June 2003

LONDON – It is very difficult to know if the U.S. in on course or off course with its policy towards Iran. This is in large measure because Washington hasn’t made up its mind on what course it wants to set. President George Bush said last weekend that an Iran with nuclear weapons cannot be tolerated. At the same time there are no plans afoot to invade Iran and topple the regime and get rid of the country’s alleged possession of dangerous nuclear facilities and materials. Yet no one any longer really doubts that Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb. (This column argued as long as four years ago that this, in all likelihood, was the Iranian intention.) Surely the U.S. should go into Iran now and get the whole nasty business of regime change over. There are indeed a few outspoken Iranians who say they would welcome this....

1. Fulfill Existing Obligations. The nuclear weapons states have made solemn promises to the international community to negotiate in good faith to achieve nuclear disarmament. The United States, Russia, Britain, France and China accepted this obligation when they signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and extended their promises at the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference and again at the 2000 NPT Review Conference. India and Pakistan, which are not signatories of the NPT, have committed themselves to abolish their nuclear arsenals if the other nuclear weapons states agree to do so. The only nuclear weapons state that has not made this promise is Israel, and surely it could be convinced to do so if the other nuclear weapons states agreed to the elimination of their nuclear arsenals. The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, unanimously highlighted the obligation to nuclear disarmament in its 1996 Opinion: “There exists an obligation...

The Bush administration told the American people over and over again that war against Iraq was necessary because Saddam Hussein was lying about not having weapons of mass destruction. We were told that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were an imminent threat to the United States. We were told that our government knew where those weapons of mass destruction were located. And yet, after another brutal war in which thousands of innocent civilians were killed, the Bush Administration can produce no evidence that Saddam Hussein had the weapons of mass destruction. Prior to the war, the Bush administration offered detailed descriptions of Iraq’s weapons programs, including the claims famously made by Colin Powell before the UN Security Council. Bush administration claims included assertions that Iraq had a program for enriching uranium, that it had weaponized thousands of liters of biological weapons, including anthrax and botulism, and that Iraq could...

COPENHAGEN – Today Belgium feels the lash. Yesterday so did Denmark and tomorrow, we are promised, so will Taiwan. But none of these three sturdy, self-confident nations is going to buckle. If anything Big Brother publicly humiliating them has toughened their sinews. Belgium came under direct fire last week from Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defence Secretary, who threatened to move NATO headquarters out of Brussels unless Belgium agrees to re-write its controversial human rights legislation that allows non-Belgians to be tried in Belgium for alleged war crimes on the basis of the now widely accepted principal of international jurisprudence, universal jurisdiction. The principle is enshrined in the statutes of the new International Criminal Court. (Although it gives the right of first crack of the whip to the courts of the country of the accused, an often overlooked point, particularly in the Bush Administration.)  It was also recognized by the British House...

The Bush administration told the American people over and over again that war against Iraq was necessary because Saddam Hussein was lying about not having weapons of mass destruction. We were told that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were an imminent threat to the United States. We were told that our government knew where those weapons of mass destruction were located. And yet, after another brutal war in which thousands of innocent civilians were killed, the Bush Administration can produce no evidence that Saddam Hussein had the weapons of mass destruction. Prior to the war, the Bush administration offered detailed descriptions of Iraq’s weapons programs, including the claims famously made by Colin Powell before the UN Security Council. Bush administration claims included assertions that Iraq had a program for enriching uranium, that it had weaponized thousands of liters of biological weapons, including anthrax and botulism, and that Iraq could...

Framing an Inquiry President George W. Bush historically challenged the United Nation Security Council when he uttered some memorable words in the course of his September 12, 2002 speech to the General Assembly: “Will the UN serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?” (1) In the aftermath of the Iraq War there are at least two answers to this question. The answer of the US Government would be to suggest that the UN turned out to be irrelevant due to its failure to endorse recourse to war against the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. The answer of those who opposed the war is that the UNSC served the purpose of its founding by its refusal to endorse recourse to a war that could not be persuasively reconciled with the UN Charter and international law. This difference of assessment is not just factual, whether Iraq was a threat...

