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May 9, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The Armey Plan:
Palestine to Ft. Worth?
May 8, 2002
James
Masterson
Hysteria
and Panic
About France
Robert Fisk
The Solution to this Filthy War: Foreign
Occupation
Edward
Hammond
and Jan van Aken
Pentagon
Pushed for Offensive BioWeapons Development
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
May 6, 2002
Fran Schor
Invasion
of Iraq:
Coming Soon
Dave Marsh
Love Hurts
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
May 3, 2002
Arundhati Roy
Democracy and
Religious Fascism
Wayne
Madsen
Dispatch
from Paris:
Le Pen's Strange Coalition
Yigal Bronner
A Journey to Beit Jalla
CounterPunch
Wire
Otto
Reich Named to Board of School of the Americas
John Troyer
Hatemongers Try to Cleanse History:
Gays and 9/11
John Stauber
Big
Food/Tobacco/Booze
Attacks "Mad Cow" Authors
Kathleen Christison
Before There Was Terrorism
May 2, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Rep.
Dick Armey Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians
Rami Kaplan
Israeli Soldiers Resisting
the Occupation:
Why We Refuse to Fight
Carol
Norris
Subterranean
Mini-Nuke Blues
Bernard Weiner
A Peek Inside Colin Powell's Personal
Diary
May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
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The
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May
9, 2002
The Disastrous Foreign Policies
of the United States
by Bill Christison
Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950,
and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years. From
the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer (principal
adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas)
for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa.
Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA's Office
of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit. His wife
Kathy also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since then she
has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine.
Part 1:
Ill-Conceived Wars Against Terrorism And Nuclear Proliferation
NOTE: Since September 11, both my wife
Kathy and I have been giving talks on how the United States should
change almost all of its foreign policies, i f it wants to give
this globe a decent shot at a peaceful 21st century . We have
discovered that most groups are happier to listen to us for 20
rather than 40 minutes, and to use the extra time for questions
and discussion. It seems as though we're always struggling to
shorten the prepared part of our talks. On the other hand, people
generally seem pretty enthusiastic about having us come back
and talk to them more than once. So we want to try giving shorter
talks limited to one subject. There is in our view so much wrong
with U.S. foreign policies that we can probably go on for months,
with one subject every week or so. Kathy, by the way, has a new
talk on U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine that's already
here on CounterPunch.org.
Although we'll be talking about U.S.
foreign and military policies, everything we say has a direct
influence on U.S. domestic policies as well. Since September
11 the Bush administration has been rapidly militarizing the
country to the point that very soon the U.S. will be spending--foolishly--more
on the military than all other nations of world combined. Military
spending at that level will inevitably cut back the resources
the U.S. can devote to domestic problems such as healthcare,
education, and poverty. This imbalance is occurring, we will
be told, ad nauseam, because we are at war. The real cause, however,
will be the pursuit of global hegemony, empire, and domination
by the United States. I hope everyone will think seriously about
and make his or her own decision on whether this ultimate goal
of U.S. foreign policy is either necessary or desirable, and
whether it will in the end be worth the cost, both in terms of
money and in terms of domestic needs that will be sacrificed.
Today, the first point I want to make requires
only three words: STOP THE WAR. While a horrible crime was committed
last September 11 against the United States, I believe the Bush
administration has responded in the wrong way. The government
could and should have responded by treating what happened as
a crime, not a war. But instead, while following the now well-established
precedent of skirting the Constitution by not seeking a congressional
declaration of war, the U.S. government did in fact start a war.
In this war, the government has used
the tactics, the massive airpower, and the other murderous accoutrements
that distinguish a large-scale war from a limited and carefully
targeted overt or covert police action. It has done its best
to divert attention from the unknown but sizable number of civilian
casualties it has caused. If the world had possessed one, I would
have urged using an efficient international police force to capture
criminals like Osama bin Laden. Since we don't have such a force,
I would support U.S. covert or Green-Beret-type operations to
capture, but not assassinate, him. Some years ago, several CIA
employees were assassinated by terrorists outside the CIA headquarters
near Washington, DC, and a couple of years later, a covert operation
captured the people who killed them--as far as I know without
causing the deaths of innocent civilians. The perpetrators were
tried, convicted, and imprisoned. That's the kind of covert action
I would approve of--again, only in the absence of a competent
international police force.
