Dutch panel declares Iraq war illegal

Posted on February 5th, 2010 in Politics, War by Robert Miller

Last month, a Dutch inquiry panel concluded that the Iraq war, supported by the Dutch government, based on intelligence from the U.S. and Britain, “had no sound mandate in international law.” The panel disclosed that, in a shocking violation of normal protocol, British Prime Minister Tony Blair had sent a personal letter to Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende for his eyes only and that the letter was then returned to Britain after Balkenende read it. The letter was unavailable to the panel who asked for a copy, but the British government refused to comply. Normally such letters would be delivered through regular diplomatic channels, become part of the national archives and would have been available to the panel. The letter might have shed some additional light on Tony Blair’s arguments, but it is unlikely that its contents would have changed the ruling of the panel.
The Dutch ruling is likely to have significant influence on how the war in Iraq is perceived in Europe. [From the article] Philippe Sands QC, a professor of international law, who gave evidence to the Dutch inquiry, said:

There has been no other independent assessment on the legality of the war in Iraq and the findings of this inquiry are unambiguous. It concludes that the case argued by the Dutch and British governments, including the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, could not reasonably be argued.

[further] “This is the authoritative view of seven commissioners including the former president of the Dutch supreme court, a former judge of the European court of justice, and two legal academics.”

The report of the Dutch panel has raised controversy in the Netherlands, but so far no parliamentary inquiry has been stimulated by the panel’s conclusion. In Britain however, the Chilcot inquiry has been looking into the justification for the war, but this committee lacks the legal sophistication of the Dutch panel and is seemingly in a poor position to offer a contrary opinion that will provide any serious counterbalance. In a way, this ruling puts Tony Blair in a more uncomfortable spot than he was with the Chilcot-only inquiry.
While it is unclear how influential this panel’s ruling will be, it is unlikely that it will be challenged by legal scholarship, as the Dutch panel consisted of expertise focused on that very specific issue–the legality of the war on the basis of national and international law, from the standpoint of the Netherlands and the entire European community. If I were Dick Cheney, George Bush, Condoleezza Rice or Donald Rumsfeld, planning on a vacation any time soon, I would probably avoid Europe. I suspect that this ruling, will in time, pervade into the European community and further erode the image of Tony Blair, who already walks around as damaged goods. His main problem was serving as a willing sycophant to GWB.

For a country that felt morally equipped to pass  judgment on Nazi Germany after WW II,  the U.S. now finds itself in a moral quagmire created by its own hubris, coupled with a complete disregard for our own Constitution and the obligations we have to our  international agreements and treaties. But when will a panel of legal experts in America rule on the legality of our invasion of Iraq, so that Americans can see for themselves how GWB shredded our own Constitution and the international agreements we helped to establish, the purpose of which was to prevent illegal wars from ever taking place? GW considered the Constitution to be an unbinding document throughout his entire presidency.  Unfortunately, all of the inquiries carried out in the U.S.  are done through a political process, not one founded within our legal, academic system alone;  until we establish such a vehicle, achieved at the peril of politicians who like war, we will never have a non-political evaluation of our own behavior. If you think that the Supreme Court offers that kind of objectivity, just ponder their recent 5-4 ruling which allows corporate wealth to dominate our political system, even more than it does today. That ruling has placed our democracy on the beltway towards the paper shredder.  For the Iraq war, however,  we shouldn’t really need a “truly objective” panel of legal experts to tell us that our invasion of Iraq was illegal and that the perpetrators of this war should receive stiff penalties, if for no other reason than to serve as a warning to all future militaristic politicians: if you love war, you could wind up in jail if you take us there! Taking a country to war should be a grave, agonizing decision, one that has, since WW II,  been far to easy for our presidents. But, for George W Bush, the decision to invade Iraq was an act of trivializing our own rules. That is one reason why the U.S. is so down, why we have a sense of national confusion. We are not following our own rules and because of that there is a gnawing rumbling in our gut that doesn’t respond to antacids, but responds better to the trivialization of our American culture. We avoid these kinds of conflicts by watching reality TV, wondering where Paris Hilton is tonight and staying away from history lessons and literature.

