IRELAND, NATO AND

 CRIMES AGAINST

 HUMANITY:

 Paper presented by Dr.Edward Horgan, International Secretary, Irish Peace and Neutrality Alliance (PANA) and Shannonwatch member , at the Stop the War International Anti-War Conference, 30 November 2013 in London.

 Irish Governments have continuously declared since 1939, that Ireland is a neutral state, subject to the rules and obligations applicable to neutral states under international law. In recent years the Government has attempted to re-define neutrality in order to justify its entanglement in military alliances such as NATO Partnership for Peace (PfP) and European Union (EU) battlegroups under the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).

However, the rules are clearly defined in The Hague Convention1, Article 2 of which states that:

“Belligerents are forbidden to move troops or convoys of either munitions of war or supplies across the territory of a neutral Power.”

Since October 2001 successive Irish Governments have allowed over two and half million armed U.S./NATO troops and large quantities of war materials through Shannon airport on their way to and from the Afghan and Iraq wars, in clear contravention of the customary international laws on neutrality.

In addition, Ireland has been complicit in crimes against humanity including torture by

allowing U.S. special forces and CIA “extraordinary rendition” aircraft to refuel at Shannon airport while on special missions that we know did include the torture of prisoners and may have included assassination missions in breach of national and international laws.

Adding insult to collateral damage, Ireland has also joined NATO’s so-called Partnership for Peace, an organisation designed to suck in neutral states into NATO’s warmongering schemes. Not only has NATO become involved in facilitating crimes against humanity, it has been doing this under the false pretence of promoting international peace and claiming to honour the articles of the UN Charter. There is a certain type of honesty for full NATO countries such as Britain and France to be engaged in wars. These NATO countries could be described as ordinary decent international criminals (ODCs in prison language) compared to neutral countries like Ireland complicit in war crimes that should be described as despicable international criminals.

The main international warmongering organisation is NATO, whose members have been acting both collectively and individually in breach of international laws and conventions by perpetrating military aggression and crimes against humanity on several continents, in the Balkans, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, in breach of the UN Charter2.

 

1 The Hague Convention V 1907, Convention respecting the rights and duties of neutral powers and persons in

case of war on land.
2 UN Charter Article 4. “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force
against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with
the Purposes of the United Nations.”

 

NATO has developed since 1949 from a military alliance of just 12 states intended to protect Western Europe and the “North Atlantic” region from the threat of Soviet communist military expansion. Now NATO has expanded to 28 members3, the same number as the EU, and 23 members of the EU are also full members of NATO. Most of this expansion has taken place since 1990 when NATO should have been declared redundant. Practically all other European states except Switzerland and Cyprus have been tied in to NATO’s coat-tails with the so-called Partnership for Peace (PfP). NATO is still seeking to expand further and to entice in several more permanent members with the apparent objective of pushing NATO’s boundaries right up to and around Russia.4

But, NATO’s ambition does not stop in Europe and it is no longer confined to the North Atlantic as its name implies. It is now seeking to entice so-called partnership states in North Africa, and worldwide, and in so doing is usurping the role of the United Nations. There is no longer a defensive military need for NATO, so its main purpose is to protect the national interests of the world’s elite group of states, and it is prepared to engage in resource wars to achieve this. It does so under the false guise of “humanitarian intervention”, and sometimes cites the “responsibility to protect” theories espoused by the United Nations in recent years.

Since the Al Qaeda attacks on the U.S. in 2001, the U.S. and its allies have been using and abusing this atrocity to justify a war of revenge in Afghanistan and a resource war in Iraq. The discourses of security and stability are used to hide the real purposes of such military aggression, which include maintaining the existing international order (or disorder), which favours the Western elite states, and which was copper-fastened in 1945 by the veto powers given to the UN Security Council permanent members.

It is worth examining some key articles in the NATO charter:

NATO Charter Article 1: The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

Clearly NATO has been in gross breach of this Article since its 1999 attacks on Kosovo and Serbia, and its invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, its bombing campaign in Libya, French led military interventions in Chad and Mali, drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and targeted assassinations wherever it suits President Obama to decide on his Tuesday morning assassination conferences.

NATO Charter Article 2:

In order more effectively to achieve the objectives of this Treaty, the Parties, separately and jointly, by means of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid,

will maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.

This article seems to have been written by or for the benefit of the military industrial

complexes (MICs). The arms industries are in the business of profiteering from human
misery and war crimes. Any unjustified war of aggression and all wars that are not
specifically approved by the UN Security Council are in breach of this Article.

NATO Charter Article 5:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all …

This is the Three Musketeers Article, all for one and one for all. This includes any attack on overseas territories occupied by NATO members. In theory if Spain occupied Gibraltar, Spain would have to assist the UK to repel its own occupation forces. That’s military logic. Also other NATO states should have assisted the UK in the Falklands War. In reality, French Exocet missiles were used against UK warships.

