From: owner-abolition-usa-digest@lists.xmission.com (abolition-usa-digest) To: abolition-usa-digest@lists.xmission.com Subject: abolition-usa-digest V1 #99 Reply-To: abolition-usa-digest Sender: owner-abolition-usa-digest@lists.xmission.com Errors-To: owner-abolition-usa-digest@lists.xmission.com Precedence: bulk abolition-usa-digest Sunday, March 28 1999 Volume 01 : Number 099 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 01:32:02 EST From: DavidMcR@aol.com Subject: Re: (abolition-usa) Internal nuclear threat? Dear David Crockett Williams, I understand your concern with this material, but it is "far out". You've posted a couple of items like this. I know there are probably hundreds of thousands of Americans who believe this material and see links between Hillary Clinton, mysterious murders in Arkansas, and suitcase nuclear bombs scattered around the U.S. But I don't think this is the list for them. You have given your address - gear2000@lightspeed.net - and I think you should count on getting into "one on one dialogues" with people who want to pursue these things with you. Sincerely, David McReynolds gear2000@lightspeed.net writes: << Subj: (abolition-usa) Internal nuclear threat? Date: 3/28/99 12:13:15 AM Eastern Standard Time From: gear2000@lightspeed.net (David Crockett Williams) Sender: owner-abolition-usa@lists.xmission.com Reply-to: abolition-usa@lists.xmission.com To: abolition-usa@lists.xmission.com (Abolition 2000 USA), bay_area_activist@onelist.com (BayAreaActivistList), Activist_List@listbot.com (Activist Mailing List), peacebuilders@gemini.cia.com (PeaceBuilders) [from website reference below] [Russian and Chinese "Speznatz" or special forces Army teams are always inserted on strategic recce, assasination and sabotage missions in the enemy rear. Nuclear weapons, command HQs and VIPs will be their targets. The weapons are already in the United States. They are stored in hidden caches, including conventional, nuclear, chemical and nuclear "brief case" bombs. >> - - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 22:50:57 -0800 (PST) From: Timothy Bruening Subject: Re: (abolition-usa) ?? new Name ????. NO !!!!!! At 01:17 PM 10/3/98 -0500, danfine@igc.apc.org (Daniel Fine) wrote: >Believe new name would be a mistake: > >(1) "Abolition" is an abiding categorical imperative, but I don't believe >many members or supporters ever really believed we would have a treaty >(NWC) in place by the year 2000. 2000 was and still is, and will remain a >symbol of a threshold, a passage, a new beginning, a new century, new >millennium etc. So 2000 remains meaningful and will still be after 2000 (as >is the Y2K bug). >To us, 2000 means struggle for abolition and steps on the journey, now and >in the 21st century. I suggest calling us "Abolition Y2K" - - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 03:04:10 EST From: DavidMcR@aol.com Subject: (abolition-usa) NATO and Kosovo / part two Subj: NATO and Kosovo / part two Date: 3/28/99 2:59:49 AM Eastern Standard Time From: DavidMcR To: wrll@scn.org, wrl@igc.apc.org To: COC-L@CMSA.BERKELEY.EDU To: RedYouth@lefty.techsi.com To: SocialistsUnmoderated@lefty.techsi.com The other day I'd sent out a short analysis just before the bombing started. These are some additional thoughts. Personal, not official for War Resisters League or the Socialist Party. On action, while we write each other, we urgently need to write members of Congress. High priority. (Don't waste time writing Clinton - hopeless). Where possible we need to mount peaceful local demonstrations at federal buildings so that the public is aware of the lack of consensus. Last night a friend said he would get up early Sunday to watch the Washington Talk Shows. I said why waste his time. He said "I know they aren't very bright, but I need to find out what they want us to believe - and the Washington talk shows are it". He's right. All the good grey folks, all the paid talking heads, whose political views range from far right to moderate liberal, are explaining to us some things which can't be explained. So at this late hour on Saturday night . . . let me offer an antidote. First, the instant the first bombs fell on Yugoslavia, the United States and its NATO allies had engaged in an act of aggression against a sovereign state. It can be argued that having threatened bombing for so long, they had no choice but to do it. Sorry - a state of war against a nation is a state of war - - vastly different from threats of a state of war. Second, while I am not clear why the US is doing this, I am very clear on why it is NOT doing it. It is not doing it because of the slightest humanitarian concerns. If it had such concerns, it would have lifted the sanctions on Iraq, where over a half million civilians, largely infants and the elderly, have died because of our sanctions. And it would have pursued a totally different policy in the past twenty fives years. Please remember - and we are not talking ancient history - that the United States killed over two million Vietnamese (not counting those in Laos and Cambodia) during its invasion of Indochina. The U.S. colluded in the Indonesian slaughters in East Timor. The U.S. CIA played a central role in the overthrow of the elected government of Chile - the Allenda government. The U.S. worked with heroin and cocaine trafficers in the Contra scandals when we were directly