The Prophecy is much more than seeing into the future. For the Prophecy sees without the element of time. For the Prophecy sees what is, what was, and what always shall be. 11:11 LLC
By Meteorologist Michael Gouldrick New York State PUBLISHED 6:30 AM ET Sep. 09, 2020 PUBLISHED 6:30 AM EDT Sep. 09, 2020
New York State has a long history of earthquakes. Since the early to mid 1700s there have been over 550 recorded earthquakes that have been centered within the state’s boundary. New York has also been shaken by strong earthquakes that occurred in southeast CaThe History of Earthquakes In New York Before the Sixth Seal (Revelation 6:12) nada and the Mid-Atlantic states.
A school gymnasium suffered major damage, some 90% of chimneys toppled over and house foundations were cracked. Windows broke and plumbing was damaged. This earthquake was felt from Maine to Michigan to Maryland.
Another strong quake occurred near Attica on August 12th, 1929. Chimneys took the biggest hit, foundations were also cracked and store shelves toppled their goods.
Strong earthquakes outside of New York’s boundary have also shaken the state. On February 5th, 1663 near Charlevoix, Quebec, an estimated magnitude of 7.5 occurred. A 6.2 tremor was reported in Western Quebec on November 1st in 1935. A 6.2 earthquake occurred in the same area on March 1st 1925. Many in the state also reported shaking on August 23rd, 2011 from a 5.9 earthquake near Mineral, Virginia.
Earthquakes in the northeast U.S. and southeast Canada are not as intense as those found in other parts of the world but can be felt over a much larger area. The reason for this is the makeup of the ground. In our part of the world, the ground is like a jigsaw puzzle that has been put together. If one piece shakes, the whole puzzle shakes.
In Rochester, New York, the most recent earthquake was reported on March 29th, 2020. It was a 2.6 magnitude shake centered under Lake Ontario. While most did not feel it, there were 54 reports of the ground shaking.
So next time you are wondering why the dishes rattled, or you thought you felt the ground move, it certainly could have been an earthquake in New York.
Here is a website from the USGS (United Sates Geologic Society) of current earthquakes greater than 2.5 during the past day around the world. As you can see, the Earth is a geologically active planet!
Another great website of earthquakes that have occurred locally can be found here.
To learn more about the science behind earthquakes, check out this website from the USGS.
On March 20, 2003, the United States led a coalition that launched a fully-fledged invasion of Iraq, closely supported by the United Kingdom.
The case it had made for invading the Middle Eastern nation was built on three basic premises: that the regime of Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD); that it was developing more of them to the potential advantage of “terrorist” groups; and that creating a “friendly and democratic” Iraq would set an example for the region.
An Iraqi man looks at his mother in a bus being loaded to head to Syria at a bus station in Baghdad, on March 9, 2003. Buses at this station increased their trips to Syria from 4 to 20 a day, carrying people fleeing the threat of a US-led invasion and others headed to the Shia shrine of Sayeda Zeinab in the Syrian capital [David Guttenfelder/AP Photo]
What appears inescapable is that the Iraq war has cast a long shadow over the US’s foreign policies, with repercussions to this day.
Weapons of mass destruction
“Let me begin by saying, we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here,” David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), told the US Senate on January 29, 2004.
His team – a fact-finding mission set up by the multinational force to find and disable Iraq’s purported WMDs – was ultimately unable to find substantial evidence that Hussein had an active weapons development programme.
The Bush administration had presented that as a certainty before the invasion.
Anti-war protesters mass in Hyde Park during the demonstration against war in Iraq on February 15, 2003 [Toby Melville/Reuters]
In a speech in Cincinnati in the US state of Ohio on October 7, 2002, the US president declared that Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.”
He then concluded that Hussein had to be stopped. “The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons,” Bush said.
Then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair had said the same thing on September 24, 2002, as he presented a British intelligence dossier affirming that Hussein could activate chemical and biological weapons “within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population”.
When the ISG presented its findings, one of the war’s main arguments crumbled. “We’ve got evidence that they certainly could have produced small amounts [of WMD], but we’ve not discovered evidence of the stockpiles,” Kay said in his testimony.
According to Sanam Vakil, deputy director of the Middle East North Africa programme at Chatham House, the decision to invade Iraq was a “huge violation of international law” and that the real objective of the Bush administration was a broader transformational effect in the region.
