After five years of war and little end in sight, much of the anti-war movement has acquired a case of “war fatigue.” Over the last two years, some of the most energized movements opposing the war have not been those made up of civilians but those who have served on the front lines.
As the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) goes around meeting with Members of Congress this week, they will be arguing for stronger sanctions against Iran. Their latest focus will be “sanctions” on refined petroleum products to Iran.
Well over half the world’s governments agreed last week to “consign cluster munitions to the trash bin of history,” in the words of the Cluster Munition Coalition, the civil society collective that delivered the treaty. Meeting in Dublin, Ireland, representatives of 110 governments completed negotiations on a new international treaty that bans the production, use, and export of all existing cluster munitions and commits them to destroy their stockpiles within eight years.
A fighter pilot would never cut the throat of an innocent woman or child. However, the same pilot drops bombs into enemy territory to kill enemy personnel, knowing he may also kill innocent civilians. The luxury of a large distance between the bullet or a bomb used to kill suspected enemies in Iraq is a luxury many of our soldiers do not have.
[Note: This essay was drawn from FPIF’s latest book, Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War, published by Paradigm Publishers.]
The two Samoas are divided by politics, economics, and a stretch of Pacific Ocean. Samoa, once known as Western Samoa, became the region’s first independent country when it separated from New Zealand in 1962. American Samoa, on the other hand, remains an unincorporated U.S. territory.
More than 100 governments, including all major NATO allies, met on May 19 to begin two weeks of negotiations in Dublin, Ireland to finalize a global treaty banning cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians. The U.S. government will not be there, and is exerting pressure on allies to weaken the treaty. Washington claims that future joint military operations will be undermined if allied governments prohibit the use of these weapons.
Imagine you are the president of the United States. You have just received word that violent conflict has ended in Somalia, one of the most war-torn states in the world. Your national security advisor believes the newly signed peace agreement will stick. “Great,” you say, “now we can turn to the next crisis.”
It has taken America’s leaders a long time to learn the lessons of nuclear weapons. President Harry Truman, who took the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki called the atomic bomb the “greatest thing in history.” Almost 20 years later, with America having lost its nuclear monopoly, trapped in a desperate growing arms race with the Soviet Union, and having survived a crisis that threatened nuclear war, President John F. Kennedy described the bomb as having turned the world into a prison in which man awaits his execution. Fast forward another two decades, under pressure from peace movements, President Ronald Reagan agreed with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the superpowers should eliminate all nuclear weapons.
This essay was drawn from FPIF columnist Michael T. Klare’s new book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, published by Metropolitan Books