involved in acts of murder in Nicaragua. (Remember the World Court ruling which WENT AGAINST THE U.S., on the mining of the harbor there?). The U.S. was actively involved in massascres in Guatemala, through training the military at Fort Benning, Georgia, and through covert aid and financial and military help to the government in Guatemala. Ditto El Salvador. And Honduras. One could go on. This is enough. No government has "moral interests" in its foreign policy. Not the U.S., not Vietnam, not Israeli, not Cuba. All governments seek to mask their actions through a pretense of morality. Because ours is a democratic country with a fairly free press there is less excuse for any of us to take Clinton seriously. He may or may not be a moral person as an individual. The same may be true of Milosevic. But the governments involved, Yugoslavia, Germany, Britian, the U.S., etc. are not moral (nor are they particularly immoral - they each seek to advance their own interests). Second, the attacks launched by the U.S., Great Britain, and Germany are remarkable in the context of wars of agression over the past fifty years in the cynical use of "victims". Right now, as the bombing continues, the dangers of any Albanian dissidents in Kosovo is much greater. The killing will be speeded up. I cannot think of a war which was launched because of deep moral concern for suffering people. Look back at history. In World War II everyone who had followed events in Germany knew the fate of the Jews was ominous in the extreme. Yet not one country lifted a hand to do a damn thing. (And the Soviet Union signed a non- aggression Pact with the Nazis). Only when Hitler attacked Poland did the Allies enter the war - and even then, the issue of the Jews was not the reason. (Nor in our own Civil War, where the freeing of the slaves was not the issue, but rather Lincoln's determination, somewhat akin to Milosevic's, to keep the nation united at any cost). Only late in the Civil War, as a means to help win it, did Lincoln set the slaves free - and then only in the States in insurrection. In World War II we knew about the rape of Nanking. I used to get bubble gum wrapped in colorful wax sheets which showed Japanese troops killing Chinese women. But no one did a damn thing - until Pearl Harbor. In the Iraqi case, Washington supported Saddam during the long war with Iran in which a half million youth on each side was killed. This is morality? The depth of cynicism of the United States is perhaps no greater than that of Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia, but it is emphatically no less. The tendency of the good people that we all - individually - are, is to want to believe what Clinton says. I do. My first reaction is "how can I oppose any action that will help the poor souls in Kosovo?" and "Surely David, there must be some good reason for what Clinton is doing". Who wants to realize and admit that their own government is doing terrible, criminal things? Please think of the not distant past. I remember sitting in a room at the F.O.R. headquarters in Nyack during the invasion of Somalia and some of those good and decent pacifists argued that the U.S. troops sent by Bush were necessary to prevent bloodshed and starvation. Look at the result - the U.S. had to flee the scene, in the face of what is now conceded to be the universal hatred of the U.S. troops by everyone in Somalia. Look at Iraq, where we said we wanted to do good. As a result of our "necessary" actions, in addition to the 100,000 or so killed by the U.S. during Desert Storm (never forgetting the faithful contemptible support of the British government), we gave hope to religious groups that were restless, they rose up, got no help from us and were slaughtered by Saddam. Then we imposed sanctions and a half million or more died. I don't have an answer for Kuwait (though that was far more complex than our media told us) but the answer we employed was a human disaster which continues to echo. If the U.S. has the right to dictate the terms on which Yugoslavia will deal with what emphatically is an internal problem, then does NATO have the right to bomb Tel Aviv for refusing to carry out UN resolutions of long standing? Should Spain be bombed if they don't concede to the Basques? Should Tony Blair be arrested because he has British troops in Northern Ireland? Should we bomb China because of Tibet? Is there a nation that shouldn't, once we get on this topic, be bombed for the good of humanity and the cause of peace? You may think I'm joking but I'm not. The U.S./NATO aggression occured, ironically, only because the Soviet Union had collapsed and the military balance that held the US (and the Soviet Union) in relatve check has vanished. The U.S. has, in a number of acts of aggression, Somalia, Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, and now the attack on Yugoslavia, proved to be a very dangerous power. The range of international treaties that have been broken is unnerving. The UN has been by-passed. Serbia may be led by a nasty man (who won a free election) but the Serbs are not nasty people. They were good allies to the West during World War II. They have not fired a single shot at any NATO member. What is the justification for this extraordinary aggression? That they had refused to accept the partition of their country on terms dictated by military powers