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AMERICA'S NEW NUCLEAR STRATEGY Time
to part company with our 'very, very, very good friend'?
By Christine Dann, February 2003 Anticipating regime change At the time of the first President Bush, a Defence Policy Guidance (DPG) paper was prepared for the then US Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, by Pentagon policy advisors Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby. This 1992 paper '...boldly called for permanent US military pre-eminence over virtually all or Eurasia - to be achieved by ''deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'' and by pre-empting states believed to be developing weapons of mass destruction.' (Lobe, 2003) The paper saw the United States, not the United Nations, as the creator and guarantor of international order. It said 'While the US cannot become the world's ''policeman'' by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies and friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations.' (quoted in Lobe, 2003). The paper caused controversy when it was leaked before it had been formally approved, and it was not acceptable to the incoming Clinton administration. Five years later, however, the two authors of the DPG, and the former Secretary of Defense, had regrouped and were working on the same issues, under the auspices of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). PNAC was founded in 1997 by prominent rightwing Americans with close links to former and current Republican administrations. They included Dick Cheney (now Vice-President), Lewis Libby (co-author of the DPG report and now Cheney's chief of staff), Jeb Bush (younger brother of George W.), current US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy Secretary of Defense, and co-author of the DPG report, Paul Wolfowitz. PNAC's statement of intent says: ''We aim to ... rally support for American global leadership''. It goes on to say that it supports '...the essential elements of the Reagan administration's success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and a national leadership that accepts the United States global responsibility.' Further, 'we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future; ...we need ...to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values; ..we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.' (www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm) In 2000 PNAC saw an excellent opportunity for promoting its views on defense and security - a budget surplus, and a possible change of administration. It produced a report, entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses; Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century, which built on the strategy outlined in the DPG. Contributors to Rebuilding America's Defenses included the original DPG co-authors, Wolfowitz and Libby. The introduction to the Rebuilding America's Defences report, released in September 2000, two months before the 2000 presidential election, is quite explicit about the directly political role of the report. It notes that it is published in an election year, that the new administration will need to produce a Quadrennial Defense Review shortly after it takes office, and that PNAC hopes that its report will be useful as a road map for the nation's immediate and future defense plans. (Rebuilding America's Defenses, p. iii) It recommends that America '...should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the pre-eminence of US military forces', a situation which it calls an ''American peace''. It advises the new administration to establish four core missions for US military forces. These include to 'fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars; perform the ''constabulary'' duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions; [and] transform US forces to exploit the 'revolution in military affairs'' ' (Rebuilding America's Defenses, p. iv). In order to carry out these four core missions, PNAC provides a nine-point list of what needs to happen. This includes maintaining strategic nuclear superiority, developing and deploying global missile defense systems, and increasing defense spending. As we shall see, much of what PNAC recommended in September 2000 has been systematically put into place since the Bush administration took power in January 2001. This is hardly surprising, given that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Libby are now in an excellent position to take and implement their own advice.
Research and speculation continues into whether and how the Bush administration, and government agencies under its command, were actively or passively complicit in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on American targets. [Refs needed here - Vidal, 'The Great Deception' video, ???] However, is not necessary to prove that the Bush administration actively allowed the attacks to happen to demonstrate that they were immediately seized upon for their utility in providing a likely-to-be-popular rationale for implementing the PNAC agenda. In addition to American global supremacy in general, PNAC was promoting control of Eurasia and its oil supplies in particular. Rebuilding America's Defenses advises moving permanent overseas deployment of US troops further South and East, with the nominally rotational forces and bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait becoming permanent. 'From an American perspective, the value of such bases would endure even should Saddam Hussein pass from the scene. Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests in the Gulf as Iraq has.' (Rebuilding America's Defenses, p. 17). On September 12, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a Bush cabinet meeting that Iraq should be a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism. Shortly after that, Bush's National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, called together senior members of the National Security Council, and asked them how they thought America could capitalise on the 'opportunities' proved by the September 11 attacks (Pilger, 12.12.02). The stage was being set for the further development and deployment of Weapons of Mass Destruction, including nuclear weapons - not by Iraq, or Afghanistan, or al-Qaeda - but by the United States of America.
