blatant political maneuvers to get the US into Iraq, back in 2002. In the fall of that year, I remember, Tom Dashiell [the former leader of the Democrats in the senate– remember him?] went to President Bush and begged him to postpone holding the vote on the war until after that round of mid-term elections… Just as George H.W. Bush had done, back in 1990-91, you remember. But in 2002, Bush and Rove said ‘No.’ They insisted that they had to hold the Congressional vote on the war before the elections, and they put the Democrats into a terrible bind over that…
But to think that they would now blatantly use such partisan political reasoning to jerk the US out of Iraq, whether that would benefit the Iraqi people or not? That would truly be a new moral low… On the other hands, the lows do carry on getting lower and lower under this president.
He said that if we suddenly start to see utterances being reported from within the administration about the “Iraqi forces being actually being more capable than we had earlier described them as”, and so on– reports in which he, Packer, evidently did not place a lot of credence– “then we can start to conclude that that kind of advice being given by Republican party stalwarts is starting to be followed.”
Well, guess what? Check out what journos very “well-connected” with the US military and political officials in Baghdad, like John Burns and Dexter Filkins, have started to write in the past few days…
In a talk that Packer had given just before the lunch, he had spelled out his view that the future US policy in Iraq “will be driven mainly by the constraints of the manpower shortage in the US armed forces. (Because there won’t be a draft here.) So these constraints may lead to a withdrawal from the country even if there should not be one.”
That latter thought was Packer’s, of course; not my own. He said he could see some fairly strong reasons why the US should not undertake an inappropriately speedy withdrawal, and estimated it might be “some 7, 8, or even 10 years” till Iraq was sufficiently stable to allow a real US withdrawal.
One questioner asked “What exactly would happen that would allow this withdrawal at the end of those ten years? Would it be that all the insurgents have gotten killed by then? Or would it be the emergence of a new strongman there? Or what?”
This was a really good question– one to which Packer was unable to provide any good answer. And of course, no-one dwelt much at all on what would happen to the Iraqi citizenry– or to the US citizenry, come to that– over the course of those ten further years of war…
Reconciliation issues– Australia and East Timor
I’ve been doing some online research, namely, checking out what I’ve been getting from the two daily “Google news alerts” I signed up for recently using the search terms “Saddam trial” and “transitional justice”. The Saddam trial one netted me a relatively small number of new stories, beyond what I’ve already been reading. The transitional justice one has been a really mixed bag– some news stories that have almost nothing to do with what I’ve been looking for, and alongside them some really fascinating new pieces.
Like today and yesterday. Today, I found a link to this piece, by Mark Byrne on “New Matilda.com — a different tune”, who was looking at the stalling of the efforts many white Australians had started to make 15 and 20 years ago to restore a little bit of decent balance to their relations with their country’s Aboriginal peoples.
Byrne, who’s a Jesuit social activist, writes:
- Overall, it’s a sorry picture. As former Governor-General and CAR [Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation] chair Sir William Deane said earlier in 2005, ‘In the years since Corroboree 2000, relations between Indigenous Australians… and our nation seem to me to have significantly deteriorated.’ Few people outside the government would disagree.
Responsibility is easily laid at the foot of the Prime Minister, who has consistently opposed anything other than practical measures to improve Indigenous disadvantag…
Nevertheless, the government is motivated by popular opinion as well as ideology. Opinion polls have consistently shown that while the majority of Australians are willing to accept that Indigenous people were mistreated in the past, they are divided as to whether disadvantage today represents continuing mistreatment or is rather the fault of Indigenous people themselves. They are certainly not in favour of apologising for the actions of people long dead, and do not see themselves as perpetuating racism and exploitation by their lifestyles and attitudes. In addition, the Howard government has done a sterling job of associating an apology to the Stolen Generation with personal and legal responsibility for their plight, rather than understanding ‘sorry’ to be a simple expression of compassion…
I found a really interesting piece in yesterday’s haul, too. It was a report in the Sunday Times of Australia about the recently released report of the East Timorese “CAVR”– that is, their Commission for Reception and Reconciliation.
