This month's anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompts only the most somber reflection and most fervent hope that the horror may never be repeated.

 

In the subsequent 60 years, those bombings have haunted the world's imagination but not so much as to curb the development and spread of infinitely more lethal weapons of mass destruction.

 

A related concern, discussed in technical literature well before 11 September 2001, is that nuclear weapons may sooner or later fall into the hands of terrorist groups.

 

The recent explosions and casualties in London are yet another reminder of how the cycle of attack and response could escalate, unpredictably, even to a point horrifically worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

 

The world's reigning power accords itself the right to wage war at will, under a doctrine of "anticipatory self-defense" that covers any contingency it chooses. The means of destruction are to be unlimited.

 

US military expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world combined, while arms sales by 38 North American companies (one in Canada) account for more than 60 per cent of the world total (which has risen 25 per cent since 2002).

 

There have been efforts to strengthen the thin thread on which survival hangs. The most important is the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which came into force in 1970. The regular five-year review conference of the NPT took place at the United Nations in May.

 

The NPT has been facing collapse, primarily because of the failure of the nuclear states to live up to their obligation under Article VI to pursue "good faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. The United States has led the way in refusal to abide by the Article VI obligations. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, emphasizes that "reluctance by one party to fulfill its obligations breeds reluctance in others".

 

President Jimmy Carter blasted the United States as "the major culprit in this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including Anti-Ballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating 'bunker buster' and perhaps some new 'small' bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states".

 

The thread has almost snapped in the years since Hiroshima, repeatedly. The best known case was the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, "the most dangerous moment in human history", as Arthur Schlesinger, historian and former adviser to President John F Kennedy, observed in October 2002 at a retrospective conference in Havana.

 

The world "came within a hair's breadth of nuclear disaster", recalls Robert McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, who also attended the retrospective. In the May-June issue of the magazine Foreign Policy, he accompanies this reminder with a renewed warning of "apocalypse soon".

 

McNamara regards "current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous", creating "unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own", both the risk of "accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch", which is "unacceptably high", and of nuclear attack by terrorists. McNamara endorses the judgment of William Perry, President Bill Clinton's defense secretary, that "there is a greater than 50 per cent probability of a nuclear strike on US targets within a decade".

 

Similar judgments are commonly expressed by prominent strategic analysts. In his book Nuclear Terrorism, the Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison reports the "consensus in the national security community" (of which he has been a part) that a "dirty bomb" attack is "inevitable", and an attack with a nuclear weapon highly likely, if fissionable materials -- the essential ingredient -- are not retrieved and secured.

 

Allison reviews the partial success of efforts to do so since the early 1990s, under the initiatives of Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Richard Lugar, and the setback to these programs from the first days of the Bush administration, paralyzed by what Senator Joseph Biden called "ideological idiocy".

 

The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programs and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.

 

The threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along with jihadi terrorism.

 

A high-level review of the "war on terror" two years after the invasion "focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple of years", Susan B Glasser reported in The Washington Post.

 

"Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to anticipate what one called 'the bleed out' of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe. 'It's a new piece of a new equation,' a former senior Bush administration official said. 'If you don't know who they are in Iraq, how are you going to locate them in Istanbul or London?'"

 

Peter Bergen, a US terrorism specialist, says in The Boston Globe that "the President is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this is a front we created".

 

Shortly after the London bombing, Chatham House, Britain's premier foreign affairs institution, released a study drawing the obvious conclusion -- denied with outrage by the Government -- that "the UK is at particular risk because it is the closest ally of the United States, has deployed armed forces in the military campaigns to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and in Iraq ... [and is] a pillion passenger" of American policy, sitting behind the driver of the motorcycle.

 

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity. While speculation is pointless, reaction to the threat of another Hiroshima is definitely not.

 

On the contrary, it is urgent, particularly in the United States, because of Washington's primary role in accelerating the race to destruction by extending its historically unique military dominance, and in the UK, which goes along with it as its closest ally.

