Law & War: A Comparison of Vietam and Indochina

26 Aug

[Prefatory Note: The post below in the text of my foreword to an exceptionally valuable comparison of conflicts: Vietnam and Arab-Israeli. These two regions have preoccupied me throughout my professional career and in the course of my life as an engaged citizen. The book, just published by Michigan University Press, is the source of insight, as well, to the evolution of international law relative to such conflicts.]

Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law

Brian Cuddy and Victor Kattan, Editors, 2023.

How International Law Evolves: Norms, Precedents, and Geopolitics

Prologue

We should understand that this volume devoted to the relevance of international law to these two geographically distinct war zones in the Middle East and Southeast Asia in the period after World War II is a very distinctive undertaking. I am not familiar with any similar search for comparisons and connections, either in relation to the Indochina or Arab-Israeli conflicts, with respect to lawmaking interactions and potentialities. What is notable about this inquiry is that it considers the interaction between regional scale conflicts to be both a source of new norms of international law and occasions for evasions and justifications of existing norms.

My point of departure is to take note of the motivation of the lead political actors in both conflict configurations to evade the constraints on the use of force imposed by the UN Charter, a constitutional framework for international law drafted under the primary influence of World War II, achieving a special urgency after the use of atomic bombs against Japanese cities. This influence expressed itself by the adoption of a war prevention rationale powerfully set forth in the opening words of the Charter Preamble, “…to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” This language was a response not only to the devastation associated with the thus concluded war with its 60 million deaths, but to the fear that a future war of similar or greater proportions would bring even more catastrophic results for the entire world. The Charter norms on the use of force were designed to be very constraining, suggesting that recourse to force by states was to be legal only if undertaken in self-defense against a prior armed attack [Articles 2(4), 51 of the UN Charter] or in response to a decision authorizing the use of force by the Security Council. As the editors’ introduction to the volume suggests, the Charter carried forward the transformational ambitions to prohibit international war-making and coercive diplomacy by constraining legally mandated recourses to international uses of force as comprehensibly as possible. It should be understood that these ambitions were always tied to the self-restraint of and harmony among the five permanent members of the Security Council who enjoyed a right of veto, which effectively exempted them from an obligatory connection to the international legal norms governing force set forth in the Charter. Even if the General Assembly attempted to fill this gap between international law and this disturbing geopolitical privilege its authority was constitutionally limited to making ‘recommendations,’ lacking in obligatory force.

The geopolitical condition of fragile and always partial harmony that prevailed in 1945 as a result of the recent victory over fascism achieved by the Allied Powers did not last very long. The UN was established with some hope, although contested by political realists from its inception, that the combination of these restraining norms and the collective security mechanisms of the Security Council could ensure a peaceful world. Such idealistic expectations were challenged by events. First came the Korean War (1950-53) and then by the 1956 Suez Crisis and Operation, and above all by the outbreak of the Cold War that ruptured forever the pious hope a wartime alliance could be transformed into a peacemaking coalition. Nevertheless, until the decade of the 1960s there remained a superficial attachment by the geopolitical antagonists to the UN Charter framework constraining aggressive war-making as the focus continued to be on the avoidance of a third world war or any disregard of the taboo prohibiting recourse to nuclear weaponry.

This changed in the decade of the 1960s. It became clear that the victors in World War II were faced with significant geopolitical challenges and possessed strategic ambitions that could not be satisfied by adhering to the Charter norms. This was made apparent in the Indochina War, especially its Vietnam central arena. The Charter notion of self-defense was not applicable nor would the American extension of the war to North Vietnam in 1965 have enabled the Security Council to restore peace due to the veto power possessed by the geopolitical antagonists, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States. For these reasons the Indochina War, despite its scale and level of destruction, was undertaken without heeding or seriously engaging the UN framework or contemporary international law.[1] The U.S. Government, in particular, issued elaborate documentary justifications for the forcible actions undertaken by invoking international law. Its legal rationalizations were partisan in nature and one-sided, and as such unconvincing to the scholarly community of international jurists.

As well, both in Indochina and the Middle East the warfare that resulted was not between political entities of symmetric technological capabilities and tactics. International law had been evolved to address wars fought between sovereign states of roughly equivalent technological capabilities, and was concerned with limiting and regulating war rather than outlawing it. The experience of World War II convinced the victors that there was a gap in the legal framework concerning the protection of civilians living under military occupation, captured prisoners of war, and the treatment of wounded soldiers on the battlefield. This realization resulted in the negotiation of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, a new corpus of law that became known as ‘international humanitarian law.’

Yet these Geneva Conventions were still preoccupied with wars between sovereign states. What was shown by the Indochina and Middle East wars of the 1960s was the importance of extending international humanitarian law (IHL) to conditions of sustained warfare within sovereign states, especially when magnified in intensity by external interventions, proxy wars, and geopolitical alignments. Acknowledging the prevalence of this new type of violent conflict gave rise to the two 1977 Geneva Protocols that were deemed supplemental to the 1949 treaties. In particular, Protocol I dealing with the Protection of Victims in International Conflicts was a tricky area for international law as it challenged the sovereign rights of the territorial government, and even trickier for the United States as it explicitly extended the protection of international humanitarian law (IHL) to armed conflicts in which a people are fighting against colonial domination, alien occupation or racist regimes.[2] This meant that Protocol I applied to foreign interventions in domestic armed conflicts that were struggles over the control of the state. Protocol II was somewhat less controversial as it extended IHL to non-international conflicts and did not have any bearing on interventionary diplomacy, although it did seek IHL accountability for purely internal wars, purporting to put legal limits on previously unlimited territorial sovereign rights.  

By considering such conflicts as entitled to international protection it was perceived as weakening the sovereign authority of states to deal with insurgent opposition movements without being subject to international legal accountability. This resistance to the internationalization of anti-colonial struggles pertains directly to the Vietnam and Palestinian experiences. Indeed, the diplomacy producing the Protocol was prompted by the tactics and experience of the Vietnam War, which exhibited gaps in the coverage of international humanitarian law as specified by the four Geneva Conventions of 1949.[3] The importance of exempting such armed conflicts from IHL is part of the geopolitical effort to retain freedom of geopolitical maneuver, as Cuddy and Kattan explain, in the momentous international shift from the earlier international law focus on total war to the new realities of endless limited, yet devastating, wars. Protecting civilian populations in this new epoch of post-colonial warfare, as in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine are suggestive of the need for further renovation and effective implementation of IHL, and indeed the overall law of war framework. A merit of this volume is to frame this transition by reference to the Vietnam and Middle East experiences, with particular reference to the unresolved Palestinian struggle. This struggle has taken on a new relevance in the last five years as a result of an emergent civil society consensus that Israel apartheid policies and practices are blocking the realization of the long denied basic rights of the Palestinian people.  

In assessing these legal developments two features of international political society are paramount, and need to be kept in mind when discussing the two geographically and psycho-politically distinct war zones:

                        –the primacy of geopolitics vis-a-vis international law;

                        –the primacy of military necessity in combat situations.

These two realities, given the absence of centralized governmental institutions on a global level, have accentuated the marginality of international law in war/peace situations, both with respect to recourse to force and the behavior of the parties in the course of warfare.

Acknowledging these two definitive constraints on the role of international law in relation to war should not lead us to cynical conclusions that ‘law is irrelevant with respect to war’ or that ‘international law does not matter.’ International law is relevant and matters for several reasons: it empowers civil society activism; it provides a channel for domestic dissent from war making in democratic societies in both government circles and civil society; it moderates behavior of belligerent states to the extent that reciprocal interests support compliance with international legal norms (e.g. treatment of prisoners of war).

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Government was more eager than subsequently, to retain its liberal image as a champion of a law-governed international order, and so went to great lengths to argue that its policies and practices in Vietnam accorded with international law and the UN Charter. Such motivations also legitimated anti-war activism that could invoke international law to challenge Washington’s behavior in Vietnam. It also emboldened critics in Congress to mount objections framed in legal and constitutional language, and allowed international law scholars like myself to be invited to testify before Congressional committees or have opinion pieces published in mainstream media venues.[4]

Unfortunately, with the rightest drift in American politics and the lobbying leverage of AIPAC and other Zionist groups, the authority of international law and the UN have experienced sharp declines. The U.S. no longer invests diplomatic energy in upholding a liberal image, and increasingly relies on coercive threats and militarism to pursue its foreign policy goals, especially in the Middle East. The reliance on unlawful threats of military attack has been at the core of U.S./Israeli/Saudi confrontational diplomacy directed at Iran for several decades. This trend has reached a symbolic climax of sorts by its imposition of sanctions on the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for recommending an investigation of U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan. Israel, also, has responded with a furious denunciation of this international institution for daring to propose a limited investigation of its crimes in Occupied Palestine. Although the U.S. government after a change in presidential leadership terminated its sanctions imposed on ICC officials, it refused to accept the extension of ICC authority to investigate allegations against itself or Israel. Since the Ukrainian Crisis of 2022 the U.S. Government has displayed a mixture of hypocrisy and opportunism by urging ICC investigation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, and the indictment of Putin.

The fury of these reactions suggests two opposite interpretations. The first, and most obvious, is the refusal of leading states to defer to international law in settings where national security issues or geopolitical alignments are paramount. And the second, that the fury of the reactions to legally framed allegations suggest how deeply sensitive the governments and leaders of such states become when accused of serious violations of international law by credible procedures. In response, such governments do not try to defend their behavior, but move to discredit and weaken international procedures of accountability, in part, as a form of damage control to avoid any worsening of their international reputations. Even if the ICC were to prosecute and convict, there is almost no prospect that its judgments would be enforced, and so the whole pushback is about safeguarding legitimacy and opposing impingements by the deployment of symbolic politics as causative influences in traditional spheres of geopolitical and sovereign autonomy.

A Brief Comment on the Two War Zones

For the United States in Vietnam the Charter norms were perceived as inconsistent with the mission to prevent a Communist victory in South Vietnam and a subsequent unification of Vietnam under the control of Hanoi. It was believed in Washington that it was militarily necessary to extend the war zone beyond the boundaries of South Vietnam to punish North Vietnam for supplying the anti-regime insurgency led by the NLF. Similarly, the extensions of the war to Laos and Cambodia were prompted by calculations associated with disrupting the support of the war in the South of Vietnam by keeping a base area in and maintaining supply chains that passed through Cambodia. Similar reasoning produced sustained U.S. air attacks on Laos, unlawfully abusing diplomatic privileges by orchestrating this military campaign from within the American Embassy in the Laotian capital city of Vientiane. In other words, the Cold War priorities prevailed over efforts to constrain recourse to war and tactics in war.  On the other side, the priorities of national liberation and anti-colonial legitimacy also prevailed over legal constraints.

In the Middle East there were similar factors at work, although tempered by some balancing considerations. The United States was still in the 1960s seeking to balance, at least in public, its commitment to Israel with its vital strategic interests in retaining favorable access to regional oil supplies at affordable prices situated in Arab countries. In this respect, contrary to Israel’s wishes at the time, the U.S., along with European countries, sought to affirm international law with respect to the acquisition of territory by force, the major premise of the unanimous UN Security Resolution 242 adopted after the 1967 War. Yet even then there was insufficient political will to implement the rhetoric, by an insistence on a timely Israeli withdrawal.

Of even greater relevance to the focus of the volume is the degree to which antagonists in the Middle East with respect to Israel/Palestine evaded the Charter norm on recourse to war. Israel in 1967 and Egypt in 1973 both sought to gain military advantage by striking first, and thus apparently violating the requirement of a prior armed attack contained in Article 51, although there are respectable legal counter-arguments in each setting.[5] Both governments defended their actions by claiming security imperatives as providing a convincing ‘legal’ rationale for preemption.

As far as interconnections are concerned, both war zones produced conflicts that ignored the fundamental framework of international law and institutional accountability that was the hallmark of the war prevention efforts after World War II. The asymmetric nature of the wars also strained the law of war during combat, especially in Indochina, but also in the Middle East to the extent that warfare after 1967 temporarily shifted to Palestinian efforts to pursue an armed struggle strategy that was designated as ‘terrorism’ by Israel and its supporters.[6] During its various military attacks on occupied Gaza Israel exhibite a disregard for international law constraints, and did no without suffering any adverse consequences. This counter-terrorist rationale had been used by the U.S. in Vietnam, but with less impact due to the outcome of the struggle and the absence of widespread support for the war in the West, including even in the U.S. in its last stages.