Book Review The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. By Jonathan Schell. New York: Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Co.). 412 pp. $27.50. Ever since his earliest days as a writer, more than three decades ago, Jonathan Schell has had an uncanny ability to depict public preoccupations in an arresting manner. His superb journalistic coverage of the Vietnam War for The New Yorker later published as The Village of Ben Suc, remains to this day the best battlefield account of the war, and a classic in its genre. But Schell’s worldwide fame was established back in 1982 with the publication of The Fate of the Earth, an eloquent disquisition on the unsustainability of the nuclear arms standoff at the core of the cold war. As with all his work Schell has a special gift for articulating the most urgent concerns of the day in a prose that...

Frontline, Vol. 20 – Issue 8April 12-25, 2003 For over three decades, Richard Falk has shared, with fellow Americans Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, a reputation of fearless intellectual and political commitment to the building of a just and humane world. He recently retired as Professor of International Law and Practice, at Princeton University and is currently a Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has been a prolific writer, speaker and activist of world affairs and the author or co-author of more than 20 books. The following are excerpts from a discussion that Falk had with Zia Mian and Smitu Kothari about the US war on Iraq, the role and future of the United Nations and the need to rethink democratic institutions and practices. Kothari/ Mian: Before the war, there were unprecedented protests in the U.S and around the world. It was evident that a significant...

LONDON – “What is Europe?” Winston Churchill wrote in 1946, “A rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground for pestilence and hate”- language that would not be out of place on one side of the vitriolic debate on the Euro, a new European constitution and indeed all things European that is now the everyday grist of Britain’s most populist press and which spills over not only into the Conservative party, as it has since the days of prime minister Margaret Thatcher, but into the ambivalence in the Labour party leadership that is unable to bite the bullet on taking Britain into full membership of the Euro currency. Yet Churchill, aware of Europe’s problems- a hundred times worse than today, if not a thousand- reached a different conclusion. On 19th September, 1946, speaking in Zurich a bare six months after his more famous Iron Curtain speech, Churchill appealed for a United...

The killing of Antioquia state Governor Guillermo Gaviria Correa on May 5, 2003, among ten hostages massacred by FARC guerrillas in reaction to a military rescue attempt, deprived Colombia and the world of a nonviolent political leader whose legacy is no less significant than those of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. He was born in Medellín in 1962, eldest son of a family prominent in politics, publishing and business. A mining management specialist by training at the Colorado School of Mines, after a decade of innovative public service including as Antioquian Secretary of Mines and General Director of the Colombian Roads Institute he campaigned for “A New Antioquia” in 2000 and was overwhelmingly elected Governor by 600,000 of six million people in Colombia’s most populous state. Gaviria’s brief but dynamic governorship was profoundly rooted in the principles and practices of nonviolence derived from his Christian faith and serious study...

Grundlovsdag – 5. juni, 2003 I sin tale den 9. maj på Woodrow Wilson Centret i USA Washington løftede statsministeren sløret for et initiativ for sikkerhed og samarbejde mellem Europa og Mellemøsten. Fogh Rasmussen ønsker en dialog mellem Europa og Mellemøsten inspireret af den OSCE-proces, der fra 1975 bidrog så stærkt til at nedbryde fjendskabet i vort fælles Europa. Sådan et initiativ har længe været savnet. Det er i grunden visionært i en tid hvor kortsigtede og hårdtslående midler ellers dyrkes. Og det er godt timet. Selvom der er grunde til at være pessimistisk om køreplanen for fred mellem Israel og Palæstina, er der dog nu kommet positive toner fra Tel Aviv; og uden en grundig dialog mellem netop Europa og Mellemøsten kan vi hverken få løst de gamle problemer eller reparere det fornyede fjendskab mod Vesten, som krigen mod og besættelsen af Irak har forårsaget. Fogh Rasmussens greb om...

LONDON – With unanimous approval in the Security Council the UN is authorizing a beefed up peacekeeping force into the Congo maelstrom. At least this time the UN, hitting trouble in the face of massacres and the deaths of its peacekeepers, is not going into reverse. In Rwanda eight years ago it was said that the UN force appeared to have four gears, one for forward and three for reverse. In Rwanda  800,000 million people were massacred. An independent investigation by Ingvar Carlsson, the former Swedish prime minister, laid the blame squarely on the shoulders of the U.S. and British governments which, when the small contingent of  Belgian peacekeepers were attacked and brutally castrated and killed, refused to allow the UN presence to be beefed up. The report also faulted Secretary-General Kofi Annan who was then head of peacekeeping and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then Secretary-General, for not keeping the Security Council well...