“We know that the intelligence was manufactured and that [Hussein] didn’t have the weapons,” Vakil told Al Jazeera.
Egyptian anti-war protesters carry a sign that reads ‘Stop Killing’ in reference to the US-led war against Iraq during an anti-American protest outside Al Azhar Mosque 28 March 2003 in Cairo – more than 10,000 protesters marched peacefully against the US-led war against Iraq [Mike Nelson/EPA Photo]
“They felt that by overthrowing Saddam Hussein and supposedly bringing democracy to Iraq then there would be a domino effect,” Vakil said.
Some observers have pointed to the fact that while the ISG did not find an active WMD program, it had gathered evidence that Hussein was planning to resume the programme as soon as international sanctions against Iraq were lifted.
According to Melvyn Leffler, author of the book, Confronting Saddam Hussein, uncertainty was a defining factor in the months prior to the invasion.
“There was an overwhelming sense of threat,” Leffler told Al Jazeera. “The intelligence community in the days and weeks after 9/11 developed what they called a ‘threat matrix’, a daily list of all incoming threats. This list of threats was presented to the president every single day.”
For years prior to the invasion, Hussein resisted inspections by the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, established in 1999 with the mandate to disarm Iraq of its WMDs.
A US Marine watches a statue of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein topple over in 2003 [Goran Tomasevic/Reuters]
‘Terrorism’
While Bush campaigned for the presidency on the promise of a “humble” foreign policy, the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, dragged the US on a decades-long global counterterrorism military campaign it dubbed the “War on Terror”.
In his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, Bush stated in no uncertain terms that the US would combat “terrorist groups” or any country deemed to be training, equipping or supporting “terrorism”.
“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, aiming to threaten the peace of the world,” he said.
The speech went on to identify Iraq as a pillar in the so-called “axis of evil”.
“Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror,” the US president said.
“This is a regime that agreed to international inspections – then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilised world.”
A year later, on January 30, 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney drew a link between Hussein’s government and the group deemed to be behind 9/11, stating that Iraq “aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda”.
Hussein was known to have supported various groups deemed “terrorist” by some states, including the Iranian dissident group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and several Palestinian splinter groups, but evidence of ties to al-Qaeda has never been found.
According to Leffler, Bush never believed in a direct link between Hussein and al-Qaeda.
However, he believed the sanctions regime against Iraq was breaking down, that containment was failing and that as soon as the sanctions were lifted, Hussein would restart his WMD program and “blackmail the United States in the future”.
‘Exporting democracy’
In a speech on October 14, 2002, Bush said the US was “a friend to the people of Iraq”.
“Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us … The long captivity of Iraq will end, and an era of new hope will begin.”
A few months later, he added that “a new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region” and “begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace”.
Ultimately, the attempt to turn Iraq into a “bulwark for democracy” largely backfired, with little evidence of a strengthening of democracy in the wider region.
“Since the war in Iraq, there has been not only a persistent threat from al-Qaeda but also the emergence of ISIS [ISIL] and the growth of the Iranian state as a regional power, which has been profoundly destabilising in the region,” Vakil, of Chatham House, said.
In 2005, under US occupation and with strong input from American-supplied experts, Iraq hastily formulated a new constitution, establishing a parliamentary system.
While not written in the constitution, the requirement that the president be a Kurd, the speaker a Sunni, and the prime minister a Shia became common practice.
According to Marina Ottaway, Middle East fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, the US invasion “created a system dependent on divergent sectarian interests” that is “too bogged down in the politics of balancing the factions to address policies that would improve the lives of Iraqis”.
“The Iraqi constitution was essentially an American product, it was never a negotiated agreement among Iraqis, which is what a successful constitution is,” the analyst added.
“The United States made a huge mistake in trying to impose its own solution on the country.”
Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown, 2020)
“Whatever you do won’t be enough. … Try anyway.”
