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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
So you don't think our war in Afghanistan is an example of self-defense?
Is the United States under an armed attack?
I would think so.
Article 51 [of the U.N. charter] is very explicit and I believe it's correct. It says force can be used in self-defense against armed attack. Armed attack has a definition in international law. It means sudden, overwhelming, instantaneous ongoing attack. Nobody believes the U.S. is under armed attack.
[Note: After the attacks, NATO allies invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty which states, "An armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all."]
If the United States wanted to appeal to Article 51, it could. The United States could easily have obtained Security Council authorization for its use of force in Afghanistan but purposely chose not to. It would have gained authorization [and] Britain would go along reflexively, France would raise no objections, Russia would be enthusiastically in favor of it because Russia is eager to gain U.S. support for its own massive atrocities in Chechnya. China would have gone along for similar reasons -- support for its own atrocities in Western China. So there would have been no veto. But the U.S. preferred not to have authorization, just as the U.S. preferred not to ask for extradition.
What would motivate the U.S. to do this?
My speculation is that the U.S. does not want to establish the principle that it has to defer to some higher authority before carrying out the use of violence.
It's a very natural position on the part of a powerful state; in fact, I think it's probably close to universal. If a state is powerful enough, it wants to establish the principle that it can act without authorization. In fact, that's official U.S. policy, announced very clearly by Clinton and Madeleine Albright: The U.S. will act multilaterally when possible, unilaterally when deemed necessary.
I don't suggest that the United States is different from any other country in this respect. Andorra would do it too, if they could get away with it. But unless you're a powerful state, you can't get away with it.
Why do you think that the attack on Sept. 11 was not an armed attack on our country?
First of all, the United States itself does not claim it was an armed attack. It claims it was an act of terrorism, which is not an armed attack. An armed attack is an act of war. So nobody claims that it was an armed attack. But post-Sept. 11 there is no armed attack. The only thing coming close was the anthrax scare but that's apparently domestic.
You have to currently be under attack and you don't think we are?
Yes, armed attack is ongoing, overwhelming attack. But my opinion doesn't really matter. If the U.S. believed it was under armed attack, it could go to the Security Council under that principle. The U.S. doesn't want to. The fact of the matter is it's not under armed attack and nobody claims it is.
Is there anything about the Islamic threat -- we've heard so much about their hatred of the West -- that requires our intervention and use of force?
I tend to agree with radical rags like the Wall Street Journal on this. Right after the Sept. 11 bombing, to its credit, the Journal was the first and almost the only newspaper -- the Christian Science Monitor did it too -- to have a look at what opinion was really like in the Islamic world. The Journal turned to the people it's concerned with: wealthy Muslims. They had an article -- I think it was called "Moneyed Muslims" -- that evaluated the attitudes of very pro-Western, pro-American elements in the Islamic world: bankers, international lawyers, people who worked for multinational corporations. [The article] asked them what they thought of the United States.
They expressed their attitude ... they're very strongly in favor of major U.S. policies -- in fact they're part of them. But they were opposed to the United States because of its systematic opposition to democracy in the Islamic world, its undermining of democratic elements, its support for oppressive, corrupt and brutal regimes. They're strongly opposed to its policy of severely harming the civilian population of Iraq while strengthening Saddam Hussein. And they remember, even if we choose not to, that the United States supported him through the worst atrocities. Of course, they oppose the decisive U.S. support for what has been a harsh and brutal military occupation for 35 years in the Palestinian territories. They oppose all those policies and that's very widespread, not only in the Islamic world but in much of the Third World.
Take Latin America. There were international Gallup polls taken after Sept. 11. The question was: Should military force be used when everyone understands that that military force is going to severely harm civilians? Support was not very high, even in Europe. But in Latin America it was particularly low. The latest figures I've seen come from Envio, the research journal of the Jesuit University in Managua. According to them, figures ranged from a high of 11 percent in Venezuela and Colombia to a low of 2 percent in Mexico. Well, Latin America has experience with U.S. power.
