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LONDON – It was Dag Hammarskjold, the greatest of UN secretary-generals, practitioner and contemplator in one, who observed that the UN was not established to take humanity to heaven but to save it from hell. He would have been in his intellectual element wrestling with the present situation. Is it better if the US does go to war against Iraq that the UN approves it? It didn’t do the UN any good to be left on the shelf when the US and its main European allies bypassed it and decided to bomb Belgrade without a Security Council mandate. Or is it better that the U.S. goes ahead without the approval of the UN? If things go wrong with the war which well they might- Mahathir Mohamad, the prime minister of Malaysia told the Financial Times on Tuesday that he despairs at a “racist” war that could spark communal violence across the...

Boken, Propagandans Makt,av David Barsamian och Noam Chomsky Propagandans MaktSamtal med Noam ChomskyAv David Barsamian och Noam ChomskyÖversättning: Gunnar SandinOrdfront(Utkommer i dag) Den amerikanske dissidenten Noam Chomsky kommer i veckan till Sverige och bokmässan i Göteborg, där hans besök mötts med större intresse än någon tidigare författare. På söndag blir det stor Chomsky-“gala” på Scandinavium, de vanliga seminariesalarna räckte inte alls. Chomsky är professor i lingvistik i Bosnien, knappast en karismatisk talare, snarare lågmält klok. Som språkmänniska varnar han inte minst för verbala övergrepp och falska termer, vad är “i nationens intresse”, “humanitär intervention”. Besöket är efterlängtat. Vi lever i en tid där sanningar sällan kan hävda sig mot massmedialt marknadsförda lögner, där vad som är rätt ofta avgörs med vapenmakt. Bara få vågar eller orkar ifrågasätta. Noam Chomsky hör till de outtröttliga motståndsmännen. Stora amerikanska medier recenserar eller kommenterar sällan eller aldrig det han skriver. Många söker smutskasta honom, också...

Now that President Bush has put the argument for preemptive war against Iraq before the United Nations as the centerpiece of the war against terrorism, it becomes a matter on national urgency to consider the merits and drawbacks of this position. I believe that threatening a preemptive war against Iraq represents a momentous failure of American foreign policy, whether considered from the perspective of international law, international morality, or national interest, and so does the rest of the world, including many of America’s closest allies. The evident insistence on initiating such a war in the face of this international opposition would likely lead to further anti-Americanism overseas and might even ignite a grassroots revolt against US unilateralism. It may still not be too late, but if this slide toward a disastrous war is to be averted, the American people must become quickly aroused and vocal in their opposition before it...

LONDON – It’s ironic at best, dangerously absurd at the worst, that a year to the week after President George Bush made his initial decision to hunt down Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan all the debate now is focussed on Iraq and there is barely a word on the president’s pledge to “smoke out” bin Laden. Yet no one has produced hard evidence of complicity linking Iraq with Al Qaeda. Neither is Bush visibly pulling out the stops to hunt down bin Laden in the mountains of Pakistan where he is said to be hiding out. One can only conclude that this Administration is not drawn to the boring business of stealthy slow police work. It seems to prefer what the Germans used to call a  “frischer, fröhlicher Krieg” (a short jolly war). But the Bush administration is arguably not much worse than its predecessors The fact is that bin Laden...

Most humans who have ever lived have never directly killed anyone. The global lesson of 9.11 is that we humans must learn to stop killing each other from domestic homicide to war. We must stop praying, planning, training, arming, and threatening to kill. We must stop celebrating killers and the killed and begin compassionately to recognize that they and we are victims of our failure to learn how not to kill. For just as humans can learn to kill, we can learn not to kill. Just as we are capable of killing, we are capable of not killing. But as long as readiness to kill is abroad on our planet no one will be safe in home, community, nation, region, and world. Offensive lethal ingenuity has been able to penetrate every form of lethal defense. In conflict we must make it absolutely credible to each other that we will not...

