|
The
Rogue Elephant
By
Francis
A. Boyle
Professor of International Law,
University of Illinois
TFF
associate
October 11, 2002
Machiavelli Redux
When George Bush, Jr. came to power in January of
2001, he proceeded to implement foreign affairs and
defense policies that were every bit as radical, extreme
and excessive as the Reagan/Bush administrations had
starting in January of 1981. To be sure, Bush Jr. had no
popular mandate to do anything. Indeed, a majority of the
American electorate had voted for his corporate-cloned
opponent.
Upon his installation, Bush Jr.'s "compassionate
conservatism" quickly revealed itself to be nothing more
than reactionary Machiavellianism--as if there had been
any real doubt about this during the presidential
election campaign. Fascism with a friendly face. Even the
Bush Jr. cast of Machiavellian characters were pretty
much the same as the original Reagan/Bush foreign affairs
and defense "experts," many of whom were called back into
service and given promotions for international crimes
they had committed anywhere from ten to twenty years ago.
It was deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra aptly put
it.
International Legal Nihilism
In quick succession the world saw these Bush Jr.
Leaguers repudiate the Kyoto Protocol on global warming,
the International Criminal Court, the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty (CTBT), an international convention to
regulate the trade in small arms, a verification Protocol
for the Biological Weapons Convention, an international
convention to regulate and reduce smoking, the World
Conference Against Racism, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Systems Treaty, inter alia. To date the Bush Jr. Leaguers
have not found an international convention that they
like. The only exception to this rule was their shameless
exploitation of the 11 September 2001 tragedy in order to
get the U.S. House of Representatives to give Bush Jr.
so-called "fast-track" trade negotiation authority so as
to present the American people and Congress with yet
another non-amendable fait accompli on behalf of American
multinationals, corporations, banks, insurance companies,
the high-tech and biotech industries, Wall Street, etc.
The epitome of "globalization," American-style.
More ominously, once into office the Bush Jr. Leaguers
adopted an incredibly belligerent posture towards the
Peoples' Republic of China (PRC), publicly identifying
the PRC as America's foremost competitor/opponent into
the 21st Century. Then their needlessly pugnacious
approach towards the downing of a U.S. spy plane in China
with the death of a Chinese pilot only exacerbated these
already tense U.S./Chinese relations. Next the Bush Jr.
Leaguers decided to sell high-tech weapons to Taiwan in
violation of the USA/PRC Joint Communiqué of 17
August 1982 that had been negotiated and concluded
earlier by the Reagan/Bush administration. Finally came
Bush Jr.'s breathtaking statement that the United States
would defend Taiwan in the event of an attack by the PRC
irrespective of Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the
United States Constitution expressly reserving to
Congress alone the right to declare war. President Jimmy
Carter had long ago terminated the U.S.-Taiwan
self-defense treaty.
For twelve years the Constitution and the Rule of
Law--whether domestic or international--never deterred
the Reagan/Bush administrations from pursuing their
internationally lawless and criminal policies around the
world. The same was true for the Clinton administration
as well - invading Haiti; bombing Iraq, Sudan,
Afghanistan, and Serbia; the Lewinsky scandal, etc. The
Bush Jr. administration has behaved no differently from
its lineal Machiavellian predecessors. Their bellicose
handling of the 11 September 2001 tragedy was no
exception to this general rule.
The Bush Jr. Withdrawal from
the ABM Treaty
Then, as had been foreshadowed, whispered, hinted at
and finally broadcast over a period of several months,
came the monumentally insane, horrendous, and tragic
announcement on 13 December 2001 by the Bush Jr.
administration to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, effective
within six months. Of course it was sheer coincidence
that the Pentagon released their self-styled Bin Laden
Video just as Bush Jr. himself publicly announced his
indefensible decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty in
order to pursue his phantasmagorical National Missile
Defense (NMD) Program, the lineal successor to the
Reagan/Bush Star Wars dream. Predictably, the Bin Laden
Video back-staged this major, pro-nuclear announcement.