— President Barack Obama
It was December 2009 and the still-new president was in his hotel room in Oslo getting dressed in the tuxedo he would wear for the ceremony to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. An aide knocked on the door and urged him to look out the window. Pulling back the shades, Barack Obama saw several thousand people in the narrow street below holding lit candles over their heads to celebrate him. “[O]n some level,” he notes in his excellent new 700-page memoir, “the crowds below were cheering an illusion … The idea that I, or any one person, could bring order to [this chaotic world] seemed laughable.” (p. 446)
Obama famously had questioned how he deserved this prize so early in his presidency. One answer was the “Prague speech” he had given that April, stating “clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Now, 11 years later, Obama devotes more words in his memoir to describing the scene on the streets through which his motorcade lumbered en route to the speech site than he does to the content of the speech. (p. 348)
The reticence clearly is not an accident. Throughout the book he barely mentions and never explores in depth what had been hailed earlier as the Prague Agenda.
For example, in an insightful 12-page discussion of Russian politics and U.S. efforts to “reset” relations with Moscow, Obama writes merely that his initial meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev produced “an agreed-upon framework for the new strategic arms treaty, which would reduce each side’s allowable nuclear warheads and delivery systems by up to one-third.” (p. 462)
Nowhere in the text does he mention the considerable labor that he personally devoted to shaping his administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, which was completed in 2010. His signature nuclear policy innovation, a “forty-seven-nation nuclear security summit” to strengthen international efforts to keep nuclear materials away from terrorists, gets no more mention than these four hyphenated words. North Korea receives two glancing comments.
Why does Obama — who was deeply engaged in nuclear policy issues throughout his presidency — devote so little to the topic in his memoir? What does this omission reveal about the politics of nuclear weapons in the United States? And finally, what should those working to reduce nuclear risks around the world learn from Obama’s attempts to grapple with his own legacy on nuclear matters?
There are many ways to interpret Obama’s nuclear reticence. He paid more personal attention to nuclear policy than any president since Ronald Reagan, and he was more knowledgeable about details than any predecessor, except perhaps Jimmy Carter. Disappointment over the results are surely a factor. Although this memoir covers only the first 18 months of his presidency, it is informed by knowledge of what happened later, including the near collapse of arms control with Russia, renewed qualitative arms racing with Russia and China, North Korea’s burgeoning arsenal, and the impossibility of winning Republican support for a nuclear deal with Iran.
But Obama faced lots of other disappointments that he discusses at length. He writes 30 pages on climate change policy and his diplomatic intervention to save the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009. You can imagine him saying of New START nuclear policy what he writes wryly about the Copenhagen effort:
All that for an interim agreement that — even if it worked entirely as planned — would be at best a preliminary, halting step toward solving a possible planetary tragedy, a pail of water thrown on a raging fire. I realized that for all the power inherent in the seat I now occupied, there would always be a chasm between what I knew should be done to achieve a better world and what in a day, week, or year I found myself actually able to accomplish. (p. 516)
An earlier passage may partially answer why nuclear issues barely register in the book. In recounting the 2009 press conference in Moscow with Medvedev where Obama had described the framework for what became the New START Treaty, Obama wryly (as usual) notes that Robert Gibbs, his press secretary, “was more excited by Russia’s agreement to lift restrictions on certain U.S. livestock exports, a change worth more than $1 billion to American farmers and ranchers.” This, Gibbs said, was “[s]omething folks back home actually care about.” (p. 462) Later, Obama bemoans the absence of a strong domestic constituency “clamoring” for the treaty’s ratification by the Senate, which left him no choice but to make “a devil’s bargain” with Republican leaders to boost funding to modernize the nuclear weapons infrastructure. (p. 608)
To sell books or political candidates today, the less said about nuclear policy the better. The public and media don’t follow the details. They can’t reasonably assess the pros and cons of policy options. Until there is a nuclear war — or a real scare that one is imminent — busy people are unlikely to demand big changes.
One could say that the public doesn’t care or follow what’s going on in Afghanistan, either, yet Obama writes much more about it. The difference is that Afghanistan was a war and topic of necessity — as Obama insisted in the 2008 campaign. He had to deal with it. Nuclear policy is an issue of choice so long as deterrence seems to be working. When the political payoff is negligible, it is better to turn to other things. People do get alarmed by Iranian or North Korean proliferation. The president should try to address those challenges. But neither the public nor Congress and the defense establishment see how stopping proliferation requires fidelity to nuclear disarmament, as Obama argued.