International Law Evolves

Against this background it becomes possible to get a better appreciation of how international law evolves. It is important to realize that in some sense all of international law is ‘soft law’ because of the absence of regular procedures of authoritative interpretation and enforcement, not to mention ‘the geopolitical exemption’ of the winners of World War II implicit in the right of veto conferred by the Charter.

Added to this, international law in relation to peace and security issues suffers from the special issues previously mentioned—essentially, the primacy of geopolitics and of military necessity. Geopolitics manipulates the law governing recourse to force, while military necessity by its priority under combat circumstances is constantly reshaping the law involving the use of force.

A major interconnection between Indochina and the Middle East is illustrative. In Indochina the United States created a strong precedent for disregarding the Charter conceptions governing the law governing recourse to force. It put forward some legal justifications to the effect that North Vietnam was guilty of ‘indirect aggression’ by its support of the insurgency in the South, creating a legal foundation for extending the war beyond the artificial boundary delimiting South Vietnam. After the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin alleged attack on American naval vessels in international waters and the February 1965 NLF attack on a U.S. military camp near Pleiku, the U.S. Government shifted its legal rationale to one of collective self-defense against a prior armed attack.[7] It also contended that Cambodia and Laos violated the laws of war governing neutrality by allowing their territories to be used for hostile purposes associated with North Vietnam’s belligerent activities.

Although Israel in 1967 and Egypt in 1973 did not specifically invoke the American precedents set in the Vietnam War, their conduct was shielded from critical scrutiny by the combination of a weakening of the geopolitical commitment to the Charter conception of permissible recourse to force, and by the sense that these specific recourses to force were within their context ‘reasonable.’ Because of the geopolitical alignment with Israel, the Egyptian surprise attack on Israel was legally condemned by Western countries, but in a manner that made it appear to be more an expression of alliance diplomacy than a pronouncement of allegiance to international law. Such a view gains weight from the pattern of practice in years subsequent to 1973.

It was also evident that the West controlled international legal discourse on permissible and impermissible uses of force. In this way the violence of non-state actors and liberation movements was demonized as ‘terrorism’ while state violence even if directed at civilian targets was treated under rubrics of security and self-defense rather than delimited as ‘state terror.’ Such a discourse gained wider impacts after the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., and through the launch of the so-called ‘War on Terror.’ It has impacted strongly in the Middle East contexts, especially allowing Israel to validate its excessive force and collective punishment as security measures or as the exercise of the right of every sovereign state to defend itself. To some extent, especially in recent years, the UN has challenged this discourse by issuing many reports on Israeli violations of the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law more generally. This tension between the geopolitical discourse and the UN discourse is what leads the U.S. and Israel, in particular, to make accusations about UN bias when it comes to violations of international law. It is this tension, however, that encourages civil society initiatives to claim the legitimacy of international law, as is the case with support for the BDS Campaign or by mounting challenges to Israeli apartheid.

It should be noted, in passing, that when Western interests are engaged, as by Russia’s recent aggression against Ukraine, the Charter framework is again invoked as if it is as authoritative and constraining as when adopted in 1945. In other words, the fate of norms is tied to the control of the international normative discourse, and especially in relation to the geopolitics of propaganda. For partisans it highlights the relevance of international law, while for objective jurists it suggests the manipulation of law as a self-serving policy instrument aptly invoking criticisms of double standards.

Conclusion

The main conclusion reached is that the Charter framework established in 1945 was greatly weakened, if not altogether rendered somewhat anachronistic, by the combined impact of geopolitical opportunism and military circumstances in the wars taking place in Indochina and the Middle East in the decades after World War II. To some extent, it can be asserted that the Charter framework was always unrealistic given the character of a state-centric world order system that included hegemonic actors recognized as such by their right of veto in the UN Security Council, a disempowering reality that became fully evident onlly after the onset of the Cold War. The nature of the conflicts, which consisted of nationalist movements was also not anticipated by the kind of legal order envisioned for the post-World War II, and not able to cope with the normative challenges of asymmetric warfare or wars of national liberation.

There is also an important tension with regard to the orientation toward normative discourse. The West seeks a statist discourse with unrestricted discretion for geopolitical actors, excepting of course, its rivals who are to be held fully accountable by reference to the UN Charter framework. The South, and at the UN General Assembly, is generally favorable to the claims of nationalist movements and anti-colonialist struggles, especially if directed toward liberation from European or Western control. In this regard, this subaltern discourse is supportive of the situation of the Vietnamese and Palestinian national liberation struggles, given concreteness in international law by the wide consensus supporting the inalienable right of self-determination as enshrined in Article 1 of both International Covenants on Human Rights, and more broadly reaffirmed in the influential Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.[8]

[1] Indeed, the flaunting of international law was so notorious and the failure of the UN to respond so pronounced that the celebrated British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, convened a civil society tribunal charged with assessing unlawful conduct and international crimes. The tribunal was composed of leading public intellectuals, presided over by Jean-Paul Sartre, and producing a full documented set of conclusions relating to U.S. violations of the laws of war. See John Duffett, ed., Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, (1968). See also Tor Krever’s chapter in this volume for a more detailed discussion of the Russell Tribunal.

[2] On the reasons for the US refusal to ratify the Additional Protocols see the chapter by Victor Kattan in this volume.

[3] On the influence of the Vietnam and Arab-Israeli conflicts on the drafting of Additional Protocol 1 see the chapters by Amanda Alexander and Ihab Shalbak and Jessica Whyte in this volume.

[4] On the significance of international law for civil society activism and domestic dissent during the Vietnam War, see the chapter by Madelaine Chiam and Brian Cuddy in this volume.

[5] See John Quigley’s chapter in this volume for a differing legal characterization of responsibility for initiating the 1973 War. See also, John B. Quigley, The Six-Day War and Israeli Self-Defense: Questioning the Legal Basis for Preventive War (Cambridge University Press 2013).

[6] On the development of ‘operational law’ in the U.S. and Israel, which appears to have been developed partly in response to the conflict conditions in Vietnam and the Middle East as well as the new IHL rules of the 1977 Additional Protocols, see the chapter by Craig Jones in this volume.

[7] For further analysis see Brian Cuddy’s chapter in this volume. Both the Gulf of Tonkin and Pleiku attacks were used to justify plans to expand the combat zone in Vietnam to the north of the country, across the international boundary.

[8] General Assembly Resolution 2625, 24 October 1970, A/Res/2625.  

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Quran Desecration and Freedom of Expression

17 Aug

[Prefatory Note: The following post is a revised version of responses to questions addressed to by Javad Arabshirazi, a journalist in Iran, on the issues raised by recent Quran Desecration incidents in Scandinavia. The link to the earlier online publication of this interview is below:https://iqna.ir/en/news/3484743/int%E2%80%99l-law-not-strong-enough-to-stop-affronts-to-holy-sanctities-ex-un-rapporteur ]

Q#1: As you know, over the past month, the Quran has been subject to acts of desecration multiple times in Sweden and Denmark. What is your take on these acts?

As a first line of response, I would interpret these acts of desecration as an aspect of the assault by right-wing extremists on secular democracy in Europe. The fact that Sweden was the principal site of these incidents involving the Quran are significant as Sweden was the previously viewed as the most progressive social democracy in Europe with a generally permissive atmosphere, but not a breeding ground of extremist political movements, although quite conformist in its skepticism about religion. The anti-migrant right (but not the desecrating extremists) have emerged from most recent national elections with great influence, although not currently governing the country.

A more proximate cause seems connected with a far-right reaction of anger and fear to the leverage displayed by the Muslim majority state of Turkey in relation to Sweden’s governmental effort to join NATO almost 75 years after the alliance was formed, an undertaking itself indicative of this Swedish swing to the right. The motivation for these desecration incidents from this perspective should be viewed as directed both at the Swedish Government for its apparent willingness to bargain with Turkey on the issue, tarnishing its right-wing credentials by doing so and at Islamist Turkey encroaching on European cultural space in the sensitive sphere of freedom of expression.

Of course, these explanatory remarks are highly conjectural on my part, but they do seem consistent with the behavioral patterns of these extremist fragments (the most prominent leader of these events was a Danish-Swedish lawyer and political extremist, Rasmus Paludan, head of the Danish Strum Kurs (hardline) political party, managed to win only 1.8% of vote in the last Danish election. This weak electoral showing was not enough to qualify the party for seats in Parliament. In response to his role in these embassy provocations, Turkey has issued an arrest warrant charging Paludan with responsibility for a desecration incident posing security threats to the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm earlier this year.

In general, anti-Islamic extremism is both an internal and international challenge to the European Union, which wants to ensure peace and stability within Europe without giving rise to blowback effects in

Muslim majority countries that take offense. For instance, Qatar, although not targeted in Sweden,  removed all Swedish products from its largest market, Souq Al Baladi, and a number of other states have withdrawn their ambassadors from Sweden as expressions of Islamic solidarity. The EU remains reluctant to challenge by recourse to law freedom of expression standards that prevail in several of its leading member states. Josep Borrell, the EU minister for foreign policy, summed up the official response accurately, although elliptically,  by saying on the subject of Quran desecration, ‘Not everything that is legal is ethical.’

A similar approach was evident in the July vote at the UN Human Rights Council of a resolution condemning the desecration of the Quran by the negative votes of the leading European states (UK, Germany, France, joined by the USA). Although these governments publicly deplored the Quran desecration they refused to support the HRC resolution, which was claimed to be an unbalanced text, endangering freedom of expression, and unacceptably close to prohibiting all forms of blasphemy. The overall vote on the resolution of the 47 HRC members was 28-12 (with 7 abstentions). Most HRC members from Africa, as well as China, supported the resolution. The HRC’s official release described the resolution this way: “The Human Rights Council July 12th adopted a resolution in which it condemned and strongly rejected any advocacy and manifestation of religious hatred, including the recent public and premedicated acts of desecration of the Holy Quran.” The body of the resolution called upon states to enact national laws reflecting these sentiments, but overall it seems unlikely to have the slightest effect on the 12 states voting against the resolution.

Q#2: How can we stop such acts and help promote interfaith respect and peaceful coexistence among followers of various faiths?

There is a paradox present: The harder efforts are made to stop this highly objectionable behavior by Islamophobic and right-wing extremists groups the greater is their temptation to persist in such action. In the short-term what these groups seek is public recognition and media attention, not power or authority. These are displays of symbolic politics at its worst as it champions ethno-religious supremacy as the alternative to coexistence with dark and evil forces. Quran desecration also serves as a recruiting strategy that attracts those deeply dissatisfied with their lives and receptive to blaming the Islamic other.

And then there is counter-pressures from dogmatic secularists not to alter behavior in response to outcries from foreign religious sources. Such secularists, whether openly or not, seek to insulate from governmental interference anti-religious speech and symbolic acts, however hurtful, even when coming from extremist sources. In the current historical setting of Europe, desecration acts especially those directed at theocratically governed states such as Iran, and more recently, Turkey, enjoy a high level of silent approval from a hostile populace. What is often criminalized and harshly punished as blasphemy in some Muslim majority states, for instance, Pakistan or Bangladesh, is celebrated as protected speech in the secular West.

Inter-faith dialogue if conducted at high enough levels at least promotes a better understanding of cultural and religious differences among countries and civilizations, but the root cause is ethnically and religiously driven extremism, which at its worst sets the stage for autocratic, and even fascist styles of governance, which happened in post-World War I Europe. A further step in moderating such tensions is to mount a major international effort to improve the material conditions in the least developed countries that would have an almost automatic effect of discouraging massive migratory flows now arising from impoverished societies, conflict zones, and climate disaster, disproportionately situated in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The political resonance of Quran burning is emotionally linked for many in the West to the backlash against these patterns of migrating peoples fleeing from alien cultural traditions for economic, political, and ecological reasons. We should appreciate that most people do not leave their homelands unless national living conditions become intolerable and more opportunities seem worth pursuing elsewhere.

With the planet challenged currently by ecological and geopolitical threats to species survival, only ways of acting on a global scale to improve procedures of conflict resolution and inter-governmental cooperation can have any chance of weakening incentives of extremists and those most acutely alienated to carry out attacks against scapegoated religious and ethnic minorities.      

