[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 56 (Wednesday, May 10, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E769-E773]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TOWARDS A RULE BASED INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY
______
HON. JOHN CONYERS, JR.
of michigan
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, May 9, 2006
Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to call my colleagues' attention to
an alarming, but accurate portrayal of where the Bush Administration
has been taking America. This survey shows how they have dragged down
the United States from its traditional leadership in international law
and peace-keeping institutions and turned America into a worldwide
pariah for flouting the rule of law. In the latest issue of the ``New
York Review of Books,'' scholar Brian Urquhart reviews the work of
three authors. Their common theme is the damage done by the Bush/Cheney
doctrines to the world's peacekeeping structure. As Urquhart notes,
they have ``brushed aside fifty years of international law in the name
of the ``global war on terrorism.'' A pioneer of international peace-
keeping and a former U.N. Undersecretary General, Urquhart is well-
placed to summarize the Bush Administration's disdain for the rule of
law, or as he puts it: ``the ideological opposition of the Bush
Administration, both to vital treaties and to international
institutions.''
One of the authors reviewed, Phillipe Sands, a professor and veteran
international lawyer, has provided a history of how modern governments
like the United States have alternated between weaving a stronger
fabric of international law, and at other times taking actions that
unraveled it. Sands has made especially invaluable contributions to our
understanding of how President Bush and Prime Minister Blair secretly
plotted to drag both nations into war with Iraq. For this I salute him.
Last spring, the British press published classified minutes of a
series of 2002 secret meetings between Prime Minister Tony Blair and
his senior national security advisors about planning for war in Iraq.
They were originally described in Sands' book, The Lawless World,
[[Page E770]]
(before the press published the full texts.) These ``Downing Street
Memos'' revealed the cynical deceit on which those plans were based.
After meeting with their U.S. counterparts in the spring and summer of
2002, the British officials advised Blair that the case for war was
``thin;'' that the White House was hatching plans to create an
artificial justification for attacking Iraq; and that Bush reluctantly
agreed to go back to the U.N. but only to precipitate a basis for war,
not to avoid it. The memos also revealed that Bush had secretly decided
to go to war by the summer of 2002, although he publicly insisted for
months thereafter that he was undecided and war was his ``last
resort.'' The clearest ``smoking gun'' of all was the memo by Britain's
highest intelligence official who had met with his U.S. counterparts
and warned that ``the intelligence and facts were being fixed around
the policy'' by the Bush Administration. My request for answers from
the Administration about these charges met with silence.
I also convened an informal hearing at which several experts
discussed the importance of these and other revelations in the Downing
Street Memos. Most of the mainstream press pooh-poohed them and echoed
the White House mantra that they presented little new about the lack of
grounds for war. Faced with their failure to be more skeptical of the
White House claims before the war, the media seemed reluctant to read
the real significance of the memos, or they simply missed the point.
Obviously by last spring, the truth about WMD and alleged links between
Saddam and Al Qaeda were well known. The momentous disclosure in these
Memos, however was their hard evidence of all the false statements and
manipulation of intelligence that the President and other officials
intentionally and cynically had made before the war to the Congress and
the American people. Fortunately a number of columnists, magazines and
blogs, not blinkered by their performance before the war, did
acknowledge the importance of the revelations Professor Sands had first
provided.
Most disturbing were press reports earlier this year, again based on
Professor Sand's revelations. They quoted a memo marked ``extremely
sensitive'' by, David Manning, Blair's top foreign affairs advisor
about Blair's January 2003 meeting with Bush. Bush reportedly said he
would attack Iraq whether or not WMD were found or the U.N. Security
Council passed a second resolution. The memo recorded that Bush also
suggested provoking war by flying American U2 reconnaissance planes
with aircraft plane cover, and painted with U.N. insignia, over Iraq,
so that when Iraq fired on it that would be a breach of U.N.
resolutions. My call for a Special Counsel to investigate this
astounding revelation also went unheeded.