outside their country. Again, I don't know yet to my own satisfaction why the US and NATO is engaged in this. I do know that morality has nothing whatever to do with it and if I hear one more sweet soul say "yes, but do you mean you won't do anything for the poor people there" I may bloody well scream. There are people being butchered and murdered and raped all over the world and I live in horror of it. There is almost nothing I can do about these actions in Sudan, Congo, Indonesia, India, etc. But where my own country is involved - as in Vietnam - then I have to give priority to stopping my country from making a very nasty world much worse. We simply must stop responding to what the media holds up as "the issue of the day" to which we are all supposed to say "Oh yes, bomb that country, they are wicked". The world is filled with wicked people doing wicked things. The talking heads are among the wicked people doing wicked things. We will never get the kind of world we want, in which the bloodshed diminishes, if we keep agreeing to military actions. Do we learn nothing? Our "innocent anti-Communism" which in 1960 got us involved in Indochina "to stop terrorism" cost us so many lives, our own and Vietnamese, and in the end left us wounded so deeply. How many more hundreds of thousands must die before we stop our own government from "doing good things for the poor people of the world". (Which usually translates as "making the world safer for the wonders of a global capitalism"). I know bad things are happening in Kosovo. They got worse since Clinton started to make them "better". Please, if you have foreign contacts, transmit this to them. International pressure is needed to stop the US and NATO. Peace, David McReynolds former Chair, War Resisters International former Co-Chair, Socialist Party USA >> - - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 17:00:16 EST From: DavidMcR@aol.com Subject: (abolition-usa) Chomsky on Current Bombings (fwd) Subj: Chomsky on Current Bombings (fwd) Date: 3/28/99 2:57:16 PM Eastern Standard Time From: eschuster2@juno.com (Eric A Schuster) To: SocialistsUnmoderated@lefty.techsi.com CC: spiegv@worldnet.att.net --------- Begin forwarded message ---------- The Current Bombings By Noam Chomsky There have been many inquiries concerning NATO (meaning primarily US) bombing in Kosovo. A great deal has been written about the topic, including Znet commentaries. I'd like to make a few general observations, keeping to facts that are not seriously contested. There are two fundamental issues: (1) What are the accepted and applicable "rules of world order"? (2) How do these or other considerations apply in the case of Kosovo? (1) What are the accepted and applicable "rules of world order"? There is a regime of international law and international order, binding on all states, based on the UN Charter and subsequent resolutions and World Court decisions. In brief, the threat or use of force is banned unless explicitly authorized by the Security Council after it has determined that peaceful means have failed, or in self-defense against "armed attack" (a narrow concept) until the Security Council acts. There is, of course, more to say. Thus there is at least a tension, if not an outright contradiction, between the rules of world order laid down in the UN Charter and the rights articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD), a second pillar of the world order established under US initiative after World War II. The Charter bans force violating state sovereignty; the UD guarantees the rights of individuals against oppressive states. The issue of "humanitarian intervention" arises from this tension. It is the right of "humanitarian intervention" that is claimed by the US/NATO in Kosovo, and that is generally supported by editorial opinion and news reports (in the latter case, reflexively, even by the very choice of terminology). The question is addressed in a news report in the NY Times (March 27), headlined "Legal Scholars Support Case for Using Force" in Kosovo (March 27). One example is offered: Allen Gerson, former counsel to the US mission to the UN. Two other legal scholars are cited. One, Ted Galen Carpenter, "scoffed at the Administration argument" and dismissed the alleged right of intervention. The third is Jack Goldsmith, a specialist on international law at Chicago Law school. He says that critics of the NATO bombing "have a pretty good legal argument," but "many people think [an exception for humanitarian intervention] does exist as a matter of custom and practice." That summarizes the evidence offered to justify the favored conclusion stated in the headline. Goldsmith's observation is reasonable, at least if we agree that facts are relevant to the determination of "custom and practice." We may also bear in mind a truism: the right of humanitarian intervention, if it exists, is premised on the "good faith" of those intervening, and that assumption is based not on their rhetoric but on their record, in particular their record of adherence to the principles of international law, World Court decisions, and so on. That is indeed a truism, at least with regard to others. Consider, for example, Iranian offers to intervene in Bosnia to prevent massacres at a time when the West would not do so. These were dismissed with ridicule (in fact, ignored); if there was a reason beyond