A Yemeni Famine Made in Washington and Riyadh

 

BY CHARLES PIERSON

Photograph Source: Felton Davis – CC BY 2.0

Ending months of speculation, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on January 10 that the Trump Administration would designate Yemen’s Houthi rebels (Ansar Allah) as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (FTO).

Branding the Houthis as terrorists will make it vastly more difficult for humanitarian groups to deliver desperately needed food, fuel, and medicine to 24 million Yemenis, 80% of the country’s population.  Most of the Yemenis who need aid, including 12 million children, live in Houthi-controlled areas.  Aid agencies, which are forced to coordinate their activity with the Houthis, must now fear being subject to legal sanctions.

The UN has called Yemen the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” and rightly so.  A cholera epidemic and the coronavirus have added to the suffering caused by the war.  Even before the Houthi insurgency against the government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, which began in 2014, Yemen was the Arab world’s poorest country.  Six years of war have intensified Yemen’s suffering.  Ten million Yemenis are “at risk” of famine, according to Human Rights Watch.  UN Secretary General António Guterres declares that “Yemen is now in imminent danger of the worst famine the world has seen in decades.”  This could happen within “a few short months,” David Beasley, UN World Food Programme Executive Director, said in November.

Hardly anyone says that Yemen is already suffering from famine.  That’s odd, given the hellish conditions in Yemen.  Instead, we are told that Yemen is on the “brink” of famine, the “verge” of famine, that famine is “imminent,” that the people of Yemen are “facing” famine, or that famine is “looming” in Yemen.

There is a reason for that.  The UN has not yet declared that a famine exists in Yemen.  So, conditions in Yemen, while nightmarish, may not yet meet the definition of “famine” under the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification(IPC), the food insecurity scale used by the UN.

However, I think Professor Shireen Al-Adeimi of Michigan State University has a better explanation.  Professor Al-Adeimi has tweeted: “Famine hasn’t been declared because the UN faces immense pressure from its top donors, the US & Saudi [Arabia], who are also causing the famine in Yemen.”

We should have known.  Labeling Yemen’s suffering as a “famine” is politically inconvenient.  You may be reminded of the Clinton Administration’s cowardice in refusing to call the 1994 slaughter in Rwanda “genocide”because that might have forced the US to step in to stop the killing.

The famine in Yemen isn’t an accident.  The famine is intentional.  Kamel Jendoubi, the Chairperson of the UN Group of Experts on Yemen, reported to the Security Council in December that “Civilians in Yemen are not starving; they’re being starved by the parties to the conflict.”[1]

Some of the blame goes to the Houthis who divert and delay aid deliveries, and extort bribes before allowing aid to go through.  Yet most of the blame for Yemen’s famine belongs to the Saudi-led coalition.  The famine exists due to the coalition’s bombing campaign and the coalition’s land, sea, and air blockade on Yemen.  The bombing campaign and blockade have continued, with brief interruptions, since 2015.

Yemen imports 80% of its food.  The Saudis intercept and impound some aid ships for periods up to 100 days.  Other ships are never allowed to dock in Yemen.  The coalition says the blockade is necessary in order to keep Iranian arms shipments from the Houthis.  The delays the naval blockade creates cause food and medicine prices to soar, making them unaffordable to most Yemenis.

Saudi and UAE airstrikes have killed or wounded some 20,000 Yemeni civilians.  In addition, the coalition deliberately targets water treatment plants and facilities involved in food production.  Half of Yemen’s hospitals and medical clinics have been destroyed or forced to close since the coalition bombing began.  The coalition also bombs cranes used in Yemeni ports, making it impossible to unload food and medicine.

The US Role in Creating Starvation in Yemen

The US aids and abets the coalition’s intentional starvation of Yemen.  The US shares intelligence with the coalition, provides targeting assistance, and provides spare parts for coalition warplanes.  President Barack Obama took the US into the war in 2015 in order to placate the Gulf States which opposed his nuclear deal with Iran.  President Donald Trump, who hates everything else President Obama ever did, has enthusiastically continued Obama’s Yemen policy despite Congressional resistance.