NATO’s original purpose was achieved by 1990 when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact military alliance disintegrated and it should have been retired. However, large bureaucracies specially those involved in the military industrial complexes never retire voluntary, they have to be put down by the people or else they will put the people down. We have seen that the Egyptian military, ever since Nasser and his group of officers seized power, have

almost continuously held on to power in the meantime except for the very brief period during which President Morsi was the democratically elected president of Egypt, before being deposed brutally by the Egyptian military, with support from their US backers and funders. The “Arab Democratic Spring” was poisoned and destroyed by the corrupt Egyptian military industrial complex with the connivance of the U.S. whose taxpayers provide large military funding to Egypt. The US taxpayer also funds the Israeli military, so it’s great for the MICs when every decade or so, there is an Arab/Israeli war which destroys lots of military hardware. Like Egypt, the Pakistani military have developed their own even more all-encompassing MIC. They have held power in Pakistan overtly or covertly almost since independence, overthrowing and sometimes killing civilian leaders who dare to challenge their power. They also are supported and funded lavishly by the US Government. The term “deep state” has been used to describe such underlying abuses of power in dictatorial states, but it also applies to Western democracies which are increasingly being controlled and manipulated by vested interests that include their security and military establishments.

NATO to a certain extent, did protect Western Europe from threat of Soviet Union

expansion throughout the Cold War, except of course that this was at the expense of
terrorising humanity with the real threat of nuclear holocaust, and very likely by
exaggerating the Soviet threat. The NATO Charter gave it a very clear and very limited
mission to protect and defend its member states with no authority to take action against any other state that was not attacking a NATO member state. Instead of retiring a redundant NATO in 1990, it continued in existence so as to justify the continuing existence of the military industrial complexes in the US and Europe. Cynical words such as “interoperability” are being used to justify additional military spending on newer weapons, in spite of the fact that the older weapons kill just as effectively. In fact the oversupply of weapons presents a problem for the MICs, because the flood of weapons available throughout the world means that new weapons might be unnecessary. To overcome this problem, wars are needed to destroy the old weapon stocks, necessitating the purchase of new weapons.

The possibility of NATO redundancy spelled disaster for the MICs, so the Kosovo war was engineered through the collapsing of the Rambouillet Peace conference by the U.S. That gave NATO the unjustified excuse to engage in war beyond its charter and in breach of the UN charter also. In the meantime NATO has been making war almost continuously in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and in parts of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. When the NATO dogs of war were let loose, it seems there was no recall mechanism because three of NATO’s leaders, the US, UK and France, are outside the rule of international law and the UN Charter by the trick they gave themselves with their UN veto powers.

In the meantime, NATO and its principal rogue state members have been dragging

additional new states into its coalition of complicity, just as successful ordinary criminals as well as war criminals will do in order to conceal or share the guilt of their own criminality. Georgia was encouraged into an unwinnable war with Russia in 2008 with NATO membership as a carrot. The people of Ukraine are at present experiencing civil strife over conflicting demands for closer ties with the EU and NATO on the one hand and Russia on the other. In reality, Ukraine should be a bridge of neutral peace between the East and West. We in the peace movement must not underestimate the power and resources of the forces of evil we are up against or their cunning ability to operate as sheep in wolves clothing. NATO’s Partnership for Peace is one such wolf and so is that international smokescreen for war that is now called “humanitarian intervention”5. The Afghan, Iraqi and Libyan peoples all have experienced just how murderous this “humanitarian” intervention has been. The
dogs of war will not lie down, they must be put down, and that will take a huge and a very concerted effort by a well organised peace movement. That does not necessarily mean a Uno Duce, Uno Voce, type of mass movement. I believe that far greater strength and results can be achieved by peace activists acting more as a bunch of cats than as a herd of sheep.

Some examples include Bradley/Chelsea Manning, Wikileaks Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, and many other individuals and groups acting individually, and in cohort when it suits, overcoming the forces of the military industrial complexes by unconventional and asymmetric peace-fare. We must all be prepared to serve time for such a justified cause in various ways including, if necessary, time behind bars.

It is important also to realise that NATO is a multi-headed hydra. The NATO dogs of war are not confined within a carefully controlled set of leashes as all vicious dogs should be. The term “coalition of the willing” is used by NATO to enable NATO’s principal states to engage either in resource wars either in large coalitions such as ISAF in Afghanistan, or smaller acts of aggression pursuing national interests of particular NATO states such as the French led “humanitarian” missions in Chad, Central African Republic and Mali, or even individual NATO states pursuing their own very questionable national interests such as the United States carrying out carelessly targeted assassinations using special forces and drones. When you lie down with the dogs of war, you don’t just wake up with fleas, you wake up with a type of H.I.V., the Horrors of International Violence.

This NATO type of international disease has its origins in the very flawed foundation of the UN in 1945, when the five self-appointed permanent members of the United Nations, China, USSR, USA, UK, and France gave themselves unlimited powers of veto at the UN, thereby placing themselves above and beyond the rule and sanctions of international laws. Three of these states, UK, USA and France are the leading states in NATO, and now we are increasingly seeing them joined by Germany which is being described as the G5+1. This device is being used to give Germany the equivalent of a UN veto also, which results in Europe having 2+1 permanent members in the UN, while India, the largest democracy in the world, with over twice the population of all of Europe has the same voting powers in the UN as Lichtenstein. Such an elitist divided world is a recipe for long term disaster.

The primary role of NATO is to maintain this elitist divided world, and to maintain Africa in particular not only in relative poverty but also in a semi-permanent state of conflict and corruption, so as to more easily extract an undue share of African resources for Europe and the West. That is the real cynical and vicious purpose of NATO’s existence since the end of the Cold War. Of course there are security and stability concerns nationally and internationally but these can and should be addressed more appropriately, first by enhancing the rule of international law, and then by increasing international and global cooperation rather than the

confrontation that NATO expansion and aggression has been creating. Most importantly, justice, including restorative justice, must be pursued and achieved so as to right some of the injustices that have been and are being perpetrated on the disadvantaged peoples of the world.

