“… [The United States] [b]ehaving as a superpower that seeks perpetual dominance, … that considers itself and its allies as exempt from international law, will not make us more secure. It will only provoke proliferation, just as our invasion of Iraq has not reduced terrorism but has instead created new grievances and new bands of terrorists. By trying to reap maximum benefit from our temporary role as sole superpower, our government is acting like the terrorist we fear, and in the process is making more likely the very things we fear the most: nuclear terror and a new arms race.”

The excerpt above is from an op-ed published in the Saturday/Sunday June 30–July 1, 2007 edition of the Bangor Daily News. My friend Mike Howard and I co-wrote the piece. The full text (as submitted) of the op-ed is below the fold. The piece does not yet appear on line at the newspaper’s site. If it does, I will post an update.

Update: Posted at Bangor Daily News, HERE.

Nuclear primacy is not security

The occasion of the meeting between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Kennebunkport, Maine is a good time to discuss critical unfinished business of the post-Cold-War era concerning the continuing threat of nuclear weapons use.

After September 11, 2001, it is not difficult to recognize the truth of Vice President Dick Cheney’s remark that the death and destruction caused by those attacks “would pale into insignificance compared to what could happen” if terrorists “had a nuclear weapon and detonated it in the middle of one of our major cities.”

Yes, but it should be noted that these fearful nuclear consequences our leaders are keen to emphasize apply not just to the United States, but also to everyone else in the world, because the threat to use nuclear weapons still forms the backbone of U.S. foreign policy. This is the essential background for understanding the escalation in tensions between the US and Russia over Bush’s proposal to deploy missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The U.S. is pursuing an intimidating posture of nuclear primacy. America still has enough warheads to destroy the world, and the Bush Administration has dramatically increased the budget for new nuclear warheads, despite assurances from the Secretaries of Energy and Defense that the stockpile is safe, secure, and reliable. In the most recent Doctrine For Joint Nuclear Operations, U.S. military leaders describe “new thinking for a new era” where a “broader array of capability is needed to dissuade states from undertaking diplomatic, political, military, or technical courses of action that would threaten US and allied security.”

The authors are keen to point out that unlike less-destructive chemical and biological weapons, “no customary or conventional international law prohibits nations from employing nuclear weapons in armed conflict.” This doctrine could lead to use of nuclear weapons in practically any situation because, as explained in another part of the document, “the U.S. does not make positive statements defining the circumstances under which it would use nuclear weapons.”

Actual plans under discussion within the Pentagon have included proposed use of “bunker-buster” nukes against Iran despite the possibility of massive civilian casualties, as reported in 2006 in the New Yorker magazine. The threat of U.S. attack on Iran, ostensibly to prevent its acquisition of nuclear capability, is set starkly against the open secret of Israel’s possession of an advanced nuclear arsenal. Hostilities in Lebanon and Palestine for which Iran indirectly is blamed and in which the U.S. seems to endorse Israel’s strong role raises fears that the violence could possibly escalate beyond all reason. Real progress in averting nuclear proliferation in the Middle East requires a comprehensive solution, including US pressure on Israel to negotiate concerning its nuclear weapons.

Relevant to the tension with Russia, the U.S. has abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to develop Star Wars, a move that appears at first glance as defensive, but that a closer look reveals to be part of a nuclear offensive strategy: an ABM shield is designed to absorb a second strike of remaining missiles from an adversary after a massive U.S. first strike, thus making the latter a more credible threat. These examples indicate why the rest of the world is alarmed by the U.S. nuclear posture, and why Putin sees missile defenses in Europe as an offensive move.

The event that the Vice President provokes us to fear will be possible because of nuclear proliferation, ultimately resulting in a nuke in the hands of a terrorist. Two things need to happen to prevent proliferation: 1. non-nuclear states need to renounce nuclear weapons, and 2. nuclear states need to reduce and eventually eliminate their arsenals. These are not utopian dreams. The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which mandates these, has been signed by 188 nations, the exceptions being Israel, India, and Pakistan. (North Korea withdrew in 2003 after being put on the “axis of evil” list.)

A group of analysts led by former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix last year issued a report on weapons of mass destruction stating that, “All states possessing nuclear weapons should commence planning for security without nuclear weapons. They should start preparing for the outlawing of nuclear weapons through joint practical and incremental measures that include definitions, benchmarks and transparency requirements for nuclear disarmament.”

What is needed to achieve these practical steps towards outlawing nuclear terror is our political will. Unfortunately, our government seems intent on another path. Behaving as a superpower that seeks perpetual dominance, and that considers itself and its allies as exempt from international law, will not make us more secure. It will only provoke proliferation, just as our invasion of Iraq has not reduced terrorism but has instead created new grievances and new bands of terrorists. By trying to reap maximum benefit from our temporary role as sole superpower, our government is acting like the terrorist we fear, and in the process is making more likely the very things we fear the most: nuclear terror and a new arms race.

Michael Howard teaches philosophy at the University of Maine
Eric Olson teaches physics at EMCC
Both are members of the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine

Are we more secure after Bush’s post-9/11 wars? The answer is no, and the main reasons rarely appear in the usual brand of 5-yr 9/11 assessments blanketing the corporate media over the last couple of weeks.

Panelists included (in order of appearance):

• Doug Allen, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maine and Education Committee Coordinator for the Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine
• Ron Warner, member of Veterans for Peace
• Mary Horrigan, Gold Star mother
• Connie Jenkins, member of Pax Christi

Thanks to Ilze Petersons of the Peace & Justice Center for moderating. And thanks to the Bangor Public Library for sponsoring and providing space for this community event. Special thanks to Mary Horrigan for her courage to speak about her son and the war.