The darned thing is, I read that news piece on another browser window, then the newspaper’s website suddenly went down, and now I can’t read it any more. Shucks…
Oh, here‘s another version of, I think, the same story– this one, from the Brisbane Courier-Mail. Here’s the lead there:
- THE Australian, British and US Governments and international arms makers should pay compensation for their part in Indonesia’s brutal 24-year occupation of East Timor, a commission of inquiry has demanded.
The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR), an independent organisation established by the East Timorese Government, is calling for reparations for victims of torture, rape and violence perpetrated by Indonesia from its invasion in 1975 to its bloody withdrawal in 1999.
The 2500-page report, which President Xanana Gusmao presented to East Timor’s Parliament on Monday, contentiously recommends East Timor’s victims be paid compensation by the colonisers Indonesia and Portugal, as well as by those nations that sold weapons to Indonesia and supported its annexation – including Australia.
Mr Gusmao spelled out the detail of the recommendation, and told Parliament he was “truly concerned” by it.
The commission also recommended a continuation of the UN-backed investigation and prosecution of war crimes in East Timor during the Indonesian occupation.
“This recommendation does not take into account the situation of political anarchy and social chaos that could easily erupt if we decided to bring to court every crime committed since 1974 or 1975,” Mr Gusmao said.
Obviously, a good story to watch further. Does anyone know of a good link to the CAVR report itself?
CPT abductions update
AP is reporting that the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) in Iraq is calling for the release of the four CPT people abducted on Saturday as well as the German woman who was (separately) abudtced in Iraq last Friday.
In addition to the AMS, the (also Sunni) Chief Mufti of Palestine, Ikrema Sabri, has also called for the CPTers’ release.
AP reported that,
- “These aid workers have stood beside (the) Palestinian people and it’s our duty now to stand beside them,” [Sabri] said.
Palestinians in several towns said they had worked with the activists and asked Sabri to issue the appeal.
Actually, I’m not sure if any of the four CPT men abducted in Iraq have actually worked in Palestine, or not. (Their names, ages, and nationalities are listed here.) But CPT has maintained a well-respected presence in Hebron, and worked in other Palestinian towns, for several years now.
If you have the stomach to read something quite distasteful (and almost literally nauseating) about the abductions, you could read these comments by the sadly deluded rightwing talkshow host, and one-time pill addict, Rush Limbaugh…
Christian Peacemakers abducted in Iraq
I invite you all to join me in praying for the wellbeing and safe release of the four members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) who were abducted by unknown assailants in Iraq on Saturday.
CPT headquarters has now released the names of the abductees. They include a fellow Quaker from Virginia called Tom Fox. I’ve never met Tom, but I just received an anguished call from a f/Friend who is a member of his Quaker meeting, in northern Virginia. Tom has intemittently, since October 2004, been keeping a blog called Waiting in the Light, that contains some very moving pieces of writing.
The other CPT abductees are Norman Kember, 74, from London, UK; James Loney, 41, from Toronto; and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, also from Canada.
Al-Jazeera has aired a video it received, presumably from the kidnappers: it showed the four men and a quick image of Kember’s passport. The abductors called their group the “Swords of Righteousness Brigade”. No group of this name has been heard of before. A voice on the tape accused the four CPT-ers of being spies working undercover as peace activists.
(A German woman archeologist called Susanne Osthoff was also, separately abducted in Iraq, apparently last Thursday. A video handed to a rep of the German t.v. station ARD in Baghdad showed images of Osthoff in captivity and threatened to kill her and her Iraqi driver–also abducted– “unless Berlin stopped cooperating with the US-backed Iraqi government.”)
Christian Peacemaker Teams is an incredibly brave and visionary organization, supported principally by three of the historic “peace churches”– the Quakers, the Brethren, and the Mennonite– but with the participation of pacifists from a number of other Christian denominations. Small CPT teams maintain a constant “ministry of presence” in a number of areas of strife and tension around the world. One of their concepts stresses the need to “Get in the Way”, in order to obstruct the perpetration of violence, but to do so in a way that embodies equal love and respect for everyone.