Q#3: Who or what group do you think is behind the affronts? Or who or what group benefits from them?

 As suggested throughout, these affronts to Islam emanate from the extreme right by individuals drawn to fascist beliefs and practices as historically contextualized in relation to time and place. For Hitler and Naziism it was Jews as a people, in the United States those seeking to restore white supremacy it is African Americans, and after 9/11 attacks in 2001 it was Islam while for Donald Trump it has become migrants, especially those entering the country unlawfully.

Extremists tend to flourish in national settings where their acts, while superficially condemned, are congruent with the beliefs and biases of large parts of the population. I feel the danger in Europe arises from the extreme right gaining further political strength through such acts of demonization. The rise of secular populism and its autocratic leaders around the world has produced the suppression of religious freedoms and political participation of Muslims even in many countries within the Arab world, and most pronouncedly in Modi’s India with its drive to achieve Hindu supremacy and even in Myanmar where the military leadership in alliance with the Buddhist majority has ruthlessly suppressed Muslims in the federal state of Rakhine where the Muslim minority, the Rohingya people mostly live.

Q#4: Swedish and Danish officials have deplored the desecration of the Quran, saying, however, that they cannot prevent it under constitutional laws protecting freedom of speech. What are your thoughts on this as an international lawyer?         

Although there is some support for the view that desecration of the Quran and other holy books violate international law, and a July 25 UN General Assembly Resolution drafted by Morocco and adopted by consensus so declares, it is not regarded by most governments in the West as obligatory and would encounter strong resistance if implemented in national criminal codes and operational practices. The emphasis of the resolution is suggested by these words, deploring ”all acts of violence against persons on the basis of their religion or belief, as well as any such acts directed against their religious symbols, holy books, homes, businesses, properties, schools, cultural centers or places of worship, as well as all attacks on and in religious places, sites and shrines in violation of international law.”

There is an underlying jurisprudential problem that is rarely discussed. In the West, meaning in Western Europe and North America, the separation of church and state followed upon decades of religious warfare within Christianity. From the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 onwards until the present the dominant political tradition in various formats has embraced the separation of church and state, including seeking to make the legal order autonomous, that is, resistant to overt religious oversight and direct interference. To be sure, there have been inconsistencies on the level of practice, especially on such symbolic issues as the reproductive rights of women and the character of conscientious objection to obligatory military service. In contrast, it is my understanding that Islamic values reject such a separation, believeing strongly that the law should reflect the precepts of religious guidance or oversight.

In any meaningful sense, I do not think international law is strong enough in relation to these issues at the interface of human rights, sovereign rights, and the sanctity of religious values and practice to impact on behavior at the level of nation states. Perhaps, the struggles for species survival will build enough support for trans-civilizational unity on behalf of the global public good, which has been put forward by some, including myself, as a unique instance of ‘a necessary utopia.’ In the interim, there will be clashes of the sort embedded in diverse ways of handling the desecration of the Quran, the scriptures of other faiths, and holy sites and objects generally. In fashioning responses, we must be careful not to fuel the passions and dark ambitions of such extremists by giving them media feasts that promote their dark designs and feed their sense of self-importance..

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Quran Burning interview/article by Rabia Iclal Turan, Anadalou Agency, Turkey

8 Aug

 https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/quran-burnings-assertion-of-broader-bias-against-immigrants-in-europe-ex-un-rapporteur/2962817

EUROPE

2 DAYS AGO

Quran burnings point to broader anti-immigrant bias: former UN Rapporteur

A surge in Quran burnings by far-right extremists triggers concern over anti-immigrant sentiment and freedom of expression, with a former UN special rapporteur calling it ‘an assertion of a broader anti-immigrant, anti-non-European right-wing bias’.

There is a ‘strong case’ for prohibition of such acts that ‘serve no possible constructive purpose,’ says Richard Falk / Photo: Reuters Archive.
REUTERS ARCHIVEThere is a ‘strong case’ for prohibition of such acts that ‘serve no possible constructive purpose,’ says Richard Falk / Photo: Reuters Archive.

A recent wave of the desecrating of the Quran, Islam’s holiest book in Sweden and Denmark is “an assertion of a broader anti-immigrant, anti-non-European right-wing bias that has grown to be quite politically strong,” according to a former UN special rapporteur.

“There’s no legitimate purpose by allowing groups to burn the holy scriptures of another religious faith,” Richard Falk, a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, said in a video interview.

“It seems to me to serve…no possible constructive purpose. And I think there is a strong case for (such acts to be) prohibited.”

In recent months, far-right extremist groups have desecrated and burnt several copies of the Quran in Denmark and neighboring Sweden, drawing fierce condemnation from Muslims around the world and calls for measures to stop such acts.

The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on July 25 that terms all acts of violence against holy books a violation of international law.

‘Is it hate speech?’

About the line between freedom of expression and actions that may be considered offensive to religious beliefs, Falk said they could fall under the umbrella of “free speech” but could be linked to a “formation of violent behaviour” in some cases.

On the question of limits to freedom of speech in cases where, for instance, it threatens security, he said: “Yes, it could be (limited) in certain contexts if it could be argued to be a threat to security”.

He said various European countries “have a less permissive view (than the US) of freedom of speech and are more concerned with prohibition of hate crime”.

“Therefore, this kind of act could be prohibited under the broad prohibition against hate speech, which exists, I know, in the UK and Germany, for instance,” he said, adding that the same may not be the case under Scandinavian laws.

Quran burnings could be “alleged to be hate speech,” said Falk, but it also depends on the precedent within a particular country or region.

Falk said that countries could pass laws to prevent attacks on holy books, emphasising that they “would have considerable international support at this point.”

“Because there is a recent UN resolution … that does say it’s contrary to international law, to burn or otherwise destroy,” he said. 

Threat of violence

Muslims around the world are concerned that these increasing attacks on the Quran could lead to more violence against the community itself.

With book burnings having been one of the main Nazi campaigns in the lead-up to the Holocaust, Falk warned that “democratic societies have to be vigilant against the repetition of this kind of genocidal behaviour because it obviously can be repeated.”

“It has, to a certain extent, been repeated recently in Myanmar, where the Muslim minority … was subjected to what many observers have defined as genocidal,” he said, referring to the plight of the Rohingya community.

Innovative Regional Dialogue: Iran, Iraq, and Six Gulf Countries

7 Aug

[Prefatory Note: The post below is a modified text of an August 2, 2023 interview by the Iranian journalist, Javad Heiran-Nia. The text containing my responses was published in the periodical, Tahrir Bazaar [link: < https://www.tahlilbazaar.com/news/235594/Professor-Falk-China-s-influence-in-the-Persian-Gulf-has-worried>] The focus is upon the regional dialogue scheduled for September 2023 between Iran and Iraq and the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), formed in 1981. It is a notable recent breakthrough by way of a new series of diplomatic initiatives to replace tensions with stability in the Middle East, and in the process gaining political independence from U.S./Israel hegemony. This development also reflects the increased involvement of China in the region, most strongly evident in promoting normalization of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia and by creating the political space to give Saudi Arabia and OPEC the self-confidence needed to set oil production and pricing on the basis of national interests rather than in response to international pressures exerted by oil-importing countries.]    


1. It is planned to hold a meeting this September at the initiative of the Secretary General of the United Nations with the participation of the foreign ministers of eight countries of Iran and Iraq and GCC members. The Secretary General’s initiative for regional dialogue is included in UN Security Council Resolution 598, which led to the end of the Iran-Iraq war. What is your assessment of this meeting?

It is notable that SC Res. 598 adopted in 1987 has not yet been implemented more than 35 years later. In view of the intervening conflicts, especially the Gulf War in 1991 and the US/UK in 2003 attack on Iraq, which was undertaken without UN authorization and in violation of the UN Charter this long delay is hardly surprising. Violations included recourse to international sanctions, non-defensive force, ‘shock and awe’ tactics. regime-changing intervention, prolonged occupation, denial of sovereign rights, failed state-building, it is notable that this old conflict resolution and war prevention resolution is being revived in this new serious, seemingly stability-seeking spirit. At this stage it is difficult to anticipate what will result from the September meeting because of the diverse motivations of the direct participants and attitudes of such leading influential international actors as the U.S. and China have not been disclosed. The willingness of the eight participating states to agree to hold an exploratory regional dialogue that includes Iran and Iraq is itself an encouraging development, suggesting that Israel, as well as the United States’ has less regional leverage in 2023 than previously for several interrelated reasons.

It is worthy of comment that the forthcoming regional dialogue is structured in a way that brings Iran and Iraq into conversation with Gulf countries rather than the entire Arab Middle East or the region as a whole. Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen have been excluded (along with Israel), and presumably were never invited. This diplomatic framework with its ad hoc sponsorship can also be understood as substituting the regional and sub-regional actors for the U.S. and even China as a preferred path to realizing a ‘comprehensive, just, honorable, and durable’ peace specified long ago in this Security Council initiative that was original a response to the long destructive war between Iraq and Iran. What lies behind such an extensive wording of peaceful relations in the contemporary setting has not been publicly disclosed at this point. It will become clearer in the course of the conference in September provided transcripts of the meetings are released or at least. a concluding Declaration is issued, the assembled foreign ministers meet with the media before and after the event, and most significantly agree to meet again or to keep meeting periodically.

The fact that it is a meeting of foreign ministers, and neither lower-level national representatives nor higher-level heads of state, suggests a rather strong commitment to the event by the participating governments. At the same time, there is no expectation that this single dialogue event,  no matter how successful the meeting and upbeat the Declaration, will itself produce immediate or spectacular results. It is best conceived as a promising beginning of a long overdue process of reconciliation and coexistence.

Iran stands to gain most from the event, and an ensuing process, as it is definitely a step toward reintegration into the normal politics and economics of the region and away from continued isolation. Saudi Arabia may also gain increased credibility for its recent efforts to pursue a more independent regional diplomacy, which at times has departed rather pointedly from the policies preferred by the U.S. Or maybe this event is favored because it somewhat balances and offsets Riyadh’s long rumored move toward a normalization of its relations with Israel. At this point, such conjectures should not be taken too seriously. The fact that the conference is taking place at all is a hopeful breakthrough considering the conflictual atmosphere of recent decades in the Middle East, particularly in interactions with Iran. A major unknown involves the extent to which non-participating regional and extra-regional actors will exert obstruct proceedings from behind the scenes.

2. After the improvement of the relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia, improvement in the relations between Iran and other Arab countries can be seen. To what extent can creating a mechanism for regional dialogue be successful in such an atmosphere?

This UN sponsored conference seems definitely to parallel recent inter-governmental diplomacy that began normalizing Iran’s relationship with the Arab World after decades of tension and hostile engagement as in the course of the Syrian War that began in 2011. The September conference can also be contextualized in relation to declining U.S. hegemonic ambitions, capabilities, and strategic priorities in the region, and a slowly shifting geographic emphasis on attaining stability. A further consideration is the interplay between Israel’s search for diplomatic normalcy with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, and this Iran/Iraq/Gulf move toward normalization of relations as a foundation for achieving internal cohesion and stability.

Also relevant is the rise of other regional concerns on the part of the U.S. and others, including non-political challenges within the region encouraging replacing conflictual relations with. cooperative ones on a priority basis. Severe stresses are already being experienced throughout the Middle attributable to severe global warming, which has brought record heat impairing health and even threatening future livability within the region. Responsible statecraft of regional actors needs more than ever to focus its problem-solving capabilities on these new threats to wellbeing arising out of rising instabilities between modernizing economies and the natural habitat. In this sense, militarism and warfare become expensive distractions from too longed delayed efforts to achieve national and human security given the greatly altered ecological and political conditions in the contemporary world.

3. Following the reduction of America’s presence in the region, diplomacy in the region regarding important security issues for the countries of the region has increased. Do you evaluate this process as tactical or strategic?

