[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

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     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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