April
7, 2006
John,
I have
decided just to get on with what I want to say and not answer
past
issues point by point.
I am
surprised by two things you wrote. The
first is the question of
whether
President Bush ever said that Iraq posed an "imminent threat"
to the
US during the lead up to the war.
I am
surprised because it's the peace movement that should be making
the
point that Bush never claimed an imminent threat -- not the other
way
around. The reason is simple.
Unless
Iraq posed "an imminent threat," there is no international
legal
justification for this war. Our
invasion and war is
unequivocally
illegal. Only if Iraqis were massed on
our borders or
posed a
similar, immediate threat could the US initiate military
action. And then only until the UN could meet to
consider the issue
and
decide on a legal response.
That
is, simply, what international law says.
It's called "jus ad
bellum"
in legalese.
The
point was made very clearly in the first Gulf War. It is
universally
acknowledged that the initiation of force by the U.S. in
1991
was a lawful act because the UN Security Council had met and
authorized
the use of force (for the sole purpose of removing Iraqi
troops
from Kuwait).
You
have mentioned that you are a "news junkie" of sorts. (Not your
term
but you spoke of listening a lot to news shows and commentary.)
If you
listen to ANY of our mainstream media have you ever heard the
question
of the illegality of the US invasion discussed? Very much?
By the
way, I'll just add that the question of whether Iraq had WMDs
or not
doesn't matter to the legal argument.
Even if they did posses
them,
the US would still need to show that Iraq posed an imminent
threat. The reason is obvious: otherwise any country
could start wars
with
any other by saying they were worried that the other might some
day
have bad future plans.
In 1945
we were a major force at Nuremberg and in the creation of the
UN; the
goal was to "end the scourge of war." Here is what the
Nuremberg
Charter says: "To initiate a war of aggression... is not
only an
international crime, it is the supreme international crime,
differing
only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself
the
accumulated evil of the whole."
While
the first Gulf War was legal, from the start this 2nd war was an
illegal
war of aggression.
The
second thing that surprised me was your comment regarding all the
deaths
that were taking place in Iraq because you figured that the UN
must
have been aware of the situation.
Of
course they were!
My
friend Hans von Sponeck, whose papers I sent you, was so aware of
the
situation -- of the deaths of so many children due to bad water,
compounded
by malnutrition -- that he regularly called it to the
attention
of the UN Security Council (as often as the US allowed him
to).
His
predecessor did exactly the same thing.
But what could they do.
Everyone
who knows the very least about the UN knows that the US
essentially
runs the show. Madeleine Albright famously said that the
UN is
an instrument of US policy: "We'll use it when we want to and
ignore
it when it suits us." (That's
years before John Bolton came on
the
scene at the UN.)
Simply
put: UN sanctions on Iraq could not possibly end until the US
wanted
them to end.
The US
has veto power in the UN SC; it would take another resolution
to
declare Iraq free of WMDs and therefor to end the sanctions. The
US had
already declared publicly that we'd never let that happen --
not
until Saddam Hussein was gone. Although
Bush the father and James
Baker
said that, I'll again quote Madeleine Albright. At Georgetown
University
she said, "The US disagrees with those countries who say
the
sanctions should end if Iraq is disarmed."
Now
what the US was saying is simple: We don't care what the UN
resolution
which created the UN sanctions says; we will do what we
want
and disregard the legal, binding meaning of the resolution which
specifies
when sanctions must end. We will do
this because we can;
there
is no independent jurisprudence to oversee what the member
states
in the UN SC do.
(There
needs to be an independent international court to oversee the
legality
of the actions of the UN SC and to determine if they violate
the
very Charter of the UN. This would be
much the same as the
purpose
of the US Supreme Court and the US Constitution. If such a
court
existed, then I believe it would have found -- as did the UN
Subcommission
on Human Rights -- that UN sanctions on Iraq are
"unequivocally
illegal under international humanitarian law.")
Again
I'll ask you the question about what you hear on the mainstream
news:
Did you know that Denis Halliday, the first UN head of the
oil-for-food
program, resigned his 30-plus-year career at the UN to
condemn
the US role in using sanctions as a weapon of destruction? He
actually
says that what the US and the UK did to the Iraqi people
constituted
genocide.