subordination to power, it was because Iranian "good faith" could not be assumed. A rational person then asks obvious questions: is the Iranian record of intervention and terror worse than that of the US? And other questions, for example: How should we assess the "good faith" of the only country to have vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to obey international law? What about its historical record? Unless such questions are prominent on the agenda of discourse, an honest person will dismiss it as mere allegiance to doctrine. A useful exercise is to determine how much of the literature -- media or other -- survives such elementary conditions as these. (2) How do these or other considerations apply in the case of Kosovo? There has been a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo in the past year, overwhelmingly attributable to Yugoslav military forces. The main victims have been ethnic Albanian Kosovars, some 90% of the population of this Yugoslav territory. The standard estimate is 2000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees. In such cases, outsiders have three choices: (I) try to escalate the catastrophe (II) do nothing (III) try to mitigate the catastrophe The choices are illustrated by other contemporary cases. Let's keep to a few of approximately the same scale, and ask where Kosovo fits into the pattern. (A) Colombia. In Colombia, according to State Department estimates, the annual level of political killing by the government and its paramilitary associates is about at the level of Kosovo, and refugee flight primarily from their atrocities is well over a million. Colombia has been the leading Western hemisphere recipient of US arms and training as violence increased through the '90s, and that assistance is now increasing, under a "drug war" pretext dismissed by almost all serious observers. The Clinton administration was particularly enthusiastic in its praise for President Gaviria, whose tenure in office was responsible for "appalling levels of violence," according to human rights organizations, even surpassing his predecessors. Details are readily available. In this case, the US reaction is (I): escalate the atrocities. (B) Turkey. By very conservative estimate, Turkish repression of Kurds in the '90s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early '90s; one index is the flight of over a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital Diyarbakir from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside. 1994 marked two records: it was "the year of the worst repression in the Kurdish provinces" of Turkey, Jonathan Randal reported from the scene, and the year when Turkey became "the biggest single importer of American military hardware and thus the world's largest arms purchaser." When human rights groups exposed Turkey's use of US jets to bomb villages, the Clinton Administration found ways to evade laws requiring suspension of arms deliveries, much as it was doing in Indonesia and elsewhere. Colombia and Turkey explain their (US-supported) atrocities on grounds that they are defending their countries from the threat of terrorist guerrillas. As does the government of Yugoslavia. Again, the example illustrates (I): try to escalate the atrocities. (C) Laos. Every year thousands of people, mostly children and poor farmers, are killed in the Plain of Jars in Northern Laos, the scene of the heaviest bombing of civilian targets in history it appears, and arguably the most cruel: Washington's furious assault on a poor peasant society had little to do with its wars in the region. The worst period was from 1968, when Washington was compelled to undertake negotiations (under popular and business pressure), ending the regular bombardment of North Vietnam. Kissinger-Nixon then decided to shift the planes to bombardment of Laos and Cambodia. The deaths are from "bombies," tiny anti-personnel weapons, far worse than land-mines: they are designed specifically to kill and maim, and have no effect on trucks, buildings, etc. The Plain was saturated with hundreds of millions of these criminal devices, which have a failure-to-explode rate of 20%-30% according to the manufacturer, Honeywell. The numbers suggest either remarkably poor quality control or a rational policy of murdering civilians by delayed action. These were only a fraction of the technology deployed, including advanced missiles to penetrate caves where families sought shelter. Current annual casualties from "bombies" are estimated from hundreds a year to "an annual nationwide casualty rate of 20,000," more than half of them deaths, according to the veteran Asia reporter Barry Wain of the Wall Street Journal -- in its Asia edition. A conservative estimate, then, is that the crisis this year is approximately comparable to Kosovo, though deaths are far more highly concentrated among children -- over half, according to analyses reported by the Mennonite Central Committee, which has been working there since 1977 to alleviate the continuing atrocities. There have been efforts to publicize and deal with the humanitarian catastrophe. A British-based Mine Advisory Group (MAG) is trying to remove the lethal objects, but the US is "conspicuously missing from the handful of Western organisations that have followed MAG," the British press reports, though it has finally agreed to train some Laotian