Once again the terrible national tragedy of 11 September
was shamelessly exploited in order to justify a reckless
decision that had already been made for other reasons
long before. Then on 25 January 2002, the Pentagon
promptly conducted a sea-based NMD test in gross
violation of Article 5(I) of the ABM Treaty without
waiting for the required six months to expire, thus
driving a proverbial nail into the coffin of the ABM
Treaty before its body was even legally dead.
The Bush Jr. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, which was
originally negotiated by those well-known Machiavellian
realpolitikers Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger,
threatens the very existence of other seminal arms
control treaties and regimes such as the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Biological Weapons
Convention, which have similar withdrawal clauses. The
prospect of yet another round of the multilateral and
destabilizing nuclear arms race now stares humanity
directly in the face, even as the Bush Jr. administration
today prepares for the quick resumption of nuclear
testing at the Nevada test site in outright defiance of
the CTBT regime and NPT Article VI. The entire edifice of
international agreements regulating, reducing, and
eliminating weapons of mass extermination (WME) has been
shaken to its very core. And now the Pentagon and the CIA
are back into the dirty business of researching,
developing and testing biological weapons and biological
agents that are clearly prohibited by the Biological
Weapons Convention and its U.S. domestic implementing
legislation, the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of
1989.
The U.S. First-Strike Nuclear
Strategy
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
impoverishment of Russia leaving the United States as the
world's "only superpower" or "hyperpower," we are getting
to the point, if we are not there already, where only the
United States has the capability to launch an offensive
first-strike strategic nuclear weapons attack upon any
adversary. For that precise reason, deploying the
so-called "national missile defense" (NMD) has become a
critical objective of the United States government. NMD
is not really needed to shoot down a stray missile from
some so-called "rogue state." Rather U.S. NMD is
essential for mopping up any residual Russian or Chinese
strategic nuclear weapons that might survive a U.S.
offensive first-strike with strategic nuclear weapons
systems.
The successful deployment of NMD will finally provide
the United States with what it has always sought: the
capacity to launch a successful offensive first-strike
strategic nuclear attack, coupled with the capability to
neutralize a Russian and/or Chinese retaliatory nuclear
attack. At that point, the United States will proceed to
use this capability to enforce its Hegemonial Will upon
the rest of the world. Strategic nuclear "thinkers" such
as Harvard's Thomas Schelling call this doctrine
"compellance" as opposed to "deterrence." With NMD the
world will become dominated by this U.S. "compellance"
strategy.
Honest Nuclear War-Mongering
Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the
historically covert intent of America's nuclear
"deterrence policy" should now come to light through
almost off-the-cuff remarks such as those by the
omnipresent U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz appearing in the 9 January 2002 edition of the
New York Times:
"We're looking at a transformation of our deterrence
posture from an almost exclusive emphasis on offensive
nuclear forces to a force that includes defenses as well
as offenses, that includes conventional strike
capabilities as well as nuclear strike capabilities, and
includes a much reduced level of nuclear strike
capability," the deputy secretary of defense, Paul D.
Wolfowitz, said.
Well, at least he was honest about it.
Wolfowitz admitted that the current U.S. practice of
so-called nuclear "deterrence" is in fact really based
upon "an almost exclusive emphasis on offensive nuclear
forces." To reiterate, since this deserves emphasis: The
U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense has publicly admitted
and conceded that "almost" all U.S. nuclear forces are
really "offensive" and not really "defenses." That
Statement could be taken to the International Court of
Justice and filed against the United States government as
an Admission Against Interest, Wolfowitz acting within
the scope of his official duties. Of course the Peace
Movement and informed American public knew this was true
all along. Nonetheless, it should be regarded as an
ominous sign of the times that the Pentagon has become so
brazen that it is publicly admitting U.S. nuclear
criminality to the entire world. The arrogance of the
Hyperpower!