Aa a press conference on March 15, 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo shed crocodile tears for Yemen’s plight.  Pompeo said that anyone who “truly care[s] about Yemeni lives” will support a Saudi victory in the war.  Two days earlier, the Senate had approved a War Powers Resolution which would have ended US assistance to the Saudi-led coalition.[2]  Pompeo added that “The way to alleviate the Yemeni people’s suffering isn’t to prolong the conflict by handicapping our partners in the fight, but by giving the Saudi-led coalition the support needed to defeat Iranian-backed rebels and ensure a just peace.”

Horseshit.  Pompeo doesn’t care about Yemenis.  Pompeo sees the war in Yemen entirely through the prism of his obsession with Iran.  Iran supports the Houthis (although nowhere near the extent to which the US supports Saudi Arabia and the UAE), so Pompeo supports the Saudi-led coalition no matter how many innocents it kills.

Just how little Yemeni lives matter to Trump and Pompeo is apparent in the Administration’s slashing of tens of millions of dollars in aid for Yemen in March 2020.  The justification the Administration gave was Houthi diversion of aid.  No matter that humanitarian groups objected that this was far too drastic a response to Houthi moves.

Even before the cuts, US aid to Yemen fell far short of the gargantuan sums reaped by US defense contractors in weapons sales to the coalition, such as the Trump Administration’s upcoming $23 billion arms sale to the UAE.

Trump loves arms sales and they have been his Administration’s chief motivation for supporting the Saudis.  Two years ago, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo falsely certified that Saudi Arabia and the UAE were “undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure” in Yemen.  The State Department’s Bureau of Legislative Affairs, then headed by Charles Faulkner, a former Raytheon lobbyist, had warned Pompeo that failure to certify could jeopardize US arms sales.  The truth is that there is no evidence that the coalition is at all concerned about civilian deaths.

The Trump Administration’s designation of the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization goes into effect on January 19, the day before Joe Biden is inaugurated as president.  Biden said on the campaign trail that he will end US assistance to the Saudi-led coalition.  Biden must issue an executive order to that effect on his first day in office, and must also rescind the Trump Administration’s designation of the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.  Congress will have the task of restoring aid to Yemen.  Terminating US assistance to the coalition may not be enough by itself to end the fighting.  The Biden Administration will also need to work with the UN and the parties to the conflict to bring about a political, not military, solution.  Ending the war will be the Biden Administration’s first big foreign policy challenge.

Notes.

[1]  The Group of Experts on Yemen has recommended to the UN Security Council that the situation in Yemen be referred to the International Criminal Court.

[2]  President Trump would go on to veto the resolution, which the Senate was unable to override.

Charles Pierson is a lawyer and a member of the Pittsburgh Anti-Drone Warfare Coalition. E-mail him at Chapierson@yahoo.com.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/15/a-yemeni-famine-made-in-washington-and-riyadh/

How the National Security State Has Come to Dominate a “Civilian” Government

 

BY WILLIAM HARTUNG – MANDY SMITHBURGER

This month’s insurrection at the Capitol revealed the dismal failure of the Capitol Police and the Department of Defense to use their expertise and resources to thwart a clear and present danger to our democracy.  As the government reform group Public Citizen tweeted, “If you’re spending $740,000,000,000 annually on ‘defense’ but fascists dressed for the renaissance fair can still storm the Capitol as they please, maybe it’s time to rethink national security?”

At a time of acute concern about the health of our democracy, any such rethinking must, among other things, focus on strengthening the authority of civilians and civilian institutions over the military in an American world where almost the only subject the two parties in Congress can agree on is putting up ever more money for the Pentagon. This means so many in our political system need to wean themselves from the counterproductive habit of reflexively seeking out military or retired military voices to validate them on issues ranging from public health to border security that should be quite outside the military’s purview.

It’s certainly one of the stranger phenomena of our era: after 20 years of endless war in which trillions of dollars were spent and hundreds of thousands died on all sides without the U.S. military achieving anything approaching victory, the Pentagon continues to be funded at staggering levels, while funding to deal with the greatest threats to our safety and “national security” — from the pandemic to climate change to white supremacy — proves woefully inadequate. In good times and bad, the U.S. military and the “industrial complex” that surrounds it, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower first warned us about in 1961, continue to maintain a central role in Washington, even though they’re remarkably irrelevant to the biggest challenges facing our democracy.