3 At present, NATO has 28 members. In 1949, there were 12 founding members of the Alliance:

Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal,
the United Kingdom and the United States. The other member countries are: Greece and Turkey
(1952), Germany (1955), Spain (1982), the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (1999), Bulgaria,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia (2004), and Albania and Croatia (2009).
4 Currently, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Montenegro and the former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia¹ are aspiring members.5 Comment: Of course not all humanitarian interventions are fraudulent ones, particularly in the cases of

natural disasters such as earthquakes and severe storms. There has also been an urgent need for properly
controlled humanitarian interventions ever since the foundation of the UN, in cases of gross crimes against
humanity such as Rwanda in 1994 and Cambodia 1975-78. Yet the international community has failed to act in
such cases because the most influential states either had “no dog in the race”, or were pursuing their own
national interests by interfering inappropriately in such disasters, as France did in Rwanda.

 

 

France, as a NATO and EU member, is perceived as one of the most respected democracies in the world. Rwanda is frequently quoted by military interventionists as justification for their wars, aerial bombings and drone attacks. Yet our fellow EU member, France, played a disgraceful role in arming and protecting the genocidal Rwanda Government not only before the genocide but also while the genocide was occurring, and it engineered a special UN approved mission called Operation Turquoise, composed mainly of French Para troops, whose purpose was rescue the defeated Rwandan army and engineer their escape into the Congo where they are still causing havoc, all in the interests of preserving French interests in Francophone Africa. An examination of all the former French African colonies reveals that virtually none of them have evolved into stable democratic states. Most of them are

corrupt, violent, neo-colonial client states of France, and many of them are minority military dictatorships. The Central African Republic (CAR) with its gold and uranium mineral resources is one of the worst examples of French colonial and neo-colonial abuses. It has descended once again into chaos in recent weeks with a danger of genocide according to UN officials. France as usual is increasing the number of its troops in CAR to protect French interests.6

When we are all hopefully protesting at the NATO summit in Wales next year let us

remember that we are protesting towards achieving the ideals of Liberty, Equality and
Fraternity, not for our so-called North Atlantic friends, but Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, for the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, all of Africa and the Middle East, and every region where people are being exploited by North Atlantic predators, in our name. But most of all, we must be protesting and campaigning for global justice. Being opposed to war is good, but is not enough. Peace is not just the absence of war. Peace without justice is just a temporary cease fire. Humanity does need security and stability just as every town and village needs a considerate and appropriate police agency. The United Nations should be such a world police force, but it never has been, because the five founding members set themselves up as the “five policemen”, when they wrote the UN Charter and gave themselves immunity and impunity by placing themselves above international law. Reform of the UN is not enough. It
urgently needs to be either transformed or replaced, and NATO must never be seen as a surrogate or replacement for the UN.

Small neutral European states such as Ireland, Austria, Sweden, Finland and Malta, should work together to initiate such substantial UN transformation, and should begin by abandoning their associations with NATO, and opting out of other military commitments such as EU battlegroups.

Next year, on the centenary of WW1 we will have sickening celebrations and glorifications of this most stupid war. WW1 was a prime example of the psychological reprogramming whereby soldiers are trained to obey senseless orders unquestionably, so that when they are required to do something that to a normal thinking human being is stupidly dangerous, the soldier obeys his orders, regardless of common sense. When he is killed he will of course get a military medal of honour, and, provided there are enough body parts to bury, he will get a military funeral, with full military honours.

The WW 1 victims did not die honourably for their country, they died needlessly and stupidly so as to preserve the elite status of the elite. Civilian populations are subjected to separate propaganda programming in favour of war. In recent wars Western soldiers are dying needlessly trying to support undemocratic

governments in Iraq and Afghanistan some of whose ministers include drug barons, child molesters and gross human rights abusers. In the Afghan case the NATO soldiers will know that the government they have been dying for will be replaced by the Taliban within weeks of NATO withdrawal in 2014. Echoing the words of Thucydides over 2000 years ago, In Iraq and Afghanistan NATO has created deserts and called them peace.

In our quest for peace and opposition to war we must also take care not to adopt the

attitude that if we can’t beat them then we should join in the violence or encourage others to do so, by engaging in civil wars. The present civil war in Syria and civil wars elsewhere including past civil wars in Ireland are disastrous. Justice cannot be created by killing people. Peace must be nurtured by peaceful means and by enhancing the rule of law and by accountability.

During a recent visit to Cardiff, David Cameron, the British prime minister, said: "It's the end of Afghan mission and important to reflect on the future of Nato."7 I disagree with David Cameron. NATO must have no future, it is well past its sell by date.

We must actively campaign for the dismantling of NATO and for the transformation of the United Nations into a proper and genuine organisation for world peace, in which no UN member state can be above international law, whereby they can, and do, commit crimes against humanity with impunity.

 

6 Washington Post 27 November 2013: The Central African Republic descending into ‘complete chaos’.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/the-central-african-republic-descending-into-completechaos/
2013/11/26/35f71348-5394-11e3-9e2c-e1d01116fd98_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines
7 the Guardian, November 25, 2013.