A Nuremberg Crime Against
Peace
Then, writing in the March 10, 2002 edition of the Los
Angeles Times, defense analyst William Arkin revealed the
leaked contents of the Bush Jr. administration's Nuclear
Posture Review (NPR) that it had just transmitted to
Congress on January 8. The Bush Jr. administration has
ordered the Pentagon to draw up war plans for the
first-use of nuclear weapons against seven states: the
so-called "axis of evil" - Iran, Iraq, and North Korea;
Libya and Syria; Russia and China, which are nuclear
armed. This component of the Bush Jr. NPR incorporates
the Clinton administration's 1997 nuclear war-fighting
plans against so-called "rogue states" set forth in
Presidential Decision Directive 60. These warmed-over
nuclear war plans targeting these five non-nuclear states
expressly violate the so-called "negative security
assurances" given by the United States as an express
condition for the renewal and indefinite extension of the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by all of its
non-nuclear weapons states parties in 1995.
In this regard, Article 6 of the 1945 Nuremberg
Charter provides in relevant part as follows:
.... The following acts, or any of them, are
crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal
for which there shall be individual responsibility:
(a) Crimes against peace: namely, planning,
preparation, initiation or waging of a war of
aggression, or a war in violation of international
treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation
in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment
of any of the foregoing; ... Leaders, organizers,
instigators and accomplices participating in the
formulation or execution of a common plan or
conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are
responsible for all acts performed by any persons in
execution of such plan.
To the same effect is the Sixth Principle of the
Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter
of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the
Tribunal, which were adopted by the International Law
Commission of the United Nations in 1950:
PRINCIPLE VI
The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as
crimes under international law: (a) Crimes against peace:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war
of aggression or a war in violation of international
treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation in
a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any
of the acts mentioned under (i). ...
Notice that both of these elemental sources of public
international law clearly provide that the "planning" or
"preparation" of a war in violation of international
"assurances" such as the aforementioned U.S. negative
security assurance constitutes a Nuremberg Crime against
Peace. Such is the Bush Jr. NPR!
The Rogue Elephant of
International Law and Politics
Equally reprehensible from a legal perspective were
the NPR's call for the Pentagon to draft nuclear
war-fighting plans for first nuclear strikes (1) against
alleged nuclear/chemical/biological "materials" or
"facilities"; (2) "against targets able to withstand
non-nuclear attack"; and (3) "in the event of surprising
military developments," whatever that means. According to
the NPR, the Pentagon must also draw up nuclear
war-fighting plans to intervene with nuclear weapons in
wars (1) between China and Taiwan; (2) between Israel and
the Arab states; (3) between North Korea and South Korea;
and (4) between Israel and Iraq. It is obvious upon whose
side the United States will actually plan to intervene
with the first-use nuclear weapons. And quite ominously,
today the Bush Jr. administration accelerates its plans
for launching an apocalyptic military aggression against
Iraq, deliberately raising the spectre of a U.S.
first-strike nuclear attack upon that long-suffering
country and its people.
The Bush Jr. administration is making it crystal clear
to all its chosen adversaries around the world that it is
fully prepared to cross the threshold of actually using
nuclear weapons that has prevailed since the U.S.
criminal bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Yet
more proof of the fact that the United States government
has officially abandoned "deterrence" for "compellance"
in order to rule the future world of the Third Millenium.
The Bush Jr. administration has obviously become a
"threat to the peace" within the meaning of U.N. Charter
article 39. It must be countermanded by the U.N. Security
Council acting under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. In
the event of a U.S. veto of such "enforcement action" by
the Security Council, then the U.N. General Assembly must
deal with the Bush Jr. administration by invoking its
Uniting for Peace Resolution of 1950.
There very well could be some itty-bitty "rogue
states" lurking out there somewhere in the Third World.
But today the United States government has become the
sole "rogue elephant" of international law and politics.
For the good of all humanity, America must be restrained.
Time is of the essence!
Boyle is the author of The
Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence: Will the US War
on Terrorism Go Nuclear? (Clarity Press, 2002)
and Foundations
of World Order, The Legalist Approach to International
Relations (1898-1922) (Duke University Press,
1999).
©
TFF & the author 2002
Tell a friend about this article
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
|