By now, WMD have taken on a mythic role in which fact doesn’t play much of a part. The phrase itself – ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – is more like an incantation than a description of anything in particular.”
Here’s a nostalgic listing of Bush Administration quotes assuring us WMDs existed. (Thanks toStuffedDog for the link)
Yesterday North Korea claimed that it has processed enough plutonium to make six nuclear weapons. I’ve often argued that wars don’t begin when the shooting actually begins, that we need to look at the militaristic decisions made years before to see how they planted the seeds for war. After the First World War, the victorious allies constructed a peace treaty designed to humiliate Germany and keep its economy stagnant. With the onslaught of the Great Depression, the country was ripe for a mad demagogue like Hitler to take over with talk of a Greater Germany.
In his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush’s team added North Korea to the “axis of evil” that needed to be challenged. By all accounts it was a last minute addition. The speechwriting team never bothered to consult with the State Department’s East Asia experts. In all likelihood North Korea was added so that the evil three countries wouldn’t all be Muslim (the other two were Iraq and Iran) and the “War on Terror” wouldn’t be seen as a war against Islam.
North Korea saw a bulldog president in the White House and judged that its best chance to stay safe was to make a U.S. attack too dangerous to contemplate. It’s a sound strategy, really only a variation on the Cold War’s “Mutually Assured Destruction” doctrine. When faced with a hostile and militaristically-strong country that wants to overthrow your government, you make yourself too dangerous to take on. Let’s call it the Rattlesnake Defense.
Militarism reinforces itself when countries beef up their militaries to stave off the militaries of other countries. With North Korea going nuclear, pressure will now build on South Korea, China and Japan to defend themselves against possible threat. We might be in for a new East Asian arms race, perhaps an East Asian Cold War. Being a pacifist means stopping not only the current war but the next one and the one after that. In the 1980s activists were speaking out against the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, an American friend who was gassing his own people. Now we need to speak out against the cowboy politics that is feeding instability on the Korean Peninsula, to prevent the horror and mass death that a Second Korean War would unleash.
By Martin Kelley. How can we use online tools to measure the state of the Peace Movement?
One of the problems with the peace movement is that it rarely measures itself. There are few metrics that point to the effectiveness of our work. There are a couple of reasons for this:
Each peace movement group is an entity unto itself. But they are also all parts of networks with other groups. Sometimes these networks are given names and membership is formally listed. But more often the networks are informal associations of like-minded organizations who have shared history, staff and past movement organizing together.
The friendships behind these informal alliances can often be a strength to overworked staff people who can easily feel discouraged. But it also means they all turn to each other too much, and an effect which the military calls “incentuous amplification” can occur. The heads of established peace groups will all talk only to the heads of other peace groups to affirm each other’s importance. Meanwhile new groups are locked out of this buddy system.
Luckily the internet has given us a way to measure these networks. If each established peace group is thought of as a “node,” then its importance is a reflection of it’s connections to other networks and to other nodes. Web search engines can measure how many links each organization’s has with other organizations.
Here at the Nonviolence Web, we prefer to use Altavista for this measurement. A properly-constructed search query on Altavista will return the number of links to the site’s homepage and to all of it’s sub-pages while not including the site’s own links to itself. Here’s the search string:
link:www.domain.org ‑url:www.domain.org
The numbers reflect just how widely our organizations are linked to other organizations and where we fit in the larger networks. Here’s how I’ve translated it for peace movement groups:
Knowing where we all stand acts as a good reality check for our ambitions. Each organization is strongest when it knows its core reputation and bases its future work on a level-headed assessment of strengths, opportunities and weaknesses. We can be visionary and strategic —- indeed we must be to bring nonviolence to the world! —- but we must also be sure not to squander donors’ money.
One obvious caveat: most peace organizations don’t focus on the internet. A low ranking doesn’t mean that their work isn’t important or useful. Internet links are only one measurement, one that needs to be taken in context. Still: when an individual or group links to our pages it does represent a sort of endorsement, a indication that they identify with the work we’re doing. The linker is telling others that this is a peace group they think their visitors should know about. We ignore these endorsements at our own folly.
The Washington Post reports that “senior intelligence officials” at the CIA felt pressured Vice President Dick Cheney’s multiple visits to CIA headquarters over the past year. These visits created “an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration’s policy objectives.”
Almost totally unreported in the U.S. media, the wars in Central Africa are getting even more bloody. Reports of the most brutal massacres are coming out of the Congo’s Ituri province. Make sure to read Sarah Left’s factsheet explaining the war. From the UK Guardian, once again one of the few sources of good information on international affairs. There’s also a good intro in June 18th’s Counterpunch What’s Behind the Killing in Central Africa?.
The War Resisters League’s excellent editorial about continuing as an anti-war activist throughout this Permanent War. From their magazine, the Nonviolent Activist.
It’s time to state the obvious: there weren’t any “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. The stated rationale for this war was “simply wrong” (see below). Either U.S. Intelligence agencies made the biggest mistake of the new century or there’s been systematic, premeditated lying at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Mid-level intelligence and military commanders are starting to duck and weave to avoid the fallout: U.S. Insiders Say Iraq Intel Deliberately Skewed and Did Iraq really have weapons of mass destruction? and Was the Intelligence Cooked?
President Bush and his insiders will surely continue to deny the obvious and bully on with more lies and misformation. Will the American public stop believing? Or have we entered a phase in American history in which the Big Lie can justify outright imperialism and perpetual war? Posted 5/31/2003