Submitted by kinsey on Tue, 02/26/2008 - 12:32.
International Law and Nuclear Weapons. Remarks by Bob Kinsey at the 3rd Anniversary of the weekly anti-war protest.
I am amazed by, and so thankful for the commitment of so many folk here in North Jeffco who have stood firm through heat and cold and derision in Arvada for so long each week to give truth a voice-- the truth that this war and occupation is illegal and immoral.
I lived here in Arvada for 34 years and never saw such outspoken courage and I hope that your efforts will get the attention of all those who seek to hold office in the US Government.
You have seen this T-shirt I am wearing [“We found them! Weapons of Mass Destruction. They are closer to home than you think!] It should remind us that this war was sold to the Congress and the American People as a war to prevent an evil Dictator, Saddam Hussein, from launching his nuclear weapons – yes even in the next 45 minutes --against us and our allies.
Day after day following the infamous “mission accomplished speech” spoken by the President with his military cod piece on, no weapons of mass destruction were found, nuclear or chemical.
I have to keep reminding myself that the chemical weapons Saddam had and apparently used against the Kurds came to him from Donald Rumsfeld back in the late 1980’s.
I have to keep reminding myself that the greatest evidence of their non-existence was that these fictional weapons were not used on the US invading forces. And that everybody in the world but our own executive branch including a US/UN weapons inspector,Scott Ritter, said they didn’t exist.
I work with the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability. My member group in that Alliance is The Colorado Coalition for Prevention of Nuclear War. So I have given a lot of thought to this.
It was so easy for the Bush Administrtion and their corporate media minions to sell us the war.
How easy it was to get the United States to plunge into a pre-emptive war – in essence a kind of nuclear war! Surely the Congress knows that pre-emptive war was the excuse Hitler used in invading Poland which he called an immediate threat to Peace in 1939.
Surely the Congress knows that the UN Charter prohibits members from engaging in pre-emptive war unless a country is in imminent threat of invasion.
If imminent is not to be 1984 speech, doesn’t that means like “tomorrow?”
How coolly the newsmedia and the Congress blew off Scott Ritter and the IAEA.
How is it that Congress ignored the millions of protestors in the streets around the world and join the Bush Administration in passing … through the Looking-Glass. Where Humpty Dumpty says, :
"When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less,"
"The question is," replied Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," retorted Humpty, "which is to be master — that's all."
Imminent? Torture? Terrorist? War? Are there any deoendable meanings left in these words??
How is it that we have accepted as a people-- for these past 5 years and ten years before that under both Clinton and Bush -- the outrageous “collateral damage” to Iraqis. Accepted and funded this lying, law breaking neocon regime in their war crimes,
How have we acquiesced to these crimes against humanity that snub both our law and international law? How have we kept from breaking into maniacal laughter when Bush and his buddies occasionally rattle on about how we are a country of laws as if repeating a mantra. Surely they must be joking.
My own answers to all of these questions come from focus on the nuclear weapons issue. We have in our Cold War years been willing to sell out our Constitution, our commitment to international law and cooperative efforts to keep the peace, in order to prioritize our unilateral confidence in a military mega force---- including a nuclear Maginot line-- to keep us secure.. We been willing to sell out our most precious American value—equal justice under law—words that take on an ironic tinge carved as they are over the doorway of our current Supreme Court.
When I was a boy learning history we were coming out of World War II with fresh memories of concentration camps and blitzes, the strafing of refugees and the firebombing of cities, and finally two nuclear blasts taking out two cities. We realized that our failure to build the rule of law into international affairs before and after World War I had led to this Armageddon where war crimes were no longer limited to unrestricted submarine warfare and illegal blockades.
And we had been led through WW II by a President who realized the importance of a United Nations to extend the rule of law to a fully international sphere.
We heard Albert Einstein warn that with the advent of nuclear bombs everything had changed but the way we think.
And so we thought it necessary to perceive war as obsolete, unthinkable. But then we got frustrated in the project as both sides of the Cold War developed nuclear weapons and we developed paranoia about each other. Each other wanted to deter the other from using them.
At least we only accepted the funding of this nuclear arsenal as a deterrent, a psychological barrier to their real use. Mutually Assured Destruction is what we called it. Assured of their own by us would assure us they would never use them.
And, then, together after a near confrontation over Cuba we realized something had to be done—we were poisoning ourselves in the process of even testing these things in the Atmosphere.
Notice that we weren’t --even then so moved to the Atmospheric Test Ban of 1963 by the deaths of Japanese fishermen and Polynesian natives, but only when Strontium 90 showed up in our suburban milk bottles. Then it was time to cooperate with the Soviets..
And you know that agreement with the Soviets held between the superpowers ever since. A treaty ratified by the Senate and pretty easy to verify worked to create security from at least one major threat of the bomb.
Then we realized that others were getting the bomb who were not a part of the testing agreement. Lots of nations were feeling threatened and feeling the need for a deterrent like ours.
So in 1970 we made a treaty to make proliferation an international crime. The treaty was signed and ratified by nearly all nations with the exception of just a few. In the Treaty ratified by the Senate we agreed with others that if they who had none yet would not build these weapons we nuclear armed states would get rid of ours. That is Article VI of this Non-Proliferation Treaty. And under Article VI of our own Constitution this treaty became the supreme law of the land. We also agreed that nothing in the treaty would prevent non-nuclear weapons states from peaceful uses of nuclear power.
But there apparently was deep hypocrisy in this treaty—a great divide in heart of America. At one point at the end of the Cold War John Deutsch said we only signed it to stop the growth in Soviet nukes—or to keep others from developing them.
And that divide has revealed itself ever since. We continued massive buildups of nuke warheads at the same time we talk of SALT Treaties, START Treaties and the Moscow Treaty for arms reductions.
