President Bush's June graduation address to the cadets at West Point has attracted attention mainly because it is the fullest articulation, so far, of the new strategic doctrine of pre-emption. The radical idea being touted by the White House and Pentagon is that the United States has the right to use military force against any state that is seen as hostile or makes moves to acquire weapons of mass destruction--nuclear, biological or chemical. The obvious initial test case for pre-emption is Iraq, whose government the United States is continually threatening to overthrow, either on the model of the displacement of the Taliban in Afghanistan or by some other method. Washington's war plans have evidently not been finalized, and whether the intimations of war--despite the numerous objections voiced by neighboring governments and European allies--are to be taken literally is still unclear.
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Turkey's Finest Hour?
Richard Falk: The sick man of Europe gets a jolt of life, but will it last?
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Questionable Verdict
Richard Falk: Even the most naive American voter cannot be expected to see the morally, legally and politically questionable death sentence given to Saddam Hussein a milestone in the Bush Administration's illegal war in Iraq. As the milestones pile up, so do the bodies.
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Gone Nuclear: How the World Lost Its Way
Richard Falk, Mary Kaldor, Randall Caroline Forsberg & George Perkovich: As the world reacts to news of North Korea's underground nuclear test, a crucial anniversary is observed: Twenty years ago at the Reykjavik Summit, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev outlined a vision for a non-nuclear world. What went wrong? In this Nation forum, four experts from the nonproliferation movement discuss how to put disarmament back on the world's agenda.
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The UN After Lebanon
Richard Falk: The UN's mixed record on the war in Lebanon proves we should lower our expectations of what it can meaningfully achieve.
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The Circle of Responsibility
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Storm Clouds Over Iran
Richard Falk: The confrontation with Iran is a wakeup call to states that possess nuclear weapons: In a world of nuclear apartheid, multilateral disarmament is the only course of action that can succeed.
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Gaza Illusions
Richard Falk: Disengagement represents a dangerous step backward in the struggle to find a just peace for Israelis and Palestinians and leaves many core issues unresolved.
Back in 1956, when the American commitment to this Charter effort to limit the discretion of states to the extent possible was still strong, the US government surprised its allies and adversaries by opposing the Suez war of Britain, France and Israel because it was a nondefensive use of force against Egypt, despite the provocations associated at the time with Nasser's anti-Israeli, anti-Western militancy. This legal commitment had evolved by stages in the period after World War I, and when the surviving leaders of Germany and Japan were prosecuted for war crimes, "crimes against the peace" were declared to be even worse than atrocities committed in the course of the war. The task of the Charter was to give this concept as clear limits as possible.
Pre-emption, in contrast, validates striking first--not in a crisis, as was done by Israel with plausible, if not entirely convincing, justification in the 1967 war, when enemy Arab troops were massing on its borders after dismissing the UN war-preventing presence, but on the basis of shadowy intentions, alleged potential links to terrorist groups, supposed plans and projects to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and anticipations of possible future dangers. It is a doctrine without limits, without accountability to the UN or international law, without any dependence on a collective judgment of responsible governments and, what is worse, without any convincing demonstration of practical necessity.
It is true that the reality of the mega-terrorist challenge requires some rethinking of the relevance of rules and restraints based on conflict in a world of territorial states. The most radical aspects of the Al Qaeda challenge are a result of its nonterritorial, concealed organizational reality as a multistate network. Modern geopolitics was framed to cope with conflict, and relations among sovereign states; the capacity of a network with modest resources to attack and wage a devastating type of war against the most powerful state does require acknowledgment that postmodern geopolitics needs a different structure of security.
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