When
Denis resigned, The Seattle Times covered his resignation in 49
words! That's all.
And his
successor, Hans von Sponeck, did exactly the same thing after
he
could not get the UN SC to change its policy because of the US.
James
Rubin, State Dept. Spokesperson, is famous (at least in my book)
for
saying publicly that Mr. von Sponeck should keep his mouth shut
and
just do his job. (He later sent a fax
saying this was only
official
criticism, not a personal one; Hans wrote back he couldn't
understand
what Rubin was trying to tell him!)
So of
course the UN knew what was going on.
And the US knew what was
going
on. And the US continued to use the
sanctions to try to force
regime
change. That was the policy -- as
stated right from the
beginning
-- by our presidents and secretaries of state, and publicly
repeated
in our newspapers and by our international-policy pundits on
radio
and TV.
Simply
by paying attention to these public declarations, I could say
to the
700 people filling Trinity United Methodist Church on January
3, 2003
-- 2-1/2 months before the war began -- that: "This has never
been
about weapons of mass destruction, it has always been about
regime
change." I was right. And Scott Ritter was right: Iraq had
been
disarmed for years.
The
terrible part of this has been what the Iraqi people have suffered
during
12 years of economic sanctions and now three years of
occupation. It goes back to the way the US waged the
Gulf War in
1991. We planned it to "make life
uncomfortable for the Iraqi people
to soon
encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from power."
(NYT,
3/91)
Even if
you might wish to argue that electricity is a military target,
the
laws of war that apply once you are in a war require you to act
with
proportionality and discrimination in how you wage the war.
That's
called "jus in bellum." In
other words, it is a war crime to
bomb an
entire city and kill a 100,000 civilians in order to destroy a
small
military garrison that's nearby.
If you
follow the link at concernforiraq.org/infrastructure to the
Col.
Kenneth Rizer article in the official USAF journal, you'll see
that he
brags that we DID kill 100,000 Iraqi civilians -- through our
attacks
on "dual-use" infrastructure; and that's good because it
"undermines
their morale."
Also,
what can you imagine that isn't "dual-use"? Water and sewage
are
used by the military as well. So are
food depots. So are
hospitals. The requirement is to consider the
proportion of military
benefit
to civilian destruction. If we applied
that rule we would
have
bombed a few high-tension lines (even just shorted them out with
aluminum
streamers) and done so at much less risk to our pilots who
had to
fly into the greatest concentration of AAA fire at the plants.
Instead
we bombed to do the greatest damage.
There were 13 separate
bombing
runs completely demolishing the Al-Hatha electrical-generating
plant,
the largest plant in Southern Iraq.
Col. John Warden III is
quoted
as saying we did this for the "long-term leverage" it created.
"Get
rid of Saddam Hussein and we'll repair your electricity," he
said.
Col.
Warden's statement -- and the statement of the other planner who
said,
Of course we knew what taking out electricity would do to the
water
and sewage: We did it to "accelerate the effect of the
sanctions"
-- these two quotes (concernforiraq.org/infrastructure) are
remarkable.
They
are a clear admission that we bombed to deny Iraqi civilians what
Warden
calls "organic essentials" (in his USAF article linked there as
well). And what one can simply call civilian
life-supporting needs.
Col.
Warden is called the architect of the bombing strategy. His job
is to
"bend the enemy" to our wishes.
But if the means of doing that
kills
100,000s of kids, then it is a clear violation of the rules of
war --
of "jus in bellum" -- and it is a war crime.
I think
that's my best statement of how I understand the central
issues. Sorry it's taken a while.
Bert
Unless Iraq
posed "an imminent threat," there is no international
legal
justification for this war. Our
invasion and war is
unequivocally
illegal. Only if Iraqis were massed on
our borders or
posed a similar,
immediate threat could the US initiate military
action.
Even if they did
posses them, the US would still need to show that Iraq posed an imminent threat. The reason is obvious: otherwise any country
could start wars with any other by saying they were worried that the other
might some day have bad future plans.
While the first
Gulf War was legal, from the start this 2nd war was an
illegal war of aggression.