(Dr Edward Horgan served as a Commandant in the Irish Army, but since retiring
has been active in the Irish and International Peace Movement. He also works
with the OSCE in supervising elections in various countries throughout the world).

                         Dr Edward Horgan, with protest banner, outside the main Terminal Building
                                                 at Shannon Airport, Co. Clare, Ireland.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New President of IPB

REINER BRAUN ELECTED
PRESIDENT OF IPB:

Distinguished German lawyer and Executive Director of IALANA, International

Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Armaments, was elected President

of the International Peace Bureau at its recent meeting in Stockholm, Sweden.

On 12.09.2013 the CEO of IALANA, Reiner Braun (Germany) at the General Assembly of the International Peace Bureau (IPB ) in Stockholm, was elected President. As co-president, the former UNESCO Assistant, Ingeborg Breines was re-elected .

The IPB is the oldest international peace organization . It was awarded the 1910 Nobel Peace Prize , and now has more than 300 member organizations.

The IPB is committed to the vision of a world without war and nuclear weapons and associated works extensively today in the international campaign " Disarmament for Development ", a comprehensive disarmament will be achieved through the  1.7 trillion dollars wasted by NATO on armaments every year in the face of tens of thousands of children dying of hunger, poverty, never accepting a scandal of this magnitude.

In his introductory speech, the new president of IPB, Reiner Braun declared:

"Disarmament and the prevention of further imperial wars are the challenges to international peace movements he emphasised . Other greater and coordinated  international efforts are needed to achieve the great goal of Albert Einstein: " a world without war”.

 

 

Reiner Braun's interview with "Democracy Now" at the Chicago Counter-NATO
Summit, May, 2012:

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/21/as_france_announces_afghan_withdrawal_global

Truth to the Empire: Joe Gerson

Joseph Gerson is disarmament coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee and director of programs for AFSC in New England. He works closely with Asian, European and other international peace and justice movements. His most recent book is Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World.

 

 

 

^{TRUTH TO THE EMPIRE:}

^{JOE GERSON SPEECH AT}

^STOCKHOLM:

 

^{Dr Joseph Gerson, a leading Peace Activist in the USA will deliver this speech in Stockholm, Sweden, Saturday, September 14, 2013:}

To Swedish participants, I want to say that I am sorry that the U.S. president preceded me here as part of his drive toward war with Syria and to bring Sweden into NATO. There is no pleasure in speaking as critically as I must about the government that acts in my name. Truth is the foundation of freedom and ultimately of security, so we must look as hard and speak as clearly about reality as we can.  I trust that you know that two thirds of the U.S. public have opposed Obama’s plan to attack Syria.

 

Recall, too, that not only the majority of U.S. voters, but, hundreds of thousands of people in Berlin on the eve of the 2008 U.S. election and even the Nobel Peace Prize Committee had great hopes – and certainly as many illusions -- about what Barack Obama would achieve as president.

 

The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives

 

Like 1976, when the Rockefeller funded Trilateral Commission put Jimmy Carter forward as the benign face of the United States in the wake of the Nixon-Kissinger savaging of Indochina and Nixon’s assault on the foundations of U.S. democracy known as the Watergate affair. Carter – who has been a much better ex-President than he was president - was to be a new face with new rhetoric that could overcome the world’s perception of the United States as a pariah nation. In 2008 many celebrated not only Obama’s election and that the U.S. people had so overcome its racial apartheid history that it could elect a man of color as president. Too few understood how deep his ties were to Wall Street and to the U.S. power elite or paid attention when he said that Iraq was the wrong war, not that war itself is wrong.

 

For the moment, we are back from the brink of yet another U.S. war in the Middle East and what seemed to be a career shattering defeat for President Obama in Congress.  Obama’s threat to launch missile and bombing attacks against Syria still stand. He argues that it was that threat that led to the Russian-Syrian agreement, and that he must continue the credible threat of deadly attacks to assure an agreement that meets his demands is fulfilled. In a peculiar way, this may in fact strengthen his hand with Congress, making it more willing to endorse attacks if a satisfactory agreement cannot be reached and is not fully implemented. On a roll, some in the U.S. elite are now fixing their attention on North Korea’s chemical weapons stores. Let’s be clear, Obama threats were made in defiance of the U.N. Charter, the Chemical Weapons Convention, with scant regard for the International Criminal Court, for Ibrahim Brahimi’s efforts to press for a diplomatic resolution of Syria’s civil war, or for U.S. public opinion.

 

As bad as the Assad dictatorship is, I am inclined to believe that, as German intelligence is reported to have advised Angela Merkel, Assad repeatedly refused requests to authorize the use of chemical weapons against opposition forces, and that the dastardly chemical attack was launched by a rogue military unit, leading to panic within the Syrian general staff. At root, have been two powerful dynamics: Syria’s civil war, which has  no military solution and can only be resolved with negotiations and diplomacy and U.S. efforts to reinforce its declining Middle East hegemony. Control of Persian Gulf oil remains the primary motive of Obama’s threats of war, but they have been about more than oil.  On August 30, Secretary of State Kerry opened the Administration’s propaganda campaign to win public and Congressional support for war. He stressed that Obama’s red line “matters deeply to the credibility and the future interests of the United States of America and our allies…It is directly related to our credibility about whether countries still believe the United States when it says something. They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they too can put the world at greater risk.” 