These days, it’s completely normal for military and defense officials to weigh in endlessly on what once would have been civilian matters. As the Biden years begin, it’s time to give some serious thought to how to demilitarize our democracy.

Unfortunately, in the America of 2021, the short-term benefit of relying on the widely accepted credibility of military figures to promote policies of every sort is obvious indeed. Who in the political class in the nation’s capital wouldn’t want a stamp of approval from dozens of generals, active or retired, endorsing their favorite initiative or candidate? (It’s something in years past the authors of this piece have been guilty of as well.) As it happens, though, such approval comes at a high price, undermining as it does the authority of civilian officials and agencies, while skewing resources toward the Pentagon that should be invested elsewhere to keep us truly safe.

It’s an essential attribute of the American system that the military remains under civilian authority. These days, however, given the number of current or retired military officers who have become key arbiters of what we should do on a dizzying array of critical issues, civilian control is the policy equivalent of an endangered species.

In the last election season, long before the attack on the Capitol, there was already an intense national discussion about how to prevent violence at the polls, a conversation that all too quickly (and disturbingly) focused on what role the military should play in the process. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was repeatedly asked to provide assurances that it would have no role in determining the outcome of the election, something that in another America would have been a given.

Meanwhile, some actually sought more military involvement. For example, in a widely debated “open letter” to Milley, retired Army officers John Nagl and Paul Yingling stated that “if Donald Trump refuses to leave office at the expiration of his constitutional term, the United States military must remove him by force, and you must give that order.” Proposals of this sort undermine the integrity of the many lawsCongress and the states have put in place to prevent the military or armed vigilantes from playing any role in the electoral process.

Similarly, both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden have identified the military as a key future player in distributing the Covid-19 vaccine, something that could and should be handled by public-health institutions, if only they, like the Pentagon, had adequate resources.

The Military Knows Best?

During and after the attack on the Capitol, officials from the military and national security worlds were given pride of place in discussions about the future of our democracy. Their opinions were sought out by the media and others on a wide range of issues that fell well outside their primary areas of expertise. A letter from 10 former secretaries of defense calling on the Republican caucus to respect the results of the election was given headline attention, while political figures pressed to have retired military officers involved in the January 6th assault tried in military, not civilian, courts.

Before pursuing the second impeachment of Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi typically turned to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs (who isn’t even in the civilian chain of command) to seek assurance that he could stop the president from starting a last-minute nuclear war. And none of this was faintly unusual, given that retired military officers have regularly been asked to weigh in on subjects as varied as abortion rights, climate change, and childhood obesity. It’s not, of course, that such figures shouldn’t be able, like anyone else, to offer their opinions or support on matters of public health and safety, but that their voices shouldn’t matter more than those of public-health experts, scientists, medical professionals, or other civilians.

Despite its failure to win a war in decades, the military remains one of America’s most respected institutions, getting the kind of appreciation that generally doesn’t extend to other more successful public servants. After almost 20 years of forever wars, it’s hard, at this point, to accept that the military’s reputation for wisdom is deserved. In fact, continually relying on retired generals and other present or former national security officials as validators effectively erodes the credibility of, and the public’s trust in, other institutions that are meant to keep us healthy and safe.

In the Covid-19 moment, it should be clear that relying on narrowly defined notions of national security harms our democracy, a subject that none of those military or former military figures are likely to deal with.  In addition, in all too many cases, current and retired military officials have abused the public trust in ways that call into question their right to serve as judges of what’s important, or even to imagine that they could provide objective advice. For one thing, a striking number of high-ranking officers on leaving the military pass through the infamous revolving door of the military-industrial complex into positions as executives, lobbyists, board members, or consultants for the defense industry.  They work on behalf of firms like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Dynamics that receive a combined $100 billion annually in Pentagon contracts with little accountability, even as they remain key go-to media figures.

They then use their former rank and the prestige attached to it to lobby Congress and influence the media on the need for endless wars and an ever-increasing military budget to support major weapons programs like Lockheed Martin’s troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — all without bothering to disclose that they stand to gain financially from the positions they’re taking. And the prospect of a big, fat salary in the weapons sector upon retirement also exerts an unhealthy influence on officers still serving in the military who are often loath to anger, or in any way alienate, their potential future employers.