 

The author is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, most recently, of Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance

 

This article was published August 6, 2005 by the lndependent/UK

Adam McKay: Wet Hot American Summer: Bushie Style

Defending The Neocon War

John Brown

July 26, 2005

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the State Department over the war in Iraq, compiles a daily “Public Diplomacy Press Review” available free by requesting it here.

“[W]e are only in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war, and Iraq is only the second front to have been opened in that war ...”

—Norman Podhoretz, Commentary , September 2004

In recent weeks, commentators from both sides of the political fence have tried to make sense of the recent London bombings. The neocons and their fellow travelers are among these. But they have another, more immediate concern. They’re eager to decouple the tragedy in England from the U.S./British occupation of Iraq. That’s because they seek to prevent further erosion of popular support for the Iraq war, which could mean the end of their imperial ambitions in the Middle East.

There’s some historical irony here, if one considers what the neocons and their allies were saying in the fall of last year. At that time of the presidential elections, über-neocon Norman Podhoretz announced in a long Commentary article (September 2004) that a reason we were in Iraq—a campaign, he argued, of World War IV—was to prevent the terror of Islamic jihadism, including from Iraq, from reaching our shores. But today, the neocons—who long argued for a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein—claim there’s no connection between the coalition’s presence in Iraq and the terror outbreak in England. “Islamist malignancy long predates Iraq,” declared Charles Krauthammer in The Wall Street Journal (July 18) “[I]t is ludicrous to try to reduce [the London bombings] to Iraq,” says Christopher Hitchens (Slate , July 7).

According to the neocons’ “It’s not Iraq, stupid” updated version of terrorism, what happened in England really represents is the reprehensible behavior of evil, delusional fanatics with Islamic slogans but no real political program. They will strike anywhere, any time, anyone and without reason. There is no place for wishy-washy academic illusions about the complexity of human nature in trying to analyze terrorists’ motivations, actions and psychological make-up. They’re mad killers, pure and simple. In the words of Cal Thomas, in The Baltimore Sun (July 19): “I don't want to understand why they hate us ... since the jihadists have declared war on us, I want to kill them before they kill me.”

Given the brutality of the London tragedy, it’s hard to argue rationally against this reaction to terrorism, which on a rudimentary level does appeal to a basic human emotion, the desire for vengeance against unjust, inhuman acts directed at persons with whom we share common experiences and values.

But it doesn’t tell the whole story about terrorism. Terrorists may indeed be driven by hate and resentment, but their actions are also determined by geopolitical considerations, as professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, among others, has pointed out. Many terrorists—and they include persons with formal educations—have reasons for carrying out their horrible deeds: “The central fact,” notes Pape, “is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland” (interview in The American Conservative , July 18). This statement, far from empathy, is an effort to explain terrorism—which we have no choice but to understand if we want to overcome it.

The neocons’ response to these observations is to repeat that terrorists are ogres with nothing on their minds other than death and destruction (even though, in Commentary , Podhoretz claimed jihadist fundamentalists had long-term geopolitical plans against the United States). This crude caveman analysis—to be fair—could be an honest effort to expose the nature of terrorism to ordinary citizens without over intellectualizing the issue. But it is naïve to assume that the neocons are only interested in enlightening the public. They have a political agenda, and their current decoupling of terror from international politics is at heart an attempt to maintain declining popular support for their number-one priority: a forceful, aggressive U.S. military presence in the Middle East that will assure permanent American-led control of the area (for reasons the neocons have never made entirely clear). Their catchword for this bloody, expensive, universally despised attempted U.S. domination? “Democracy in Iraq.”

The neocons can’t fail to realize that terrorist acts—no matter how they dismiss the current impact of these deeds—threaten their own imperial ambitions. Let’s face it: If the public in the United States and Europe increasingly sees a cause-and-effect relationship between the intervention in Iraq and present and future abominations such as the ones in London, support for the Iraq war could decline even more than it has in recent months. Of course, the United States and Britain are not “pacifist” Spain, and many in these two countries will continue hoping that “staying the course” in Iraq and keeping a stiff upper lip at home is the only answer to fighting terrorism on their own turf. But according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 45 percent of Americans believed “soon after the subway bombings in London that the war in Iraq was raising the risk of terrorism in this country. That's up from 36 percent last fall” (The Washington Post , July 22). Although “about half of the public, 52 percent, favors staying in Iraq until the country is stabilized,” the calls for an American withdrawal from Iraq could increase, especially if other terrorist attacks occur. And if American troops leave Iraq in the near future, the neocon “Project for the New American Century” —imperial hubris gone awry—is all but over, at least in the Middle East.