When I was in Hebron with a group of Quakers in 2002, we were given a quick, informative tour round the extremely strife-torn central part of the city by two red-capped members of the local CPT team. CPT has had a presence in Hebron for many years, where their presence gives some protection to the city’s much-diminished Palestinian population, who face continual bouts of extremely nasty violence from Israeli settlers who’ve been trying to take over the heart of the city
Tonight I’m praying for the five abductees in Iraq, and the families who wait anxiously for news of them at home… For the people who are holding them– that they can speedily come to understand and respond positively to the love, humanity, and extremely non-threatening nature of the CPT mission… For all the thousands of people being extra-legally detained inside Iraq, for their anxious families, and their captors… And for all the decisionmakers inside and outside Iraq whose decisions can lead either to a further escalation of tensions inside the country, or to their calming.
I see the historic peace churches as the heart of authentic, pre-Augustinian and pre-“Just War” Christianity. They/we try to keep faithful to the original, strongly pacifist and antiwar teachings of Jesus. The CPT people are true, but quiet, heroes because of the way they commit to living out their witness.
Please, you kidnappers, speak with these wise, gentle people from CPT and learn about all the work that they do! And then, please find a way to release them– and Susanne Osthoff– in safety.
White Phosphorus, the CWC, and U.S. legislation
The international Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) came into force in 1997, and the US was a founding signatory of it.
As part of the US’s obligations under the CWC, the US Congress had to enact legislation that embedded the provisions of the CWC into the US legal code, which it did through the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act of 1998. The definitions spelled out in Art. II of the CWC, including those highlighted in my previous post here, were incorporated as a body into Sec. 3 of this Act.
Sec. 229 of the Act, “Prohibited activities”, spells out that:
- “(a) Unlawful Conduct.–Except as provided in subsection (b), it shall be unlawful for any person knowingly–
“(1) to develop, produce, otherwise acquire, transfer directly or indirectly, receive, stockpile, retain, own, possess, or use, or threaten to use, any chemical weapon; or
“(2) to assist or induce, in any way, any person to violate paragraph (1), or to attempt or conspire to violate paragraph (1).M
“(b) Exempted Agencies and Persons.–
“(1) In general.–Subsection (a) does not apply to the retention, ownership, possession, transfer, or receipt [but note that use and/or threatened use of a chem weapon is NOT exempted there ~HC] of a chemical weapon by a department, agency, or other entity of the United States, or by a person described in paragraph (2), pending destruction of the weapon.
“(2) Exempted persons.–A person referred to in paragraph (1) is–
“(A) any person, including a member of the Armed Forces of the United States, who is authorized by law or by an appropriate officer of the United States to retain, own, possess, transfer, or receive [but again, no exemption here for a person using or threatening to use one ~HC] the chemical weapon; or
“(B) in an emergency situation, any otherwise nonculpable person if the person is attempting to destroy or seize the weapon.
“(c) Jurisdiction.–Conduct prohibited by subsection (a) is within the jurisdiction of the United States if the prohibited conduct–
“(1) takes place in the United States;
“(2) takes place outside of the United States and is committed by a national of the United States;
…
Sec. 229A “Penalties” stipulates that:
- “(a) Criminal Penalties.–
“(1) In general.–Any person who violates section 229 of this title shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned for any term of years, or both.
“(2) Death penalty.–Any person who violates section 229 of this title and by whose action the death of another person is the result shall be punished by death or imprisoned for life.
…
That is the US civil code.
The military code, as laid down in the US Army Field Manual 27-10 “The Law of Land Warfare” uses language that harks back to some of the earliest provisions of international humanitarian law– that is, the Hague Conventions of 1908. Ch. 2, sec II of FM 27-10 states the following:
Continue reading “White Phosphorus, the CWC, and U.S. legislation”
White Phosphorus round-up
The BBC website has quite a good round-up on the WP issue. It was originally posted on November 16, and updated November 22. Crucially, the writer there quotes Peter Kaiser, the spokesman for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, as saying this:
- “If … the toxic properties of white phosphorus, the caustic properties, are specifically intended to be used as a weapon, that of course is prohibited, because the way the Convention is structured or the way it is in fact applied, any chemicals used against humans or animals that cause harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are considered chemical weapons.”