civilians. The British press also reports, with some anger, the allegation of MAG specialists that the US refuses to provide them with "render harmless procedures" that would make their work "a lot quicker and a lot safer." These remain a state secret, as does the whole affair in the United States. The Bangkok press reports a very similar situation in Cambodia, particularly the Eastern region where US bombardment from early 1969 was most intense. In this case, the US reaction is (II): do nothing. And the reaction of the media and commentators is to keep silent, following the norms under which the war against Laos was designated a "secret war" -- meaning well-known, but suppressed, as also in the case of Cambodia from March 1969. The level of self-censorship was extraordinary then, as is the current phase. The relevance of this shocking example should be obvious without further comment. I will skip other examples of (I) and (II), which abound, and also much more serious contemporary atrocities, such as the huge slaughter of Iraqi civilians by means of a particularly vicious form of biological warfare -- "a very hard choice," Madeleine Albright commented on national TV in 1996 when asked for her reaction to the killing of half a million Iraqi children in 5 years, but "we think the price is worth it." Current estimates remain about 5000 children killed a month, and the price is still "worth it." These and other examples might also be kept in mind when we read awed rhetoric about how the "moral compass" of the Clinton Administration is at last functioning properly, as the Kosovo example illustrates. Just what does the example illustrate? The threat of NATO bombing, predictably, led to a sharp escalation of atrocities by the Serbian Army and paramilitaries, and to the departure of international observers, which of course had the same effect. Commanding General Wesley Clark declared that it was "entirely predictable" that Serbian terror and violence would intensify after the NATO bombing, exactly as happened. The terror for the first time reached the capital city of Pristina, and there are credible reports of large-scale destruction of villages, assassinations, generation of an enormous refugee flow, perhaps an effort to expel a good part of the Albanian population -- all an "entirely predictable" consequence of the threat and then the use of force, as General Clark rightly observes. Kosovo is therefore another illustration of (I): try to escalate the violence, with exactly that expectation. To find examples illustrating (III) is all too easy, at least if we keep to official rhetoric. The major recent academic study of "humanitarian intervention," by Sean Murphy, reviews the record after the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 which outlawed war, and then since the UN Charter, which strengthened and articulated these provisions. In the first phase, he writes, the most prominent examples of "humanitarian intervention" were Japan's attack on Manchuria, Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler's occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia. All were accompanied by highly uplifting humanitarian rhetoric, and factual justifications as well. Japan was going to establish an "earthly paradise" as it defended Manchurians from "Chinese bandits," with the support of a leading Chinese nationalist, a far more credible figure than anyone the US was able to conjure up during its attack on South Vietnam. Mussolini was liberating thousands of slaves as he carried forth the Western "civilizing mission." Hitler announced Germany's intention to end ethnic tensions and violence, and "safeguard the national individuality of the German and Czech peoples," in an operation "filled with earnest desire to serve the true interests of the peoples dwelling in the area," in accordance with their will; the Slovakian President asked Hitler to declare Slovakia a protectorate. Another useful intellectual exercise is to compare those obscene justifications with those offered for interventions, including "humanitarian interventions," in the post-UN Charter period. In that period, perhaps the most compelling example of (III) is the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, terminating Pol Pot's atrocities, which were then peaking. Vietnam pleaded the right of self-defense against armed attack, one of the few post-Charter examples when the plea is plausible: the Khmer Rouge regime (Democratic Kampuchea, DK) was carrying out murderous attacks against Vietnam in border areas. The US reaction is instructive. The press condemned the "Prussians" of Asia for their outrageous violation of international law. They were harshly punished for the crime of having terminated Pol Pot's slaughters, first by a (US-backed) Chinese invasion, then by US imposition of extremely harsh sanctions. The US recognized the expelled DK as the official government of Cambodia, because of its "continuity" with the Pol Pot regime, the State Department explained. Not too subtly, the US supported the Khmer Rouge in its continuing attacks in Cambodia. The example tells us more about the "custom and practice" that underlies "the emerging legal norms of humanitarian intervention." Despite the desperate efforts of ideologues to prove that circles are square, there is no serious doubt that the NATO bombings further undermine what