I commend the entire article by Brian Urquhart to my colleague's
attention.
[From The New York Review, May 11, 2006]
The Outlaw World
(By Brian Urquhart)
``A rule-based international society'' may seem a
lackluster phrase, but it describes, for those who wish
organized life on this planet to survive in a decent form,
the most important of all the long-term international
objectives mankind can have. That international law has
already been formulated to deal with a wide range of human
activities is one of the great, if often unappreciated,
achievements of the years since World War II. Yet the
obstacles to its being effective are enormous. We all know
that international law is often challenged by the caprices
and diverging interests of national politics and that it
still lacks the authority of national law. With a few
important exceptions, international law remains
unenforceable; when it collides with the sovereign interests
or the ambitions of states, it is often ignored or rejected.
It is still far from being the respected foundation of a
reliable international system.
In the first years of the new millennium, and especially
after the terrorist attacks of September 11, the development
of international law has encountered an unexpected and
formidable obstacle--the ideological opposition of the Bush
administration, both to vital treaties and to international
institutions. This attitude culminated in the 2003 invasion
of Iraq without the specific authorization of the UN Security
Council, and without allowing UN inspectors to complete their
work. Prisoners captured by the US were denied the protection
of the Geneva Conventions and were often treated brutally. It
is therefore no surprise that the three very different books
under review all end by deploring the United States' war for
regime change in Iraq and the illegal abuses that have
accompanied it.
It is ironic that such widespread criticism should be
incurred by the US. From the Permanent Court of International
Justice in The Hague, the Covenant of the League of Nations,
and the Charter of the United Nations to the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and many UN conventions, the US
has done more than any other country to develop and
strengthen both the concept and the substance of
international law. It is nothing less than disastrous that
a United States administration should have chosen to show
disrespect for the international legal system and weaken
it at a time when the challenges facing the planet demand
more urgently than ever the discipline of a strong and
respected worldwide system of law. Those challenges
include globalization at almost every level of human
society, the deeply troubling evidence of climate change,
and the linked threats of international terrorism and
proliferating weapons of mass destruction. It is true that
the United States remains broadly committed to the
international rules on trade of the World Trade
Organization and NAFTA, rules that are important to the
United States not least because they protect the rights of
US investors and intellectual property rights.
Philippe Sands is a practicing international lawyer and
professor in London. Having been involved in many cases
before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, he
took part in the effort to deny Augusto Pinochet immunity in
the UK and has represented the British detainees at
Guantanamo.
Along with the other books under review, Sands's Lawless
World provides a disturbing picture of the state of
international law and the part, at times visionary, at other
times destructive, that the US had in its development. Sands
indicts the United States, with Tony Blair's complicity, for
abandoning its commitment to the post-World War II legal and
institutional arrangements that both countries, more than
anyone else, had put in place. ``I am not starry-eyed about
international law,'' Sands writes. ``I recognize that it has
frequently failed millions around the world and will continue
to do so. But do recent events justify a wholesale change of
approach?''
Before World War II, governments could act more or less as
they wished in international affairs, provided they had the
power to do so. This situation began to change radically when
Roosevelt and Churchill proclaimed the Atlantic Charter on a
battleship off the coast of Newfoundland on August 14, 1941,
at a time when Nazi Germany appeared to be decisively
winning the European war. This first sketch of the UN
Charter and the international system that was to regulate
the postwar world was based on three simple but
revolutionary principles. First, states would recognize
the obligation to refrain from the use of force in their
international relations, and would resort to force only in
self-defense or when authorized to do so by the
international community--later to be represented by the UN
Security Council. Second, they would maintain and respect
the ``inherent dignity'' and ``equal and inalienable
rights'' of all members of the human family. Third, they
would promote economic liberalization and progress through
free trade and other means.