This revolving-door phenomenon is widespread.  A study by the Project on Government Oversight found that, in 2018 alone, there were 645 cases in which the top 20 defense contractors hired former government officials, military officers, members of Congress, and senior congressional legislative staff as lobbyists, board members, or executives. This should hardly inspire public trust in their opinions.

In some cases, ex-military officers have even taken to the airwaves and the op-ed pages of newspapers to advocate for war without disclosing their ties to the arms industry. A 2008 New York Times investigation, for example, revealed that a number of retired-officers-turned-media pundits with continuing defense industry ties had, for years, advocated for the Iraq War at the Pentagon’s behest. Ex-generals like former Trump administration Defense Secretary James Mattis, who served on the board of General Dynamics before taking the helm of the Pentagon and returned there shortly after stepping down, too often use their stature to refrain from providing basic information to the media while befogging the transparency and accountability that should be a pillar of democracy.

The Politicization of the Military

When civilian voices and policies are eclipsed as the central determinants in how our democracy should operate, a larger dilemma arises: continuing to rely on the military as a primary source of judgment for what’s right or wrong in the civilian world risks politicizing the armed forces, too. From retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn leading chants of “Lock her up!” at the 2016 Republican National Convention to the competition between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as well as, in the 2020 election campaign, between Joe Biden and Donald Trump to see who could get more retired generals to endorse him or her only helps militarize the civilian election process and politicizes what should be a nonpartisan institution.

Given the more than a trillion dollars Americans annually invest in the national security state, it’s striking to note, for instance, how such institutions let us down when it came to addressing the threats of white nationalism. Last summer, the Intercept uncovered a buried FBI report on the shortcomings of various federal agencies when it came to dealing with domestic terrorism. Before the 2020 election, the bureau refused to release that report on the domestic threat of white supremacy. Last year, in a similar fashion, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) withheld for monthsits assessment of the same “lethal” threat of racist extremism in this country.

While there must be a full investigation of what happened at the Capitol on January 6th, reports seem to indicate a striking blindness in the national security state to the possibility of such an attack. It’s not that the DHS, the FBI, or the military need an influx of new funds to face the problem. Rather, what’s needed at this moment in history is a clearer focus on the real risks to our country, which have little to do with foreign terrorists, the Taliban, or other such groups the U.S. has been fighting abroad for years on end. The Department of Defense typically did itself and the rest of us no favors by burying a report on widespread racism in the ranks of the military, which, though completed in 2017, didn’t see the light of day until this January. Only in the aftermath of the riot at the Capitol did that organization finally begin to truly address its own white-supremacy problems.

The military, like so many other American institutions, has failed to reckon seriously with deep-seated racism in its ranks. Even before the January 6th insurrection, it was clear that such racism made it nearly impossible for Black officers to be promoted. And while many questioned the naming of key military bases after Confederate generals, the issue has only recently been addressed (over a presidential veto at that) with the creation of a new commission to rename them. Reports of active duty, reserve, and veteran members of the military aiding the Capitol insurrection only bring into stark relief the inexcusable costs of not having addressed the problem earlier.

More Pentagon Spending Won’t Make Us Safer 

There are also high costs to be paid for relying on the Department of Defense to handle problems that have nothing to do with its primary mission. Using the armed forces as key players in addressing crises that aren’t military in nature only further undermines civilian institutions and is often counterproductive as well.

In the initial stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, a number of politicians called for President Trump to use the Defense Production Act (as it seems Biden will indeed soon do) and the Department of Defense to ramp up the production of N95 masks, ventilators, and other personal protective equipment. The story of what happened to such funds in the Trump years should be telling. The Washington Post discovered that $1 billion in supposed pandemic relief money was instead funneled directly to defense contractors and $70 million of the funds the Pentagon spent went to ventilators that proved unfit for Covid-19 patients. While some of that money did go to bolster mask supply chains, another Post investigation discovered that such efforts did not come close to addressing national shortfalls and amounted to less than the department spends on instruments, uniforms, and travel for military bands.

Perhaps the most disturbing cost of our overreliance on the military can be found in Congress’s budget and policy priorities. In December of last year, a bill to authorize nearly $740 billion in Pentagon spending garnered enough votes to easily overcomePresident Trump’s veto (motivated mainly by his refusal to condone renaming military bases named after Confederate generals) at the very moment when Congress was blocking legislation to give $2,000 relief checks directly to Covid-19 embattled Americans.