 

As the journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote last week, “The dirty little not-so-secret behind President Obama’s much-lobbied-for, illegal and strategically incompetent war against Syria is that it’s not about Syria at all. It’s about Iran—and Israel. And it has been from the start.” When he spoke of risks and children killed in Syria, Kerry didn’t mention the fact that the U.S. has repeatedly threatened to initiate nuclear war - most recently the B-2 and B-52 simulated nuclear attacks against North Korea last March – to enforce its empire. Nor U.S. use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and depleted uranium weapons in Iraq and Serbia. There was certainly no reference to the fact that the U.S. didn’t attack Iraq after Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons in Halabj or to U.S. collaboration with Saddam, providing coordinates and other resources for Iraqi chemical weapons attacks against Iranian troops in the 1980s.  And, when Obama and Kerry speak of enforcing international norms, we’re supposed to forget the U.N. charter and U.S. drone warfare from Yemen to the Philippines.  

 

The ostensible goal of the threated attacks belied their real purpose.  As the president said, the U.S. had no plans to destroy or seize Syria’s stores of chemical weapons or to oust its government. Yes, wrapped in the rhetoric of a humanitarian intervention, military units most likely responsible for the August 21 atrocities would be attacked, but the war plan expanded to seriously weaken Syria’s  military in order to change the balance of forces within the Syrian civil war and to maintain credible U.S. threats against Iran, North Korea, China and other nations.

This is not an aberration.  After the invasion of Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz celebrated that other nations once again feared the U.S.  And many will remember that the Pentagon Papers – the Pentagon’s secret history of U.S. Vietnam War decision-making– revealed that 85% of the reason the United States wrought massive destruction and death across Indochina was to maintain the “perception” of U.S. military power.

 

In addition to preparing a demonstration war to reaffirm U.S. will and coercive power, many in the U.S. and Israeli elite are proceeding on the basis that the U.S. loses if either of the sides in the Syrian civil war win. So, as in the 1980s, when the U.S. provided weapons, intelligence and diplomatic support at different times to Iraq and Iran during their war, Obama’s threats have been to weaken but not overthrow Assad, so that the war can go on.  Both sides have been played against the middle, with the goal of bleeding them until the U.S. can pick up the pieces.

But, there is the second superpower: public opinion. A week ago New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote that: “…one can simultaneously express sorrow for the dead, particularly the children, and resist direct United States military intervention. This is a false choice that uses the dead children as a mask for America’s militaristic instinct...” This understanding, the  massive popular mobilisation by the U.S. peace movement, the right-wing’s venal agendas, international opposition, and as one military veteran put it “We’re tired. Can’t we find a different way” that made it almost impossible for President Obama to get his initial war powers resolution through Congress.

 

We can now hope that in addition to resolving the immediate crisis over Syria’s chemical weapons, that the diplomatic process it sparked will lead to convening  the promised Geneva conference (which until now the Syrian opposition has refused to attend) and will reinforce U.S.-Iranian negotiations for a modus vivendi, including an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.

I want to focus on the foundations and the fundamental dynamics of U.S. imperialism and how they operate. Let me begin by briefly noting the United States’ most recent imperial scandal: Edward Snowden’s revelations confirming that the U.S. monitors all of the world’s electronic communications and the postal mail of every U.S. resident. As you know, this is not limited to people who actively seek to harm my compatriots. It has included the leaders of the G-20 nations, the E.U. Mission in Washington, D.C., and even my six year-old grandson’s phone conversations. They can now learn his dark secrets. Ironically, Snowden’s revelations came after months of incessant U.S. complaints about the outrages of Beijing’s cyber spying.

 

Since the decline and fall of Athenian democracy, we have known that Empire and democracy cannot coexist. We now know that in the U.S. there is a “secret body of law” governing U.S. international and domestic spying, that even those secret laws have been violated, and that the U.S. annually spends more than $50 billion on its so-called “intelligence” agencies.  As in what the Italian anti-fascist novelist Ignazio Silone once called “The Land of Propaganda”, blinkered by the daily media and by cognitive dissonance, few in the U.S. have any conception of the Deep State that lies behind the venality and daily shenanigans of many of our elected officials and their entourages,  Nor do they think about the implications of the recent Supreme Court decision that permits the wealthiest people and corporations – even foreign corporations – to contribute as much money as they wish to election campaigns – often in secret.  Similarly, few can remember yesterday’s news or connect the dots. Former President Carter, who has been a better ex-president than president, had it right when he said in July that  “America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy. Only time and our struggles will reveal if sufficient corrective forces within the U.S. can be brought to bear, or if – at enormous cost to the U.S. and the world’s people – these dynamics will worsen and inevitably lead to the implosion of the U.S. Empire and the contours of U.S. American life as we know them.

 

Foundations of Empire

 

How have we arrived at such circumstances? I’ll try to keep it brief. Those of you wanting greater detail about the evolution of the U.S. Empire can read the full text of this talk or work your way through Empire and the Bomb.