The OPCW is the international body charged with implementing the 1994 Chemical Weapons Convention. You can find the relevant Article from the CWC’s text, Art. II, here. It reads in part:
- For the purposes of this Convention:
1. “Chemical Weapons” means the following, together or separately:
(a) Toxic chemicals and their precursors, except where intended for purposes not prohibited under this Convention, as long as the types and quantities are consistent with such purposes;
(b) Munitions and devices, specifically designed to cause death or other harm through the toxic properties of those toxic chemicals specified in subparagraph (a), which would be released as a result of the employment of such munitions and devices;
(c) Any equipment specifically designed for use directly in connection with the employment of munitions and devices specified in subparagraph (b).
2. “Toxic Chemical” means:
Any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm to humans or animals. This includes all such chemicals, regardless of their origin or of their method of production, and regardless of whether they are produced in facilities, in munitions or elsewhere.
Clearly, Peter Kaiser had been telling the Beeb that the caustic quality of WP does constitute such a “chemical action.”
Para 9 of Article II of the CWC includes this clarification of para 1 (a) above:
- 9. “Purposes Not Prohibited Under this Convention” means:
(a) …
(c) Military purposes not connected with the use of chemical weapons and not dependent on the use of the toxic properties of chemicals as a method of warfare;
So that would mean that use of WP for “indirect” military applications like battlefield illumination or the generation of a “smokescreen” are permitted under the CWC. Use of WP as a caustic agent on the bodies of any person, whether combatant or noncombatant, would not be.
Death and dishonor in Iraq
This, definitely worth reading. Hat-tip to Diana.
I hadn’t seen this story before. It’s in today’s L.A. Times. It’s about a US Army straight arrow called Col. Ted Westhusing, who had a Ph.D. in philosophical ethics from Emory University in Atlanta and taught military ethics full-time at the West Point military academy. Westhusing thought he should get some experience in Iraq in order to be able to teach his officer-cadet students more effectively. So he asked to be deployed there and was tasked with overseeing a large army contract with a private, Virginia-based firm called USIS that was supposed to be doing some of the training of Iraqi security forces….
One night last June, he was discovered dead in his trailer, with a single gunshot wound to the head. A USIS manager who discovered the body later said he had personally moved the murder weapon “for safety’s sake”.
Lots of questions in this case. But what seems clear is that Westhusing– whose doctoral dissertation was on the concept of “military honor”– was deeply troubled by much of what he witnessed in Iraq.
Investigators found a four-page letter on the bed next to his body. It was addressed to his military superiors and included these words:
- “I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.
“Death before being dishonored any more.”
I was saddened (but not surprised) by the whole story. “The concept of “honor” meets the reality of US military operations in today’s Iraq? Someone should write a Greek tragedy about this, I think.
But this part at the end of the LAT story intrigued me greatly:
- A [military] psychologist reviewed Westhusing’s e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the “most difficult and probably most painful stressor.”
She said that Westhusing … was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.
“Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited,” wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. “He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses.”
Then this:
- Westhusing’s family and friends are troubled that he died at Camp Dublin, where he was without a bodyguard, surrounded by the same contractors he suspected of wrongdoing. They wonder why the manager who discovered Westhusing’s body and picked up his weapon was not tested for gunpowder residue.
Mostly, they wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing — father, husband, son and expert on doing right — could have found himself in a place so dark that he saw no light.
“He’s the last person who would commit suicide,” said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague. “He couldn’t have done it. He’s just too damn stubborn.”
Westhusing’s body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Waiting to receive it were his family and a close friend from West Point, a lieutenant colonel.
In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing’s wife, and asked what happened.
She answered:
“Iraq.”
In addition to his widow, Westhusing also left behind three children.