By now, two decades into the twenty-first century, it’s clear that more money for the Pentagon hasn’t made this country safer. It has, however, helped give the military an ever more central role in our previously civilian political world. Biden’s selection of retired General Lloyd Austin III to be secretary of defense only emphasizes this point. While it’s certainly laudatory to appoint the first Black leader to that position, Austin has retired so recently that he needed a congressional waiver from a law requiring a seven-year cooling off period before taking up such a civilian post (just as Mattis didfour years ago) — another sign that civilian control of the military is continuing to weaken. In addition, now that he has retired from his role in private industry, Austin stands to make a small fortune, up to $1.7 million, when he divests his stock holdings in Raytheon Technologies.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” President Eisenhower warned Americans in his 1961 farewell address. How right he proved to be!  Sixty years later, it’s become all too clear that more must be done to deal with that very “unwarranted influence.” The immediate crises of the American republic should be clear enough right now: responding to the pandemic and restoring our civilian democracy. Certainly, military leaders like Milley should be appreciated for agreeing on the need to prioritize the pandemic and oppose sedition. However, more Pentagon spending and more military influence will not, in the end, make us any safer.

This article was distributed by TomDispatch.

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. Mandy Smithberger  is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/29/how-the-national-security-state-has-come-to-dominate-a-civilian-government/

How Washington Rules the World

 

BY EVE OTTENBERG

Photograph Source: vaticanus – CC BY 2.0

So far, Biden’s foreign policy does not differ seismically from Trump’s. Indeed Biden’s first move – recognizing the unelected pretender to the Venezuelan presidency, Juan Guaido – was as lousy as anything Trump did. It raises the specter of CIA coups, assassinations, regime changes and Washington-orchestrated color revolutions, which Biden’s two dreadful foreign policy appointees, Victoria Nuland and Samantha Power, embraced ardently in the past. Of course, those coups the U.S. sponsors are the antithesis of democracy and have the utterly predictable result of destroying entire countries – but this has been how the U.S. has exercised power in the world (mostly the Global South) since at least the dawn of the twentieth century.

Vijay Prashad documents this shameful U.S. history in his new book, Washington Bullets, whose litany of CIA depredations is enough to cause outright despair. The opportunities lost. Human history thwarted. Virtuous leaders cut down precisely because they were virtuous. Heroes murdered. Plans to improve millions of lives just shattered.  The cumulative portrait is beyond distressing. This portrait, this book is about how the U.S. rules the world, about raw power and how amoral, bloody and criminal such power is. As Evo Morales writes in the introduction, the U.S. has justified its assassinations, coups, and massacres as “the fight against communism, followed by the fight against drug trafficking and now, the fight against terrorism.” What will the next fight be? Doubtless something to do with Great Power Competition, something needless and nuclear.

An abbreviated list of U.S. coups and assassinations against assorted socialists and democrats includes the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, that of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 – for daring to  threaten the profits of a company, United Fruit, in which state department officials held shares; the ouster and subsequent execution of heroic Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1961; the overthrow of Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim in Iraq in 1963; the 1964 removal of President Joao Goulart in Brazil and of President Kusno Sukarno of Indonesia in 1965; the ouster of President Juan Jose Torres of Bolivia in 1971; the 1973 overthrow of President Salvador Allende in Chile; and other violent and brutal regime changes.

There were also the murders of leftist leaders such as Mehdi Ben Barka of Morocco in 1965, Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967 and President Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso in 1987; and this isn’t counting the string of coups instigated by the U.S. in Central and Latin America in the early part of the twentieth century. Much later toward the century’s end, came the U.S. overthrow of the socialist governments in Grenada and Haiti, the kidnapping of authoritarian Panamanian ruler Manuel Noriega, the invasion of Iraq and dissolution of its government, the destruction of Libya, the invasion of Afghanistan and more. This is merely a portion of U.S. and specifically CIA crimes against foreign governments and people.

