Abstract
A night to remember
The sixth annual Nuclear-Free Future Awards ceremony took place October 12, 2003, in Munich, Germany. The award program was established in 1998 by German environmentalist and writer Claus Biegert.
Four awards were given in 2003:
Carol Gilbert, Jackie Hudson, and Ardith Platte shared the Resistance Award for their ongoing efforts toward nuclear disarmament.
Iraqi geologist Souad Naij Al Azzawi received the Education Award for her research on depleted uranium.
Corbin Harney was given the Solutions Award for his environmental, human rights, and anti-nuclear activism.
Physicist and mathematician Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake received the Lifetime Achievement Award.
“Each of this year's recipients has courageously spoken out and labored for a world more caring, more sane,” said Biegert.
Peru, Illinois
Catching the waves
I read Bret Lortie's “A New Wave of Energy” (November/December 2003) with interest. In the early years of the twentieth century my grandfather, Clarence A. Gourlay, obtained a patent for a device that used the motion of ocean waves for power, but he was unsuccessful in promoting its use. He probably suffered from a combination of not having the right kind of personal connections and being about a century ahead of the times.
St. Louis, Missouri
America, neoconned
Khurram Husain's Neocons: The Men Behind the Curtain,” (November/December 2003) was a good article. However, the German V-1 was not a rocket, as he states, but a relatively slow, winged pulse-jet missile, and that is why it was possible to shoot them down. None of the German V-2 ballistic missile rockets launched against England was shot down.
Whitewater, Wisconsin
Khurram Husain writes that Paul Wolfowitz led the Arms Control & Disarmament Agency (ACDA) in the Ford and Carter administrations. Not so. His bio on defenselink.mil doesn't say what he did there except that he worked on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and nonproliferation, so my suspicion is that he was just a group leader or the like. I'm sure he didn't hold a confirmable post; if he had, the bio would have listed it.
ACDA had a couple of poor directors who didn't believe in arms control, but thank heaven Wolfie wasn't one of them.
Great Falls, Virginia
Khurram Husain neatly develops the thread of specious logic dear to the likes of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and John Bolton. Instead of working toward developing a safer world for Americans, these men pursue policies that threaten already schizoid regimes like the former Iraqi government headed by Saddam Hussein, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Kim Jong Il regime in North Korea.
Brinkmanship only works when there is both positive and negative reinforcement. The oft-repeated axiom that Saddam Hussein did not respond to deterrence was never the case, as shown by the effective dismantlement of Iraq's nuclear weapons program before 1998. Instead of recognizing the logical flaw in the supposition that Iraq had nuclear weapons in 2003 before the U.S. invasion in March, the neocons continue to speculate as to the possible location of these nonexistent weapons. They seem to argue that they are now in Syria!
If there is any desire in Washington for safety for Americans both at home and abroad, justice must be the major factor in determining foreign policy. The injustice of a colonial-settler state, Israel, possessing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons along with multiple platforms for their projection needs to be addressed. Until there is justice in geographic Palestine there will be no security for anyone in the Middle East.
The people of Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon have a right not to be colonized and invaded.
Washington, D.C.
I am reading online, once again feeling grateful for your publication. I have been acquainted with it for more than a decade; it continues to be solid.
Although Khurram Husain's piece is not exactly a muckraking show-stopper full of new material, it is very useful, to me at least, in tracing the important steps in the rise of the neocons–Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and others.
Still, there is one element of the dynamic that, for some reason, always seems to be omitted or mentioned only in passing. That is the fallacy that the neocons operate as ideological/strategic purists.
They are anything but pure. The easy-to-document facts are that they can be found at the nexus of right-wing power, the intersection of an influential sector of academia, massive economic interests, and the Republican party.
What is interesting about the accelerated post-World War II drift from deterrence to the seemingly unswayable logic of worst-case scenario planning and associated fearmongering is not so much the technocratification of military strategy–the hocus pocus and pseudoscience of right-wing mathematical models–nor is it that these individuals have wormed their way into the bureaucracy. It is that after the end of the Cold War, they actually grew more powerful.
As Hussein writes: “By 1993, the ONA [Andrew Marshall's Office of Net Assessment] was conducting a series of roundtable discussions in which all the services discussed the military impact of advances in information technology, the value of space warfare, joint operational commands, greater coordination, and the impact of declining budgets.”
But if the other superpower was no longer a force in 1993 (as Bill Clinton took office), what was this exercise for? The old enemy no longer existed and a new one needed to be manufactured.
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Update
When the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out a call for entries in its “Grand Challenge” contest, it wasn't prepared for the response.
As Paul Rogers reported in the July/August 2003 Bulletin, “In a competition open to all, DARPA is offering $1 million to the design team that develops an unmanned, totally autonomous ground vehicle that navigates an as-yet-to-be-determined course from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in the fastest time” under 10 hours.
If teams' technical papers on their robots were deemed worthy, they were supposed to get a spot on the starting line. But after DARPA received more than 100 applications, entrants were informed that “factors beyond DARPA's control” made it necessary to cap the number of robots at 20. DARPA has already invited 19 teams to the challenge, but the basis on which the invitations were extended has not been made public. DARPA now says the remaining spot, and five alternates, will be awarded to the team it selects after making “site visits” to several teams that didn't make the original cut. Some would-be entrants are not pleased.
“They are not being true to their word or the spirit of the contest,” Warren Williams, leader of Team Phantasm, told London's infotech Web site The Register (November 6, 2003). Williams's team has agreed to a site visit, hoping to make spot 20. “This was supposed to be about the mom and pop teams having a chance to compete and coming up with new technology. Now, it's the same people as the military complex.”
“The same guys DARPA has given money to in the past are now the ones competing in the race,” Williams said.
The neocons' job is to pitch for dollars through threat creation. The more promising theorists are spotted in academia by scouts, groomed in the minor leagues of one government department or other, in think tanks and universities, and on the boards of industry, moving seamlessly from one place to another. The most useful ones, the ones who look good on camera and can manage and manipulate the image, make it to the big leagues. Of course they are ascendant today, when military business has its hands directly on the reins of U.S. foreign policy.
Their modern imperative is not technological. It has much less to do with tactical/strategic threats, especially when the enemy no longer can be said to exist. The modern imperative is sustaining the far-reaching and overly powerful military-industrial-political juggernaut in the face of its irrelevance; how, in other words, to fill the trough for the sows of corporate welfare.
The connection between industry and the executive branch ought to be researched and documented to a far greater degree to understand how the likes of Andrew Marshall, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld float to the top–and how they keep the military enterprise going. These intelligent opportunists are not only conscious of their roles; they gleefully leap to fulfill them. That is what makes them truly evil.
But as Husain points out, the new, never-ending conflict is unsustainable. And the neocons' adventure will eventually lead to the bankruptcy and undoing of their empire–but by that time their corpses will have turned to dust.
San Jose, Costa Rica