To be sure, the thought of what could be interpreted as the United States acceding to the demands of terrorists is by no means comforting to some. But, rather than expressing surrender or hopelessness, a serious reconsideration of our role in Iraq would suggest that Americans are not buying the neocon idea that Iraq and terrorism aren’t connected. Americans, with the latest barbarity in London, are becoming increasingly aware that the war in Iraq is a misadventure into which they were misled by weapons of mass deception, many of them invented by the neocons. Lying and neoconservatism are becoming synonymous in the American language, and “liberating” Iraq is now seen as the neocon fabrication par excellence. So why should we believe their latest fiction—that terror has nothing to do with Iraq—so that they can keep us fighting in the Middle East for reasons we don’t even know?

The decision to incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not taken in anger. White men in grey business suits and military uniforms, after much deliberation, decided the US “could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible… [and] the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.”[i] They argued it would be cheaper in American lives to release the nuclear genie. Besides, it was such a marvelous thing to show Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

 

Headlines like “Jap City No More” soon brought the news to a joyous nation. Crowds gathered in Times Square to celebrate; there was less of the enemy left. Rarely are victors encumbered by remorse. President Harry Truman declared: “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.”[ii] Not surprisingly, six decades later, even American liberals remain ambivalent about the morality of nuking the two Japanese cities. The late Hans Bethe, Nobel Prize winner in physics of Manhattan Project fame and a leading exponent of arms control, declared that “the atom bomb was the greatest gift we could have given to the Japanese”[iii].

 

Even as the United States dusted off its hands and moved on, elsewhere the radioactive rubble of the dead cities spawned not only a sense of dread, but also an obsessive desire for nuclear weapons. Stalin raced ahead with his program, while Charles de Gaulle conceived his “force de frappe”. Mao Tse Tung quietly decided that he too wanted the Bomb even as he derided it as “a paper tiger”. In newly independent Israel, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion apparently “had no qualms about Israel’s need for weapons of mass destruction,” writes Avner Cohen, the historian of Israel’s nuclear bomb. Ben Gurion ordered his agents to seek out East European Jewish scientists who could “either increase the capacity to kill masses or to cure masses”.[iv]  

 

The wind blew the poisonous clouds of fear and envy over other third world countries as well: In 1948, while arguing to create India's Department of Atomic Energy, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru told parliament, “I think we must develop [nuclear science] for peaceful purposes.” But, he added, “Of course, if we are compelled as a nation to use it for other purposes, possibly no pious sentiments of any of us will stop the nation from using it that way.”[v] Just three years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those “other purposes” were all too clear.

 

Days after Pakistan's nuclear tests in May 1998, Japan invited the country’s foreign minister to visit Hiroshima’s peace museum. The minister was visibly moved after seeing the gruesome evidence of mass devastation. His reaction: We made our nukes precisely so that this could never happen to Pakistan. 

 

One wonders what bin Laden – and others of his ilk – learnt from Hiroshima. The New York Times reported that before September 11 the US had intercepted an Al-Qaeda message that Bin laden was planning a “Hiroshima” against America.[vi] In a later taped message, released just before the US attack on Afghanistan, Bin Laden called up the image of the bombing of Japan, claiming: “When people at the ends of the earth, Japan, were killed by their hundreds of thousands, young and old, it was not considered a war crime; it is something that has justification. Millions of children in Iraq is something that has justification.”[vii]

 

One important bin Laden supporter was perfectly clear about how he felt. In a recent and widely watched nationally televised debate between myself and General Hameed Gul - an influential Islamist leader and former head of the country’s powerful intelligence agency (ISI) - my opponent snarled at me: “Your masters (that is, the Americans) will nuke us Muslims just as they nuked Hiroshima; people like you want to denuclearize and disarm us in the face of a savage beast set to devour the world”.  Gul then vented his anger at those - like myself - who oppose Pakistan’s Bomb as agents of America, apostates, enemies of Islam and the Pakistani state.