It seems to me that caution is in order about present and near future regional roles of major non-Middle East actors. Not only are political differences being reexamined under present conditions, but also the prospect of achieving peaceful coexistence as between the Gulf monarchies and the Islamic Republic of Iran, despite their continued adherence to antagonistic traditions of Islamic theology and practice. Another uncertainty concerns whether recent American preoccupations elsewhere in the world, especially Ukraine and Taiwan, have given Saudi leaders the confidence needed to keep engaging with Iran and others beyond its borders giving priority to its national interests. Also relevant is whether prolonged suffering from regional hostility and an international sanctions regime has increased Iran’s interest in the potential benefits of dialogue, especially if it is allowed to be a stepping-stone toward reconciliation and relations based on common interests and mutual benefits. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia have likely been negatively affected by their antagonistic involvements in the political turmoil in Yemen, which may partly underlie their joint willingness to substitute stability for conflict as the cornerstone of their future national security.

4. China’s participation in the region – although it does not have a wide military and security aspect at the moment – what effect will it have on regional trends?

The increased diplomatic activism of China contrasts with the essentially militarized diplomacy practiced previously by the United States in the region often openly in support of Saudi and Israeli goals, as in Yemen or with respect to the Palestinian struggle for basic rights. I believe China’s surprisingly skillful effort to achieve a dialogue between Riyadh and Tehran has created confusion in Washington. Should the U.S. attempt to reassert its hegemonic ambitions through coercive diplomacy or should it pursue its own version of normalizing and stability-oriented diplomacy in the region? To what extent is China motivated by its concerns relating to energy security and assurances of access to Gulf oil? And to what extent is China sending the U.S. Government a message to the effect if it intrudes on the traditional Indo-Pacific preoccupations of China, then China will reciprocate by intruding in areas where there has been a strong U.S. presence.

As I consider the Ukraine War to be partly about geopolitical alignments after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, much will depend on whether global security maintains its unipolar structure that emerged after the Soviet implosion in 1992 or reverts to some new type of bipolarity (perhaps China/Russia v. NATO/India) or transitions to forms of multipolarity that seek a greater reliance on cooperative global problem-solving for the sake of national, and even more, human security.

5. To what extent can commercial relation and economic interdependency be used for regional dialogues?

I believe that robust commercial relations under most conditions produce positive forms of economic interdependency, which in turn strengthens processes of conflict-resolving dialogue. Such a momentum also builds the political foundations for increases in trade, investment, tourism, cultural exchanges in the common interest, yielding mutual benefits. And yet such economic dimensions cannot be assumed as necessarily having these positive effects. It depends on the perceive balancing of complex interests and often contradictory perceptions, as well as the presence or absence of geopolitical pressures. It is difficult to generalize about such matter, which always depend on contextual factors, which are constantly in flux.

For reasons suggested earlier, regional and global developments currently support stabilizing diplomacy and the expansion of mutually beneficial economic relations among countries that have spent the last half century or more in unproductive, costly, dangerous conflict. The impact of such developments on relations with Israel, especially considering that the current internal ferment in that country remains a great, yet relevant, unknown. If the extremist Netanyahu government manages to hold onto power it may try to distract attention from internal confrontations by restoring national unity by recourse to actions that deliberately increase regional tensions, especially with Iran, backed by inflammatory claims that Israel’s national security is at stake. It is questionable whether this old diversionary game will work under present conditions, but moves in that direction could be dangerous nevertheless. Also, dangerous and posing regional and extra-regional challenges would be the implementation of annexationist and one-state visions on the part of the apartheid, settler colonial, Jewish exclusionary state of Israel.  

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Why is Palestine’s West Bank Under Assault by Settlers and Netanyahu Coalition Government?

24 Jul

[Prefatory Note: The post below is a stylistically modified version of my conversation with independent journalist Daniel Falcone, which was published online in CounterPunch on July 21, 2023 under the title Collective Forgetting and the Politics of the West Bank. It tries to clarify the focus on Israel’s intensified repression concentrated on the West Bank since the Netanyahu coalition government took control. While the media focus has been focused on ‘the judiciary overhaul’ confrontation between antagonistic Jewish factions as to the ‘democratic’ character of Israel, the unifying themes in apartheid Israel remain the further marginalization of the Palestinians in their own. Homeland and matters of internal and national security. The Biden response is to act as if the only crisis worth addressing is that of Jew against Jew with regard to the contested issue of judicial reform, which if resolved consensually,  will permit the U.S. and rightest autocrats to reaffirm ‘shared values’ and ‘common strategic interests.’ A related question not directly covered in our dialogue is to ask is why the UN is so quiet about these disturbing developments, especially ignoring the obvious applicability of the legal norm of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) even as a prolonged Israeli occupation daily defies international law and the UN Charter, subjecting Palestinians to a deprivation of their basic rights in a period that has last for over a half century.

 

Why is Palestine’s West Bank Under Assault by Settlers and Netanyahu Coalition Government?

  1. With much of the Mideast in terms of current affairs, the reporting on human rights and the plight of Palestinians is usually geared towards a coverage of Gaza, Jerusalem and Israel proper. Could you provide a brief history of the West Bank and the significance of this landlocked occupied territory? In your estimation, is the region overlooked?

You raise an important, indeed a vital question, by wondering why until quite recently the media focus on human rights issues, weak as it has been with respect to Israel overall, has mainly given attention to events involving Gaza and East Jerusalem, while indirectly fostering an impression of virtual normalcy on the West Bank. I think a partial answer has to do with the relationship of these three Palestinian territories occupied since the 1967 War to the policy priorities of the Zionist agenda. In effect, East Jerusalem was extinguished as a separate international political entity shortly after a ceasefire was negotiated in 1967. Israel quickly moved to enlarge the spatial limits of Jerusalem, declared the unified, enlarged city as the eternal capital not only of Israel but of the Jewish people, and has so administered the city ever since. This unilateral move in violation of the ceasefire diplomacy was repudiated in the UN General Assembly and Security Council by large majorities of UN members but was never further challenged at the Security Council (because of the U.S. veto) or the World Court (International Court of Justice). Jerusalem as capital of Israel became the operative reality for the country, but not for most governments in the world, including surprisingly even many NATO .members who continued to believe that peace could be found if Palestinian statehood was agreed upon with East Jerusalem as capital.

When the Trump White House in 2017 broke ranks and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and announced its intention to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem the GA reacted, condemning the proposed U.S. diplomatic departure from the UN consensus as ‘null and void’ by a. vote of 128-9 (35 abstentions; 21 absences) [GA ES-10/10/29, Dec. 21, 2017; shortly before, the Security Council supported a similar position by 14-1, but the U.S. blocked action by casting its veto]. The embassy was moved and as always, no adverse effects for Israel followed this defiance of International Law and UN authority. When Biden took over the U.S. presidency in 2021 he did nothing to modify or even moderate Trump’s extremely one-sided approach that exceeded prior forms of U.S. pro-Israeli partisanship, including that of Biden’s Democratic Party predecessor, Barack Obama. This Biden behavior is a strong confirmation that bipartisanship persists when it comes to Israel, despite the overall political mood, which is one of polarization. By so acting Biden tends to disregard even the most Trump-supported Israeli disruptive departures from the UN consensus and the requirements of international law. Yet unlike Trump Biden lamely reiterated the U.S. commitment to a two-state solution totally overlooking how much Israel’s dailly actions were making such a politically negotiated outcome almost impossible to imagine, This gave the continuing advocacy of the two-state approach an increasingly zombie-like quality, and. made Biden appear naïve or muddled, and Trump at least forthright and consistent..

The UN as an Organization, never formally accepted, nor did it meaningfully challenge, this outcome of de facto revisions of the Security Council 242 unanimous decision calling for Israeli withdrawal from all Palestinian territories occupied during the war and a just settlement of the refugee controversy, Successive UN Special Rapporteurs on Israeli violations of international law in the OPT continued to treat Israel as an Occupying State in East Jerusalem with full responsibility to uphold international humanitarian law as set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation. These well-evidenced charges angered Israel to the point of ending any semblance of cooperation with the UN, a move that ran counter to its treaty obligations as a UN Member to cooperate in the discharge of activity authorized by UN procedures. It needs to be recalled that the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) was understood as a temporary interlude, prefiguring the territorial boundaries of an independent Palestine state that was widely, and at first, genuinely believed to be the indispensable and realizable precondition for an Israeli/Palestine durable peace, with East Jerusalem serving as the capital of. Palestine.  

With respect to Gaza, although the same OPT designation as used for East Jerusalem and the West Bank was adopted at the UN after the 1967 War, its relationship to Israel and Zionism, or to the UN/US image of a peace process, was quite different than either that of East Jerusalem or the West Bank, which is explained by the fact that under most readings of the. Zionist Project Gaza is not included in standard conceptions of the permanent territorial delimitation of the Jewish supremist state. According to Jewish tradition the biblically specified Jewish entitlement in Palestine did not include Gaza, which was not part of the Jewish imaginary of ‘the promised land.’.

Israel did occupy Gaza for many years after 1967, and even established a number of unlawful settlements in the coastal region of the Strip, Nevertheless, Gaza was never a. territorial priority for Israel, which explains the adoption and relative uncontroversial implementation of Ariel Sharon’s 2005 ‘disengagement plan’ calling for the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the dismantling of the settlements. From a UN/international standpoint, Israel’s plan of disengagement had no legal effect on Israel’s continuing responsibilities of Israel as an Occupying Power regarding the administration of the Gaza Strip, In terms of the modalities of Israeli control, disengagement amounted to little more than a redeployment of IDF occupying troops on the Israeli side of the Gaza borders reinforced by a variety of miliary penetrations ranging from overflights emitting terrifying sonic booms to massive incursions with advanced weaponry.

Until very recently Gaza seemed mainly an economic and security burden for Israel, accentuated as previously mentioned that it was seldom included among Zionist territorial objectives and besides was thought of as a difficult demographic pill for Israel to swallow given its civilian population of 2.1 million, with about two-thirds living as refugees in camps, mainly families descended from those dispossessed by the Nakba in 1948. In addition, Gazans did not endure their fate passively. Gaza has long been a thorn in Israel’s side, being the site of several radical forms of Palestinian resistance, including both the intifadas of 1987 and 2000, militant forms of resistance, The Great March of Return (March 2017-December 2019), and the heartland of Hamas. In 2006 Hamas was partly enticed by Washington to abandon armed struggle and participate in the 2006 Gaza elections, being assured that this was a way of moving toward ‘peace’ or at least ‘peaceful co-existence,’ which Hamas leaders were proposing during this period. Despite this background, the Hamas electoral victory defied Washington’s expectations and came as a shock. It also produced a harsh Israeli response awkwardly supported by the U.S., leading to the imposition of a comprehensive punitive blockade that has remained in force since 2007, periodic large-scale military incursions causing much devastation and serving as a show case for new Israeli weapons and counterinsurgency tactics, the scene of frequent targeted assassinations, and a deterrent warning to Arab neighbors and Iran to avoid provoking Israel or expect punishing military attacks as directed at Syria and Lebanon over the years..

When it comes to Israel proper, the settler colonial discourse is relevant and has been more recently relied upon to explain the. history of the struggle through the optic of the Palestinian narrative, featuring an apartheid regime of ethnic control and repression. Palestinians are effectively marginalized within Israel, currently threatened by the prospect of a single Jewish supremist state that incorporates the entire OPT, plus or minus Gaza, and enjoys legal status in Israel by virtue of the Basic Law adopted in 2018.. The only internal obstacle to carrying out this maximalist version of the Zionist Project seems to be the resistance mounted in the West Bank, typified by the deep attachment of the residents to what they feel and understandably believe to be their homeland. The interplay of. oppressive rule and tragic circumstances, given meaning and dignity by Palestinian sumud or steadfastness, and expressed by the common extreme sayings popular among WB residents: “If we had the chance we would choose death over living under occupation” or “living from lack of death.” This situation is made more acute by the absence of proper Palestinian representation in international and domestic venues, exemplified

by the collaborationist Palestinian Authority and the fragmentation of Palestinian unity arising from bitter ongoing tensions between the PA and Hamas.

Given the extremist government in Israel since the beginning of 2023, this shift in attention. to the West Bank seemed inevitable. Netanyahu’s coalition government has given a green light to settler violence and extremist strivings, apparently to bring an end to the conflict through tactics of state-endorsed terror, ethnic cleansing, dispossession, settlement expansion, and total demoralization of West Bank Palestinian communities. It represents the last desperate stage of settler colonialism in which the objective is to totally subdue and marginalize the resisting native population., In some historical instances of settler colonialism the people of the land are virtually eliminated as an oppositional presence (U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand). It is also widely believed by settler communities if they do not win by such a replacement logic, they lose as in South Africa or Algeria.