“So in this prison house of psychological warfare,” Prashad writes, “it is perfectly acceptable for the Free World to claim resources from the colonized world, which should be forced to surrender its wealth for the sake of someone else’s freedom.” That sums up Western colonialism. And when Western profits are threatened, the CIA and US state department have regime change down to a science, whose nine steps Prashad lists: 1) lobby public opinion; 2) appoint the right man on the ground in country; 3) make sure the generals are ready; 4) make the economy scream; 5) diplomatic isolation; 6) organize mass protests; 7) greenlight the overthrow; 8) assassinate opponents; 9) deny U.S. involvement. Sound familiar? That’s because the U.S. currently engages in several of these activities vis a vis Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea and other countries.

“The great decolonization process – whose highpoint was in the 1960s and 1970s – became the prelude to poverty and war that now wracks the Third World. Beneath the paving stones in these colonized lands…[lie] the corpses of freedom fighters,” writes Prashad. How many corpses? One estimate is seven to ten million dead worldwide from Washington’s aggressions since World War II. That includes millions in Southeast Asia, millions in Korea, the million leftists slaughtered with CIA assistance in Indonesia in the 1960s, a million in Iraq and many, many in Latin America and Africa.

One CIA effort alone, Operation Condor in Latin America, killed 100,000 people. In this, the U.S. “worked within the archipelago of military juntas from Argentina to Paraguay to abduct, torture and murder Communists in the continent.” The program ran from 1975 to 1989 and also imprisoned half a million people. The U.S. relied on men who can only be described as fascists. “A ruthlessness was let loose upon the earth,” Prashad writes, “as the most toxic political ideologies were given full license to kill.”

Those toxic ideologies were well summed up in Trump. So while Biden breaks with all things Trump, he has an opportunity to remake foreign policy as well. Wouldn’t it be terrific if Biden did not intervene militarily anywhere in the world? If he ended the sanctions that starve ordinary people in countries the U.S. has designated “adversaries,” but which really, in most cases, are just trying to remain independent of Washington? If he cut off weapons to dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, so it cannot continue to crush Yemen’s bloody corpse? If he left countries like Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela alone, instead of continuing to try to destabilize them for useless ideological reasons? A new presidency is a great time for a new beginning.

But many of Biden’s foreign policy appointments are inauspicious to say the least, and again, his first move on Venezuela is awful. Also, he has been ominously silent on Yemen, not uttering a peep about his campaign promise to end U.S. support for the morally disgusting assault on the poorest country in the Middle East. Still, it’s just the start of Biden’s presidency. He could yet mark out a different course, if he cared to. For the old ways are a failure, as the CIA and government officials who are Prashad’s sources readily admit.

Those sources, Prashad writes, are men “who did nasty things, hated talking about them but were honest enough to say toward the end of their lives that they had helped make a mess of the world.” Indeed they did. And there is little evidence that those who follow them have learned any lessons from their misbegotten crimes. Whole countries have been pulverized by the U.S., from Iraq to Haiti, whose liberation theologian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the U.S. helped depose TWICE. The second time, Aristide says he was kidnapped by the U.S. and shipped out of the country by plane. If he or someone else from his political party, which actually represents the interests of Haitians, came to power again, who’s to say the U.S. would now behave any differently, with any humanity or morality? For those are the two things lacking, for generations, in how the U.S. rules the world. It’s past time for a change. The whole world knows it. The gory U. S. assault on justice in the Global South is the scandal of the century – of two centuries. When will Washington stop it?

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Birdbrain. She can be reached at her website.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/29/how-washington-rules-the-world/

Why We Can’t Give Up on the Idea of a World Free From Nuclear Weapons

 

BY VIJAY PRASHAD

Photograph Source: Hajime NAKANO – CC BY 2.0

On January 22, 2021, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) became international law for the 122 states who signed the agreement in July 2017. The TPNW, as with most treaties, is summed up in one sentence (article 1a): “Each State Party undertakes never under any circumstances to… Develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” There is no complexity here. This is a treaty to ban nuclear weapons.

Hideous Weapons

Wilfred Burchett was the first non-Japanese journalist to visit Hiroshima. His first dispatch for London’s the Daily Express (September 5, 1945) was entitled “The Atomic Plague.” “In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world,” Burchett wrote, “people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly… Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world… The damage is far greater than photographs can show… It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.”

