Trading Safety for Votes

Mitt Romney’s outrageous attack on President Obama in yesterday’s Washington Post, posing as a learned critique of the START Treaty, shows again the incapacity of nations to protect their populations. Even if the Senate ratifies the Treaty, such attacks disable the President politically from from building security through enforced law instead of violence.  They also disable him from slowing the global missile defense race that compels nations to build ever more deadly offensive weapons to counter the defensive weapons (read, “double the profits for Boeing, Lockheed, et al”). 

The huge variety of weapons, and the fact that every nation concentrates for various reasons more on some weapons systems than others, means that arsenals always are asymmetrical and that a negotiated treaty may reduce Nation A’s x weapons more than B’s while it reduces B’s y weapons more than A’s. A hotshot like  Romney can pick and choose, disregarding the bottom line of security.

Romney states that Russia retains the right to 10,000 tactical warheads, which, he suggests, are mounted on missiles that cannot reach the U.S. but could reach other nations.  In fact, tactical nuclear weapons are generally taken to mean artillery shells, mines, etc., i.e., battlefield weapons, not missiles at all. Missiles that are not intercontinental are generally called intermediate range missiles, not tactical weapons.  He seems ignorant of the fact that previous START treaties also omitted tactical weapons and that the U.S. and Russia have signified a mutual intention to progress to tactical weapons, once both countries ratify START. 

Romney and other Republicans concentrate their strongest criticism on the assertion that START will prevent the U.S. from developing missile defenses.  The Treaty does nothing of the kind, and what they are referring to is the reservation that a country can withdraw if it feels threatened, or weakened, by the other side’s missile defense deployments.  Either side can withdraw for any other reason as well, and the Obama Administration has given Russia clear advice that our missile defense program will proceed. 

He goes on to bemoan the agreement not to use missile silos for missile defense sites, neglecting to note that the Pentagon has advised against such use. 

He complains that ICBMs are not prohibited from bombers, a strange gaff. Bombers carry cruise missiles, but not huge ICBMs.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates published a piece in the Wall Street Journal on May 13, “The Case for the New START Treaty,” reporting that he has worked on START treaties since 1970, that all Presidents have favored them, and that bipartisan votes in the Senates have always ratified them. “The New START Treaty has the unanimous support of America’s military leadership...” START will provide “an extensive verification regime...that will help us track - for the very first time - all accountable strategic nuclear delivery systems.” He concludes, “It strengthens the security of the U.S. and our allies and promotes strategic stability between the world’s two major nuclear powers.”  What more could one ask for, unless one were running, desperately, irresponsibly, for President?

The Policy We Don't Have

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been in the news the last two days because he wrote a secret three page memorandum admitting that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy on Iran. (NYT, April 18, 19)

The policy that we don’t have as to Iran’s presumptive quest for nuclear weapons is the same policy that we don’t have as to the long term aim to reach zero nuclear weapons world-wide. The missing policy is a policy to replace force based security with security through enforced law. President Obama champions the goal of nuclear zero, but does not dare assert that it cannot be reached by arms reductions and non-proliferation treaties alone, as essential as they may be to assist the process.

Dependable security requires not just nuclear zero but war zero. Before Iran and a good many other nations including the United States will substitute security through enforced law in place of weapons superiority, an alternative security mechanism must exist. This will necessitate the same components as all nations depend on for domestic security - administrative, judicial, and police resources, but on an international scale. And, before it will be safe to empower international law enforcement institutions, global democracy must be erected adequate to make the power holders accountable.

In 1949, just before the Cold War began, Democrats and Republicans alike anticipated the United Nations evolving into such an institution. 111 co-sponsors in the House and 21 in the Senate favored concurrent resolutions stating that it should be a “fundamental objective” of U.S. foreign policy to develop the U.N. into a “world federation, open to all nations, with defined and limited powers adequate to preserve peace and prevent aggression through the enactment, interpretation, and enforcement of world law.”

The co-sponsors included Republicans Jacob Javits, Christian Herter, Gerald Ford, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Democrats John F. Kennedy, Henry Jackson, Abraham Ribicoff, Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey, John Sparkman, Lister Hill, and Russell Long.

Frantic preoccupation with military force will not permit even the best of today’s Congress Members to offer such leadership. They would be vilified and lose their seats at the next election. This is why the initiative must come from another power base. The only power base in sight unless one controls a media empire or has a billion dollars, is our cities and towns. As the targets of WMD attack by terrorists on in the event of war, they have the right to be heard. They also are within the political reach of citizens world-wide, as national governments are not. Gates is right - we have no policy for Iran. Iran does however have cities and towns that cities and towns in other nations might reach.

Citizenship Two Ways

Now and then one wants to shout some message to the world. If I had that power, I would scream, “You have to be two citizens at once.”

People everywhere are enmeshed in preoccupation with military security. No end in sight of escalating violence except eventual nuclear ruin. As world events and political reality bind allegiance in every country to military security, though, our survival instinct prompts us to ask, how might we substitute non-violent security?

We all are citizens of some town or city as well as a nation. That is how we are targeted, by other nations and by terrorists, as municipal populations. If we exercised a rational dual citizenship role, even as our nations jostle for security through force, we would erect authentic security through enforced law.

Consider one day’s news (New York Times, February 24, 2010) for evidence that nation-wise, Americans, powerful as our Super State status makes us feel, are bound on the track to destruction.

1. In “The Washington Area Primps and Northrop Grumman Shops for a New Home”Eugene L. Meyer reports the competition between the District of Columbia, Northern Virginia, and Southern Maryland to offer tax and other inducements to military contractors to locate their corporate headquarters in the D.C. area, “close to the Pentagon, Capitol, and White House.” The closer the vested interests in war are to the decision makers, the farther advocates of enforced law find themselves.

2. In “Gates Sees Danger in Europe’s Anti-Military Views” Brian Knowlton quotes Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking to NATO officers and officials at National Defense University. Gates bemoaned that demilitarization leanings in Europe, “where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it - has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.” Is seeking peace really mutually exclusive of waging just wars (assuming that is what we wage)?

3. In “Fearing Limits, States Weaken Gun Regulation” Ian Urbina describes how states are making it easier to buy and carry weapons, surely the poorest security resource that Americans could aspire to unless they take for granted their incapacity to head off the chaos that will accompany nuclear strikes resulting from either terrorism or national miscalculation.

4. In his architectural review,“A New Fort, er, Embassy, for London,” Nicolai Ouroussoff calls the winning design for America’s newest embassy, a “bland glass cube” meant to serve “when you know it may become the next terrorist target.” The design shows how to retain a “welcoming, democratic image while under the constant threat of attack.” The present embassy, it seems, already has abandoned efforts to reflect a civilized way of life, closing its public library and art gallery and building a “maze of bollards and fences.” The new embassy will sit in a mini-park of “camouflaged security barriers,” with a pond that is a “reflecting pool - but also a castle moat.”

These four stories are accompanied by the usual complement of pieces, some ten in number today, of war and almost-war news from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and other places around the world. Not a word in the paper about any effort by anyone to achieve security through any means but violence.

If all we do as citizens is seek violence, that is all that we shall find, and in the nuclear age it will prove fatal to everything that our citizenship stands for and hopes for.