 

I will not burden readers with my replies to this extremist general. But he was making a point that resonates around the globe and puts on defensive all those who oppose nuclear weapons on moral grounds. The United States has bombed 21 countries since 1948, and recently killed tens of thousands of people on the pretext of chasing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It claims to be a force for democracy and rule of law despite a long history of supporting the bloodiest of dictators and rejecting the International Criminal Court. And now it threatens its adversaries - those with and without nuclear weapons -with nuclear attack. George Bush’s “Nuclear Posture Review 2002” identifies as possible targets China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya. The review also recommended new facilities for the manufacture of nuclear bombs, research into bunker busters, a new ICBM in 2020, and much more.

 

 

Imperial America On The Move

With 12 battle carrier groups and hundreds of military bases spread around the world, the US currently will spend $455 billion on its armed forces in 2005, with another $82 billion to be spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is more than the total sum spent by the next 32 countries down the list, and is close to 50% of total world military spending. US military doctrines have shifted away from deterrence to pre-emption, unilateral military intervention, and simultaneously fighting several local wars overseas. The US military has put in place a 2004 “Interim Global Strike Alert Order" from Donald Rumsfeld requiring it to be ready to attack hostile countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction, specifically Iran and North Korea. The military claims to be capable of carrying out such attacks within “half a day or less” and to use nuclear weapons for this purpose.[viii]

There are demands from the US Air Force for authority to put weapons in space. A former Secretary of the Air Force explained 'We haven't reached the point of strafing and bombing from space… nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities.”[ix] Full spectrum dominance -in land, sea, air, and space - is necessary to achieve the goal of total planetary control.

 

US foreign policy in the Post Cold-War world owes much to “The Project for the New American Century” (PNAC), a Washington-based neo-conservative think-tank founded in 1997. PNAC was clear that the US must rule the world: “ [the new world order] must have a secure foundation on unquestioned US military preeminence ...The process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”[x] That serendipitous Pearl Harbor-like event came on 11 September, 2001.

 

After 911 there was no lack of spokesmen for the American Empire. In unabashedly imperial language, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who initiated the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, writes that the US should seek to “prevent collusion and maintain dependence among the vassals, keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together”[xi].

 

To keep the “barbarians” at bay, Pentagon planners have been charged with the task of assuring American control over every part of the planet. Major (P) Ralph Peters, an officer responsible for conceptualizing future warfare in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, is clear about why his country needs to fight[xii]:

 

We have entered an age of constant conflict.

 

We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent.

 

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

 

Now, reasonably speaking, “a fair amount of killing” can be done rather well by the US with its fuel-air bombs, conventional explosives, artillery shells, and so forth. And so it is difficult to understand why the US should hunger for nuclear weapons in addition to all else that it has. Why does it want to goad other nations towards also craving nukes? And what does it seek to achieve by announcing that it may, if need be, target even non-nuclear adversaries?

 

The answer is obvious: imperial hubris, runaway militarism, and the arrogance of power. Nuclear weapons, in the revised US view under George W. Bush, are now to be viewed as weapons for fighting wars with. They may even be used as a first-strike - no longer are they to be thought of as weapons of last resort.

 

But there is a downside to this. And the long-term consequences will not be to the advantage of the US because the nuclear monopoly is breaking down. The making of atomic weapons - especially crude ones - has become vastly simpler than it was at the time of the Manhattan Project. Basic information is freely available in technical libraries throughout the world and simply surfing the internet can bring to anyone a staggering amount of detail. Advanced textbooks and monographs contain details that can enable reasonably competent scientists and engineers to come up with “quick and dirty” designs for nuclear explosives. The physics of nuclear explosions can be readily taught to graduate students. By stealing fissile materials present in the thousands of ex-Soviet bombs marked for disassembly, or even a tiny fraction of the vast amounts of highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium present in research reactors and storage sites the world over, it is unnecessary to go through complex processes for uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing.