  • 2. How would you gauge and evaluate the international responses to the West Bank and the human rights abuses that take place there in terms of the following two areas: 1) political and legal institutions and 2) the press coverage around the world? 

We should not believe that the period before the recent Israeli government took over was free from systemic and severe human rights abuses by Israel in its role as Occupying Power of the West Bank. The issues of excessive force, unlawful settlements, house demolitions, internal mobility restrictions, collective punishments, de facto annexation, separation wall, apartheid were all present ever since the occupation commenced in 1967, and each represented serious violations of international law. At the same time, the extremists in the present Israeli government have scaled up the intensity, overtness, and blunt and defiant racism of preexisting Israel’s repressive policies and practices. To the extent that the Israeli government has responded to international criticism it has either claimed ‘security’ or ‘counterterrorist’ justifications, accompanied by a bright shining green light of hands-off approval to settler violence no matter how vicious and overt, as with the. genocidal burning of the Palestinian Village of Harawa on February 26, 2023. The attack on the Jenin refugee camp for several days in early July was a horror show for the people on the that was given scant international media coverage, given the magnitude and indiscriminate character of the Israeli violence. Such displays of excessive force flagrantly violates the duties of an Occupying Power under international humanitarian law, and has led recent UN Special Rapporteurs to declare Israel’s continued status as an authorized Occupying Power under the 4th Geneva Convention at an end.

In effect, political and legal institutions in Israel have given their approval to these settler

outbursts, which can only be seen as an attempt to make the West Bank unlivable for Palestinians, and thus should be interpreted as a campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of a people long held captive in their own homeland. The use of the IDF to mount a major military operation, involving death and devastation, against the refugee camp in Jenin was a further indication that Israeli settlers were not lone wolf predators, but part of a public/private campaign to complete the Zionist Project by imposing Israel’s rule over the whole of Occupied Palestine except for Gaza, that is, a single supremist and exclusivist Israel state of the Jewish people, containing as few Palestinians as possible. There is also renewed talk among this new brand of Israeli leadership favoring the reoccupation and resettlement of Gaza, possibly reflecting partly the extension of expansionist goals beyond the promised land and partly the realization that being situated next to Egypt and the scene of recently discovered offshore natural gas fields gives Gaza a previously unappreciated strategic importance.

The main media coverage has focused on the violent events, and in the West given a typically misleading ‘both sides’ treatment of the issue of responsibility, blaming the Palestinians, especially Hamas and Islamic Jihad, for an upsurge of terrorist incidents while mildy criticizing Israel for over-reacting by entrusting the shaping of its security policies to such leading extremist figures as Itamar Ben-Gvir, currently the Minister of National Security. There is very little interpretative assessment to be found on the main media platforms as to why this Israeli intensification of West Bankl violence is currentlly occurring, and thus little public understanding of what underlies this new stage of Israel/Palestine confrontational politics. It requires heeding a Zionist ideologue such as Tom Friedman of the NY Times to give a cynical realist account that makes overt what had long been common knowledge among independent commentators and UN diplomats that Palestinian statehood was never intended to become a reality but was useful only because it served Israel and the U.S. as ‘a shared fiction.’ [July 11, 2023], and amazingly, despite its implausibility, still does. The two-state mantra has served all along as the cynical keynote of the beguiling charade called ‘a peace process’ in which Washington has long helped Israeli leaders manage off-stage, a demeaning story well-documented by Rashid Khalidi in his pre-Trump Brokers of Deceit (2013). In truth, Trump’s value added for Israel was to end the deceitful core of Washington’s ‘honest broker’ posture and bring U.S. policies into the bright sunlight of undisguised partisanship. In a new twist, Friedman proposes an opportunistic revival of two-statism as still the most viable path to a sustainable peace, better for Israel and the U.S. than the present Netanyahu’s push for one-statism. In Friedman’s words, “it is vital that Biden urgently take steps to re-energize the possibility of a two-state solution and give it at least some concrete diplomatic manifestation on the ground.” [NYT, May 25, 2023.]

Put differently, the media coverage gives some attention to the trees (the violence), but seems mindless about the fate of the forest (the underlying scheme). The West Bank strength of Palestinian sumud  is an extraordinary display of resolve to remain attached to land and place. It is the background of the mounting Palestinian resistance to Israel’s effort to appropriate the land, olive orchards, and traditions of a rooted people. The present Israeli government conceives of this struggle to achieve supremacy in the West Bank as the overdue last act in a suspenseful political drama that has unnecessarily lasted so long in a wasteful effort to appease world opinion and satisfy allies.

While most of the. world, including the NATO West, is distracted by Ukraine and the challenges of climate change, this Netanyahu government apparently is seizing an opportunity to achieve two hard-right victories (away from constitutional democracy, and crushing Palestinian resistance). In this unfolding situation, the Palestinians rally to stay engaged in a struggle that they remained determined to win eventually, having the flow of anti-colonial history, as well as law and morality on their side. Israel, in contrast, seems caught between a final fulfillment of the Zionist dream and a fear that its house of cards may collapse as happened elsewhere, especially in South Africa. In these circumstances Netanyahu’s Israel is trying to impose an anti-democratic judicial overhaul of the Israel state to remove obstructions to institutionalizing autocratic populism that is pitting Jew against Jew in Israel in a deep struggle of marginal significance to Palestinian aspirations. Yet it keeps American leaders awake because the Jewish veneer of democracy is vanishing before their eyes and with it the credibility of the claim of ‘shared values’ and ‘shared interests,’ used to validate the continued large annual appropriations of U.S. taxpayer funds as well as the official posture of seeing no evil. Although the U.S. Congress seems undaunted and as blindfolded as ever backing a resolution of continuing unconditional support for Israel by a vote of 412-9 on July 18th, that is after weeks of the judiciary overhaul protests and the brutal attack with drones and hundreds of troops on the densely inhabited Jenin refugee camp, cutting electricity and water, and ripping up many of the camp’s roads with bulldozers.

  • 3. The US-backed recent attack on the Jenin refugee camp on July 4, 2023 saw thousands fleeing for safety for those lucky enough to survive. One feature of the violence is the profound effect it’s having on women and children in the region and the society. Can you describe how the Israeli policies exist within a framework of sexism and childism as well as classism and racism?

You pose very deep questions about this reality, climaxing recently, at Jenin. From the Israeli point of view, the most vulnerable among the Palestinians have been victimized throughout the prolonged occupation. Partly this reflects the fact that children often were the most visible and innocent of resistors, imprudently throwing their symbolic stones at their high tech Israeli military oppressors, and thus encountering the security apparatus most directly and disturbingly, with a recent World Bank survey finding that as many as 58% of Palestinian children living under occupation are suffering from mental disorders of depression and PYSD.[Haaretz, July 16, 2023] This all takes place in the context of a pervasive repressive social structure that encompasses class, race, religion, and gender hierarchical distinctions, and what amounts to the Orientalist erasure of the Palestinian people. It is notable that in the principal rendition of Friedman’s recalibration of support for Israel, in effect, letting Israel be Israel without liberal softeners, there is not a word of empathy for the Palestinian ordeal or even the now acknowledged fiction of seeking a political compromise that turns out to have been all along a cruel, prolonged instance of ‘fake diplomacy.’ [See Philip Weiss, “’Apartheid’ Says Tom Friedman, Mondoweiss, July 15, 2023]

4) With the reemergence of Elliott Abrams, can you comment on the path forward for the Biden Administration and talk about how the recent attacks move us further away from roadmaps to achieving peace in the West Bank?

It has become clear that when it comes to human rights the Biden presidency is tone deaf, self-righteously condemning rivals for their violations while using its diplomatic leverage to. shield Israel and others from justified criticism, double standards writ large equates with moral hypocrisy. The appointment of Elliott Abrams to the U.S Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy should appall what’s left of the liberal conscience. [See Sarah Jones, Why is the Biden Administration Rewarding Elliott Abrams? Foreign Policy, July 6, 2023] It is well known that Abrams, as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, knowingly fashioning a partial coverup of the El Mazote 1981 massacre of over 1,000 left civilian opponents of the repressive government, by a U.S. trained death squad in El Salvador. In subsequent roles, Abrams has been unconditional supporter of Israel over the years backing its most controversial behavior and castigating critics. [Detailed critiques of Abrams’ career see Eric Alterman, “Confirmed: Elliott Abrams Defense of Murder Was Based on Lies,” The Nation,June 30, 2020} To select someone with Abrams’ record relative to human rights as a high-profile consultant on diplomatic policy is to drop the veil of liberal innocence altogether. It is, perhaps, a further indication that Friedman’s shift to ‘fake diplomacy’ is part of a broader revisioning of American political identity, although it makes even emptier Biden’s already vapid championship of an alliance of democracies.

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SHAPE Webinar: Asia-Pacific NATO: Fanning the Flames of War

28 Jun

SHAPEflyer

I encourage attendance at this webinar under the auspices of SHAPE (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth), on July 4 or 5, despending on time zone, devoted to encroachment of NATO on Asia-Pacifice security, with excellent speakers. Go to website of SHAPE PROJECT for details.

http://www.theshapeproject.com
An Asia-Pacific NATO: Fanning the Flames of War A SHAPE international webinar As part of SHAPE’s (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth) mission to expose the perils of confronta2on in the nuclear age and explore pathways to a safer, just and sustainable future, this webinar will explore the rising militarism in the Asia Pacific region, and the threat it poses to regional and global security. Importantly the webinar will go beyond analysis. It will offer crea2ve ideas on what can be done to avert a major disaster and move the Asia-Pacific region from confronta2on to coopera2ve coexistence. With special guests Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, President of the UN Sustainable Development SoluYons Network, Co-Chair of the Council of Engineers for the Energy TransiYon, and academician of the PonYfical Academy of Social Sciences at the VaYcan. He is SDG Advocate for UN Secretary General António Guterres. He previously served as Special Advisor to UN Secretaries- General Kofi Annan (2001-7) and Ban Ki-moon (2008-16). Professor Victor Gao is Vice President of the Beijing-based Center for China and GlobalizaYon, and Chair Professor of Soochow University. He has extensive experience in government, diplomacy, securiYes regulaYon, legal affairs, investment banking, private equity, and corporate management. He was Deng Xiaoping’s English interpreter, and has worked with the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the UN Secretariat, and the SecuriYes and Futures Commission of Hong Kong. Dr Alison Broinowski was an Australian diplomat unYl 1996. She served as Director, Japan SecYon, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and then Director, Australia-Japan FoundaYon, and later Chargé d’Affaires with the Australian Embassy in Jordan. Her last overseas assignment was at the Australian Mission to the UN in New York. Her PhD is in Asian Studies (Australian NaYonal University). She is the President of Australians for War Powers Reform. Professor Chung-in Moon is DisYnguished University Professor of Yonsei University. He previously served as the Special Advisor to President Moon Jae-in of South Korea for UnificaYon, Foreign Affairs and NaYonal Security. He was also an Ambassador for InternaYonal Security for the ROK Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and akended the 1st (2000) and 2nd (2007) Korean summits as a special delegate. He is Co-Convener of the Asia- Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-proliferaYon and Disarmament, and Editor-in-Chief of Global Asia. MAPW This event is co-sponsored by:
Tuesday 4 July 2023 Hawaii 5:00pm
Los Angeles 7:00pm New York 10:00pm Wednesday 5 July 2023 Registra7on & enquiries To register, visit: http://www.theshapeproject.com For queries, email SHAPE London 3:00am Athens 5:00am New Delhi 7:30am Jakarta 9:00am KL/Perth/Shanghai 10:00am Tokyo/Seoul 11:00am Melbourne 12:00pm Auckland/Fiji 2:00pm

Daniel Ellsberg: An American Hero

25 Jun

Prefatory Note: The following post was written a few days after Daniel Ellsberg’s death, which occurred on June 16, 2023.

It was published in its original form on June 23 in Counterpunch under a different title, and republished several time since. This version takes advantage of reactions from others and reflections by myself.

