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History
Won't Absolve Mr. Bush
July 23, 2002
By Luciana Bohne
 The
Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal, set up to try Nazi-era war criminals,
concluded in 1950 that "individuals have international duties
which transcend the national obligation of obedience. Therefore,
individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws
to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."
Since President Bush's September 11 speeches, Americans have
been encouraged to wear patriotism on their sleeves and not
to question their leaders. Obedience, however, is not a quality
by which democracy thrives. Obedience is the bedrock of tyranny.
A day will come when the actions of the Bush administration
will stand trial in the courts of world history - or even
at the International Criminal Court, which the Bush administration
presciently rejects.
At that time, the kind of knee-jerk, unthinking patriotism
that is demanded of us will not constitute an internationally
legal defense. We might well reflect now on what some of the
charges will be and decide whether our patriotism resides
in seeing that our country act according to its constitutional
principles of justice, fraternity, and equality or according
to the dictates of an un-elected president and business-first
entrepeneur with little more than cents for brains.
In the future trial by history of how the Bush administration
obstructed the cause of peace and humanity in the world, one
piece of evidence against it will be this: in March of 2002,
an ice-shelf in Antarctica, the size of England's Wales, fell
apart in a month. Weighing 500-million-billion tons, it broke
off the continent and splintered into thousands of icebergs
as a result of climate changes. Scientists had long noted
that Antarctica's temperature had risen by 2.5 centigrades
in 50 years, and, although scientists could not explain why
the rate of increase in temperature was five times greater
than in other places, they could not deny that global warming
was a major cause of climate change. An excess of greenhouse
gases, it is agreed, causes temperatures to rise. Greenhouse
gases are carbon dioxide from fossil fuel and deforestation;
methane from farm animals; and nitrous oxide from vehicles.
These gases trap much of the energy that the earth radiates
out toward space. More gas, more warmer-temperatures. On Mount
Everest, in Tibet, entire glaciers are melting, causing the
extinction of villages. China experiences terrifying floods.
Colorado's droughts envelop the state in frightening fire
bursts. In my own native Alps, sudden lakes are appearing,
threatening to overflow and drag down to the valleys the houses
and bodies of people. Yet, when President Jacques Chirac alluded
to the necessity of finding alternatives to fossil-fuel energy,
President Bush, then visiting in Paris, responded with a blank
and puzzled stare, as French newspapers noted. Why, history
(and our grandchildren) will ask did we not protest our government's
refusal to co-operate with the Kyoto Protocol? After all,
the US is 4% of the earth's population and is responsible
for 20% of greenhouse-gas pollution.
Another charge against the Bush administration will be the
Patriot Act. This evidence will suggest that some people in
the United States were considered more equal than others,
thereby violating the International Declaration of Human Rights
which guarantees protection, among other things, from detention
without trial as a fundamental human right of any inhabitant
of the globe whose country has signed the Universal Declaration.
Furthermore, in accusing the Bush administration, history
will ask us why we didn't notice that Section 802 of the Patriot
Act created a bogus new crime - the appearing-to-be-intending-to-harm-people-for-the-purposes-of-subverting-the-
government crime. How, we will be asked, could we allow our
legislators to pass a law which left the state free to criminalize
anyone for an appearance of intent? And how could we allow
this paranoic travesty of law to translate into foreign policy?
To Mr. Bush, Iraq appeared poised to be intending to harm
people outside its borders.
Mr. Hussein's neighbors hadn't felt threatened. Turkey, in
fact, had lost $40 billion in trade with Iraq over a decade
of sanctions. Ironically, Turkey took this punishment with
a stiff upper lip while Mr. Cheney cynically led Halliburton
to some unscrupulous profits by trading with the enemy, Iraq,
in spite of the sanctions. As a result of decreased trade,
Turkey had to pander to the IMF for loans. The required "re-structuring,"
exacted by the international usurers, was dutifully performed.