 

 

Can The Islam-US Clash Go Nuclear?

 

Anger in Muslim countries at the United States has never been higher than today: torture and prisoner abuse in Abu-Ghraib and Guantanamo by American interrogators, and instances of Quran desecration have added on to already existing resentments, most particularly the unequivocal US support for Israeli occupation of Arab lands. The desire for an atomic weapon to seek vengeance - utterly immoral, foolish and suicidical though it be - is not limited to extremists.  The Islamic Bomb is a concept that is becoming ever more popular.

The notion of an Islamic Bomb had existed long before 911. Addressing posterity from his death cell in a Rawalpindi jail, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the architect of Pakistan's nuclear program, wrote in 1977: “We know that Israel and South Africa have full nuclear capability. The Christian, Jewish, and Hindu civilizations have this capability. The communist powers also possess it. Only the Islamic civilization was without it, but that position was about to change.”

Another Muslim leader stressed the need for a bomb belonging collectively to Islam. Addressing an Islamic conference in Teheran in 1992, the Iranian vice-president, Sayed Ayatollah Mohajerani said, “Since Israel continues to possess nuclear weapons, we, the Muslims, must cooperate to produce an atomic bomb, regardless of U.N. efforts to prevent proliferation.”

In the celebrations following the 1998 nuclear tests, the Jamaat-e-Islami paraded bomb and missile replicas through the streets of Pakistani cities. It saw in the Bomb a sure sign of a reversal of fortunes and a panacea for the ills that have plagued Muslims since the end of the Golden Age of Islam. In 2000, I captured on video the statements of several leaders of jihadist, right-wing political parties in Pakistan - Maulana Khalil-ur-Rahman and Maulana Sami-ul-Haq - who also demanded a bomb for Islam.[xiii]

 

Nonetheless, it is impossible to conceive of any Muslim state declaring that it has an “Islamic Bomb” that would be used for defense of the “ummah” against the United States or Israel (but it is worth recalling that this kind of “extended deterrence”, as it was called, was practicised aggressively by both superpowers in the Cold War, including during the Cuban Missile Crisis). From time to time, the media reports the speculation that Pakistan would provide a “nuclear umbrella” for Arab countries in a crisis. But nothing in the history of Pakistan has shown a substantial commitment to a pan-Islamic cause. Pakistan, so far the only Muslim nuclear state, is unlikely to risk devastating retaliation from Israel or the United States if it did attempt to provide nuclear weapons for use in the Middle East. Its earlier clandestine nuclear cooperation with Iran - officially attributed to the antics of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan and his network - came to an end a decade ago. This was followed by similar sales to Libya that continued till 2003 and the exposure of the network, leading to a public confession by A.Q. Khan in early 2004.

 

In my opinion, the danger of a nuclear conflict comes not from Muslim states, but from radicalized individuals within the states. Post September 11: although Pakistan’s military government insisted that there was no danger of any of its nuclear weapons being taking for a ride by some radical Islamic group, it wasn’t taking any chances. Several weapons were reportedly airlifted to various safer, isolated, locations within the country, including the northern mountainous area of Gilgit. This nervousness was not unjustified – two strongly Islamist generals of the Pakistan Army, close associates of General Musharraf, had just been removed. Dissatisfaction within the army on Pakistan’s betrayal of the Taliban was (and is) deep; almost overnight, under intense American pressure, the Pakistan government had disowned its progeny and agreed to wage a war of annihilation against it.

 

Fears about Pakistan’s nukes were subsequently compounded by revelations that a high-ranking nuclear engineer, Syed Bashiruddin Mahmood, and a materials specialist, Chaudhry Majid, had journeyed several times into Afghanistan in 2000. Both scientists were well known to espouse radical Islamic views. Mahmood had even been photographed with Osama Bin Laden. 