Points of Departure

Daniel Ellsberg’s death like his life occurred with flair and purpose. Dan (a cherished fried for more than 65 years) had taken the unusual step of sharing with the world the deeply personal news that he had only a few months to live, and even less to be active, as he was just diagnosed as suffering from inoperable pancreatic cancer. It was clear that Dan was not seeking pity or adulation by the release of this sad news. The clear purpose of such a public message was to let be known to all who care that he would continue to devote his energy as long as he could to the urgent struggle to make the world less prone to nuclear mega-catastrophes. Dan firmly believed that we humans are living at a unique time of ominous global danger, and he personally felt an imperative to take action. This inspirational message personified Daniel Ellsberg’s special human qualities of belief, courage, commitment, and enagement that made him a heroic figure for so many of us. It should be added that Dan’s love of life and people made him far more humanly lovable than if he had confined himself to being an austere political crusader. 

I had the opportunity to have two long phone conversations at that fragile interface between Dan’s intense engagement with world history and the ravages of the disease. During these talks I mostly listened. It became obvious to me that Dan had lost none of his cerebral brilliance or weakened in his resolve to warn humanity of an increasingly imminent nuclear danger if geopolitics as usual continued on the path taken since the outbreak of the Ukraine War. Besides the warning, Dan also believed there were many things of a political and technical nature could and should be done to reduce immediate risks such as de-alerting the missiles and declaring a No First Use. policy. Yet without any doubt, Dan’s fundamental vision was safely to achieve a denuclearized and demilitarized world.

In our talks, Dan’s was preoccupied, in his relentlessly exhausting probing mental style to elucidate root causes, with an anguished awareness that this meant acknowledging. That the threat of species extinction was now present on the horizon of likely human futures. Dan wondered aloud as to whether the disasters he feared, would in fact result in the literal end of our species. He attached importance to a view that even though the imminent global catastrophes would be  of unprecedented gravity they would not result in extinction,  even in the eventuality of a ’nuclear winter’ scenario. Such an event would be devastating beyond imagination on a civilizational level, and yet Dan believed it was still almost certain that  there would be some human survivors, even if they constituted nothing more than remnants of humanity. Dan was never content with vague generalities, but insisted on getting to the concrete bottom of things. In this spirit he went on to speculate as I recollect, ‘that likely 8 or 10% of humanity would probably survive, and that’s still a lot of people.’ Not that he envied the survivors, but he wanted to stress that dire as the situation was it should not be assumed to be bio-political closure for the species. It was through ‘the glass darkly’ of these grim reflections that he viewed the situation confronting humanity. These long shadows, more than anything else, led Dan to lament and condemn the utter recklessness of Biden’s seeming resolve to engage in a geopolitical war with Russia, teaching Moscow and Putin a stay-at-home lesson in the aftermath of the aggressive, if irresponsibly provoked, attack against Ukraine.

With news of Ellsberg’s imminent demise broadcast widely the mainstream media was finally awakened to write and interview him extensively, and generally sympathetically. Most accounts and interviews placed their emphasis quite naturally on the drama and legacy of Dan’s 1971 release for publication in the NY Times and Washington Post of the Pentagon Papers, and how this  ‘invention’ of whistleblowing left behind a precedent seized upon, whether self-consciously or not, by others. Yet unlike these subsequent notable whistleblowers, Dan’s work did not cease with the disclosure of specific official dirty deeds hidden from the citizenry by secrecy regulations and dragnet espionage laws. His peace activism had barely began. In the course of the next half century Dan distinguished himself as both a tireless activist and as an author producing two pedagogical memoirs of lasting value. [Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2003); The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, 2017].

Dan deserves all the praise he is receiving, and even more, yet I find that two major elements of his strikingly original mental and humanistic qualities have been so far largely missing in the many recent valuable assessments of his life and death. At most Dan’s unusual career journey from being a star consultant to the Pentagon and RAND on the Vietnam War and nuclear war plans to becoming a world renowned anti-nuclear activist and peace worker who was arrested and imprisoned numerous times over the years, was mentioned as milestones in the early phase of his life journey. I found little commentary on what made Dan’s personal trajectory so remarkable, requiring courage, insight, persistence, timing, and a truth-telling sense of mission. From my vantage point I will do my best to reduce this gap in understanding and appreciation.

Daniel Ellsberg’s Trajectory

I first encountered Dan during 1957-58, a year we were both at Harvard. Unlike me, Dan was a rising star, making his name as a strategic wizard who even while a student was doing pioneering work in exploring the use of nuclear weapons as a potent weapon by which to threaten and blackmail adversaries, aside from its more familiar deterrent roles in preventing or fighting wars.

We had initially been brought together for a dinner by an engaging apolitical journalist who convinced me that I should meet Dan because we were in her judgment soulmates. How wrong, or at any rate, premature she was, as we sparred throughout the evening about Cold War issues and I regarded Dan as a gifted, but dangerous, ‘defense intellectual’ of the sort I would be later surrounded by in my early years at Princeton. Yet looking back on that mutually unpleasant evening, I now realize there was one element of Dan’s hawkishness that set him apart from his likeminded militarist cohort, a quality that would a decade later be the bedrock of his explosive progressive behavior.

He was already in 1958 as he was after he switched sides, someone who deeply enjoyed both friendship and comradery, based on consistent solidarity, believing deeply that he was doing the right thing. Later at Princeton when I had antagonistic contact with several leading defense intellectuals, I noted their careerist motivations and amoral, often cynically playful intellectuality that contrasted with Dan’s intense moral convictions that functioned as his lifelong anchor, making him always a person driven by responsiveness to the dictates of conscience rather than of naked ambition or expressive of a cavalier attitude of many leading ‘war thinkers’ toward the menace of nuclear war, perhaps to hide from the horror of it all, including their refusal to behave responsibly.

Endowed with an amazingly gifted, quirky mind and astonishing energy, Dan was further animated by an ardent passion to make a difference in all that he undertook. These lofty standards of performance he set for himself starts with his outstanding academic record from high school (and maybe earlier) through graduate school, reinforced ever after by performative excellence in whatever he chose to do.

Even taking account of his mainstream Cold War outlook as a young man at Harvard it was rather unusual for someone with his background, interests, social position, and professional opportunities to seek enlistment in the U.S. Marines as Dan did in 1954. He served as a junior officer for several years including an overseas assignment in the Middle East during the Suez Operation of 1956, earning him a promotion by the time he de-enlisted.

This military service was followed by a period as an influential consultant to Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, who sent Dan to Vietnam in 1964 to evaluate U.S. so-called ‘civilian pacification programs’ (really killing machines at the village level apparently improvised as counterinsurgency tools by the CIA) in order to advise him on the conduct of the war. This stint was followed by working for 18 months alongside Major Gen. Edward Lansdale, a legendary counterinsurgency specialist, although to some a reckless adventurer. Dan’s assignment while working with Lansdale included going on extremely risky combat patrols in Vietnamese jungles.

He would later talk about his growing doubts about the way the war was being fought and the suffering inflicted on the Vietnamese people, but was not yet ready to break openly with the U.S. policies in the Vietnam War. Yet again, Dan was motivated by doing the right thing. He reasoned, during his official advising years, that even if the war was not going well or eventually proved unwinnable, the U.S. campaign was benevolent at its core, aiming at giving the Vietnamese a better life than they could expect under communism and  being a reasonable extension of the overall American diplomatic and military effort to prevent World War III by containing Sino-Soviet expansion in Asia. These views of Dan I never shared, and he would soon himself reject.

Then came the remarkable change from his posture as an expert trying to figure out a winning strategy in Vietnam to a rejection of the whole undertaking, and thus in harmony with various strands of the growing Vietnamese peace movement. His disillusionment with the Vietnam War that intensified over time after he returned to the U.S. to continu working as a top consultant grand strategy at the RAND corporation, then the prime venue of ‘war thinkers.’ In collaboration with my former Princeton graduate student, Tony Russo, another convert to radical anti-war activism due to what he experienced in Vietnam, especially in working on RAND’s prisoner interrogation program, which was carried on with no regard for the protection accorded to enemy prisoners of war by international humanitarian law. It was in that alien militarist atmosphere at RAND that this pair of former supporters of the Vietnam War spent their evenings copying the Pentagon Papers.

Of course, copying itself was a daring act even without disclosure, given the highly classified character of many documents comprising the 3,000 pages of Pentagon material brought together in a classified study entitled “U.S. Decision Making in Vietnam Policy,  1945-68” on which Ellsberg had himself worked on briefly while working at the Department of Defense.  The drama of arranging publication and the post-publication pushback by the Nixon presidency has received much commentary and is widely treated as the highlight of Dan’s turn toward activism.

Dan had become utterly convinced that the American people deserved to know that they had been lied to by their elected leaders for years about the progress in the war, as the war went on year after year and the casualty figures for Americans and Vietnamese rose higher and higher, but he had no appetite for martyrdom. The keystone of his initial effort was to make the copied documents discreetly available to anti-war Congressmen and trusted media platforms whom he felt had a constitutional duty to make public use of the Pentagon study in furtherance of the public interest. Dan felt that knowing the truth about how badly the war was going in Vietnam would make its continuation a political impossibility, and in a sense he was proven correct. At first, he imposed a strict condition on those he handed the documents, including myself, that his identity as the source not be disclosed. This condition was notoriously breached by Neal Sheehan of the NY Times because of the unwillingness of the newspaper to publish without authenticating the source. In any event Dan’s role was already known by the FBI. I was visited by two agents at my home a few days after I received the Papers, which was well before the newspaper publishing began. Needless to say, I refused to cooperate, including later on when I was summoned to testify by a Federal Grand Jury in Boston established to determine whether indictable crimes had been committed by the release of the Papers.

Again, Dan was determined to do the right thing, but prudently.  Subsequently, this resolve was always centermost and without further second thoughts. Contrary to his earlier beliefs Dan grew convinced that the U.S. government definitely could not be counted on to do the right thing, and in fact was so structured as invariably to do the wrong thing. At the same time, Dan steadfastly refrained from releasing material that would expose sensitive foreign intelligence agents or impart inflammatory material to foreign adversaries.

Special Qualities of Mind, Spirit, Dramatization, and Obsessive Dedication

Moral Compass: What I mainly want to impart is through it all Dan impressively never lost trust in his moral compass or his political identity. He wanted to do the right thing always, and was willing, although not eager, to pay heavy costs for doing so, earning him high profile defamatory attacks from the likes of Kissinger and Nixon. Yet he remained an American patriot throughout his life, who drew vivid no-go lines in his mind when it came to anti-government activism and civil disobedience. Unlike many radical activists Dan knew the difference between civil disobedience (to the law) and espionage (against his country, as typified by those documents in among the Pentagon Papers he refused to release).

Mastery reinforcing brilliance. Another notable feature in Dan’s way of taking political stands was his refusal to commit his illuminating energy until he had mastered a subject with penetrating, memorable precision. He spent his activist life on opposing the Vietnam War by every non-violent means at his disposal including insider knowledge and extensive field experience in combat zones. During the last several decades his concern mainly focused on multi-faceted opposition to the way the U.S, government addressed risks of nuclear war with both the knowledge of a brilliant insider and someone who penetrated below the surface of public knowledge to uncover the terrifying nature of highly secretive nuclear war plans.

Dramatization of Knowledge and Action Dan had a natural disposition to dramatize knowledge and action that had the effect of maximizing the impact of whatever he undertook, whether in public or private. Without doubt, the saga of the Pentagon Papers is the most publicized drama of his life, but throughout, no other public intellectual was so publicly articulate and poised about why he was doing what he did. He once told me during the media frenzy after the Papers were finally released, “I wish I could always be the way I am on television.”  For me, a scary prospect, for him, not a matter of vanity, but of an infectious passion to make a difference by what he did, especially when his reputation or life were at risk.

Love and Politics Well Mixed. As the outpouring of grief exhibits, Dan will be as remembered for his loving modes of relating to family, friends, and co-activists as for his political engagements, exploits, and achievements. Unlike many in the peace movement who were personally detached or narrowly focused on daunting political challenges, working with Dan was a warm, emotionally satisfying, always challenging experience of someone that lived out daily his intense belief in the transformative power of love whether for peace, justice, a good time, or a fulfilled and satisfying life.

Completing the Thoreau legacy

Dan will be rightly long remembered for his seminal role in enriching the legacy of the anti-slave, anti-war civil disobedience associated with the work and life of the New England transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau (who exerted a major influence on Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Tolstoy). It was this courtly writer, poet, and wilderness seeker who by choosing jail over paying taxes funding government policies that struck him as deeply immoral gave to democratic governance an added vitality. As a private person Thoreau chose conscience over obedience to law as the most essential quality of citizenship, which is the golden thread that runs through the fabric of Dan’s rich and varied life.