Result? One million Turks out of work. ( Put yourself in Prime-Minister's
Ecevit's shoes: if he "does" Iraq, the Turkish economy will
not recover but will be rewarded with further indebtedness;
if he doesn't "do" Iraq the economy will not recover and the
IMF won't come up with a cent.)
Anyway, wasn't the reasoning behind Section 802 of the Patriot
Act the same reasoning that planned to bomb the people of
Iraq? Viz., the appearance of Mr Hussein's intent to harm
as subjectively perceived by the US, alone on the globe, with
the exception of the Blair clique, which announced that British
participation in the war on Iraq would not be discussed in
the British Parliament? Indeed, the Jose Padilla (aka Abdullah
al-Mujajir) case will become paradigmatic in the history books
as a signal example of Machiavellian distortion of law in
the service of force. The case will be thrown into our faces
as the evidence of our abject cowardice before the unchallenged,
illegal detention of an American street punk for the hitherto
unfamiliar crime of talking.
The Bush administration will be charged with crimes against
humanity for waging illegal wars. For the Nuremberg trials,
an illegal war was the supreme crime - the one from which
all others derived. How come, we will be asked by the International
Criminal Court, or its historical equivalent, that, since
1945, the US had not waged a single, constitionally declared
war? Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kosovo - for example?
The Bush administration was not at war when it bombed Afghanistan.
Congress had denied President Bush a declaration of war. Besides,
wars are not metaphors or advertising slogans: they require
a provocation, preferably an aggression, by a state - not
by a state where the provocateurs are hiding. Wars are not
waged against terrorist tactics perpetrated by criminals -
the September 11 action was a huge, unforgivable crime by
murderers. Why, we will be asked, were we so bamboozled that
we considered ourselves at war against no army, no border,
with no demands, and no negotiations? How was that being at
war? Did we just want an international, self-proclaimed license
to kill? If the only legal war is a defensive one, by what
right did we call our unjustifiable murder of civilians in
Afghanistan a war?
And without pausing to address these questions, we went on
planning to bomb Iraq. Here, history will remind us that the
right to self-defense by war is only legitimate as a temporary
measure, undertaklen to repel an attack until the Security
Council of the United Nations can intervene. The right to
self-defense must be directed at the actual state that launched
the armed attack; the attack must be proportionate to the
threat and not constitute overkill. Considering that nothing
links Iraq to September 11 (even if that act could conceivably
justify a World War on a protean and stateless target) in
what way does Iraq warrant a defensive war? Did it attack
us?
History will not find the US a law-abiding nation under President
Bush. And yet, the 1990s had been the decade celebrating International
Law. Had the people of the US not been informed of that? The
objectives of the decade of International Law had been to
promote acceptance throughout the globe of the principles
of International Law; to promote the peaceful settlement of
disputes, including greater use of the International Court
of Justice; to encourage the teaching, studying, and disseminating
of International Law. Instead, President Bush unsigned the
charter of the International Criminal Court.
No, history won't be kind to the Bush administration nor
to our silence before the victims of his policies. Except
for September 11, Americans don't know what aerial bombardments
feel like. We don't even try to imagine 42 days of September
11s. That's what the people of Iraq went through. However,
most of the people of the world know bombs. That is why Europe,
for example, after centuries of internal butchery, hasn't
had a war since 1945. The atomic bomb ended all that free-for-all
pathological warmongering. That's when a respect for international
law was born - and all its formalization into the human rights
conventions, the non-proliferation treaties, the no-first-strike
agreements, the arm reduction talks - everything, in fact,
that the Bush administration has been shredding under the
incredulous, astonished gaze of the people of the planet.
Oh no Mr Bush, they don't hate us for our freedom. They hate
us because we are trampling over the very principles of freedom
we spent half a century indoctrinating them to respect. They
hate us because they are discovering, on the ever-growing
scale of mockery of their human rights, that the obsessive
teacher of democracy, the democratiae magister par excellence,
is a fraud.
Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature. She can be contacted
at lbohne@edinboro.edu
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