 

Preventing Doomsday

 

Today, the United States rightly lives in fear of the Bomb it created because the decision to use it - if and when it becomes available - has already been made. But this time around business suits will be absent. Pious men with beards will decide when and where on American soil atomic weapons are to be used. Shadowy groups, propelled by fanatical hatreds, scour the globe for fissile materials. They are not in a hurry; time is on their side. They are doubtless confident they will one day breach Fortress America. Shall it be by the end of the century? Sooner?

 

The possibilities for nuclear attack are not limited to the so-called suitcase bomb stolen from the arsenal of a nuclear state. In fact, this is far more difficult than the use of improvised nuclear devices fabricated from highly enriched uranium, constructed in the very place where they will eventually be detonated. Still more likely is an attack on a vulnerable nuclear reactor or spent fuel repository. 

 

Some nuclear weapon experts (who I am not at liberty to name) privately believe that it is not a question of if but when the attack is to happen. This may be too pessimistic, but obviously tight policing and monitoring of nuclear materials (and rapid reduction of stockpiles) and nuclear weapons knowledge must be the first step. There should not be the slightest delay in moving on this. But this is far from sufficient. If nuclear weapons continue to be accepted by nuclear weapon states as legitimate instruments of either deterrence or war, their global proliferation - whether by other states or non-state actors -can only be slowed down at best. Coercive non-proliferation will only serve to drive up demand. Non-proliferation by cooperation and consent cannot succeed as long as the US is insistent on retaining and improving its nuclear arsenal - by what reasonable argument can others be persuaded to give up, or not acquire, nuclear weapons?

 

If we accept that religious fanatics are planning nuclear attacks and that they may eventually succeed, then what? The world shall plunge headlong into a bottomless abyss of reaction and counter reaction whose horror the human mind cannot comprehend. Who will the US retaliate against? Will the US nuke Mecca? The capitals of Muslim states? What will the US and its allies do as their people fear more attacks, will they expel Muslims from the US and Europe or like the Japanese Americans in World War II, herd them into internment camps?

 

Hiroshima signaled a failure of humankind, not just that of America. The growth of technology has far outstripped our ability to use it wisely. Like a quarrelling group of monkeys on a leaky boat, armed with sticks of dynamite, we are now embarked on an uncertain journey. Humanity’s best chance of survival lies in creating taboos against nuclear weapons, much as already exist for chemical and biological weapons, and to work rapidly toward their global elimination. We cannot afford to live in a savage dog-eat-dog world. Instead, we must dare to imagine and work urgently towards a future that is based on universal, compassionate, human, secular values. For this to happen, the civilized world will have to subdue the twin ogres of American imperialism and Islamic radicalism.

 

Pervez Hoodbhoy is a member of the Pugwash Council and is professor of nuclear and high-energy physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.

---

[i] Notes of the Interim Committee, May 31, 1945, in Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the origins of the Arms Race, (Vintage Books,  1987), Appendix L, p.303..

[ii] Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the origins of the Arms Race, (Vintage Books,  1987), p. xvii.

[iii] I heard Bethe say these words at a meeting organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists at Cornell University in June, 1997. They provoked outrage among some in the audience. Bethe responded that more Japanese lives would have been lost if the fire-bombing of cities had continued.

[iv] Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 11.

[v] Cited in e.g. Zia Mian, “Homi Bhabha Killed a Crow”, in Zia Mian and Ashis Nandy, The Nuclear Debate- Ironies and Immoralities (RCSS, 1998), p. 12-13.  

[vi] James Roisen, Stephen Engelberg, “Signs of Change In Terror Goals Went Unheeded”, The New York Times, October 14, 2001.

[vii] Anthony Shadid, “Bin Laden Warns No Peace for US” Boston Globe, October 8, 2001.

[viii] William Arkin , “Not Just A Last Resort? A Global Strike Plan, With a Nuclear Option”, Washington Post Sunday, May 15, 2005.