 

I’ll begin on a personal note. Not knowing enough to perceive obvious contradictions, I entered Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in 1964 with the goals of both becoming a Civil Rights Freedom Rider and a U.S. diplomat. I was naïve indeed, but with the Vietnam War it became almost immediately apparent that there was no way I could represent a government that waged a criminal war. I did join the Civil Rights movement and for reasons not worth sharing here, I remained at Georgetown. There I was a middle class Jewish kid, getting the same education as my classmates Bill Clinton, Gloria Macapagal (later Macapagal-Arroyo, President of the Philippines and now an indicted criminal,) other sons and daughters of corrupt and brutal heads of state, and more than a few who became diplomats, intelligence officers, and businessmen. Among the most fundamental lessons taught at Georgetown were that civilizations – and by extension empires -  function as interdependent systems of intellectual, economic, military, social, political, and spiritual dynamics, and that at various periods of time, one or a combination of these factors are preeminent. Thus, without economic and intellectual foundations, the NSA, drones and atomic weapons would not exist. 

 

Other lessons included the conquest and creation of the U.S. continental empire fueled by the “Manifest Destiny” ideology as well as economic enticements, fire power, war and genocide. We were taught the beliefs that “the study of international relations is analogous to the rules of the games among Mafia families” and that “international law is what those who have the power to impose it say it is.” This is a lesson that President Clinton apparently remembered when, in violation of the U.N. Charter, he launched the 1999 NATO war against Serbia, a war which had little to do with humanitarian intervention and saving Kosovars. George W. Bush and now Barack Obama have since built on this Clinton precedent.

 

Professor Jules Davids, the primary ghost writer of President Kennedy’s campaign book Profiles in Courage, taught that in the 1850s William Seward argued that if the U.S. were to replace Britain as the world’s dominant empire, it must first control Asia. Davids also explained how, having built The Great Fleet that could challenge Britain’s naval superiority and facing the turmoil and protests that accompanied the Great Depression of the 1890s, U.S. leaders responded with the war against Spain. The U.S. thus launched its global empire by conquering Cuba and Puerto Rico, making it possible to dominate the Caribbean, Central America and northern South America. As important, the Philippines and Guam were seized and pacified, and Hawaii was annexed, all to gain the geostrategic stepping stones to the holy grail of capitalism: the China market and its storied millions of potential consumers.

 

In addition to serving U.S. “Manifest Destiny” these conquests – especially those in Asia and the Pacific - were designed to create “social peace” within the United States by creating the global market that would put unemployed and often protesting workers back to work in factories and mines that would operate 24 hours a day, while simultaneously increasing corporate profits and private wealth. In our resistance to the Vietnam War, some of us learned from movement elders that The Vietnam War is not an aberration, but it took time to stumble across  In 1948, Assistant Secretary of State for Policy Planning George Kennan’s prepared a TOP SECRET memo that advised:

 

We have about  50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity….We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction….We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights and, the raising of the living standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

 

This was said just three years after President Truman, operating out of “straight power concepts,” had burned all of Japan’s major cities to the ground and attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs in order to send a message to Moscow. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a primer for his students and the U.S. elite to overcome long-standing and blinding Cold War taboos against naming or speaking explicitly about the Empire. He thought it necessary for them to have the conceptual frames of reference to continue the country’s “imperial” project. 

 

Drawing on Mackinder and others, he taught that the nation that controls the Eurasian heartland dominates the world, and that as an island power – like Britain when it controlled three-quarters of the world - the U.S. must have toe-holds on Eurasia’s Western, Southern and Eastern peripheries. Thus we had NATO in Western Europe – designed to contain Germany as well as the Soviet Union – and U.S. dominance in the Middle East. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and with the Afghanistan War, Washington reached into the mineral-rich Central Asian southern underbelly of Eurasia. To the east of Eurasia lies the “American Lake,” the Pacific Ocean with its client states, and hundreds of U.S. military bases from Hawaii to Japan and South Korea to Guam and the Philippines that serve as Washington’s “unsinkable aircraft carriers.” In fact, the U.S. maintains a global network of an estimated 1,000 foreign military bases and installations, an infrastructure of foreign fortresses unmatched by previous empires that have made possible U.S. wars, from Vietnam and Iraq to Serbia and Panama, and many elements of U.S. nuclear war fighting doctrines.

 

The Bush-Cheney government was anything but discrete about its imperial ambitions. Soon after Vice-President Cheney remarked that the Bush Administration was preparing to impose “the arrangement for the 21^st century”, the cover of the Sunday New York Times Magazine announced “The American Empire – Get Used to It”.  That cover heralded an article in which a “senior White House official” – later reported to be Karl Rove – boasted: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality…we’ll act again, creating other new realities…that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…”

That was a time when the elite scholar Francis Fukayama had announced “the end of history,” and neoconservatives spoke of the “unilateral moment” – revising former Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s conceit that the U.S. was the “indispensable nation.”

 

As the country and the world recoiled from the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the destruction of Iraq, and the cratering of the U.S. economy, we thought that era of imperial excess had passed.  The Obama Administration seemed to promise a return to the more complex practice of multi-lateral imperialism, renewing dependence on privileged allies – with whom it shared the spoils - and highlighting the roles of the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and other international institutions. But, after stumbling over an ill-conceived red line, and being pressed by militarists, and encouraged by liberal “humanitarian hawks” like U.N. Ambassador Samantha Powers and National Security Advisor Susan Rice, we’re back to U.S. unilateralism. President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry are singing yet another chorus of Madeleine Albright’s, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?”