In 1952, Sakamoto Hatsumi—a primary school student who had experienced the terror of the bombing—wrote a short poem: “When the atomic bomb drops/day turns into night/people turn into ghosts.” It is simple and elegant, a plea from the darkness to abolish nuclear weapons. This is what the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic nightmare of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have been demanding since 1945. Their pleas have been heard around the world, but not in the capitals that have developed these hideous weapons.

Nuclear Weapons Today

Nine countries of the 193 member states of the United Nations possess nuclear weapons. Two of them—the United States of America and Russia—have more than 90 percent of all the 13,410 warheads. Four countries—the U.S., Russia, the UK and France—have at least 1,800 warheads on high alert, which means that they can be fired at very short notice.

To compare the warheads currently deployed with the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima is enough to make the heart stop: the yield from the “Little Boy” used on Hiroshima is estimated at 15 kilotons, whereas the yield from one W88 warhead that is deployed on a Trident II submarine is estimated at 475 kilotons. It is not just the number of nuclear weapons that are available; the current nuclear weapons, many of them deployed on submarines and ships, are far more lethal.

None of the nine nuclear weapons states have joined the TPNW; they boycotted the negotiations and the vote in the United Nations General Assembly. In October 2020, the U.S. government circulated a letter asking those governments who signed the treaty to withdraw from it. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2017—Nikki Haley—said that the TPNW threatens the security of the United States; she condescended to the 122 governments that joined the TPNW, saying, “do they really understand the threats that we have?” Iran, incidentally, voted with 121 other countries for the TPNW.

Over the course of the past few years, the U.S. administration has undermined the three core treaties for disarmament: “the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, which has now metamorphosed into the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START),” as Prabir Purkayastha wrote in January 2020. Appetite for serious nuclear disarmament has simply not been evident. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office in the U.S. estimates that the government will spend $1.2 trillion between 2017 and 2046 to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The other eight nuclear weapons states will follow suit but far behind, since in these matters the United States drives this terrifying agenda.

Threats Against China

While 122 countries voted to ban nuclear weapons, the United States pursued a project to threaten China with a nuclear attack. In August 2019, the U.S. withdrew from the INF treaty, tested two intermediate-range missiles, and then posted an order for a variety of cruise and ballistic missiles. When the U.S. government sought bases for these missiles around China, its Asian allies balked. They do not want to inflame the already tense situation between the United States and China.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in 2020 that the U.S. “Department of Defense has ramped up its efforts” against China. These threats grew more and more explicit later that year. Biden’s nominee to be the new U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Donald Trump’s administration was right to be tough on China.

The presence of these missiles on U.S. naval vessels and the development of hypersonic cruise missiles as well as open threats against China simply make it impossible for Beijing to dismantle its nuclear arsenal. To do so would be tantamount to surrender before a U.S. attack. China’s government, meanwhile, has said that it welcomes the establishment of nuclear-free zones, including the Southeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ) Treaty.

At a press briefing in July 2020, Fu Cong, China’s director-general of the Department of Arms Control and Disarmament in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that his country would be willing to enter into disarmament negotiations if the U.S. arsenal (at 5,800 nuclear missiles) drops down to the Chinese level (300 nuclear missiles). “The U.S. knows full well the huge gap between the Chinese and American nuclear arsenals, both in terms of quantity and sophistication,” said Fu Cong. “For the U.S., hyping up the China factor is nothing but a ploy to divert world attention, and to create a pretext, under which they could walk away from the New START, as they have done on so many other arms control treaties. The real purpose is to get rid of all possible restrictions and have a free hand in seeking overwhelming military superiority over any adversary, real or imagined.”

Nuclear Ban

Public opinion, even in many NATO states, favors a total ban on nuclear weapons. After the treaty went into force on January 22, Beatrice Fihn of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) addressednuclear weapons states, “Your weapons are now banned. Permanently. You are on the wrong side of international law, the wrong side of history, and the wrong side of humanity.” In 2017, ICAN won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Nuclear disarmament has a long history. In 1961, the U.S. and the USSR signed the McCloy-Zorin Accords or the Agreed Principles for General and Complete Disarmament, which called for “general and complete disarmament” but also that war should “no longer [be] an instrument for settling international problems.” Gone is that spirit. It needs to be revived.

Vijay Prashad’s most recent book is No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2015).