The Atlantic Charter marked the beginning of the long
process that led to the establishment of the UN, the various
UN specialized agencies, the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(which after forty-five years became the World Trade
Organization), and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (in Sands's words ``arguably the single most important
international instrument ever negotiated''), as well as the
Geneva Conventions of 1949 and 1977.
Further steps toward establishing an international
institutional and legal order continued with the 1957
International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, which has now
become an important monitoring and inspection agency; the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and other arms control
conventions; environmental law and institutions; and now the
International Criminal Court, and the beginning of a system
of legal obligations for states related to the prevention and
suppression of international terrorism.
Throughout Lawless World Sands's main preoccupation is the
damage that current United States policies and actions may do
to the respect for international law and its authority, both
of which may be decisive in dealing effectively with the
global challenges that lie ahead. His concern is well
justified. As he notes, the 1997 manifesto of the
neoconservative organization Project for the New American
Century, signed by such people as Dick Cheney, Paul
Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Scooter Libby, proclaimed
that the detention of Augusto Pinochet, the new International
Criminal Court, and the Kyoto Protocol on global warming
were all threats to American security. John Bolton, now
United States ambassador at the UN, said at the time that
treaties were simply political acts and ``not legally
binding.'' Richard Perle declared publicly in April 2003
that the war in Iraq provided an opportunity to refashion
international law and undermine the United Nations.
Sands is particularly concerned about the frenzied
opposition of the Bush administration to the new
International Criminal Court, which has been accepted by one
hundred other nations and is now investigating the current
genocide in Darfur. The Bush administration, he writes, is
using the ICC as ``a useful stalking horse for a broader
attack on international law and the constraints which it may
place on hegemonic power.''
As for the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, Sands recalls
with nostalgia that in 1970, another Republican president,
Richard Nixon, signed into law the National Environmental
Policy Act, the world's first comprehensive attempt to
protect the environment. The UN Charter makes no mention of
rules governing the environment. Nixon vigorously
[[Page E771]]
supported an environmental program within the UN, and just
before the UN's first global conference on the environment in
Stockholm in 1972, he proposed a World Heritage Trust to
protect regions of such unique worldwide value that they
should be treated as part of the heritage of all mankind. The
United States was also a leader in adopting the first
measures, taken under the Reagan administration in the 1980s,
to counteract the depletion of the ozone layer; it did so
against the opposition of European governments that were
worried about possible unfavorable economic consequences.
Since 1990, when the report of the UN's International Panel
on Climate Change revealed a deadly potential threat to
islands and other low-lying regions that clearly called for a
timely global response, Sands himself has been deeply
involved in such issues. He makes it clear that short-term
economic considerations have so far taken precedence over the
enormous long-term risks involved in doing too little about
climate change.
As he points out, the United States and OPEC initially
opposed an international convention on climate change or any
timetables to reduce and stabilize the emission of greenhouse
gases. A preliminary convention, in a very modest form, came
into force in 1994. In 1997 the Kyoto Protocol marked a real
commitment to action and provided a basis for more far-
reaching measures. In signing it, President Clinton praised
the protocol as a major step forward. Sands writes that
Clinton was then informed somewhat mystifyingly by former
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and a number of other
Regan and Bush officials that the protocol would
``hamstring'' American military operations and undermine
American sovereignty. The Bush administration soon
``unsigned'' the Kyoto Protocol, claiming among other
reasons that the scientific verdict on global warming was
not yet in. Alone of all industrialized states, the United
States and Australia have not ratified the protocol.
Whatever its defects in not adequately controlling
emissions from the large Asian economies, it remains an
essential preliminary step toward limiting climate change.
The invasion of Iraq that started in March 2003 arouses
Sands's deepest objections to what he sees as an unwarranted
assault on international law. The invasion itself, without
benefit of Security Council authorization, was a blow to the
essential basic principle contained in Article 2.4 of the UN
Charter, which reads:
``All Members shall refrain in their international
relations from the threat or use of force against the
territorial integrity or political independence of any state,
or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the
United Nations.''