 

There is, in fact, the continuation of U.S. policies that can be traced to the beginning of the United States’ overseas empire in the 1890s.  Joseph Nye, who has served in the U.S. government in many capacities, including Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, and who has been a principle driver of U.S. Asia-Pacific foreign and military policies for a generation put it this way:

 

“Asia will return to its historic status, with more than half of the world’s population and half of the world’s economic output. America must be present there. Markets and economic power rest on political frameworks and American military power provides that framework.”

 

The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman described the economic and military foundations of the American way of life more bluntly:

 

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

 

Thus we have Obama’s U.S. “Pivot” to Asia and the Pacific, with the U.S. military buildup across the region, the reinforcement of U.S. military alliances with Japan (whose foreign minister recently urged that his government draw on the lessons of Nazi Germany in eviscerating the country’s peace Constitution,) South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand which constitute “the fulcrum for our strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific”, the deployment of 60% of U.S. air and naval forces to the region,  deepening military-to-military cooperation with Vietnam, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the military collaborations and tacit alliance with India.

Nye also recognizes parallels between the current moment, 1914 and the late 1930s, repeatedly pointing to the inevitable tensions between rising and declining powers. With China in mind, Nye has also warned that twice during the twentieth century the dominant powers – the U.S. and Britain – failed to integrate rising powers – Germany and Japan – into their global systems, with the result being two catastrophic world wars. China is thus to be engaged as well as contained.

 

One way to understand the United States’ relative decline is to note that by the 1990s, Japan and Europe had essentially recovered from World War II’s devastations and the colonial era was little more than memory. No longer able to boast that U.S. people were 6% of the world’s population with 50% of the world’s wealth, President Clinton spoke of Americans being 4% of the world’s population with 22% of its wealth. With China’s extraordinary economic growth, the U.S. share of global wealth has been further reduced.

In response, and in addition to its military agendas, the U.S. elite are attempting to create something along the lines of a “Greater West,” and in the early days of the Obama Administration this vision was inclusive of Russia. Looking at the decline in global market share of the Trilateral powers - the U.S., Europe  and Japan – and thus the likely entropy of the foundations of their industrial and military power,  the U.S. is in the process of negotiating the Transatlantic Partnership (TAP) and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP.)  As Sergey Rogov has observed, the plan is to place the U.S. “at the head of two ‘rings’ – two giant regional economic coalitions….which account today for 20 percent of the world’s population, 65 percent of global GDP, and almost 70 percent of global exports.” If successfully negotiated and implemented, these free trade agreements would contain China’s growing economic power. Designed as “docking agreements,” that would permit other nations to join, but only on the terms of the original agreement, they are thus designed to fulfill Nye’s vision of integrating a rising power into the dominant powers’ existing systems.

Before turning briefly to NATO, the Middle East and Africa, I want to point to one other foundation of the U.S. Empire. The scholar Alfred McCoy argues that the U.S. empire will either simply continue its decline or, if it can extend monopolies over the most advanced forms of intelligence and space weaponry technologies, it could persist for several decades, even as its economic and political systems rot from within.

McCoy traces the foundations of the modern Philippine and U.S. states to the conquest of the Philippines and the repression of its nationalist movement between 1898 and 1901. He explains that this was done with the most advanced intelligence technologies of the day: telephone, telegraph, typewriter and the Dewey decimal system for data management, as well as by the parallel development of the Philippine Constabulary, a paramilitary force. The FBI and other U.S. agencies then put these technologies to work within the U.S. to disrupt and defeat popular forces seeking economic and social justice. The second generation of these technologies was developed during WW II and the Vietnam War, including the so-called “electronic battlefield” and the precursors of cruise missiles.  We see their current manifestations in Edward Snowden’s revelations and in the deep integration of space and military technologies for everything from operating drones and targeting for U.S. missiles to naval and counter-insurgency warfare.


Although successive U.S. Secretaries of Defence/War have raised deep concerns about NATO and its future, especially comparatively low levels of European military spending, as Brzezinski wrote, NATO has provided the means to ensure "the United States [as] a key participant even in inter-European affairs." European allies are seen as "vassal states," whose elites provide hundreds of military bases and installations, diplomatic support, co-production of weapons systems, and intelligence sharing, and in exchange receive slices of imperial privilege.[1] As in Afghanistan and Libya, NATO reduces the U.S. monetary costs and casualties when Washington goes to war. And, until the recent British parliamentary vote and Germany’s refusal to join a war on Syria, the alliance has provided political and diplomatic cover for U.S. imperial wars.

With the end of the Cold War, the public rational for NATO’s existence evaporated, but the alliance was re-purposed, not retired, becoming a global alliance and in some ways an alternative to the United Nations. Violating Bush the Elder’s pledge not to expand NATO one centimeter closer to Moscow in exchange for the Kremlin’s acceptance of German reunification on Western terms, Clinton began expanding NATO to Russia's borders. The expansion was also directed against Washington’s Western European allies, opening the way for divide and rule diplomacy, including playing what Secretary of War Rumsfeld termed "New Europe" (in the East) against "Old Europe" (in the West). And, as we could read in Foreign Affairs, NATO’s 1999 war on Serbia, "with little discussion and less fanfare ... effectively abandoned the old U.N. Charter rules that strictly limit international intervention in local conflicts…in favor of a vague new system that is much more tolerant of military intervention but has few hard and fast rules."