remains of the fragile structure of international law. The US made that entirely clear in the discussions leading to the NATO decision. Apart from the UK (by now, about as much of an independent actor as the Ukraine was in the pre-Gorbachev years), NATO countries were skeptical of US policy, and were particularly annoyed by Secretary of State Albright's "saber-rattling" (Kevin Cullen, Boston Globe, Feb. 22). Today, the more closely one approaches the conflicted region, the greater the opposition to Washington's insistence on force, even within NATO (Greece and Italy). France had called for a UN Security Council resolution to authorize deployment of NATO peacekeepers. The US flatly refused, insisting on "its stand that NATO should be able to act independently of the United Nations," State Department officials explained. The US refused to permit the "neuralgic word `authorize'" to appear in the final NATO statement, unwilling to concede any authority to the UN Charter and international law; only the word "endorse" was permitted (Jane Perlez, NYT, Feb. 11). Similarly the bombing of Iraq was a brazen expression of contempt for the UN, even the specific timing, and was so understood. And of course the same is true of the destruction of half the pharmaceutical production of a small African country a few months earlier, an event that also does not indicate that the "moral compass" is straying from righteousness -- not to speak of a record that would be prominently reviewed right now if facts were considered relevant to determining "custom and practice." It could be argued, rather plausibly, that further demolition of the rules of world order is irrelevant, just as it had lost its meaning by the late 1930s. The contempt of the world's leading power for the framework of world order has become so extreme that there is nothing left to discuss. A review of the internal documentary record demonstrates that the stance traces back to the earliest days, even to the first memorandum of the newly-formed National Security Council in 1947. During the Kennedy years, the stance began to gain overt expression. The main innovation of the Reagan-Clinton years is that defiance of international law and the Charter has become entirely open. It has also been backed with interesting explanations, which would be on the front pages, and prominent in the school and university curriculum, if truth and honesty were considered significant values. The highest authorities explained with brutal clarity that the World Court, the UN, and other agencies had become irrelevant because they no longer follow US orders, as they did in the early postwar years. One might then adopt the official position. That would be an honest stand, at least if it were accompanied by refusal to play the cynical game of self-righteous posturing and wielding of the despised principles of international law as a highly selective weapon against shifting enemies. While the Reaganites broke new ground, under Clinton the defiance of world order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts. In the current issue of the leading establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington warns that Washington is treading a dangerous course. In the eyes of much of the world -- probably most of the world, he suggests -- the US is "becoming the rogue superpower," considered "the single greatest external threat to their societies." Realist "international relations theory," he argues, predicts that coalitions may arise to counterbalance the rogue superpower. On pragmatic grounds, then, the stance should be reconsidered. Americans who prefer a different image of their society might call for a reconsideration on other than pragmatic grounds. Where does that leave the question of what to do in Kosovo? It leaves it unanswered. The US has chosen a course of action which, as it explicitly recognizes, escalates atrocities and violence -- "predictably"; a course of action that also strikes yet another blow against the regime of international order, which does offer the weak at least some limited protection from predatory states. As for the longer term, consequences are unpredictable. One plausible observation is that "every bomb that falls on Serbia and every ethnic killing in Kosovo suggests that it will scarcely be possible for Serbs and Albanians to live beside each other in some sort of peace" (Financial Times, March 27). Some of the longer-term possible outcomes are extremely ugly, as has not gone without notice. A standard argument is that we had to do something: we could not simply stand by as atrocities continue. That is never true. One choice, always, is to follow the Hippocratic principle: "First, do no harm." If you can think of no way to adhere to that elementary principle, then do nothing. There are always ways that can be considered. Diplomacy and negotiations are never at an end. The right of "humanitarian intervention" is likely to be more frequently invoked in coming years -- maybe with justification, maybe not -- now that Cold War pretexts have lost their efficacy. In such an era, it may be worthwhile to pay attention to the views of highly respected commentators -- not to speak of the World Court, which explicitly ruled on this matter in a decision rejected by the United States, its essentials not even reported. In the scholarly disciplines of international affairs