[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Presidential Race Ignores Arms Race

[Bill Totten]

by Amy Goodman

Truthdig (May 21 2008)


As the US presidential race continues, so does the arms race worldwide.
People - civilians, children - are being killed and maimed, on a daily
basis, by unexploded cluster bombs and land mines. Thousands of nuclear
missiles remain at hair-trigger alert. The US government rattles its
saber at Iran, alleging a nuclear-weapons program, while at the same
time offering uranium to Saudi Arabia. And with the war in Iraq well
into its sixth year, one of its architects, Douglas J Feith, the former
undersecretary of defense for policy under Donald Rumsfeld, has
predictably penned a revisionist history of the war and the decisions
behind it.

Feith said this week: "So while it was a terrible mistake for the
administration to rely on the erroneous intelligence about WMD - and, I
mean, it was catastrophic to our credibility - first of all, it was an
honest error and not a lie. But even if you correct it for that error,
what we found in Iraq was a serious WMD threat. Even though Saddam
Hussein had chosen to not maintain the stockpiles, he had put himself in
a position where he could have regenerated those stockpiles in three to
five weeks."

In an interview I asked Hans Blix about Feith's comments. He was the
United Nations' chief weapons inspector, in charge of the WMD search.
Reflecting back five years, he said: "To prove that there is nothing is
almost impossible. I think that if we had been in Iraq for a couple of
months more, it would have been enough to make it extremely clear to
everybody that the chances were real that there were no weapons of mass
destruction." Instead of waiting for the inspections, the Pentagon was
busy trying to discredit Blix. I asked him about the allegations that
the US was bugging his office and home. He said, "I wish to heaven that
they had listened a little better to what I had to say, if they did listen".

Blix describes the current state of the world as a "Cold Peace": "It is
hard to avoid the impression that - almost twenty years after the end of
the Cold War - military calculations still dominate the long-term
thinking about major global relations. Terrorism is formally made the
chief enemy, but precautions are taken against the growing power of
China and Russia." President Bush's nuclear-cooperation pact with India,
Barack Obama's stated willingness to unilaterally strike nuclear-armed
US ally Pakistan, Hillary Clinton's promise to Iran to "totally
obliterate" the nation of seventy million (should it attack Israel), and
John McCain's hard-line position on Russia, including the deployment of
a missile defense in eastern Europe, all point to a reliance on military
solutions that Blix sees as a path to conflict and war.

In a remarkable demonstration of hypocrisy, the Bush administration has
pledged to deliver enriched uranium to Saudi Arabia. Anti-nuclear
activist Harvey Wasserman said: "The idea of giving enriched uranium to
the Saudis while threatening war with the Iranians for enriching uranium
is astonishing. The idea that the Saudis are going to somehow lower the
price of oil on the basis of possibly getting nuclear reactors in the
future is just almost staggering to think about."

I asked Blix what is the single most important thing the US could do to
support world peace. Sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, he said:
"Then I think it's very likely that the Chinese, who have not ratified,
will follow. If China does it, maybe India does. If India does, Pakistan
does, et cetera. And the treaty would enter into force. It would be a
great thing if we outlawed any nuclear-weapons tests in the future."

Nuclear weapons are not the only weapons of mass destruction. As I spoke
to Blix, hundreds of people were meeting in Dublin, Ireland, to craft an
anti-cluster-bomb treaty, the cause Princess Diana championed in the
last years of her life. The Dublin Diplomatic Conference on Cluster
Munitions is dedicated "to negotiate a new instrument of international
humanitarian law banning cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm
to civilians".

The conference in Dublin has 128 participating nations. Absent is the
leading producer of cluster munitions, the United States. Russia and
China are also not there.