We were talking out of both sides of our mouth, just as we talked to the Native Americans promising to honor our word, “So long as the Grass is Green and the Rivers run etc”.
Our commitment to the rule of law was only to keep our advantage it seems – and not to really create justice and safety for all. At least among our leaders, our arms manufacturers and their employees and somewhere in our own hearts where we trusted more in military security with huge collateral damage—than we trusted in the rule of law.
Somewhere in our psyche has been planted a trust in that we will be secure as a nation if we can deter with counter force and to project force to get others to do what we want. That is combined with our mask of righteousness, that we Americans are good people and therefore would never want anything that was unfair to others. To the contrary, George Kennan had written a memo shortly after WW II that the United States was only 6% of the world’s population but controlled 50% of the worlds resources and that it was our job of our foreign and military policy to keep that disparity in place to our advantage.”
Part of us tried to build up treaties includinan anti-ballistic missile treaty to keep nukes as a deterrent rather than a first strike weapon
an inspection regime,
a nuclear freeze,
a comprehensive ban on any weapons test,
and a reduction and elimination schedule that would be true to our 1970 pledges.
I emphasize that these efforts included a non-proliferation pledge by almost the whole world.
But another part has continued to build nukes, redesign nukes and deploy nukes and that side has come to the fore as we perceive ourselves as the only superpower. That side talks out of both sides openly. It accuses others of proliferation and being a threat to peace while extending our own capability.
In doing so we have given up on the rule of law. After all. those Senate ratified treaties are the Supreme Law of the Land according to the Us Constitution Article VI. Yet Congress funds the nuclear weapons establishment and the general military establishment and the prosecution of wars based on lies --with earmarks in all fifty states. We accept nuclear weapons development in India and Pakistan and Israel. But not in countries our leaders define as evil.
Objectively, in terms of actual track record those evil countries have not plunged into international war any more, or disregarded UN resolutions designed to create justice and security any more than the proliferators to whom we give a free pass..
We have confidence, not in the rule of law but the rule of dominance and client states – truly a Roman Empire security system. Our hearts are hardened by the deep memory that we used nukes, that we can explain away the collateral damage that nuclear weapons -and all our methods of modern warfare which make soldiers safer than civilians—by the mantra that it is necessary to keep us safe.
I just ask you -- on 9/11 did our nukes keep us safe?
Yet the DOE is planning a new streamlined Nuclear Complex Transformation program. This week they began environmental Impact hearings on this re-building of our nuclear weapons production complex.
I ask you, did our fear of nukes help us make wise judgments about war in Iraq?
Yet we will not accept the IAEA inspections in Iran even today after suffering the consequences of 5 years of warring to destroy fictional nuclear weapons. .
The fear that turns to outrage and revenge when 3000 of us die in an act of terror is accompanied by our inexplicable blind acceptance of massive civilian deaths of others long before and after that event. A friend, Dan Winters, recently challenged a letter that by R Eggers in the Boulder Camera. Eggers had written that the figure of 650,000 civilian Iraqi deaths was overestimated and that the real number is 151,000 deaths. Eggers was exercised to indignation that the higher figure was a magnification nefariously put forward by disloyal people bound to discredit the war. Winters replies:
“Even if one were to accept the new lower death count as accurate – and there are real questions as to the accuracy of the new lower figure – the real question is: how can one human being, from Niwot CO, be so insensitive, so blind, so wraped up in his or her political agenda that they fail to see the enormity of “only” 151,000 deaths? R Eggers expends not a single word, not a single syllable on what 151,000 dead means to mothers whose husbands were murdered by other Iraqies or by US bombs and bullets. R. Eggers is apparently not interested in thousands of children who wake up each morning without the comforting hand of a mother to guide them from infancy to adulthood. Have we reached the point whereby an illegal war causing such great suffering for today and for generations to come brings not a scintilla of human emotion to the heart of R. Eggers”
But there is precious little outrage about either figure and more interest in Brittany Speers’s troubles, the Super Bowl or the Oscars.
I ask you, does our acceptance of nuclear weapons in Israel’s hands but not Arab lands create the trust that enables the rule of law to work?
I ask you, will we find security in attacking Iran? Muscling North Korea? Facing off Russia with antimissile systems in Eastern Europe? Demonstrating our capacity to use super weapons in space? (AS we did this week to impress the Chinese)
Faithful people who really believe the deep American value of rule of law have pressed for our compliance, and further development of the Non-Proliferation Treaty commitments, international inspections and universal nuclear disarmament. Five non-nuclear states – so called Middle Powers – have proposed actual paths to this reality. They have affirmed what current American Policy has rejected – the rule of law.
Whether it be in a treaty we signed and completely ignore about keeping space for peaceful uses, and a common heritage of all humanity…
Whether it be in a treaty we signed on the common uses of and respect for the seas (Resisted by Corporations who want unrestricted opportunities to compete for these resources).
Whether it be a commitment to International courts of Justice that say nuclear weapons threats or use are crimes against humanity (While our NATO Generals and our President develop nuclear postures that include nukes in our “quiver of tools” in warfare and first use policies)…
The USA has lost whatever commitment to the rule of democratic law – Our Prime Value – we ever might have had. And Congress refuses to hold our leaders accountable. It continues to pour trillions down the rat hole of weapons and war for security and ignore the President and Vice President’s egregious impeachable acts, all the while voting supplemental monies that continue the dying.
I am sure that you all have been told you are unpatriotic for standing on the corner saying “War is not the answer”. You have been accused of hating America for calling for the impeachment of the neo-cons and their “unified executive”. But I commend your witness and faithfulness to real patriotism – standing for the values which make America good and honorable and admirable – at least whenever we get the guts to live them out.