Sands is equally concerned with the violation of
international laws in connection with the conduct of the war.
In the Guantanamo prison hundreds of alleged ``killers,''
``terrorists,'' or ``unlawful combatants,'' as they have been
variously designated by the United States, have been
deliberately put, he writes, into a ``legal black hole,''
from which most of them are unlikely to emerge anytime soon.
The basic principle of habeas corpus has seldom if ever taken
such a beating at the hands of a leading democracy. The
atrocities at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere are plainly in
violation of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention
against Torture. They also set a terrible precedent for the
future treatment of captured Americans.
The 1899 Hague Convention, which puts limits on methods of
interrogation of prisoners of war; the four 1949 Geneva
Conventions, which deal, among many other matters, with
treatment of prisoners; and Article 75 of the Geneva
Protocol I of 1977 mean, in Sands's judgment, that ``no
person can ever fall outside the scope of minimum legal
protections'' against violence, torture, threats of
torture, outrages against personal dignity including
humiliating and degrading treatment, and any form of
indecent assault. This list certainly describes what
happened in Abu Ghraib and other prisons.
Of course these rules have often been violated by other
states, but the United States, since 2001, is unique in
claiming, in the words of Deputy Assistant Attorney General
John Yoo in 2002, ``What the Administration is trying to do
is create a new legal regime.'' This was also presumably the
basic notion behind Bush's proclaiming the right to resort
unilaterally to preventive war as part of his new national
security strategy. To minimize legal constraints on the
United States and to extract information from prisoners,
Alberto Gonzales, then White House general counsel and now
attorney general of the United States, urged the President to
declare that the Geneva Convention III of 1949 did not apply
to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. ``This new paradigm,'' Gonzales
wrote in January 2002, ``renders obsolete Geneva's strict
limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders
quaint some of its provisions. . . .''
Although Guantanamo, because it was not in US territory,
was chosen partly to avoid such interference, from time to
time the US judiciary has tried to stem the administration's
flood of expedient revisionism. A federal judge halted the
first hearing, after nearly three years, before a special
military commission established to try non-American
Guantanamo prisoners. He did so on the grounds that the
proceedings lacked the basic elements of a fair trial and
violated the Geneva Conventions.
Sands is particularly good at picking, from an amazing
wealth of material, quotations that capture the eerie
atmosphere of the Bush administration in the midst of a war
of choice and an unprecedented assault on international law.
On the Guantanamo inmates, for example, he quotes Cheney as
saying, ``They're living in the tropics. They're well fed.
They've got everything they could possibly want.''
Sands's discussion of the period preceding the second Iraq
war are particularly interesting in charting Bush's
relatively unobstructed path to war as compared with Tony
Blair's far more difficult one. Sands shows that both leaders
engaged in much dissembling and tinkering with the truth. He
describes the content of the so-called ``Downing Street
memo,'' which caused a considerable stir on both sides of the
Atlantic when it was later published in full in the London
Sunday Times and in these pages.
On March 27, 2006, The New York Times reported on another
``extremely sensitive'' British memo describing Bush and
Blair's private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office in
January 2003, of which several highlights were first
published in the later edition of Sands's book. The sometimes
bizarre quality of these talks make one long for the
publication of the full five-page text. Bush apparently
suggested provoking a confrontation with Saddam Hussein by
painting a US surveillance plane in UN colors in the hope of
drawing Iraqi fire. The basic theme of the meeting was Bush's
determination to go to war in early March regardless of
Security Council resolutions, the findings of UN inspectors,
or anything else.
About the performance of the UN Security Council concerning
Iraq, Sands concludes:
``The simple fact is that the great majority of states who
sat on the Security Council in March 2003 did not consider
that the circumstances, as they were then known to be, could
justify the use of force. History has shown that they were
right and that the US and Britain were wrong. No WMD have
been found. It could be said that the UN system worked. No
amount of bullying by two permanent members could buy the
votes they wanted.''