RFM

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Tributes to Howard Zinn

Posted on February 3rd, 2010 in Biography by Robert Miller

The Nation has compiled a number of tributes to Howard Zinn, who died last week at age 87. These are largely from students and friends who themselves have become prominent as writers, politicians and academicians. If you go to that site, you will surely be impressed by the range of people whose views have been impacted and shaped by their friendship with Howard Zinn, his philosophy and take on history. His most famous book, A People’s History of the United States has sold a million copies and has achieved a sense of permanency in American history, as perhaps the real history of America, rather than the faux history to which many of the more senior members of our generation were exposed, including me.

Howard Zinn believed in a permanent state of revolutionary zeal, always challenging the established authority, with movements that begin at the bottom. He did not see the election process as a major solution to our problems, but viewed elections as a cushion used by the ruling elites to soften and absorb the misery of our war-making elitism, carried out within an inequitable society. He gauged success of movements by what they achieved for the disenfranchised, those on the bottom rungs of the ladders of racism and economic disparity. His writing and his personal history emphasized the power of movements that begin at the bottom of society and from there blossom into a populist surge, which inevitably becomes corrupted, absorbed and dampened by the ruling elites. But slowly, these movements have an impact, although the never-ending process must be continuously refreshed from below. Zinn didn’t look at the failure of a social movement to make change as failure per se, but saw such terminal events as indicating the need for new refreshed fomenting from below. The erosion of the middle class in America and the shocking growth of poverty and homelessness are the forces created by the ruling elites to suppress grand social movements from taking root at their historical source, where  social transitions in the past have ignited and changed America for the better. Zinn was only modestly approving of Obama and since his election was highly critical of him for his escalation of the war in Afghanistan. There is at least some discussion about creating a social forum and structure in the name of the two giants that have represented the voices of the people in the latter have of the 20th century–Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Who will follow such influential scholars?

RFM

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Abolish the filibuster and put back the public option

Posted on February 1st, 2010 in Politics by Robert Miller

The filibuster we witnessed by Jimmy Stewart  in the Movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” was the classic filibuster in which a Senator who wanted to kill the passage of a bill did so by speaking interminably on the Senate floor until the interest in passing the bill subsided (in Jimmy Stewart’s case, he was filibustering for honest government, whereas in reality, the filibuster rule has more often been used to kill good legislation). In times past, the Senator could recognize one of his colleagues to continue the speech, turning over occupation of the floor, so that a small group of Senators could effectively prevent a bill from ever coming to a vote. Sometimes the bill opposition Senator and his colleagues would have to stay on the floor for long periods to block passage of the bill and any moment of weakness or a pause could result in bringing the bill to the floor, where it only needed a simple majority to pass. But those days are gone and haven’t been used since a new arrangement was made in 1975.

(Note: Much of the history of the filibuster was taken from Wikipedia). The term filibuster was first used in 1851 and its definition means “pirate” or hijacking the process. It was practiced in the Roman Senate and has also occurred in the British House of Commons where filibuster means “talked out.” The filibuster was an historic method that, for one thing,  was used to keep slavery in existence. “In 1946, Southern Senators blocked a vote on a bill proposed by Democrat Dennis Chavez of New Mexico  that would have created a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to prevent discrimination in the work place. The filibuster lasted weeks, and Senator Chavez was forced to remove the bill from consideration after a failed cloture vote even though he had enough votes to pass the bill.”  Senator Strom Thurmond (then D-SC, later R-SC)) set the modern record for an individual when he filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for 24 hours and 18 minutes, although the bill ultimately passed. The essence of the filibuster is that it allows a minority or a single person to block any bill favored by the majority. To close a filibuster through the “cloture” process, one needs a 3/5 majority and hence it’s the epicenter of the problem we face today, where the Republicans have voted in a block and are keeping many important bills from being passed and Federal nominees from being considered. As we have seen, the healthcare bill in the Senate was morphed into its current, more odious form, because, to get the super majority vote of 60, concessions had to be given to conservative Democrats, greatly weakening the bill and increasing its unpopularity.