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/28/why-we-cant-give-up-on-the-idea-of-a-world-free-from-nuclear-weapons/

A New U.S. Foreign Policy

 

in World — by Ron Forthofer — January 31, 2021

President Biden has inherited a terribly flawed US foreign policy. For the past few decades, the pro-corporate US foreign policy has been a catastrophic failure, especially in the Middle East. Our criminal military interventions there have resulted in the devastation of much of that area, impoverished millions, created millions of refugees, and injured or killed millions more. Moreover, this criminal policy has wasted trillions of US taxpayer dollars, injured or killed thousands of US forces, and has badly damaged US strategic interests.

The illegal US use of aggressive sanctions against nations that don’t follow its dictates has also harmed tens of millions of people worldwide. In addition, US pro-corporate trade policies as well as the US-influenced International Monetary Fund and World Bank have impoverished tens of millions in the Third World. Perhaps of even greater importance, the US-led opposition to enforceable policies that ameliorate the effects of climate chaos threatens billions of people.

Clearly these ruinous policies need to be changed. The Biden administration must seize this opportunity and implement a sane foreign policy. Below are some excellent principles that provide a guideline for such a foreign policy. These principles were laid out in the “ Cross of Iron” speech delivered by President Dwight Eisenhower on April 16, 1953. Two lengthy excerpts from this speech are shown next.

He said:

“The way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs.
First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.
Second: No nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.
Third: Any nation’s right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.
Fourth: Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.
And fifth: A nation’s hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.”

Later in this speech, Eisenhower added:

“This Government is ready to ask its people to join with all nations in devoting a substantial percentage of the savings achieved by disarmament to a fund for world aid and reconstruction. The purposes of this great work would be to help other peoples to develop the underdeveloped areas of the world, to stimulate profitability and fair world trade, to assist all peoples to know the blessings of productive freedom.
The monuments to this new kind of war would be these: roads and schools, hospitals and homes, food and health.
We are ready, in short, to dedicate our strength to serving the needs, rather than the fears, of the world.
We are ready, by these and all such actions, to make of the United Nations an institution that can effectively guard the peace and security of all peoples.”

Eisenhower also pointed out the implications of spending huge amounts on military weapons in terms of homes, schools, hospitals, etc. that weren’t built.

President Eisenhower plainly recognized that our security and well-being, as well as that of all people on the planet, come from cooperation, not competition. Once we understand this point, the necessary policies become clear. In summary, President Eisenhower, a military icon who knew well the horrors of war, specifically stressed respect for the sovereignty of nations, the need to make the U.N. stronger, spoke against forced changes in regimes or economic systems, called for military disarmament and supported world aid and reconstruction. Even though he wasn’t correct in describing what the US was willing to do or its path, imagine the difference had Eisenhower or any of his successors followed through on his words.

President Biden now has the opportunity to follow Eisenhower’s counsel in a world where US actions have destroyed the myth of its moral authority or of being the exceptional nation. The US must work to rejoin the community of nations by complying with international law instead of running roughshod over it. This means among other things that the US must stop threatening other nations as well as ending its illegal sanctions.

In particular, some possible steps the Biden administration could take in collaboration with the international community are:

• share covid-19 vaccines with all nations at an affordable cost; may require the temporary suspension of patents;
• create enforceable steps for dealing with climate chaos including a large and increasing carbon tax; and fulfill funding climate change commitments to Third World nations;
• drastically reduce weapons spending, disband NATO and rely on the UN and diplomacy for settling conflicts; may require the ability to override a veto in the Security Council;
• strongly support international law and human rights for Palestinians; also support enforcement of the Right of Return for Palestinians;
• rejoin weapons treaties including the JCPOA (aka, the Iran Nuclear Deal) and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons;
• pay reparations for their rebuilding to nations the US has devastated;
• close overseas military bases;
• end unilateral sanctions, especially those against Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and North Korea; and
• strongly support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Disappointingly, it appears as if President Biden will continue to pursue the disastrous US foreign policy. It is up to us, we the people, to convince President Biden and Congress to put the public interest over corporate profits.

Ron Forthofer, Ph.D.  is a retired Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Texas School of Public Health, Houston, Texas; former Green Party candidate for Congress and for Governor of Colorado

https://countercurrents.org/2021/01/a-new-u-s-foreign-policy/