He could have added that had the inspections been allowed
to continue, war probably could have been avoided, with all
credit being given to the US for putting the necessary
pressure on Saddam Hussein. Instead, the ostensible reason
for the US invasion was changed from the alleged threat of
WMDs to regime change. Moreover, as Hans Blix reminded the
Security Council after inspectors had reached preliminary
conclusions about the absence of WMDs, ``international
inspections and monitoring systems were to stay in
place.''
Michael Byers states that the objective of his book is to
``provide the interested non-lawyer with a readily
comprehensible overview of the law governing the use of force
in international affairs.'' Clear and informative, his
account is particularly valuable at a time when there is a
worldwide debate, arising largely from the Iraq situation--
but also relevant to the genocide in Darfur--about the
circumstances in which it is legally appropriate for one
country to use force against another or for international
intervention on humanitarian grounds.
Byers's discussion of self-defense, the justifying
condition for the unilateral use of force in the UN Charter,
takes up more than half his book. He goes back to the case of
the steamship Caroline, which was hired in 1837 by a private
militia to ferry men and supplies across the Niagara River to
support a Canadian rebellion against the British. The British
set the ship on fire and floated it over Niagara Falls, later
claiming that they did so in self-defense and that their
action was justified on political grounds. When the dispute
was finally, and amicably, settled in 1842, the American
secretary of state, Daniel Webster, conceded that the use of
force in self-defense could sometimes be justified as a
matter of necessity, but that nothing ``unreasonable or
excessive'' could be done in self-defense.
These criteria--``necessity and proportionality''--were
widely accepted as the requirements of a new international
legal right to self-defense. Byers emphasizes the importance
of this precedent as showing that a country could defend
itself without declaring war, and that peace could be
maintained even when the right to self-defense was exercised;
he traces the development of this concept up to the present
time.
The United Nations was the first international organization
to combine in its charter the three main rules for
maintaining peace: prohibition on the use of force in
international affairs (Article 2.4); a provision for the use
of force by the Security Council against threats to the peace
and acts of aggression (Chapter VII); and an exception for
the use of force by governments in self-defense (in Article
51). But the plea of self-defense, as Byers shows, can be
complex when it involves forceful action beyond a nation's
own territory.
For example, in 1976 an Air France plane with many Israeli
passengers aboard was hijacked by Palestinians and taken to
Entebbe in Uganda, where non-Jewish passengers were released.
Facing a deadline for meeting the hijackers' demand for the
release of fifty-three Palestinian terrorists, an Israeli
commando team, led by Jonathan Netanyahu, killed the
hijackers, rescued the Israeli hostages, and flew them back
to Israel. Netanyahu himself was killed. This action is
now credited as a precedent for extending the right of
self-defense to protecting nationals abroad.
[[Page E772]]
In April 1993 an attempt to assassinate former President
George H. W. Bush in Kuwait was thwarted by the discovery of
a sophisticated car bomb. When Iraq's involvement in this
attempt was established, President Clinton ordered the
destruction of Saddam Hussein's Military Intelligence
Headquarters in Baghdad by twenty-three Tomahawk missiles.
The Security Council did not censure this action, although
the use of force without Council authorization was condemned
by the Arab League.
The Council did not even consider President Clinton's
response to the destruction by terrorists of the U.S.
embassies in Tanzania and Kenya when he fired seventy-nine
Tomahawk missiles at al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan
and also at a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan suspected of
making chemical weapons for terrorists. Moreover, by
authorizing the U.S.-led operation against the Taliban in
Afghanistan after September 11, the Security Council also set
a precedent for using force against a state harboring
terrorists, provided that the terrorists had previously
attacked the state concerned.
On the even more controversial question of preemptive self-
defense, Byers cites the case of Israel's 1981 attack on
Iraq's French-built Osirak nuclear reactor, which the Council
unanimously condemned as a grave breach of international law.