Public inattention means that Republican leaders could have relatively free hands to pursue arms control and disarmament measures if they wanted to. Their supporters will not protest, and Democrats by and large will go along. Democratic leaders face a much tougher challenge. The more public their arms control-related initiatives, the more that nativist Republican forces will counter them with narratives of weakness, naivete, and indulgence of evil Iranian Ayatollahs, Chinese Communists, or Russian cheaters. Those narratives win in cable news and internet combat in swing states and districts. To counter them and buy the necessary Republican votes, Democrats are compelled to fund new or different military capabilities that signify strength and revenue to defense contractors and host states. This says more about the public and the political-psychology of enmity than it does about Democrats, but the reader imagines that the Obama of the Prague speech underestimated the challenge.
For Democrats, the most plausible way around the mass constituency problem is to appoint motivated experts to key administration positions and to team them with military leaders who share the view that nuclear deterrence can be maintained between the United States and Russia and China with much leaner arsenals. Obama had a few such officials (e.g., Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James Miller) but neither Secretary of Defense Robert Gates nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shared his nuclear policy predilections or exerted themselves against domestic and international resistance to them.
The political logic of selecting and working with military leaders who share a president’s view on the relative importance of conventional versus nuclear forces for securing the United States and allies is affirmed, indirectly, in another line from Gibbs. Talking about what became the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Obama wonders if the public would understand the arcane rule changes involved. Gibbs assures him, “They don’t need to understand it. … If the banks hate it, they’ll figure it must be a good thing.” (p. 553) In nuclear policy, the equivalent line might be, “If the military hates it, the public will figure it’s a bad thing.” In general, Obama stays shy of arguing with the military. Indeed, the memoir’s discussions of Gen. David Petraeus, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and Adm. Mike Mullen are sugarcoated compared to Bob Woodward’s account of White House-military relations in Obama’s Wars.
According to the Constitution, civilians should direct the military, of course. But the public trusts military leaders more when it comes to national security, especially compared to Democrats. To shift national nuclear policies in the current environment, the president needs to win 60 votes in the Senate to advance legislation — 67 to ratify treaties. This requires persuading senators from swing states to support the agenda. If the military joins opponents against a Democratic president, that president and his or her policies will lose. (This logic may, in part, be reflected in President-elect Joe Biden’s selection of retired Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III as secretary of defense. Due to the public’s trust in the armed forces, Austin’s military experience is likely to be a political asset. His impact on potential nuclear policy is unclear. Austin comes from the Army, a service that is less invested in the nuclear enterprise, as they and the Marines don’t have any nuclear weapons. As former commander of U.S. Central Command, he will have the best possible credibility for arguing in favor of returning to the Iran nuclear deal — credibility that Biden will need in front of the Congress and the public.)
To win military leaders’ support for new nuclear policies, or at least their politically useful nonresistance, experts and civilian officials will need to offer the military better alternatives for deterring or defeating threats. The best such alternatives would be dialing down Russian and Chinese coercion of their neighbors, and negotiating verifiable reductions of Russian nuclear forces and limitations on China’s military buildup. The United States, of course, will have to provide reciprocal reassurance to Moscow and Beijing, which is easier said than done. The other, not mutually exclusive, need is to improve U.S. and allied non-nuclear capabilities to prevent Russia or China from taking small bits of disputed territory and then leaving Washington with the dreadful choice of capitulation or major conflict that could escalate — purposefully or inadvertently — to nuclear war. To allay concerns of arms racing, Washington should make clear to Moscow and Beijing that it prefers to negotiate confidence-building and arms control mechanisms with them if they want to.
Rather than the audacious hope of Senator Obama, President Obama’s experience suggests that people seeking the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons need an attitude more like Albert Camus’ Sisyphus, whom “we must imagine happy” as he repeatedly pushes the rock up the hill. This is the Obama that comes through the superb memoir: patient, ironic, steadily trying, and grinning even as he knows that whatever we can accomplish may not be enough.
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George Perkovich is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
North Korea’s drill was “carried out under the tense situation in which a large-scale war drill is being frantically scaled up by the U.S.-South Korean allied forces to invade the DPRK and U.S. nuclear strategic assets are massively brought to South Korea,” according to state outlet Rodong Sinmun.
North Korea said the ballistic missile launched as the nuclear simulator, tipped with a mock nuclear warhead, flew about 500 miles off the country’s eastern coast and exploded about 800 meters above targeted waters. The country claimed the drill had “no adverse effect on the security of the neighboring countries.”