LONDON – The tragedy of September 11th was not just the incinerated bodies and the shock to the political nervous system of our one and only superpower, it is that a year later it has led to America becoming separated from the world at large. Governments may still pay formal allegiance to Washington, but behind the façade of politeness few have a kind word. As for the people, who last had a conversation where real empathy for America’s predicament was readily apparent? Even the most sympathetic or most loyal have their doubts. It was not that “America had it coming to it”. That would be to exaggerate (although a poll published today reports that a majority of Europeans think that U.S. policy is partially to blame for the September 11th attack). But having been hit so hard in the solar plexus America then seemed to rear up like a wounded elephant...

By Ralph SummyNonviolence Commission of the International Peace Research Association September 6, 2002 Darkness cannot drive out darknessOnly light can do that.Hate cannot drive out hate;Only love can do that.Hate multiplies violence,And toughness multiplies toughnessIn a descending spiral of destruction…The chain reaction of evil-Hate begetting hate,Wars producing more wars-Must be broken,Or we shall be plunged intoThe darkness of annihilation. -Martin Luther King, Jr. What happened on Sept 11 to the American people, and especially to New Yorkers and their foreign visitors, was a crime of ineffable proportions. No moral code or religious teaching, including the prescripts of the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet (the Hadith), allows for the wanton slaughter of innocent people. Such acts of terror rightly deserve universal condemnation, whether committed deliberately and directly as happened in America, or perpetrated indirectly through means known to be causing death and terror disproportionate to a just end – for...

In the event of nuclear war, as well as death and destruction there will be serious political consequences. Social activists should be prepared. The confrontation between Indian and Pakistani governments earlier this year showed that military use of nuclear weapons is quite possible. There are other plausible scenarios. A US military attack against Iraq could lead Saddam Hussein to release chemical or biological weapons, providing a trigger for a US nuclear strike. Israeli nuclear weapons might also be unleashed. Another possibility is accidental nuclear war. Paul Rogers in his book Losing Control says that the risk of nuclear war has increased due to proliferation, increased emphasis on nuclear war-fighting, reduced commitment to arms control (especially by the US government) and Russian reliance on nuclear arms as its conventional forces disintegrate. A major nuclear war could kill hundreds of millions of people. But less catastrophic outcomes are possible. A limited exchange might kill...

LONDON – “A Russian scientist who worked on nuclear reprocessing has gone missing. Sergei Bakhvalov disappeared in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia on Sunday”. That’s all the Financial Times reported. Important enough to be on the front page. Obscure enough to have no further information or follow up. We are left to read between the lines and there is much to read. Ironically a day later newspapers gave prominent coverage to the reporting of a joint American, Russian, Yugoslav, UN mission to whisk away 45 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium from an ageing nuclear reactor in Yugoslavia in what was described as a “dramatic, military-style operation”. It was, supposedly, the first of a series of pre-emptive strikes against the threat of nuclear terrorism. According to the U.S. State Department two dozen research reactors in 16 countries are being considered as subjects of similar missions. Fine. There is much to be done in countries all over...

The Bush administration’s apparent resolve to wage war against Iraq, tempered for the moment by conservative critics, violates the spirit and letter of the US Constitution, as well as disregards the prohibitions on the use of force that are set forth in the UN Charter and accepted as binding rules of international law. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states: “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.” Nothing in Iraq’s current behavior would justify a preemptive attack against Iraq based upon self-defense as set forth in Article 51 of the Charter. Even Henry Kissinger has stated, “The notion of justified pre-emption runs counter to modern international law, which sanctions the use of force in self-defense only against actual not...

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...

Beyond the Sanctions What accounts for the obsessiveness of American policy toward Iraq over the course of more than a decade? Is it another Vietnam in the sense that the US Government cannot bring itself to acknowledge the failure of its approach to regime change in Baghdad since the end of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein having withstood comprehensive sanctions, a variety of covert assaults, and repeated American harassment from the air without flinching? Is it the pique at the White House and Pentagon associated with the electoral removal from the scene of Bush, Sr. contrasting with the persistence of Saddam Hussein, posing a filial challenge to Bush, Jr.? Is it the long deferred payback to Israel for staying on the sidelines during the Gulf War, despite the Scud missiles being fired from Iraq? Is it a matter of securing US control of the oil reserves being linked to periodic...