The next thing President Bush has done,
from September 11 right up to the present, is to show how powerful
he is by deciding unilaterally what actions around the world
constitute "terrorism" and what actions do not. He
has made it clear, for example, that he has no intention of ever
labeling as terrorism any act committed by the U.S. or Israeli
governments. He also no longer criticizes Russia for killing
noncombatants in Chechnya.
Bush has also framed his policy in a
categorical "with-us-or-against-us" way that tries
to impose his will on the rest of the world. He has emphasized
that everyone in the world must "choose" between the
U.S.-defined War on Terrorism and the terrorists themselves.
Bush is outrageously fond of saying that "[all] nations
must choose--they are with us or they're with the terrorists."
But of course he is only thinking about those terrorists who
are his "evil" enemies. This unrelenting black-and-white
over-simplification of the complex issues surrounding U.S. foreign
policies, including the causes and the very definition of terrorism,
seems to me at best to be childish and unworthy of a president
of the United States. At worst, this over-simplification is dangerous
to the security of the U.S., because it practically guarantees
more terrorism against the U.S. and an erosion of support among
U.S. allies. Military action will not--cannot--solve the problem
of terrorism more than temporarily.
In January 2002, four months after he
launched the War on Terrorism, President Bush began threatening
more wars--wars unrelated to terrorism. These would be preemptive
wars against nations that he believed were developing nuclear
or other advanced weapons. Explicitly espousing preemptive wars
against such nations would be a 180-degree reversal of policy
that this country has followed for the past 57 years since the
nuclear age began. We rejected preemptive war against the Soviet
Union in the late 1940s, and we have rejected it against China,
England, France, Israel, India, and Pakistan since then. We have
deliberately relied on the admittedly imperfect policies of deterrence
and containment to restrain other nations from using nuclear
weapons against us, and have avoided the ultimate step of actually
going to war to prevent anyone from just acquiring, rather
than using, nuclear weapons. I personally do not believe the
United States should abandon a 57-year-old policy that has worked
so far, in favor of a new preemptive-war strategy, especially
since eight nations already possess nuclear weapons. The risk
of uncontrollable escalation--which might well be nuclear escalation--is
too great. I also oppose a policy of ever initiating a
war, because this is simply immoral, as immoral as terrorists
killing noncombatants.
While the U.S. has been correct in refusing
to employ preemptive war against nuclear proliferation since
1945, I think it has botched--and botched badly--other aspects
of its policy on the proliferation of nuclear and other advanced
weapons. There never was a possibility that all other nations
would forgo developing nuclear weapons unless the U.S. were willing
to give up its own. But the U.S. quickly made it clear, even
in the 1940s, that it would never relinquish its own nuclear
capability.
Then, in the 1960s, the U.S. government
engaged in some quite appalling hypocrisy. The administrations
of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson each spewed
out more lip service and propaganda against the further spread
of nuclear weapons than any other administration before or since.
But at the same time, each administration was fully aware and
watched knowingly as Israel implemented, one by one, every step
necessary to produce its own nuclear weapons. Although the U.S.
made some pro forma attempts at the time to dissuade Israel
from developing its own nuclear capability, the top levels of
the U.S. government made a mockery of their stated policy against
nuclear proliferation by refusing to put any meaningful political
or economic pressure on Israel to stop its nuclear weapons program.
For more detailed information about this, I recommend the book
Israel and the Bomb, which was written by an Israeli citizen
named Avner Cohen and published by Columbia University Press.
This book presents strong evidence that
by some time before the 1967 war, Israel had produced a nuclear
weapon it was confident would work, without testing the weapon.
In the 1970s and 1980s, knowledge that Israel had accomplished
this feat spread to all nations of the world, along with the
assumption--probably correct--that the U.S. could have prevented
it from happening if Washington had really wanted to. Ever since
that time, leaders of all nations not friendly to the U.S. have
believed that the United States itself, with notable hypocrisy,
has been the world's most active proliferator of nuclear weapons,
most particularly with respect to Israel. The natural assumption
of these leaders, in the face of such hypocrisy, was that they
had no obligation to refrain from producing their own nuclear
weapons. Such assumptions have affected not only Arab states
like Iraq but, I am quite sure, other nations including India,
Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea as well.
Given this history, I find it impossible
to believe that either President Bush's War on Terrorism, or
his threats of preemptive war against Iraq and other enemies
that might be developing advanced weapons, can be good for the
future of either this country or the world. Terrorism will only
grow worse over the long term. Internal security measures will
never be more than partly successful, even as they reduce freedoms
and privacy in this and other advanced nations. Year by year,
hatred of U.S. policies around the world will grow. Year by year,
nuclear and other advanced weapons will become easier to acquire,
even by groups that may have suffered by then from preemptive
U.S. military attacks, until finally some group manages to slip
through the new global Maginot-Line defenses of the U.S., and
use one of these weapons. What kind of terrible escalation is
likely then from an unthinking adminstration bent on retaliation?