Historically, because of the personal drain demanded by the mind-numbing process of the filibuster, and the fact that it often made the filibustering Senator look like a clown,  it was used very rarely. But, in 1975, the Jimmy Stewart version of the filibuster was rendered extinct and replaced by a form of filibuster  in which the mere filing of a motion to extend the debate indefinitely can take place without any floor appearance or clown performances. Under the new rule, the bill can be brought forward for consideration only when a super majority of 60 votes meets the cloture rule. Thus, without a word being said, the threat of a filibuster is the same as the real thing and since that rule change, the filibuster has been used far more often than it was in its historic past, aided no doubt by the polarization we see between the two parties. The accompanying graph illustrates the increased numerology of the filibuster–gridlock city in the Senate.

From Wikipedia

From Wikipedia

The constitution provides that ‘a majority of each [house] shall constitute a quorum to do business.’ In other words, there is nothing in the constitution that demands a filibuster rule and in one very direct way, you could argue that the filibuster is an unconstitutional element of the Senate rules. Moreover, the Supreme Court ruled in 1892 (U.S. v. Ballin), that the senate voting rules could be changed by a majority, i.e., by 51 votes.  Contemporary scholars point out that in practice, narrow Senate majorities were able to enact legislation. Majorities were able to prevail because of an implicit threat that the filibuster could itself be changed by majority rule if the minority used it to prevent, instead of merely to delay, votes on measures supported by a bare majority. Why isn’t that being done anymore? So what’s to prevent the Senate from voting to eliminate the filibuster? Absolutely nothing except the makeup of their own vertebral columns. We are all aware that in modern times, the normally bony structure of the vertebral columns of Democrats has been replaced by a gelatinous substance that collapses at the first sign of stress.

Thus, as Tom Geoghegan has argued in The Nation, it would take only a majority vote in the senate to do away with the filibuster altogether.  It is an ancient, archaic tool of obstruction, that has no place in a deliberative body that is trying to set the country right against a force of obstructionists who are desperately trying to save their own political party from the trash can of history. The next time a Senator asks you for a contribution to make sure we get back to a super majority in the Senate, tell him/her that it only takes a majority of the Senate, each equipped with their own version of a normal vertebral backbone, to vote for permanent elimination of the filibuster rule in the Senate and add it as a topping to the overdue demise of the Republican Party. Elimination of the filibuster rule would then make it easy to put back the public option and add Medicare for 55 year-olds into a new healthcare bill and pass it with ease. That’s the bill that had the highest level of popularity in the polls.  The polls show that the Democrats would gain by this simple strategy.  Furthermore, the enormous public agenda that must be addressed to deal with jobs, healthcare, regulatory control and excessive military spending would become much easier. The health of the Democratic party would be improved by the election process, where opponents of “blue dog” or “corporatist Democrats” could campaign against their obstructionist voting record in the primary elections. The reputation that the Senate has today as the obstructionist political body, would disappear. It could be a true revolution, getting us asymptotically closer to the nirvana of solution-ville.

With the recent Supreme Court ruling that gives corporations unlimited capacity to contribute to election campaigns, new legislation will be required to modify the impact of this ruling and we know that Republicans will be against each of these solutions, serving their own self-interests for more corporate money.  For example, we must make sure that if corporations make such contributions, it comes out of company profits, without a tax deduction, so that, in essence, it comes from the shareholders of the corporation. The Republicans have made it very clear that they will vote in a block to oppose any Democratic legislation, so why not respond in the most appropriate way that gives the Democratic party the vertebral factor it needs to acquire true national leadership qualities–eliminate the filibuster, put back the public option and let’s get on with our lives. Here, here!

RFM

RFM

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