[ix] Tim Weiner, “Air Force Seeks Bush's Approval For Space Arms”, The New York Times, May 18, 2005

[x] Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for A New Century,  Project for A New American Century, September 2000, p.51, On the web at http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

[xi] Charles William Maynes, "Two blasts against unilateralism", in Understanding Unilateralism in US

 Foreign Policy, RIIA, London, 2000.

[xii] Ralph Peters, US War College Quarterly, summer 1997.

http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm

[xiii] Pakistan and India Under the Nuclear Shadow, a video production of  Eqbal Ahmad Foundation, 2001, available from zia@princeton.edu

Look in the mirror, Mr. President
A Reaganite Republican says Bush should apologize for his grievous failures on Iraq.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Doug Bandow

July 28, 2005  |  In the wake of the London bombings, President Bush continues his attempts to rally public support for his policies in Iraq. Instead, he should apologize to Americans for those policies.

Republicans have been demanding a lot of apologies from Democrats recently. On "Meet the Press" on July 17, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said Democrats should apologize to Karl Rove for their "smear campaign" against him. Republicans also pushed Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., to recant his ill-considered comparison of Guantánamo jailers to Nazis. And the GOP demanded that Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean repent of his virulent attacks on Republicans. But it is the Republican president who has the most to apologize for.

Not that the Democrats don't have anything to apologize for. I started my career in Washington working for Ronald Reagan and would happily do the same again. But for reasons that I offered in a column in Salon last fall (which subsequently was featured in a "Doonesbury" cartoon), the current president is no conservative, at least as that philosophy has traditionally been understood. His grievous failures dramatically overshadow those of his political adversaries.

President Bush took the United States into war based on a falsehood. His appointees talked about mushroom clouds, Iraq's stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and unmanned aerial vehicles that could hit America.

Vice President Cheney claimed that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11. Various administration officials, from the president on down, declared that the Saddam regime was a "threat," a "significant threat," the "most dangerous threat of our time," a "threat to the region and the world," a "threat to the security of free nations," a "serious threat to our country, to our friends and to our allies," a "unique and urgent threat" and a "serious and mounting threat."

None of these claims was true. Bush and his appointees had ample reason for doubt. Indeed, as John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman of the New Republic pointed out, "Unbeknownst to the public, the administration faced equally serious opposition within its own intelligence agencies." The CIA, the State Department's intelligence bureau, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Energy, the Air Force and the International Atomic Energy Agency all disputed particular administration claims.

If the president's insistence on believing what he wanted to believe had only cost America $200 billion, it would be bad enough. But more than 1,750 servicemen and women have been killed, nearly 14,000 have been wounded (many of them maimed), and Iraq, as even President Bush admits, has become a vortex of international terrorism. The president should apologize.

The failings of U.S. intelligence -- the assumption that Iraq possessed a wide variety of threatening weapons when it in fact had none -- were manifold. The Senate Intelligence Committee report noted that "most of the major key judgments" in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting."

Yet the president didn't address this issue until the 9/11 commission prepared to announce its findings as the 2004 election approached. And he has yet to hold anyone accountable for anything, other than in the few cases in which people told him what he didn't want to hear.

Once the truth came out, the president could have taken responsibility and acknowledged that he'd been wrong. Instead, in his 2004 State of the Union speech, Bush devoted just two sentences to WMD, noting the presence of "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities." The administration mantra became: "Never mind the WMD, Saddam was a bad guy."

The administration's loss of domestic credibility and America's loss of international credibility have been huge. The president should apologize.

Although the administration evidently made its decision to go to war months before it actually invaded Iraq, it failed to prepare for the inevitable consequences of loosing the dogs of war. Most incredibly, it failed to contemplate the possibility of sustained opposition -- the sort of resistance routinely engendered by foreign occupations -- with officials from the vice president on down dismissing the prospects of a violent insurgency. The administration deployed inadequate forces to suppress violent criminals and insurgents alike, neglected to secure sensitive sites after Saddam was overthrown, and provided too little body armor and too few armored vehicles to protect U.S. forces. Even now, two years later, the latter problem continues. The Boston Globe recently reported that Marines in western Iraq lack not only armored vehicles but also heavy machine guns and communications equipment.

