|
|
The Progressive ResponseVolume 9, Number 26 Editor: John Gershman, IRC |
|
||||
|
|||||
Table of ContentsI. Updates and Out-TakesWar Crimes: The Posse Gathers | Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith I. Updates and Out-TakesWar Crimes: The Posse Gathers Diverse forces are assembling to bring Bush administration officials to account for war crimes. Cindy Sheehan, Gold Star Mother for Peace, insists: “We cannot have these people pardoned. They need to be tried on war crimes and go to jail.” Paul Craig Roberts, Hoover Institution senior fellow and assistant secretary of the treasury under Ronald Reagan, charges Bush with “lies and an illegal war of aggression, with outing CIA agents, with war crimes against Iraqi civilians, with the horrors of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture centers” and calls for the president's impeachment. Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and former president of the American Society of International Law, declares: “These policies make a mockery of our claim to stand for the rule of law. [Americans] should be marching on Washington to reject inhumane techniques carried out in our name.” Can such disparate forces as the peace movement, conservative advocates of the rule of law, and human rights advocates join to halt high government officials demonstrably engaged in criminal enterprise? Can they reach out and appeal to the deep but vacillating commitment of the American people to the national and international rule of law? Or will the Bush administration divide the posse and retain for itself the mantle of defender of international law and the U.S. Constitution? Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith, with Jill Cutler, are the co-editors of In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (New York: Metropolitan/Holt, 2005) <www.americanempireproject.com> and co-founders of War Crimes Watch. They are frequent contributors to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org). See new FPIF paper online at:
Torture Degrades Us All For those who think we live in an age of terror, it is intuitively appealing to believe that torturing one person to save many is the right thing to do. Discussion of torture should not be taboo, but arguments for it must withstand moral scrutiny. The legal meaning of “torture” was drafted by human hands; it is therefore fallible and cannot merely be accepted as divine truth—particularly if the definition of torture is too weak. Terrorism does not demand that we torture to defend ourselves. To the contrary, the threat of terrorism reminds us of the importance of protecting human dignity, even of terrorists. Law necessarily draws moral lines in the sand which cannot be crossed; the inevitability of torturing the innocent is a price too high to pay to save the lives of others. Arguments against torture are not based on alarmism, moral absolutism, or rhetoric. The consequences of forcibly violating the body and the mind are profound and signal an unnecessary return to the blunt techniques of medieval justice. Torture irreparably damages human dignity, devalues human life, and corrupts the institutions of our democracy. Ben Saul (http://www.law.unsw.edu.au/staff/SaulB/) is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law (http://www.law.unsw.edu.au/) at the University of New South Wales, the director of the Bills of Rights Project (http://www.gtcentre.unsw.edu.au/projects_partners/projects/bor/index.asp) at the Gilbert & Tobin Centre of Public Law, and a regular contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org). This is a slightly edited version of a speech given during the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture sponsored by Amnesty International and the New South Wales Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia, June 26, 2005. See new FPIF report online at:
Taking the Wind Out of the Perfect Geopolitical Storm: Iran and the Crisis over Non-proliferation The intense negotiations over Iran's nuclear ambitions have brought into relief the defects in the international system controlling the spread of nuclear weapons. This Special Report fills in the background of the current crisis and explains the roles of the international players: the EU, United States, China, India, Russia, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and potentially the Security Council. It provides a clear explanation of the nuclear fuel cycle and the relationship between the production of peaceful nuclear power and nuclear weapons. It analyzes the major proposals for regulating this production in the service of non-proliferation. And it outlines a set of policy recommendations that can “navigate a course to calmer waters.” Dr. Ian Davis is Executive Director of the British American Security Information Council. He has published widely on British defense and foreign policy, transatlantic security issues, the international arms trade, and arms control and disarmament issues. He has made high-level presentations in Washington, DC and in Europe on WMD non-proliferation and transatlantic security issues. Paul Ingram, Senior Analyst, has twelve years' experience as a researcher and project leader at the Oxford Research Group, and has published articles on European security, non-proliferation, and international arms trade issues. See new FPIF report online at:
U.S. Immigration Policy on the Table at the WTO In the contentious negotiations leading up to the December 13-18 World Trade Organization (WTO) summit, the big drama has centered around agricultural trade and whether the richer countries will grant expanded market access to commodities from the Global South. However, there has also been a battle brewing between developing countries and the U.S. government over immigration. Led by India, several countries are demanding expansion of U.S. visa programs for temporary professional workers. How did immigration wind up on the table at the WTO? Under the global trade body's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), governments can regulate the supply of services performed by foreigners. The technical term for this type of service trade is Mode 4. Thus far, the types of visas being discussed are those for executives and highly skilled professionals, such as Indian software engineers who have come to work in the Silicon Valley and other high-tech hubs in the United States. Some developing countries are pushing for the Mode 4 talks to cover less-skilled workers as well. The wrangling over visas is just one more example of the WTO's mission creep. Global trade rules are no longer aimed merely at eliminating tariffs on goods that cross borders. The ultimate goal of GATS, for example, is to lift barriers to all manner of services by curbing national and local government controls on the entry of global banks, insurance companies, and other service providers into each country's markets. Other WTO rules limit government efforts to offer affordable generic medicines or to protect native plants and traditional handicrafts from being patented for profit by global businesses. And any domestic law, including public interest regulations, can be challenged under WTO rules as “an unfair barrier to trade.” Sarah Anderson is the Director of in the Global Economy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies (www.ips-dc.org) and a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org). See new FPIF paper online at:
Talking Points #6—A Speech to Stay the Course President Bush's speech, failed to take the opportunity created by the public and the U.S. Congress to engage in a real debate about the Iraq War. Instead Bush continued to give a view of the Iraq War clouded by rose-colored glasses. Vowing to “Stay the Course” the President made clear that the administration still doesn't recognize that the U.S. occupation is driving the resistance. Erik Leaver is a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and the policy outreach director for the Foreign Policy In Focus Project. He is the co-author of, “The Iraq Quagmire: The Mounting Costs of War and the Case for Bringing Home the Troops.” See new FPIF talking points online at:
Iraq Strategy: Still AWOL, Still Costly Some of Bush's November 30 speech at Annapolis seemed as old as Vietnam. Johnson, appearing before a friendly audience, tried to explain the nature of the Vietnam War, why the United States was there, and the war's objectives, ending with a vision of Vietnam's economic development within a larger world order. Johnson said he regretted the “waste of war,” noting however that often it had to precede “the works of peace.” By that April 7, 1965, just 400 U.S. troops had died in Vietnam. Bush, under growing criticism across the political spectrum, also chose a friendly audience at the Naval Academy for his latest attempt to define and defend what the White House terms its “stay the course” strategy in Iraq. Unfortunately, maintaining the status quo is not and never has been a strategy. Moreover, as is evident from what Bush doesn't say, he seems to be disconnected from the real world of real war and real politics in Iraq today—and hence somehow not responsible. Accusing the terrorists of making Iraq the “central front in their war against humanity,” he calls Iraq “the central front in the war on terror.” Nowhere does he acknowledge that before March 20, 2003, no al-Qaida or other non-Iraqis were fighting in Iraq. Dan Smith is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org), a retired U.S. Army colonel, and a senior fellow on military affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. See new FPIF commentary online at:
Where We Stand: Honesty about Dangerous Climate Change, and about Preventing it We stand, first, with the emerging scientific consensus, which tells us we have very little time to act if we honestly expect to avoid a global (as opposed to a “merely local”) climate catastrophe. Further, we insist, contrary to the pretended realism of those who seek to be “reasonable,” on a rather direct approach. We do not, for example, imagine that carbon concentrations that would quite probably yield 3ºC or 4ºC of warming can reasonably be considered “safe.” Instead, we prefer to stay in the reality-based world of those (the E.U., the Climate Action Network) who draw the line at 2ºC maximum (which is itself not by any means safe) and who admit that avoiding a global climate catastrophe is going to be difficult indeed. Like the larger social-ecological crisis, the climate crisis is fundamental to our real conditions of life. If admitting this simple truth makes us appear “unrealistic,” so be it. There is no honest hope in dissemblance and spin. Besides, the news isn't all bad - the bottom line is that it's still physically possible to avoid a global climate catastrophe. Adequate precaution requires that we, all of us together, stay within a limited global climate budget. Unfortunately, this simple truth has some fairly momentous implications. How can it not when the science now tells us that, to have a good chance of avoiding a global climate catastrophe, total global 21st Century emissions must be held to about 400 Gigatonnes of carbon? It is directly from the limitations of this budget that we conclude that allocation necessarily means reallocation, a global redistribution of emissions rights. And this for the obvious but rarely remarked reason that this reallocation is a precondition for the “development” of the poor. Just now, of course, most everyone is shying away from such unpleasant conclusions, for the obvious reason that our society is so riven by economic and social divisions that it's difficult to imagine anything like a feasible and acceptable response. Better, many argue, to go on quietly, in tactical silence, as if this the fundamental political challenge of the climate crisis would solve itself in time. But it will not. Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer are the co-directors of Ecoequity (www.ecoequity.org) and co-authors of Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming (Seven Stories Press). They are regular contributors to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org). See new IRC commentary online at: Please consider supporting Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF). FPIF is a new kind of think tank—one serving citizen movements and advancing a fresh, internationalist understanding of global affairs. Although we make our FPIF products freely available on the Internet, we need financial support to cover our staff time and expenses. Increasingly, FPIF depends on you and other individual donors to sustain our bare-bones budget. Click on http://www.irc-online.org/donate.php to support FPIF online, or for information about making contributions over the phone or through the mail. We Count on Your Support. Thank you.
Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the International Relations Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). ©2006. All rights reserved. Subscribe to The Progressive Response!
The Progressive Response aims to provide timely analysis and opinion about U.S. foreign policy issues. The content does not necessarily reflect the institutional positions of either the International Relations Center or the Institute for Policy Studies. We're working to make the Progressive Response informative and useful, so let us know how we're doing, via email to irc@irc-online.org. Please put "Progressive Response" in the subject line. Please feel free to cross-post the Progressive Response elsewhere. We apologize for any duplicate copies you may receive.
|
|||||
