-Caveat Lector-
From the sky will come great King of Terror.
To bring back the rule of Fear to Americans.
Before and after, Mars rules happily.
http://www.transnational.org/forum/meet/2002/Falk_RushtoWar.html
Impending Constitutional Crisis:
The Rush to War
By
Richard Falk
Visiting Distinguished Professor, Global Studies, University of California,
Santa Barbara and Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton
University
TFF associate
August 27, 2002
The American Constitution at the very beginning of the republic sought above
all to guard the country against reckless, ill-considered recourse to war.
It required a Declaration of War by the legislative branch, and gave
Congress the power over appropriations even during wartime. Such caution
existed before the great effort of the 20th century to erect greater
barriers to war by way of international law and public morality, and to make
this resistance to war the central feature of the United Nations Charter.
Consistently with this undertaking German and Japanese leaders who engaged
in aggressive war were punished after World War II as war criminals. The
most prominent Americans at the time declared their support for such a
framework of restraint as applicable in the future to all states, not just
to the losers in a war. We all realize that this struggle to avoid war has
been far from successful, but it remains a goal widely shared by the peoples
of the world and still endorsed by every government on the planet.
And yet, here we are, poised on the slippery precipice of a preemptive war,
without the benefit of meaningful public debate. The constitutional crisis
is so deep that it is not even noticed. There are many devils in these
details! The unilateralism of the Bush White House is an affront to the
whole world, which is unanimously opposed to the proposed war. The
Democratic Party, even in its role as loyal opposition, should be doing its
utmost to raise the difficult questions. Instead, the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, under the chairmanship of Democratic Senator Biden, has
organized two days of hearings, notable for the absence of critical voices.
Such hearings are worse than nothing, creating a forum for advocates of war,
fostering the illusion that no sensible dissent exists, and thus serving
mainly to raise the war fever a degree or two. How different might the
impact of such hearings be if respected and informed critics of a proposed
preemptive war, such as Hans von Sponeck and Denis Halliday, both former
respected UN coordinators of humanitarian assistance to Iraq who resigned in
protest a few years back, were given the opportunity to appear before the
senators. The media, too, has failed miserably in presenting to the American
people the down sides of war with Iraq. And the citizenry, too, has been
content to follow the White House on the warpath without demanding to know
why the lives of young Americans should be put at risk, much less why the
United States should go to war against a distant foreign country that has
never attacked us and whose population has endured the most punishing
sanctions in all of history for more than a decade..
This is not just a procedural demand that we respect the constitution as we
decide upon recourse to war, the most serious decision any society can make,
not only for itself, but for its adversary. It is also, in this instance, a
substantive matter of the greatest weight. The United States is without
doubt the world leader at this point, and its behavior with respect to war
and law is likely to cast a long shadow across the future. To go
legitimately to war in the world that currently exists can be based on three
types of considerations: international law (self-defense as set forth in
article 51, backed by a UN mandate as in the Gulf War), international
morality (humanitarian intervention to prevent genocide or ethnic
cleansing), and necessity (the survival and fundamental interests of a state
are genuinely threatened and not really covered by international law, as
arguably justified the Afghanistan War).
With respect to Iraq, there is no pretense that international law supports
such a war and little claim that the brutality of the Iraqi regime creates a
foundation for humanitarian intervention. The Administration argument for
war rests on necessity, the alleged risk posed by Iraqi acquisition of
weapons of mass destruction, and the prospect that such weapons would be
made available to al Qaeda for future use against the United States. Such a
risk, to the scant extent that it exists, can be addressed much more
successfully by relying on deterrence and containment (what worked against
the far more menacing Soviet Union for decades) than by aggressive
warmaking. All the evidence going back to the Iran/Iraq War and the Gulf War
shows that Saddam Hussein, whatever else, responds to pressure and threat,
and is not inclined to risk self-destruction. Indeed, if the US attacks and
if Iraq truly possesses WMD, then the feared risks are then likely to
materialize as Iraq and Hussein confront defeat and humiliation, and have
little left to lose.
A real public debate is needed not only to revitalize representative
democracy, but to head off an unnecessary war likely to bring widespread
death and destruction, as well as heighten regional dangers of economic and
political instability, encourage future anti-American terrorism, and give
rise to an American isolationism that this time is not of its own choosing!
We must ask why is the open American system so closed in this instance. How
can we explain this unsavory rush to judgment when so many lives are at
stake? What is now wrong with our political system, with the vigilance of
our citizenry, that such a course of action can be embarked upon without
even evoking criticism in high places, much less mass opposition in the
streets?
� TFF & the author 2002
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