And Iraqis' concern over Washington's ultimate intentions makes a bad situation worse. Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, commander of the Multinational Corps in Iraq, observes that "part of the recruitment for this insurgency is fueled by the perception that we are an occupying power and have no intention of leaving." All Americans, and particularly the troops in the field, are paying a very high price for the administration's blunders.

Even as the occupation turned violent, senior officials refused to level with the American people. Turning points and new dawns were constantly said to beckon: the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam Hussein's capture, the transfer of sovereignty, the Iraqi election, the formation of a government.

New assaults are now routinely claimed to have broken the back of the insurgents. On the eve of the president's June 28 speech attempting to rally American support for his policies, Dick Cheney opined that the insurgency was in its "last throes." The administration similarly makes extravagant claims about the readiness of Iraqis to take over their own security. He's "pleased with the progress," Bush says.

But military officials are far more circumspect. Gen. John Abizaid, the commander in the Persian Gulf, says the insurgency appears to have the same strength as it had six months ago. The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency testified before Congress in April that "the insurgency has grown in size and complexity over the last year." The U.S. military's spokesman in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, says that "military options or military operations" aren't going to solve the problem of terrorism in Iraq: "It's going to be settled in the political process."

Soldiers doing the fighting say much the same. Lt. Col. Frederick P. Wellman, who helps train Iraqi security personnel, explains: "We can't kill them all. When I kill one I create three." Nor will loyal Iraqi security forces quickly solve the problem. "I know the party line," observes 1st Lt. Kenrick Cato of Long Island, N.Y. "But on the ground, I can say with certainty they won't be ready before I leave. And I know I'll be back in Iraq, probably in three or four years. And I don't think they'll be ready then."

The president should apologize.

Finding it tough to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq on their own terms, administration officials constantly point to 9/11. "I will not leave the American people at the mercy of the Iraqi dictator and his weapons," the president said just days before he ordered an invasion. He went on to cite Saddam's "terrorist connections." The vice president long linked Iraq to 9/11, even after the claim had been discredited everywhere else. The bipartisan 9/11 commission concluded that there was "no collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaida.

In his recent speech Bush made the only slightly less misleading argument that "we fight today because terrorists want to attack our country and kill our citizens, and Iraq is where they are making their stand." And in a mid-June radio address he opined: "We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens." He added, "Our troops are fighting these terrorists in Iraq so you will not have to face them here at home."

But we were not attacked by Iraq. And jihadists are making their stand in Iraq only because U.S. forces are there. No former Baathist would think of flying to the United States to kill Americans, and most of the foreign fighters in Iraq could never make it to America, whatever their personal inclinations. Even worse, the Iraq conflict is creating terrorists -- and creating them faster than coalition forces so far have been able to kill them.

Iraq has been turned into the central front of terrorism, preparing killers who may eventually find targets elsewhere around the world, including in America. The CIA warns that Iraq may prove to be more important than Afghanistan once was in training deadly militants. The CIA's National Intelligence Council reports: The "dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq" to other nations will create new threats in the form of mutations of the al-Qaida network. Jihadists already have begun returning to their home countries, including in Europe.

The president should apologize.

The result of the administration's war of choice has been to make America far less secure. The president has involved the nation in a conflict that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld now warns could run a dozen years. Yet the military is badly stretched, with no relief in sight. The reserves are breaking, and recruiting is off even for the active forces: "We are getting toward the end of our capacity," warns retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey. It is hard to imagine the volunteer military surviving many years more of this war.

Unfortunately, Bush gives no evidence of recognizing his mistakes, let alone admitting his responsibility. The Republican-controlled Congress is unwilling to hold him accountable. Even longtime conservative activists have been largely quiet. Other than a few courageous souls at small publications such as the American Conservative and Chronicles, most conservatives have said nothing publicly. They apparently hate the Democrats too much or fear the loss of power too greatly to break ranks.

Political apologies tend to be cheap, exacted only under duress and offered to quell criticism rather than to right a wrong. But as Republicans busily demand public repentance from their adversaries, they should look in the mirror -- the president most of all.

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