The release of the Pentagon Papers could be seen as Ellsberg’s dramatic enactment of Thoreau’s imperative, but taking the crucial and more dangerous form of whistleblowing about systemic governmental abuse of its unrestricted control of information by permissively classifying it as ‘secret.’ Dan never disputed the need for legitimate state secrets, but he acted to expose the misuse of secrecy by elected leaders to lie and mislead citizens on vital matters of war and peace in Vietnam and with respect to Pentagon planning for nuclear war. Balancing the governmental right to keep secrets against the rights of the citizenry to know the truth, especially on matters of life and death pertaining to the nation’s future, is at once a delicate task, yet perhaps form of restraint more potent than law or morality.

I think it is not an overstatement to conclude that if democracy survives the digital age with its scary newly appreciated AI dimensions, it will be thanks to brave whistleblowers, starting with Ellsberg, and continuing with such heroic followers as Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Jack Teixeira, individuals currently hounded as criminals by the U.S. government. Whistleblowing being honored the world over by progressive forces in civil society, and shamefully marginalized by the mainstream media here at home that waited until Ellsberg was dying before belatedly and grudgingly acknowledging his greatness. In the end it is not the. motivation of the whistleblower that counts but whether there were sufficiently convincing reasons to violate secrecy guidelines.

Cornel West’s ‘Cri de Coeur’: Selecting the U.S. President in 2024

19 Jun

Heeding Cornel West’s ‘Cri de Coeur’

EDITORIAL, 19 Jun 2023 

| Richard Falk – TRANSCEND Media Service

In a surprising, welcome, sacrificial move Cornel West has expressed his intention to seek the U.S. presidency in 2024. At first glance, this seems like an irresponsible distraction from a deadly serious national election by a person who has never been a politician and has no hope of becoming president. Putting his hat in the ring has little prospect of attracting votes except from an alienated fragment of the citizenry. Yet in a close election as seems probable, West as a third party candidate might win enough votes to help a neo-fascist right-wing candidate like Trump or Ron DeSantis march lockstep to a victory disastrous for the U.S. and dangerous for the world. At the same time do not the American people deserve a better choice than Biden v. Trump? And Cornel West with admirable concreteness suggests that this is a not a remote phantasy, but a legally possible alternative if the political will supported such a new beginning.

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Such the contrary argument contends that for West to use the pulpit of a presidential candidacy to sound an alarm about the coming of neo-fascism to America may help bring about what he most fears and detests. Granted that this is a serious concern to be pondered, but to give in to such contentions requires maintaining silence in the face of deeply flawed choices given to the electorate. Foregoing a symbolic presidential challenge has the effect of excluding from national debate the vital question of acceptable political leadership in the US on such concerns as systemic racism, predatory capitalism, hyper-militarism, migration/asylum and ecological criminality. These, and some other key issues, have long enjoyed the bipartisan backing of both major political parties causing social unrest at home, destruction abroad, and squandered opportunities to achieve disarmament, ecologically sustainable development, and equity with respect to economic rewards, punishments, and social protection.

More concretely, these underlying realities limit voters to choosing between a war-mongering Biden presidency for another four years or giving the overtly neo-fascist Trump a second chance to steer the country toward becoming an autocratic enclave for the billionaire class and ultra nationalist minorities. Perhaps, if the U.S. was not the first global militarist state in world history, but only one among many middle powers, the choice of Biden would probably make enough of a positive difference in terms of humanistic values  as to make West’s diversionary candidacy dismissible as an example of an irresponsible exhibition of narcissism. But this is not the case here.

Biden’s response to the Russian attack on Ukraine was not one that sought an early ceasefire and diplomatic compromise. Rather it opted for send high quality weaponry and abundant economic assistance to Ukraine to enable, as well as persuade its government to maintain the war ‘for as Lon as it takes.’ NATO/US have seemed less motivated by the defense of Ukraine or upholding the Charter norm against aggression than by an overwhelming interest in humiliating Putin, defeating Russia, and warning China. Not only this. Biden added a geopolitical level of encounter to the devastating war on the ground in Ukraine, with the apparent belief that inflicting defeat on Russia would lead China to give up any hope of incorporating Taiwan. This agenda aims above all at extending U.S. unipolar primacy as a permanent feature of the post-Cold War world, effectively a ‘Monroe Doctrine for the entire world.’ Such a provocative course of action was undertaken in the face of risking nuclear escalation and the likelihood of another ‘forever war,’ undoubtedly inflicting upon the people of Ukraine prolonged suffering and accompanying devastation. In the background of such behavior is an apparent cavalier attitude toward the onset of a new cold war, which is already underway in the form of a costly, risky arms race, uncooperative problem-solving in response to an array of global challenges that cannot be successfully addressed on a state-by-state basis.

Above all, Biden’s Cold War style of partisan internationalism seems to imperil the peoples of the world to an even greater extent that does Trump’s determined repudiation of the mainstays of procedural democracy (respect for electoral outcomes and a commitment to peaceful transfer of power; an independent judiciary; and a rule of law with the will and capability to hold the wealthy and powerful accountable as well as the weak and vulnerable.) Trump also threatens gender equality and women’s reproductive rights, LGBT rights, and media independence, and remains an outspoken advocate of the gun lobby and a seeming champion of right-wing militia activism, systemic racism, and white supremacism. Overall, not a pretty picture, but looked at from a longer, detached, planetary perspective, less damaging to the species than what Biden offers.

The so-called two-party system may seem to create a meaningful choice, but it is an illusion fostered by the belief that bipartisanship on the destructive sides of public policy can be reconciled with the imperatives of peace, justice, and ecological sanity at home and in the world. Cornel West is stepping forth to expose the dangerous fallacy lurking beneath the conventional belief that these toxic structures are beyond the realm of political challenge and transformative change. It is not paranoid to conclude that democracy is the U.S. has become more a matter of procedures, funding rivalry, and special interests rather than of substance dedicated to the public good.  When was the last time that a mainstream presidential candidate in the U.S. proposed defense cuts, a stronger UN, reevaluating the special relationships of unconditional support accorded Israel and Saudi Arabia, or advocated the repeal of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution affirming the right to bear arms?

There have been prominent third-party candidates in the past, most notably a Texan libertarian business tycoon concerned with the public debt, Ross Perot, an outright Southern segregationist, George Wallace, and most relevantly, Ralph Nader, running on the Green Party in 2000. These candidates were able to deliver dissident messages, but were attacked as spoilers, that is, sham candidates that diverted votes from the real contenders, thus distorting the electoral results and eroding the value of elections as a reflection of citizen preferences, and thus of people power. Let us suppose that just enough North Americans vote for Trump (or an equivalent) to defeat his Democratic opponent, great anger will be directed at West, as was the case in 2000 when Nader’s 97,121 votes in Florida, allowed George W. Bush to win the state by 537 votes, and thereby prevent an Al Gore victory (due to the federalist peculiarities of the US Electoral College system of weighted voting), which effectively disregards majoritarian democracy.

With fall awareness of the possible adverse consequences, I unhesitatingly support Cornel West’s run for the presidency in 2024, fully expecting hostility and incomprehension from my liberal friends. West, a staunch friend from the time we were faculty colleagues at Princeton between 1988 and 1994, won my love and respect then, and ever since. West is North America’s most brilliant public intellectual, a spellbinding speaker who for decades has been unafraid to speak truth to power in a totally subversive, energizing rhetoric. And the truth he speaks combines eloquence, passion, and spiritual wisdom is in the tradition of William Du Bois, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela contra violence and all forms of oppression. Like his predecessors West promises a humanistic assault on predatory capitalism and post-colonial forms of exploitation of workers, migrants, convicts, indigenous peoples, minorities. In Cornel’s words, “Neither party wants to tell the truth about Wall Street, about Ukraine, about the Pentagon, about big tech.” West demands social protection for all at home, an end to geopolitical militarism around the world, and a pervasive commitment to justice, internationalism, and above all the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity.

West for many years a fearless African-American voice of justice, with Christian and socialist overtones, was initially known for his depiction of systemic racism in his influential book Race Matters (1992) followed a decade later by Democracy Matters. Revealingly, West openly attacked Barack Obama for his complicit accommodation with US militarism and hegemonic capitalism, whom he ironically derided as “a Rockefeller Republican in blackface.” West seems closer in his affinities to Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Edward Said and Jean-Paul Sartre, leading white public intellectuals, who spoke as they believed whatever the personal costs. Each was an advocate of transformative politics—‘a socialism to come’—than a politics of feasibility that chose to live with the evils of the system by opting for a politics of ‘the lesser of evils.”

[Prefatory Note: The post below is the text of my contribution to the April 2023 Global Forum of the Great Transition Initiative GTI as developed under the guidance of Paul Raskin at the Tellus Institute in Cambridge, MA. The monthly theme was ‘Big History,’ attracting a range of notable authors whose short essays can be found at GTI Forum. For anyone interested in a transformed future I recommend following the wide range of views and themes addressed by GTI. To achieve positive forms of change at a time of multiple converging crises imperiling the human species and its natural habitat is. the ‘crisis of crises’ facing humanity at this time.]

27 May

Assessing Big History at a Time of Global Crisis

A Skeptical Premise

I find myself fascinated by the explorations and exposition of Big History, helpful for a deeper, more vibrant metanarrative of self-understanding. And yet I also find it fundamentally irrelevant, and even delusional, when it comes to addressing meaningfully what is agreed to be a historical condition of unprecedented global crisis threatening near-term civilizational and ecological viability, imperiling even the survival of living species, including the human. Putting my skepticism in its simplest form, “we do not have time” to make Big History work in favor of a livable future, and it serves as an indulgent distraction as so presented. That is not to say that Big History may not have immediate pedagogic benefits by enriching education, allowing students and readers of all ages to grasp better how the profound predicaments of the present came about and what might be done to reach a more elevated stage of human evolution. The mistake of Big History advocates is to suppose that transformational thinking by a few people even if situated on a geo-civilizational terrain will have a sufficient impact to exert an emergent influence on a policy level within time horizons relevant to meeting the fundamental concerns associated with climate change, weaponry of mass destruction, corporate plunder, destructive forms of inequality, political extremism, mass alienation, conspiratorial myth-making, and transnational crime.

David Christian attaches great historical weight to the reaction of the astronauts who conveyed back home the images of Planet Earth as seen from the moon, regarding as a Big History event in real time that imparted lasting meaning to how we act as humans on a shared planet, inspiring a sense of oneness that will facilitate a transition from conflict to cooperation as the dominant pattern of collective behavior. In Christian’s words, “Whatever form it takes, a more expansive and interdisciplinary perspective on today’s world can galvanize the Great Transition by reorienting the thinking, attitudes, and motivations of billions of people.” Perhaps it is doing so. It has been more than fifty years since Neil Armstrong sent his famous message from the moon: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Putting to one side the discrediting reliance on patriarchal language, the dysfunctional behavior patterns of earthlings has gotten worse since that hopeful view was articulated. The material structures of wealth and power, state-centric world order, annual military expenditures (including of heavy investments in the militarization of space) exceeding by multiples the devotion of resources to achieve a cooperative approach to global-scale problem-solving. Leadership in political and economic domains continues to be assessed by short-term performance seen as beneficial to distinct nations, while most corporate behavior continues to exhibit scant concern for the worsening threats directed at the future of humanity.

Transforming the War Mentality

Big History, by its focus on underlying patterns and deep structures of evolution, is turning away from the challenges of immediacy and overlooking the resilience of geopolitical ambitions that manifest themselves through conflictual behavior that continues to dominate the political imaginaries of those running the world, as well as supportive elites who benefit from existing circumstances and bureaucrats who manage the structures of governance at every level of social interaction. Big History esoterically marginalizes or renders as harmless geological, cosmic, or evolutionary abstraction the dismaying reality that the most impressive cooperative behavior on the planet are taken against rivals or enemies, often framed as an alliance, and preoccupied with the preparation for and conduct of warfare. It is only after the carnage produced by the world wars of the past century that cooperation for peace by way of international law and institutionalized multilateralism (UN) gained prominence on the policy agenda of world leaders.