To repeat, the risks to the world arising
from the present aggressive U.S. policies are too great. We certainly
need to look at other reasons for hatred of us, including U.S.
one-sided support for Israel with respect to Palestine, a version
of globalization intended to perpetuate U.S. domination, and
U.S. support around the world for far too many dictatorial and
corrupt governments. But even limiting the discussion for now
to the unending War on Terrorism and the threats of preemptive
wars against further nuclear and other proliferation, I believe
we should all, as loudly and strongly as possible, urge the U.S.
government to (1) end this War on Terrorism; (2) stop all consideration
of preemptive military action against Iraq or any other nation;
and (3) start multilateral negotiations immediately with the
goal of transferring all nuclear weapons possessed by any nation
or sub-national group to the full control of a new, democratically
elected international organization with its own strong police
force, which would, over time, destroy these weapons.
The details of such multilateral negotiations
would obviously be tough to work out. Here, in order to get a
discussion started, are a few of my own ideas.
1. Create a new Global Nuclear Weapons
Control Commission. Label it a U.N. body or not, as you wish.
This should be a body in which no member has a veto power. This
body might have eight commissioners, each chosen through international
elections from a region of the world--(1) North, Central, and
South America, (2) Africa, (3) Western and Eastern Europe including
the Balkans, (4) Russia and other former states of Soviet Union,
(5) Middle East including Israel, the Arab States, Iran, Turkey,
and Afghanistan, (6) China, (7) India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka,
and (8) Japan, the Koreas, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New
Zealand. I am under no illusions about the difficulties of reaching
an agreement to set up such a body, or of getting rid of the
veto powers held by permanent members of the present U.N. Security
Council. I simply believe we must try, and that it would be tragic
to fail.
2. The eight commissioners would decide
all issues by majorities of five-to-three or more. Any issue
that could not muster five favorable votes would be considered
disapproved. To repeat, no commissioner would have a veto power.
Commissioners would be subject to new elections every four years.
3. The commissioners would be provided
a generous budget to set up a large and powerful staff. Part
of this budget would be used to establish a highly competent
and well paid staff of inspectors, who would be empowered to
visit and inspect any known or suspected nuclear facility for
any length of time anywhere in the world with no advance warning.
Another part of the budget would be for a strong international
police force to protect all nuclear weapons under the control
of the Global Nuclear Weapons Control Commission.
4. On an agreed date, perhaps three years
after the initial agreement, all nuclear powers, and any sub-national
groups, would transfer full ownership and physical custody
of all their nuclear weapons to the Commission. The Commission
would immediately move these weapons under proper security to
areas set up to receive them, where it would begin dismantling
and destroying them. All previous possessors of nuclear weapons
would at the same time close and dismantle all nuclear weapons
research and production facilities on their territorities. (In
the case of the U.S., this would mean closing down the Los Alamos,
Livermore, and Sandia Laboratories, any facilities still providing
weapons materials at Oak Ridge and Hanford, and any other weapons-related
installations around the country.)
5. The Commission would then become a
high-priced permanent global policeman, charged with preventing
any nation or sub-national group from beginning to develop or
re-develop nuclear weapons. Over time, a fairly short time, the
responsibilities of the organization should be expanded to cover
biological and chemical weapons.
These proposals are admittedly incomplete,
and readers may agree or disagree with any of them. The real
point is that we all have to try harder to generate public debate--debate
about this war the U.S. has already started and other wars possibly
in our future, and about the nuclear policies of the U.S. and
all other nuclear powers. A clearly selfless offer by the U.S.
with respect to its own nuclear weapons would go a long way toward
allaying the global mistrust of U.S. non-proliferation policies
that arises from 50 years of history, and I can see no way of
eliminating this mistrust short of a radical proposal like this
one. By proposing that the world eliminate all nuclear
weapons including those in American hands, the U.S. would put
immense pressure on other nations or groups possessing them.
If all sides accepted the proposal, fine. If not, the U.S. would
still have gained credibility. Over time, if the U.S. kept advocating
the proposal, I think the chances are good that the pressures
on the rest of the world would become irresistible. In addition,
the prospects for terrorist groups to obtain nuclear weapons
would be markedly diminished.
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