Even after 25 years of its nuclear explosions, it seems that the world is still not ready to consider Pakistan as a nuclear power. We often hear that Pakistan is an irresponsible state. The political and economic crisis of Pakistan raises many questions, among which the Western world is very concerned about whether Pakistan’s nuclear assets are safe. The Prime Minister’s Office has made it clear that Pakistan’s nuclear and missile program is a national asset, and the state of Pakistan is responsible for protecting this program in every way.
This program is completely safe, foolproof and free from any pressure. The spokesperson of the Prime Minister House says that all the recent statements, questions and various claims circulating in the social and print media regarding Pakistan’s nuclear and missile program, including the Director General (DG) International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Mariano Grossi’s routine visit are being painted negatively. According to the Prime Minister’s House spokesperson, the program is completely safe and it fully serves the purpose for which this capability was developed. International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi visited Pakistan on 15 and 16 February 2023. Earlier, a campaign was seen on social media, wherein claims were made from several Twitter handles that the IMF demanded the rollback of Pakistan’s nuclear program. In this context, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar has also issued a statement. Senator Dar said that the national interest was to be protected and there will be no compromise on the nuclear or missile programs. No one had the right to tell Pakistan what range of missiles or nuclear weapons it should keep, he continued.
Every Pakistani knows that they will eat grass and will not let the fire come into the country.
From the statements of these two important figures, it is clear that there has been a discussion regarding the compromise on Pakistan’s nuclear assets by the IMF or some other party. Perhaps, considering the economic conditions of Pakistan, the world wants to suppress Pakistan. But the western world should keep in mind that Pakistan is an important bridge between the countries of South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. The importance of Pakistan in world politics is also certain, which is not easy for the world to ignore. Pakistan’s role in the economic world order race between China and America is very important. Perhaps, in view of this political importance, world powers continue to impose illegal restrictions on Pakistan.
Despite the economic hardship, the real strength and pride of Pakistan is the spirit of the people and the commitment of the Pakistan Army, which is one of the few organized armies in the world. Pakistan Army is the protector of our ideological borders. Pakistan Army has always worked for the security and stability of Pakistan and is equipped with nuclear missile technology and modern weapons, Pakistan Army has always defeated the enemy on every front, due to which the enemies are afraid of its nuclear assets and missile program.
Almost 25 years ago, on May 28, 1998, Pakistan became the first nuclear country in the Islamic world and the seventh nuclear country in the world by detonating nuclear weapons at Chagai. The world was never and is not ready to accept Pakistan as a nuclear power, which is why a lot of propaganda was done for a long time that Pakistan’s nuclear assets are not in safe hands. But Thanks To Allah, Pakistan’s nuclear program is under a foolproof command and control system.
Pakistan Army with its professional skills has proved that not only do we have the best ability to defend ourselves as a nuclear power but also know how to protect it. By becoming a nuclear power, Pakistan has led to a balance in the region. Otherwise, the whole world knows what India’s role was and is in the region. Difficult economic conditions keep coming to the nations, so it is not possible that Pakistan would ever put its integrity at stake under the guise of economic conditions or in the hope of an agreement with the IMF. In any case, every Pakistani knows that they will eat grass and will not let the fire come to the country.
The need is that all of us should be committed to the security, defence and protection of Pakistan and its development and prosperity and stand in a row so that we don’t have to spread our hands in front of others.
For this, the government, the opposition, the army, the judiciary and the people have to be united for the development of the country and think together so that we can give future generations a country with a safe homeland and a strong economic power.
If we are united, no power in the world can even think of looking down on us, and no one can dictate to us our weapons of defence. If we come together and create consensus and put aside our differences for the sake of the country, and with proper planning and proper utilization of manpower, Pakistan can reach new heights of economic development. Pakistan has come into existence after great sacrifices and all of us must appreciate it. The secret of Pakistan’s development lies in the same way that during the Pakistan movement, people came together to achieve this country and united from the individual level to the collective level for its economic development.
The writer is an old Aitchisonian who believes in freedom of expression, a freelance columnist, entrepreneur and social activist.
Rocket fire comes just two days after two commanders of Islamic Jihad and Hamas were killed in clashes with Israeli forces in Jenin.