It may seem irreverent to conclude that science fiction writers are more relevant explorers of human nature and plausible alternative ways of living together as a species, than are the leading lights of Big History. Sci-fi imaginatively explores the idea that the most effective way to gain planetary unity and the ultra-cooperative problem-solving capabilities that are needed, would be to invent a belligerent planetary neighbor in the galaxy allegedly gearing up for an aggressive war against Planet Earth. Putting in a good word for “conspiracy theorists,” even if such a scenario of a galactic neighbor intent on planetary aggression was entirely made up, if widely disseminated and believed by “the right people,” it could create a political atmosphere conducive to the emergence of a widespread willingness to cooperate against a common enemy perceived as a dire threat to the whole world. Such a fictitious account of reality draws on the competence and experience of the leading intelligence agencies in the world and the main media platforms to spread such a great white lie.

The Quest for Hope in a Dark Time

In the background of this speculation is the implicit recognition that the war template is so deeply embodied in the political and cultural psyche of humanity as itself to provide ironically the only ready-made exit from catastrophic future being generated by the unsustainable and abusive ways that humans were living on the earth. Unlike postwar escalations of cooperative behavior, looming ecological disasters may become irreversible tragedies long prior to their systemic damage.

In other words, even when we look at emergent signs of transformed modes of behavior that is indispensable if humanity is to act on behalf of Great Transition visions, the future looks bleak, but I would argue not as bleak as the future conceived from the perspective of Big History. These more entrenched, emergent liberating paths of behavior are more resonant with human experience, and can plausibly be converted into political projects with some traction if activist segments of civil society can be enlisted in this struggle for the material and spiritual future of humanity. Such action would still involve an epistemological humility about the future, allowing the realities of radical uncertainty to create space for what I have called “a politics of impossibility,” which rests on struggling for a cooperative and just future by confronting militarism and predatory economic behavior. Such a posture admits both that the prospect of achieving emancipatory goals cannot be discerned from the standpoint of the present, tempered by the awareness that the future is unknowable and hence uncertain, and yet there are instances throughout history where “impossible” goals were achieved. Recent examples include the struggle against South African apartheid that seemed hopeless until it wasn’t or the implosion of the Soviet Union that ended the Cold War. Both examples of essentially nonviolent struggles that created unexpected opportunities for a brighter future.

My purpose in this brief essay is in no way to question the illuminations of Big History as exemplified by the stimulating contributions to this themed discussion. What I doubt is the usefulness of such inquiries for what I understand to be the mission of the GTI, which is to be taken seriously at the level of policy as well as ideas. To do this effectively, constructive thought and scholarly endeavor have to engage directly with the urgencies currently in evidence, and do so in the spirit of the Anthropocene, which provides a grand occasion for human responsibility and opportunity.           

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War Prevention Depends on Respecting Invisible Geopolitical Fault Lines

18 May

[Initiallly published In CounterPunch on April 26,2023, later substantially modified.]

If we look back on the major wars of the prior century and forward to the growing menace of a war fought with nuclear weaponry, there is one prominent gap in analysis and understanding. This gap is to my knowledge rarely acknowledged, or even discussed, by political leaders or addressed in the supposedly independent main media platforms in the West. Indeed, the gap seems to be explicitly denied, and given a hegemonic twist, by the Biden presidency, especially by Antony Blinken’s repeated insistence that American foreign policy, unlike that of its principal adversaries, is ‘rule-governed.’

At first glance ‘rule-governed’ seems to be nothing more than a concise synonym for adherence to international law. Blinken makes no such claim, and even a foreign policy hawk would have a hard time straining to rationalize American international behavior as ‘law-governed,’ but rather might say, or at least believe, following Thucydides, ‘that strong do as they will, while the weak do as they must.’ Some have speculated that ‘rule-governed’ as a phrase of choice these days in Washington is best associated with a rebirthing of ‘Pax Americana,’ or as I have previously suggested a dusting off of the Monroe Doctrine that guided U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America since 1823 to proclaim after the Soviet implosion in 1991 what is in effect a Monroe Doctrine for the world, or seen from a more Atlanticist perspective, the NATO-IZATION of the post-Cold War world.’

Such provocative labels seems descriptive of the NATO response to the Russian 2022 attack on Ukraine, which from day one was treated by the West as an flagrant instance of a Crime Against the Peace, more generally viewed as a war of aggression, and so declared by a large majority of countries by way of a UN General Assembly Resolution ES-11/1, 2 March, 2022, in a vote of 122-5, with 35 abstentions including China and India) although without comparable support at the UN for the follow up to denouncing the attack by way of imposing sanctions, supplying weapons, and diplomatic strong-arming looking toward a military victory rather than a political compromise achieved through a ceasefire followed by negotiations. The coercive diplomacy was left essentially to NATO members, varying according to their perceived security interests, but generally following Washington’s lead in failing to seek a ceasefire and a negotiated political compromise.

What seems to many, mostly in the West, obvious at first glance at the Ukraine War is far less clear if a closer look is taken. There is the matter of the pre-war context of Ukrainian and NATO provocations as well as the Russian right of veto entrenched in the UN Charter, amounting to a green light given to the winners in World War II to the use of international force at their discretion when it comes to peace and security issues, and in the process ignore Charter obligations to seek peaceful settlements of all international disputes.

The U.S./UK unprovoked attack on Iraq in 2003 is indicative of this double standard manifested by the contrasting international response to the Russian attack, as were the NATO regime-changing intervention in Libya and Euro-American support for the Saudi intervention in Yemen and a host of other examples going back to the Vietnam War. In other words, ‘rule-governed’ as a practical matter seems to mean impunity whenever the U.S., its allies and friends, launch their ‘wars of choice,’ while reserving accountability in relation to international law for its adversaries, particularly its geopolitical rivals, who are denied the intended impunity benefits of their right of veto and held responsible for adherence to international law in the war/peace domain as it is presented in the UN Charter. In effect, international law is not a restraint on the U.S./NATO with respect to war-making, but it functions as a strategic policy and propaganda tool for use against adversaries. Such duplicity in deploying the authority of law is widely seen outside the West as a glaring example of moral hypocrisy and double standards that undermines more generally the aspiration of substituting the rule of law for force in relations between the Great Powers in the nuclear age.

These is more to this exhibition of double standards and moral hypocrisy as illustrated by another related Blinken elaboration of the kind of world order he affirms on behalf of the U.S. It is his ahistorical assertion that ‘spheres of influence’ should have been thrown into the dustbin of history after World War II, and therefore the fact that Ukraine (and Crimea) border on Russia, with long intertwined historical experience, ethnic ties, and territorial instabilities be treated as irrelevant. Surely, Cubans or Venezuelans, or earlier Chileans and certainly Central Americans, would be excused if they laughed out loud, given the forcible contemporaneous efforts of Washington to deny the populations of these countries respect for their sovereign rights, including even the inalienable right of self-determination. Spheres of influence are admittedly abusive with respect to bordering societies, whether maintained by Russia or the United States, and yet in an imperfectly governed world such spheres in certain regional settings play crucial war prevention roles. They can mitigate potential geopolitical confrontations in which deference by antagonists to previously well-delimited spheres of influence can be credited with providing a brake on escalation at times of crisis. East/West spheres of influence for preserving world peace during the most dangerous crises of the Cold War, most notably at the time of the Berlin Crises(1950s), Soviet Interventions in Eastern Europe (1956-1968), Cuban Missile Crisis (1961).

Rather than dispensing with spheres of influence the wartime leaders of the U.S., UK, and the USSR in World War II recognized even during their common cause against Naziism that an anticipated post-war rivalry between the winners to pursue their distinct national interests by extending their ideological, political, and economic influence, especially in Europe could turn dangerous. These leaders, although espousing hostile ideologies, sought agreements to avoid postwar confrontations in Europe at a series of conferences. The leaders of the U.S., USSR, and the UK reached agreements, most notably in 1945 at Yalta and Potsdam, that might have done more to prevent a slide into World War III than certainly the UN Charter and maybe even the much invoked doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD as denoting the pathology of genocidal peacemaking in the nuclear age).


These wartime agreements did not explicitly use the cynical language of spheres of influence but rather stressed the divisions relating to the occupation of European countries previously controlled by the defeated fascist states, with a particular attention given to Germany that was seen as the most culpable and dangerous actor among the Axis Powers. In this regard, alone among European states, Germany was divided into East  Germany and West Germany, and its capital city of Berlin was notoriously divided into West Berlin and East Berlin. For the rest of Europe, the Soviet Union was given responsibility for occupation and state building in East Europe while the victors assumed a comparable responsibility in Western Europe.

This language of division did not inhibit both ‘superpowers’ from engaged in propaganda wars with one another throughout the Cold War. Yet what it did do was to induce international prudence in a form that was respectful of these wartime assessments of control. This prudence was in stark contrast to the inflammatory response of the West to the 2023 Russian attack on Ukraine, accentuated by disdaining diplomacy, a political compromise, and openly seeking the Russian defeat so as to confirm post-Cold War unipolarity when it comes to peace and security issues. Undoubtedly, the wartime atmosphere in 1944-45 contributed to the importance of taking preventive measures to guard against the recurrence of a major war fought over the control and future of Europe. The Potsdam Conference took ended less than a week before an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Harry Truman informing Stalin that the U.S. possessed a super-weapon that would hasten the unconditional surrender of Japan, as indeed it did.

Although conducted prior to the use of the atomic bomb this wartime diplomacy was fearfully aware that a future war would be far more destructive than two earlier world wars. In this sense, these fault lines in Europe were established in an atmosphere of hope and fear, but also within limits set by state-centrism and geopolitical ambition, giving rise quickly to tensions that extinguished hopes of retaining postwar international harmony, thereby dimming hopes of transcending the high-risk Great Power rivalries of the past. This led to Cold War bipolarity with its complex ideological, military, territorial, and political dimensions of intense conflict. And yet World War III was avoided, despite some close calls, in the ensuing 45 years after the end of World War II.

The idea of ‘geopolitical fault lines’ and even ‘spheres of influence’ are not well established in the practice or theory of international relations, but their existence is profoundly necessary for the maintenance of peace and security among Great Powers, and for the world generally. This relevance of geopolitical fault lines is partly a result of the failure of international law to have the capability to enforce consistently limits on the coercive behavior of the reigning Great Powers, granting them de facto impunity for acting beyond the limits of the law. In this sense, geopolitical fault lines and related agreed territorial divisions offer an improvised substitute for international law by setting formally agreed mutual limits on behavior backed by the specific commitments of Great Powers, which it is known that when transgressed result severe tensions, and possibly catastrophic warfare, between the most heavily armed states in the world might result.

The overriding point is that the Biden/Blinken response to the Ukraine War and the rise of China are contemptuous of the geopolitical prudence and diplomatic techniques that helped save the world from a disastrous conflagration during the Cold War Era. Of course, costly warfare broke out in the divided countries of Korea and Vietnam, but in settings where there was no assent to the temporary division imposed from without and the strategic stakes of challenging these imposed supposedly temporary divisions were peripheral as contrasted with Germany where they were of the highest order. Despite this, in the Korean and Vietnam contexts, the stakes were still high enough for the U.S. to threaten the use of nuclear weapons to maintain the status quo, most menacingly in relation to Korea, and China acting on the basis of border security entered the conflict to prevent the forcible reunification of Korea.

It goes almost out saying that geopolitical fault lines and spheres of influence are second-order restraints whose indispensability reflects the weakness of international law and the UN. Remedying these weaknesses should be accorded the highest priority by governments and peace-minded civil society activists. In the interim, spheres of influence are a recognition of multipolarity, a prelude to a more cooperative world order, and a sign that the distinctive challenges to the global public good posed by climate change and nuclear weaponry do indeed require a ‘new world order’ reflecting imperatives for leading states to act cooperatively rather than in conflictual manner.

However unlikely it now seems, it is possible that the Ukraine War will yet be remembered for producing a transition in outlook and behavior of global rivals in the direction of nonviolent geopolitics, multipolarism, and. multilateral global problem-solving. Arguably, China is currently showcasing the benefits of an increasingly activist form of geopolitics that seems intent on facilitating conflict resolution and peaceful relations, seeking a multipolar structure of world order that is not averse to demilitarizing international relations.

 

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