Legal or Illegal War: The basic fallacy I find with your position
is that international law does not exist . . . except to whatever level each
nation allows it to govern their actions, and even then it can be ignored at
the drop of a hat. Our Congress voted
for a regime change in Iraq during the Clinton Administration. Prior to our recent invasion of Iraq, President
Bush was told to get another approval from Congress – even though he already
had it. He did go back to Congress and
they overwhelmingly voted approval.
Pres. Bush was told to go to the U.N. before invading Iraq. He did, and they voted unanimously in
favor of Resolution 1441, which warned Saddam to come clean on his weapons of
mass destruction (WMDs) or “there would be dire consequences.” Saddam chose to ignore the warnings. [It doesn’t make any difference if Scot
Ritter, you, or half the people in the world were right. The security agencies of the world believed
that Iraq had WMDs, as demonstrated in the unanimous vote on 1441.]
Imminent Threat: Any intelligent leader doesn’t allow a situation to rise to the level of being an imminent threat. Action, diplomatic and then military (if necessary), must be taken before the citizens of the country are placed at risk. Iraq signed a peace treaty with the US at the end of Gulf War I, and then violated it for the next dozen years, including attacking our warplanes on an almost daily basis. Saddam had WMDs at one time, and used them against Iran and his own people, so there was a basis for believing that he still had them. Iraq was engaging in international terrorism, harboring terrorists (including Zarqawi), they had tried to assassinate former Pres. Geo H W Bush, and they supported a Jihad that declared war on Christianity. This is overwhelming evidence that Iraq was a growing threat to the United States.
Item #2:
International Law. There needs to be an
independent international court to oversee the legality of the actions of the
UN SC and to determine if they violate the very Charter of the UN.
Are you really ready to swear allegiance to the UN, and to
substitute international law for US Constitutional law??? I am not.
The UN recently assigned Iran to the Sub-commission limiting the spread
of nuclear weapons. In the recent past,
they assigned two countries to the Human Rights Sub-commission that were
grossly in violation of human rights.
And look at the genocide that they allow to take place in Africa. I was strongly in favor of the UN when it
was first formed, but I have been extremely disappointed.
Item #3: Bombing of
Electrical Power Plants
Col. Kenneth
Rizer article in the official USAF journal, you'll see
that he brags
that we DID kill 100,000 Iraqi civilians -- through our
attacks on
"dual-use" infrastructure; and that's good because it
"undermines their morale."
I read it, but I did not see
evidence of bragging. I saw it as a simple
statement of fact in raising the question: Should dual-use targets be
attacked???
It has been my observation that
long wars cause many more deaths than short wars (of course, with the exception
of an all-out nuclear war). A second
observation is that war planners favor strategies that minimize casualties on
their own side. If we can accept these
observations as truths, then one could expect that initial strikes are going to
target electrical power plants because they supply command and control centers,
radar, and anti-aircraft defense systems.
The secondary effects of losing electrical power are the impact on the
civilian population, as you have discussed in great length. These secondary effects are thought to be
demoralizing, and this too, can play a roll in shortening the war.
I am sure we can both go on in great detail about what we should have and should not have bombed during both Gulf Wars. I can see advantages on both sides of the issue. It is my understanding that our strategy was different during the 2nd war because we were trying to minimize the loss to the Iraqi infrastructure.
The terrible
part of this has been what the Iraqi people have suffered
during 12 years
of economic sanctions and now three years of
occupation. It goes back to the way the US waged the
Gulf War in
1991. We planned it to "make life
uncomfortable for the Iraqi people
to soon encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from
power."
Perhaps what we should be
debating is whether we should have taken out Saddam in Gulf War I.
Even if you
might wish to argue that electricity is a military target,
the laws of war
that apply once you are in a war require you to act
with
proportionality and discrimination in how you wage the war.
That's called
"jus in bellum." In other
words, it is a war crime to
bomb an entire
city and kill a 100,000 civilians in order to destroy a
small military
garrison that's nearby.
Yes, but that doesn’t represent the situation nor our action.
If we applied that rule we would have bombed a few high-tension lines (even just shorted them out with aluminum streamers) and done so at much less risk to our pilots who had to fly into the greatest concentration of AAA fire at the plants.
If their high-power lines have any form of protection (1930s
technology), shorting them out could still allow some defensive facilities to
continue operation. If my sons were
involved in the attack, I would want the power plants taken out.