During the remainder of 2001 and on in to 2002 President Bush conducted an undeclared war on Afghanistan, in the guise of a ''war on terrorism''. After six months of relentless bombing, which included the use of BLU-82s, (the so-called Daisy Cutter bombs, which are the largest conventional bomb in existence), close to 4,000 civilians were reliably estimated to have been killed by such attacks, while thousands more died from cold, hunger, illness and other ''incidental'' effects of war (Herold, 2002). In his State of the Union address on 29 January 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/print/20020129-11.html) President Bush made much of his 'victory' in Afghanistan, with statements like ''The American flag flies again over our embassy in Kabul.'' He also claimed that American military might had ''rid the world of thousands of terrorists'' - although ''tens of thousands of trained terrorists are still at large''. Where were they? Bush singled out North Korea, Iran and Iraq as hotbeds of terrorism and a threat to the peace of the world. For, 'by seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide arms to terrorists...they could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States.' (Emphasis added.) Bush's response to these highly hypothetical ''threats'' of his own invention was to throw more money at military hardware. He promised 'to develop and deploy effective missile defenses to protect America and our allies from sudden attack', and to budget for ''the largest increase in defense spending in two decades''. This was to be spent on mainly on weaponry and other military hardware, including 'expensive precision weapons [that] defeat the enemy and space innocent lives'. (Weapons of the sort that Bush expected his Congressional audience to believe were used to such effect in Afghanistan, despite all evidence to the contrary.) Thus within one year of taking office, the Bush administration was well on track to carrying out some of the key recommendations of the PNAC report. The national missile defence system ('son of Star Wars') was to be revived, and military spending increased. Now, what about maintaining strategic nuclear superiority? It was under such direction from the administration that in January 2002 Congress received the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) that it had commissioned from the Defense Department in September 2000. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield presented a review (parts of which were leaked in March 2002 - see www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/policy/dod/npr.htm , that advocated at every opportunity for a national missile defence system. Independent defense analyst William Arkin found much more to be worried about in the Nuclear Posture Review. Of particular concern was the requirement for '...the Pentagon to draft contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons against at least seven countries, naming not only Russia and the ''axis of evil'' - Iraq, Iran and North Korea - but also China, Libya and Syria.' (Arkin, 10.3.02). The
entire NPR represents a significant shift away from the previous American
position, of almost two decades standing, of seeing nuclear weapons
as weapons of last resort, with a separate command and control system.
The shift is towards an integration of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons,
military personnel and command and control systems. As part and parcel
of this shift, the NPR signals a number of new developments of major
concern. These include: With this shift in thinking made clear, (at least to Congress if to no one else who needed to know), the next action taken by the Bush administration to follow through on its change in nuclear plan was the signing of the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) with Russia in May 2002. Although touted as a reduction in nuclear armaments, and an advance on START II, the previous Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of [check date], in practice it allowed both sides to mothball, rather than destroy, the nuclear weaponry that they agreed to reduce. Even the mothballing was of a rather compromised sort, with Russia overhauling ICBMs it had agreed to scrap by 2007 under START II, and keeping them operational until 2014 (Green, 2002). On the American side, the NPR sets out all the canny recycling and re-use of old nuclear stock that the US intends to engage in, using the cover term of improved ''responsiveness''. In the same month the US withdrew from the only just created International Criminal Court, and in June 2002 it pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The former meant that it did not intend to be held accountable for any war crimes it might commit, such as the use of weapons of mass or lasting destruction; the latter that it was (legally) free to go on developing a national missile defence system. Also in June 2002, the President made an even more significant statement on the dramatic shift in US nuclear policy, in a speech he gave to the graduating class at the West Point military academy. He said that '...the doctrines of deterrence and containment, which had been cornerstones of US national security policy since the Truman era, were decreasingly relevant to the current environment - to wit ''Deterrence - the promise of massive retaliation against nations - means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.'' ' (Werther, 2002) On 14 September 2002 President Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive - 17, on a national strategy to combat weapons of mass destruction (www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-17.html). NSPD-17 is a classified document. A public version released in December 2002 said that the US would respond 'through resort to all of our options' to the use of weapons of mass destruction against the US, its forces abroad, and friends and allies.' The original wording in the classified version of NSPD-17, obtained by the Washington Times in January 2003, says 'The United States will continue to make it clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force - including potentially nuclear weapons - to the use of [weapons of mass destruction] against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies.'(Kralev, 31.1.03) [check/compare Washington Post version] The matter was raised again, and more clearly, in the National Security Strategy (NSS) released on 20 September 2002. The White House delayed releasing this document by a week '...so that its lengthy discussion of conditions under which the United States might take unilateral, pre-emptive action would not dominate delicate negotiations in the United Nations of the testimony of administration officials who appeared at Congressional hearings to discuss Iraq.'(Sanger, 20.10.02). The