A rocket fell in an open area in southern Israel on Saturday evening, setting off sirens in Nahal Oz near the Gaza Strip.
The rocket fire comes just two days after two commanders of local branches of the Islamic Jihad and Hamas terrorist groups in Jenin were killed in clashes with Israeli forces.
The two commanders were identified as Nidal Hazem, a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement’s al-Quds Brigades and the commander of the Baha Force unit, and Youssef Shreim, a member of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades.
A third individual identified as Omar Awadin and a fourth individual identified as Louay Khalil Al-Zaghair were killed amid the clashes as well and 23 others were wounded.
The IDF, Shin Bet and Border Police announced after the raid that they had assassinated Hazem and an additional member of the Islamic Jihad movement named Youssef Abu Ashrin.
According to the IDF, Hazem was involved in “significant terrorist activity” and Abu Ashrin was involved in producing explosives and firing at IDF soldiers, among other terrorist activity.
One of the other Palestinians killed was shot by Israeli forces after attacking the forces with a sledgehammer, according to the IDF. Israeli forces fired at a number of Palestinians who shot at them during the raid as well. No Israeli personnel were injured.
Hamas: Israeli crimes will not go unanswered
After the raid on Thursday, Hamas spokesman Abd al-Latif al-Qanou warned that “The crime of assassinating the heroes of the resistance in Jenin will not go unanswered, and our people and its resistance are capable of striking the occupation and making it pay the price for its crimes.”
“The Palestinian resistance in the West Bank will remain present and escalating, and no one will be able to stop its expansion or prevent it from responding to the crimes of the occupation.”
Israel and the Palestinian Authority are set to hold a meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh on Sunday in an attempt to lower tensions ahead of the month of Ramadan which is set to begin in the middle of the week.
Twenty years ago this month, the United States invaded Iraq. On the eve of the 2002 congressional vote to authorize that unprovoked and disastrous war—which claimed the lives of at least 275,000 Iraqi civilians and around 7,000 Americans—theeditors of The Nation made the case for rejecting that war of choice: “The case against the war is simple, clear and strong.” At the time, few media outlets stood with The Nation to oppose what so many now acknowledge was a foreign policy debacle; in particular, far too many liberals succumbed to either President George W. Bush’s arguments or, more likely, their own delusion that the political problem of Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship could be solved through military means. The absence of accountability for a government that lied us into war, and a media that jettisoned skepticism for stenography, continues to endanger our fragile democracy to this day.
The Nation has a long tradition of opposing this country’s imperial misadventures, from the annexation of Hawaii and the conquest of the Philippines to the occupation of Haiti and the war in Vietnam. One of the crucial voices leading The Nation’s opposition to the Iraq War—during the run-up to the invasion and afterward—was the writer Jonathan Schell. Already celebrated for his 1982 book The Fate of the Earth—a foundational text for the nuclear disarmament movement—Schell drafted the open letter to Congress below, which, like all Nation editorials at the time, ran unsigned. We reprint an excerpt of it now as a warning that, sadly, has lost none of its salience.
S oon, you will be asked to vote on a resolution authorizing the United States to overthrow the government of Iraq by military force. The nation marches as if in a trance to war. Polls and news stories reveal a divided and uncertain public. Yet debate in your chambers is restricted to peripheral questions, such as the timing of the vote or the resolution’s precise scope. You are a deliberative body, but you do not deliberate. You are representatives, but you do not represent.
The silence of those of you in the Democratic Party is especially troubling. You are the opposition party, but you do not oppose. Raising the subject of the war, your political advisers tell you, will distract from the domestic issues that favor the party’s chances in the forthcoming congressional election. In the face of the administration’s preemptive war, your leaders have resorted to preemptive surrender. For the sake of staying in power, you are told, you must not exercise the power you have in the matter of the war. What, then, is the purpose of your reelection?
On April 4, 1967, as the war in Vietnam was reaching its full fury, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And he said, “Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”
Dangerous dunce: George W. Bush and his administration blundered their way into a foreign policy disaster. (Charles Ommanney / Getty Images)
Now the time to speak has come again. We urge you to speak—and, when the time comes, to vote—against the war on Iraq.
The case against the war is simple, clear, and strong. Iraq has no demonstrated ties either to the September 11 attack on the United States or to the Al Qaeda network that launched it. The aim of the war is to deprive President Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction, but the extent of his program for building these weapons, if it still exists, is murky. Still less clear is any intention on his part to use such weapons. To do so would be suicide, as he well knows.
