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