Byers writes that George W. Bush's policy claiming the right
of the United States to use unilateral, preemptive force--
widely considered a dangerous example that other states may
try to emulate--clearly violates the common-sense criteria of
the Caroline case for self-defense. He believes that such a
policy as Bush's, if maintained, could even serve as an
incentive to some states to try to acquire a nuclear
deterrent in self-defense. He quotes the response of the UN
Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges
and Change to Bush's claim of the right of preemptive self-
defense:
``. . . In a world full of perceived potential threats, the
risk to the global order and the norm of nonintervention on
which it continues to be based is simply too great for the
legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from
collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one to
so act is to allow all.''
Byers then examines the current legal status of the
relatively recent issue of humanitarian intervention and the
obligation to protect populations in distress, even from the
actions of their own governments. One of the most important
decisions of the UN Summit Meeting of September 2005 was to
give a general, although highly qualified, approval to such
interventions. But as Byers points out, while Kofi Annan
reiterates that the ``security situation in Darfur continues
to deteriorate and the moral case for action is
overwhelming,'' the Security Council has so far agreed only
to deploying a UN peacekeeping force later this year to
take over from the existing African Union force, a move
strongly opposed by the Sudanese government. The Council
has also, as mentioned above, referred the Darfur case to
the International Criminal Court.
Byers's closing chapters on the protection of civilians and
prisoners of war, and on the various UN international
tribunals, are characterized by mounting frustration at the
US administration's contemptuous attitude toward
international law and legal institutions. Of the Bush
administration's obsessive hostility toward the recently
established International Criminal Court he writes:
``Only the United States has actively endeavoured to
undermine the court. With troops in more than 140 countries,
a propensity to intervene under dubious legal circumstances,
and interpretations of the laws of war that sometimes differ
from those of other states, the single superpower feels
vulnerable to international mechanisms for enforcing
international criminal law. Whereas the Clinton
Administration sought to negotiate protections against the
abuse of international procedures into the statutes of the
tribunals it helped to create, the Bush Administration has
adopted an entirely hostile stance. . . .
``Since coming to office, President Bush has `un-signed'
the ICC statute, pressured the UN Security Council into
temporarily exempting US forces from the Court's
jurisdiction, and obtained more than ninety bilateral
treaties committing individual countries not to surrender US
citizens to The Hague. Bush has even signed legislation that
authorizes him to use military force to secure the release of
any US service member detained by the ICC. The law is
popularly known as `The Hague Invasion Act.' ''
Since under the present ICC statute it is virtually
impossible that the Court would detain a US soldier, this
exceptional--even paranoid--brand of US exceptionalism can
only add to the frustration of the nations seeking a fair and
workable international legal system.
When the UN Preparatory Commission was setting up the world
organization in London in the fall of 1945, the European
colonial powers could sometimes scarcely contain their
resentment of what they saw as the self-righteous attitude of
the US delegation toward European colonialism and its
abolition. Their resentment occasionally took the form of
rather feeble allusions to the fate of American Indians; but
I cannot recall a single reference to America's many efforts
at regime change in the fairly recent past. These actions are
the subject of the first part of Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer's
wonderful chronicle of America's interventions in foreign
countries.
Kinzer describes three periods' of American intervention:
first the ``Imperial Era'' between 1893 and 1910 (in Hawaii,
the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, and Honduras);
second, the ``Covert Action period'' between 1953 and 1973
(in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile); and third,
the ``Invasions'' since 1983 (in Grenada, Panama,
Afghanistan, and Iraq). The original announced aim was to
help anti-colonial patriots to achieve success, as in Cuba
and the Philippines; and then, to the patriots' surprise,
the U.S. would establish an authoritarian protectorate.