NATO has since adopted doctrines making "out of area operations," i.e. military interventions in Africa, the Middle East, and beyond the alliance’s primary purpose. With 22 "partnerships" in Eastern Europe and the Global South, and more planned for Asian and Pacific nations, the Pentagon has tasked NATO with ensuring control of mineral resources and trade while reinforcing the encirclement of China and Russia.

Now to the former “geopolitical center of the struggle for world power.” Since the invention of the internal combustion engine, access to and control over the flow of oil has been a central to economic and military power. In 1944, as the end of WWII approached, State Department officials advised that, with its newly won control over Middle East oil, the U.S. had won “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”  At the time, U.S. was a net oil exporter, but for seven decades having a hegemonic hand on the jugular vein of Europe’s and East Asia’s economies, not to mention access to fuel for its own economy, has been a powerful imperial resource. On at least a dozen occasions, beginning in 1948, the U.S. has threatened to initiate nuclear war to reinforce its Middle East hegemony. To this day, along with Asia and the Pacific, the Persian Gulf remains one of the Pentagon’s two greatest geostrategic priorities.

But the U.S. has not been able to freeze dry history. Contradictions arising from its campaigns against Arab nationalism, its subversion of governments, support for military coups, unquestioning U.S. support for Israeli settler colonialism, the growth of Saudi and Iranian influence, and most importantly its calamitous war of aggression in Iraq, have seriously undermined U.S. influence in the Middle East.  To compensate, the U.S. has looked elsewhere for its energy supplies. By 2015, 25% of U.S. oil imports will originate from Africa, and new technologies have exponentially increased the ability of U.S. companies to extract oil and gas within the United States, albeit at great environmental cost.   

As the threatened U.S. attack against Syria, and the thirty-five year campaign to contain the Iranian revolution demonstrate, the U.S. remains anxious to keep its military hand on what has become the jugular vein of China’s economy. With a similar goal, and also to contain Jihadist influences, Washington is consolidating its power and influence across Africa as an important element of “the arrangement for the 21^st century.”  Thus we have the Pentagon’s recently created Africa Command which conducts secret and propaganda operations across the ABCs of continent from Algeria and Angola, Benin, Burundi, Cameroon and the Cape Verde Islands to the TUZ’s Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia, 

Latin America is not my area of expertise, but it seems that the U.S. elite have finally recognised that the region is comprised of at least nominally independent countries, some of which are involved in the TPP negotiations. NAFTA allowed the U.S. to further consolidate North America, with Mexico serving as the hinge to South America. The excesses of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the FARC in Columbia, appear to have undercut their challenges to Yankee influence, and until the recent revelation of NSA monitoring of President Dilma Rousseff’s communications, a modus vivendi with Brazil had been developed.

Where do we go from here?  Here again we may want to look for hope emanating from Latin America. Much of answer the lies in Ariel Dorfman’s reflection on the pain and suffering of the CIA-backed military coup in Chile, forty years ago last week, and of the defeat of that brutal dictatorship. The victory of democracy, he wrote, “served as a model for how unarmed people can, through sustained nonviolence and civil disobedience conquer fear and bring down a dictatorship. The thrilling democracy and resistance movements that have sprung up on every continent during the last few years prove that the future does not have to be heartless.”

Each of us here has our own list of priorities as we move forward, but, let me suggest these:

Preventing the U.S. war in Syria.

 

Pressing diplomatic solutions to the Afghan and Syrian wars, including halting arms sales to those and other nations.

 

Ensuring that no one goes hungry, a matter of distribution, not supply.

 

Educating and organizing for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons, winning the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Europe, and impacting disarmament forums like the Mexico Follow- on Conference on the Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons and the NPT Review.

 

Eliminating nuclear power production and reversing climate change

 

Using the 100^th anniversary of WWI to teach that war is not the answer.

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Dr. Joseph Gerson is an international authority of U.S. foreign and military policy with considerable experience in the Middle East. He has travelled extensively in the Middle East, Europe and East Asia. In early September, he initiated the formation of United for Justice With Peace, a Boston area peace Coalition, has spoken widely on the current catastrophe, and was the principle organizer of the Dec. 7 & 8 New England Regional conference held at Tufts University "After September 11: Paths to Peace, Justice & Security."

In the past year he has spoken on U.S. foreign and military policy issues across New England and the United States and in Goteborg, Sweden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, Seoul, Korea. His article "The Politics and Geopolitics of Missile Defences" appeared in the July/August edition of Z Magazine. His books include: With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination; The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention, and The Sun Never Sets...Confronting the Network of U.S. Foreign Military Bases.

Joseph Gerson was a student activist at Georgetown University, where he engaged with the civil rights and peace movements. He became a draft resister and participated in the 1967 March on the Pentagon, protests around the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party Convention, directed Arizonans for Peace (1969-73), served on the staff of Clergy & Laity Concerned About Vietnam (1970-73), and as Staff Coordinator of the War Resisters International in London & Brussels (1973-75.)

 

Joseph Gerson. Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World, London and Ann Arbor: The Pluto Press, 2007, pp. 37-38

Charles M. Blow. “Remembering All the Children,” New York Times, Sept. 7, 2013

http://www.ethericwarriors.com/device_tutorials/b/albright_h.html

Thomas Friedman. "A Manifesto for the Fast World". New York Times. March 28, 1999.

Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Grand Chessboard, New York: Basic Books, 1986