and international law it would be hard to find more respected voices than Hedley Bull or Leon Henkin. Bull warned 15 years ago that "Particular states or groups of states that set themselves up as the authoritative judges of the world common good, in disregard of the views of others, are in fact a menace to international order, and thus to effective action in this field." Henkin, in a standard work on world order, writes that the "pressures eroding the prohibition on the use of force are deplorable, and the arguments to legitimize the use of force in those circumstances are unpersuasive and dangerous... Violations of human rights are indeed all too common, and if it were permissible to remedy them by external use of force, there would be no law to forbid the use of force by almost any state against almost any other. Human rights, I believe, will have to be vindicated, and other injustices remedied, by other, peaceful means, not by opening the door to aggression and destroying the principle advance in international law, the outlawing of war and the prohibition of force." Recognized principles of international law and world order, solemn treaty obligations, decisions by the World Court, considered pronouncements by the most respected commentators -- these do not automatically solve particular problems. Each issue has to be considered on its merits. For those who do not adopt the standards of Saddam Hussein, there is a heavy burden of proof to meet in undertaking the threat or use of force in violation of the principles of international order. Perhaps the burden can be met, but that has to be shown, not merely proclaimed with passionate rhetoric. The consequences of such violations have to be assessed carefully -- in particular, what we understand to be "predictable." And for those who are minimally serious, the reasons for the actions also have to be assessed -- again, not simply by adulation of our leaders and their "moral compass." _ --------- End forwarded message ---------- ___________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866] -- The lefty.techsi.com server is not operated by the owners of the techsi.com domain. Views expressed in this email do not reflect the opinions of TSI, its officers, customers, or minions. To unsubscribe, send email to SocialistsUnmoderated-request@lefty.techsi.com with "unsubscribe" in the Subject line. Send complaints that can't be resolved by unsubscribing to doumakes@novia.net. - - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 21:56:53 -0800 (PST) From: Timothy Bruening Subject: (abolition-usa) Stop bombing Serbia! I have just sent the following letter to Representative Doug Ose, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Senator Barbara Boxer: Dear Representative Doug Ose, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Senator Barbara Boxer: Aside from the awful civilian casualties in Serbia, the bombing of Serbia has strengthened Milosevic by rallying all Serbians around him, and has given him cover to intensify the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. The bombing of Serbia has also angered the Russians into further delaying their ratification of START II and suspending cooperation with the West, including cooperation to avert a Y2K nuclear war. Worst of all, the bombing of Serbia has caused Russia to consider deploying nuclear weapons in Belarus, and caused the Ukraine to renounce its non-nuclear policy. Therefore, I urge you to cosponsor resolutions urging Clinton to stop bombing Serbia and adopt the following policies to defuse the Kosovo crisis, undermine Milosevic, and repair the damage to U.S.-Russian relations and to the nuclear disarmament process: I. Propose a UN Peacekeeping force in Kosovo, with no troops from the Permanent 5 UN Security Council members (U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France) or from any NATO nations, except for the three newest members. Instead, the troops should be from Eastern Europe, and/or the Third World. I believe that such a force would be more acceptable to the Serbs. The UN Peacekeepers would police an autonomy agreement, disarm both sides, and organize an integrated Serb/Albanian Peacekeeping Force. II. Broadcast graphic accounts of Serbian atrocities against Kosovo Albanians into Serbia and into Russia, and ask listeners: Is the Serbian government worth your support? Hopefully, this would undermine Milosevic's popularity in both countries. III. Dramatically announce that the U.S. is taking its nuclear weapons off alert, removing the warheads from their delivery vehicles, and halting all nuclear weapons design, testing, production, and deployment activities. IV. Challenge all the other nuclear nations to follow our lead, and challenge Russia to immediately ratify START II, cancel any deployment of its nuclear weapons outside its territory, and resume cooperation with the West to avert a Y2K nuclear war. Sincerely, Timothy Bruening 1439 Brown Drive Davis, CA 95616 - - To unsubscribe to abolition-usa, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe abolition-usa" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. ------------------------------ End of abolition-usa-digest V1 #99 ********************************** - To unsubscribe to $LIST, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe $LIST" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.