The reasons for doing so were usually presented as
extending the advantages of American democratic principles
and protecting U.S. security. In practice, as Kinzer
shows, the principal aims were to establish the right of
U.S. business to act as it wished, to satisfy a new
national ambition for expansion, and to add to the
strength of the U.S. economy.
Kinzer quotes a letter from John L. Stevens, the American
minister in Honolulu, on January 16, 1893, to Captain Gilbert
Wiltse, the commander of the cruiser Boston. He comments,
``Its single sentence is a dry classic of diplomatic
mendacity, full of motifs that Americans would hear often in
the century to come.'' The letter reads:
``In view of the existing critical circumstances in
Honolulu, indicating an inadequate legal force, I request you
to land marines and sailors from the ship under your command
for the protection of the United States legation and the
United States consulate, and to secure the safety of American
life and property.''
That, effectively, was the end of the courageous Queen
Liliuokalani's resistance to the American annexation of
Hawaii.
Although there were impassioned opponents of such actions
in the United States, William James among them, Kinzer shows
that the expansionist mood of the 1890s was already producing
justifications that sound all too familiar today. American
presidents and military officers, then as now, said they were
intervening in struggles of ``good and evil'' for humanity's
sake and had God's guidance in doing so. ``The parallels
between McKinley's invasion of the Philippines and Bush's
invasion of Iraq were startling.'' Kinzer writes:
``Both presidents sought economic as well as political
advantage for the United States. Both were also motivated by
a deep belief that the United States has a sacred mission to
spread its form of government to faraway countries. Neither
doubted that the people who lived in those countries would
welcome Americans as liberators. Neither anticipated that he
would have to fight a long counterinsurgency war to subdue
nationalist rebels. Early in the twenty-first century, ten
decades after the United States invaded the Philippines and a
few years after it invaded Iraq, those two countries were
among the most volatile and unstable in all of Asia.''
Kinzer's book is particularly enlightening about the
consequences of such unilateral interventions. He writes:
``If it were possible to control the course of world events
by deposing foreign governments, the United States would be
unchallenged. It has deposed far more of them than any other
modern nation. The stories of what has happened in the
aftermath of these operations, however, make clear that
Americans do not know what to do with countries after
removing their leaders. They easily succumb to the temptation
to stage coups or invasions but turn quickly away when the
countries where they intervene fall into misery and
repression.''
Brushing aside fifty years of international law in the name
of the ``global war on terrorism'' is a bad idea for
everyone, including the United States. Violating global rules
undermines both America's authority and standing and its
long-term strategic interests. An already globalized and
interdependent world cannot permit a return to a situation
where each nation is entirely free to act as it wishes.
To use Sands's words, the United States, like other
countries, badly needs international agreements and
international cooperation to promote and protect its own
interests, and cooperation requires rules. The conclusion
seems plain: the United States should reengage in respecting
and developing the rule-based system that it largely
initiated after World War II and which has for many years
served it well.
Such an approach could certainly not have worse
consequences than the recent attempt to abandon the idea of
international restraint and go it alone.Some US
administrations have vigorously supported international
regulation in the past. On April 1, 2005, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice told the annual meeting of the American
Society of International Law that the US ``has been and will
continue to be the world's strongest voice for the
development and defense of international legal norms.'' She
added that America ``has historically been the key player in
negotiating treaties and setting up international mechanisms
for the peaceful resolution of disputes.'' As Sands comments,
``These are important words, but they remain just that.''
A more down-to-earth perception of the situation was
expressed in May 2004 by US Senate Foreign Relations
Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, who was speaking of the
U.S. Senate's delay of some ten years in acceding to the Law
of the Sea Treaty, a delay largely caused by those Americans
who have argued that the treaty restricts the exploration and
exploitation of the seabed. Lugar
[[Page E773]]
posed the question that the US has still to face:
``If we cannot get beyond political paralysis in a case
where the coalition of American supporters is so
comprehensive, there is little reason to think that any multi
lateral solution to any international problem is likely to be
accepted within the US policy-making structure.''
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