NSS (available at www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/print/nssall.html
- page numbers cited are from this version) first makes it clear that
the US makes 'no distinction between terrorists and those who knowingly
harbour or provide aid to them.'(NSS, p 4). Having by this sleight of
hand raised the number of possible ''anti-terrorist'' targets to include
whole states and their entire non-terrorist populations, (and of course
reserving to the US the right to unilaterally determine which states
these might be), the NSS goes on to state the new doctrine of unilateral
pre-emption in several ways, as follows: National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice reiterated that last point in a speech
she gave on 1 October 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/1001-6.html) The Bush administration might have been trying to avoid upsetting United Nations discussions on the right thing to do with regards to Iraq by delaying the release of the NSS at that point, but discussion had already started among the international legal community on the legality as well as the morality of unilateral pre-emptive attacks. [check UN charter wording, and current legal challenge(s)] Six
weeks before the NSS came out two British lawyers, Rabinder Singh QC
and Alison Macdonald, provided an opinion for Peacerights on the legality
of using force against Iraq (Singh and Macdonald, September 2002). They
concluded that 'At present, the United Kingdom is ...not entitled, in
international law, to use force against Iraq.' This was because the
use of force against Iraq would not be justified unless it met the following
criteria: As Iraq had not attacked the UK (or its ally the USA), and there was no evidence that an attack was imminent, and existing Security Council resolutions did not authorise the use of force against Iraq, Singh and Macdonald were of the opinion that using force would be unlawful. In providing their opinion they discussed whether there is a right to anticipatory self-defence in international law, and found that while 'State practice is ambiguous, [it] tends to suggest that anticipatory use of force is not generally considered lawful, or only in very pressing circumstances.'(Singh and Macdonald, 2002, p 9). Nothing in the Singh and Macdonald opinion lends credence to the statements in the NSS and by Condoleezza Rice regarding historically recognised ''rights'' to anticipatory selfdefense.
In line with the new preemption doctrine - and not coincidentally with the wishes of the authors of the Project for the New American Century report Rebuilding America's Defenses - President Bush announced on 17 December 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/12/20021217.html) that '...we will take another step in countering [the threats of the 21st century] by beginning to field missile defense capabilities to protect the United States, as well as our friends and allies...Our withdrawal from the ABM Treaty has made it possible to develop and test the full range of missile defense technologies, and to deploy defenses capable of protecting our territory and our cities.' The new National Missile Defence (NMD) system is supposed to begin to be operational in 2004, and will include land and sea-based interceptors, and land, sea and air sensors. It will also include land-based interceptors on the territory of 'friends and allies', starting with basing interceptor rockets at the Fylingdales radar station in Yorkshire, UK. Britain would pay for the cost of these rockets. (Richard Norton-Taylor, Guardian Weekly, 23.1.03) [more on what NMD is and critiques of its effectiveness - see FAS site - and why it is a PNAC fetish - see Werther] Planning for developing and deploying new nuclear weapons, including tactical nuclear weapons, will continue in the US during 2003 [Borger articles]. There are clear signs that the US is no longer interested in abiding by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which it signed, but the Senate would not ratify), and is only considering when, not if, it will resume nuclear testing. It has already resumed sub-critical nuclear testing in Nevada. [NS article, other sources] There can no longer be any doubt that the Bush administration intends to develop and test new nuclear weapons, and that it has a promulgated a doctrine of justification for using them preemptively. What should be the response of those countries that it considers to be among the ''friends and allies'' that it claims it wants to protect by such means?
(A ''good friend'' is someone you are screwing but won't admit to doing it. Analogy - ally/spouse.) In March 2002 Prime Minister Helen Clark made an official visit to the United States, and met with senior Bush administration personnel, including Secretary of State Colin Powell. [Details on who she met, talks held, when/where Powell made 'very, very, very good friends' comment] Before
the election of the fourth Labour government in July 1984 and New Zealand's
subsequent refusal to allow an American nuclear warship visit to NZ
in January 1985,
February 1985 Congressman Dick Cheney (became Sec of Defense 1989) introduced a bill to bar imports from NZ (and Oz) because he was ''angered by their unco-operative attitude towards US international defence policy...if these countries are not willing to share the burden and responsibility of defending freedom, why should we facilitate the enjoyment of freedom's benefits such as unrestricted access to our markets?'' [Details in Rogers and Landais Stamp - plus other arm-twisting examples] NZ
Nuclear Free Zone law says we are not to co-operate in military operations
with other nuclear states except under UN direction [check actual wording
in Act] (so E. Timor OK, Gulf not) Use of DU weapons, other ways in which the US has/is showing itself to be an active nuclear power again, and how this conflicts with NZ law/Labour policy. Australian policy - support for preemption, NMD - relevance for NZ. Connection with trade issues - second half of NSS, referral of GE decision to NSC and the relevance of that to NZ, Zoellick's connections with the PNAC hawks, financial rewards and punishments to UNSC members from first Gulf War, current bidding round with Turkey, etc. Why NZ needs to distance itself from the US. Now. |