“People flying planes into the World Trade Center, or suicide bombers, those are real concerns. But what I’d like to suggest is these are less than one percent of the real concerns about insecurity in the world that’re not being addressed.”

-–Doug Allen

Note: The following is an excerpt of my 5-yr 9/11 commentary from Deep Blade Journal:

Most Americans still don’t get it

Over the last week or so, a media drumbeat of 9/11 5-yr anniversary programs sought answers to the question, “Are we more secure?” Every answer came from what I would have to call a jingoistic, reactionary point of view.

At the Peace & Justice Center 9/11 forum, my friend Doug, a philosophy professor and academic with a more serious analysis, made an observation I have found quite compelling: “Only a very small percentage of our insecurity has anything to do with terrorists flying planes into buildings. We need to deepen and expand our notions of security….People flying planes into the World Trade Center, or suicide bombers, those are real concerns. But what I’d like to suggest is these are less than one percent of the real concerns about insecurity in the world that are not being addressed.”

The list of unaddressed security issues are very familiar to those of us not fortunate enough to belong to the upper classes: lack of jobs, the health care crisis, school decay, soaring energy prices.

Meanwhile, the United State continues to lead a Terror War steeped in false premises and manipulation of intelligence. The consequences of the US invasion of Iraq has visited the equivalent of one 9/11 per month on the Iraqis, as the Iraqi people have suffered untold detention, torture, and death at the hands of the Americans.

Yes, the post 9/11 Terror war started up whole new programs of attempted US domination around the world. But it is funny to listen to administration officials make the ridiculous argument that 9/11 could not be about US policy because Iraq had not yet been invaded at that time. These arguments presume that history itself started on 9/11/2001. Here is a quote from Vice President Cheney from a couple of weeks ago,

I know some have suggested that by liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein, we simply stirred up a hornet’s nest. They overlook a fundamental fact: We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001, and the terrorists hit us anyway. As President Bush has said, the hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.

In fact there was history before 9/11. Rarely were US actions purely beneficent. The savagery of American policy over the last few decades hardly can be underestimated.

Here is how Guardian writer Seamus Milne put it in a September 13, 2001 comment:

Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process – or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world – seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world….As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush’s father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel’s 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.

Now President Bush wants us to believe his utterly failed war that has destroyed Iraq is some kind of global line in the “struggle between tyranny and freedom” where “the worst mistake” would be to “pull out” because the terrorists we have attracted to Iraq “will follow us” home.

Mr. Bush then says, “The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad.” He may be right, but he has it backwards. Then only victory possible at this point is a Pyrrhic victory where possibly decades of struggle against American domination by Iraqi resistance and their supporters will be the only thing that follows.

It’s turned out just like I wrote the week before the invasion:

US taking of Iraq will increase, not lessen, the chance of terrorism against Americans….Bush is in the process of whipping up such strong anti-American sentiment throughout the world that pathetically weak Iraq is near the back of the line of potential attackers who will remain angry for a long, long time. In the run-up to the attack, the terrorism threat is being played like an accordion with the flood of alerts and news of bin Laden tapes and al-Qa’ida connections to Hussein. Listen to the din carefully and you will hear the dissonance: Powell tells the U.N about al-Qa’ida in Iraq, but there are disclaimers on the terror alerts that want to direct us away from thinking there is a link to the coming war….Unfortunately, the anger generated by this approach will leave America the target of terror for years to come.…An extended, dangerous period of escalation of application of U.S. power in an attempt to hold and control its expanding spoils of war can be expected. Despite their arrogance and hubris, Bush and his team should not have much confidence that the chaos of the post-invasion period can be kept benign. There is great uncertainty about the controllability of forces that could be unleashed as America commits to new global management requirements far beyond its present substantial deployments. Current U.S. planning envisions a three-phase transition of Iraq from American military administration to some form of American-style government led by current Iraqi exiles. This process will be highly problematic and will probably require considerable force to pacify the disparate populations within Iraq. Beyond Iraq, the U.S. intends to insure that the behavior of Saudi Arabia and other countries with strategic resources align with its hegemonic goals, thus inviting a radical anti-american response.

It really didn’t take a genius to see this then, nor does it take one to see where all this is still heading right now.

I suppose this has been the genius of the Bush regime. They have taken an extreme demonstration of vulnerability in the technological age–”Nineteen men attacked us with a barbarity unequaled in our history”–and turned that into an “offensive in a war unlike any we have fought before.”

But the Terror War is a failure. The “offensive” sweeps up mostly the innocent. Americans still don’t get it. Provoking people around the world against by killing their kin while we wallow in our victimhood is hardly going to protect us. Our attention to the real question of why someone would want to hurt us is lost.

Five years ago this week I wrote this about justice for 9/11:

Naturally, our first reaction is that we want those responsible punished. And they should be punished. But I have a great deal of fear that the U.S. will retaliate, blindly, with actions that would put us on the same disgusting moral level of terrorism of the hijackers. If we as a generous, free, peace-loving people, want justice, there should be justice, not just vengeance. This is no time for blind patriotism that could become the justification for the killing of innocents in the manner of the hijackers. Justice must be calm and measured in a fair Court of Law. Justice must involve not only punishment of perpetrators, but also an examination of the conditions giving those perpetrators the passions they possess lest such attacks will happen again. We must ask and answer fully—Why?

What President Bush and his administration have done, the multiple 9/11s they have inflicted upon others, unfortunately has come to pass with far too little resistance at home. We won’t be safe until we can take a good hard look in the mirror and act on to correct the moral failings that we would see.