Some observers have likened the resolution under discussion to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964 authorizing President Johnson to use force in Vietnam. But that was passed only after a report was received of two attacks on US naval forces. (We now know that the first attack was provoked by a prior secret American attack and the second was nonexistent.) The new resolution, which alleges no attack by the nation of Iraq, is a Tonkin Gulf resolution without a Tonkin Gulf incident.
Even if Saddam possesses weapons of mass destruction and wishes to use them, a policy of deterrence would appear perfectly adequate to stop him, just as it was adequate a half-century ago to stop a much more fearsome dictator, Joseph Stalin, from carrying out nuclear warfare. It is not true that military force is the only means of preventing the proliferation of these weapons, whether to Iraq or other countries. An alternative path is clearly available. In the short run it passes through the United Nations and its system of inspections. At the very least, this path should be fully explored before military action—the traditional last resort—is even considered. Under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, for example, almost every country in the world agreed to do without nuclear weapons. The larger issue is whether proliferation—not just to Iraq but to many other countries as well—is best addressed by military or political means.
But the decision to go to war has a significance that goes far beyond the war. The administration’s recently published “National Security Strategy of the United States” sets forth even larger ambitions. It declares a policy of military supremacy over the entire earth—an objective never before attained by any power. Military programs are meanwhile forbidden to other countries, all of whom are to be prevented from “surpassing or equaling” the United States. China is singled out for a warning that by “pursuing advanced military capabilities,” it is following an “outdated path” that “threaten[s] its neighbors.” The new policy reverses a long American tradition of contempt for unprovoked attacks. It gives the United States the unrestricted right to attack nations even when it has not been attacked by them and is not about to be attacked by them. It trades deterrence for preemption—in plain English, aggression. It accords the United States the right to overthrow any regime—like the one in Iraq—it decides should be overthrown. It declares that the defense of the United States and the world against nuclear proliferation is military force. It is an imperial policy—more ambitious than ancient Rome’s, which, after all, extended only to the Mediterranean and European world. Nelson Mandela recently said of the administration, “[T]hey think they are the only power in the world…. [O]ne country wants to bully the whole world.”
Lasting scars: The US invasion of Iraq destabilized the region, ushering in destruction whose effects can still be felt today. (AFP via Getty Images)
A vote for the war in Iraq is a vote for this policy. The most important of the questions raised by the war, however, is larger still. It is what sort of country the United States wants to be in the 21st century. The genius of the American form of government was the creation of a system of institutions to check and balance government power and so render it accountable to the people. Today that system is threatened by a monster of unbalanced and unaccountable power—a new Leviathan—that is taking shape among us in the executive branch of the government. This Leviathan—concealed in an ever-deepening, self-created secrecy and fed by streams of money from corporations that, as scandal after scandal has shown, have themselves broken free of elementary accountability—menaces civil liberties even as it threatens endless, unprovoked war. As disrespectful of the Constitution as it is of the UN Charter, the administration has turned away from law in all its manifestations and placed its reliance on overwhelming force to achieve its ends.
In pursuit of empire abroad, it endangers the republic at home. The bully of the world threatens to become the bully of Americans, too. Already, the Justice Department claims the right to jail American citizens indefinitely on the sole ground that a bureaucrat in the Pentagon has labeled them something called an “enemy combatant.” Even the domestic electoral system has been compromised by the debacle in Florida. Nor has the shadow cast on democracy by that election yet been lifted. Election reform has not occurred. Modest campaign reform designed to slow the flood of corporate cash into politics, even after passage in Congress, is being eviscerated by conservative attacks. More important, this year’s congressional campaign, by shunning debate on the fundamental issue of war and peace, has signaled to the public that even in the most important matters facing the country neither it nor its representatives decide; only the executive does.
Members of Congress! Be faithful to your oaths of office and to the traditions of your branch of government. Think of the country, not of your reelection. Assert your power. Stand up for the prerogatives of Congress. Defend the Constitution. Reject the arrogance—and the ignorance—of power. Show respect for your constituents—they require your honest judgment, not capitulation to the executive. Say no to empire. Affirm the republic. Preserve the peace. Vote against war in Iraq.
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