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15 March 2011

Representatives of the major imperialist powers initiated a flurry of meetings Monday to discuss proposals for military intervention in Libya.

Foreign ministers from the Group of Eight countries—the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia—began a two-day conference in France hosted by President Sarkozy, who has been among the most vocal supporters of exploiting the revolt in Libya as a pretext for direct military action.

A United Nations Security Council meeting also convened on Monday and NATO is reportedly set to discuss possible action in the North African country on Tuesday.

Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Cameron have both publicly called for the imposition of a no-fly zone, an act of war that would begin with the heavy bombardment of Libya’s airports, air defense systems and other targets.

A French government spokesman said that France would attempt to persuade the rest of the G8 that such military action was necessary “in the face of the terrible violence suffered by the Libyan population.” These “humanitarian” sensibilities are recently acquired—the Elysee Palace saw no need for such action to protect the peoples of Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq or Afghanistan against the “terrible violence” wrought by Israeli and US bombardments over the past several years.

The Sarkozy government became the first to formally recognize the so-called transitional government, which is dominated by former functionaries in the dictatorship of Col. Muammar Gaddafi. These elements have openly demanded foreign military intervention and could serve as a cat’s paw for a US-NATO intervention, unsanctioned by the United Nations.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, representing Washington at the G8 meeting, is also scheduled to hold talks with representatives of the National Transitional Council, which is headed by Gaddafi’s former justice minister, Mustafa Abd al-Jalil. The meeting was scheduled for Monday night and was to include Mahmoud Jibril, the former head of Gaddafi’s National Economic Development Board. In a classified cable released by WikiLeaks, Jibril was described by the US embassy in Tripoli as “a serious interlocutor who ‘gets’ the US perspective.”

Aljazeera reported that sources on the National Transitional Council claimed they had received promises from Washington as well as London and Paris of support for a no-fly zone in the United Nations Security Council. But, according to the British Guardian, the Libyan delegation was prepared to ask Clinton not only for US backing of the no-fly zone, but for “tactical” air strikes aimed at destroying pro-Gaddafi ground forces and assassinating the Libyan dictator himself.

Speaking in Washington Monday, President Barack Obama echoed previous comments, declaring that Gaddafi “has lost his legitimacy and he needs to leave.” While he said that the US and its allies would continue seeking ways to “tighten the noose” around the Gaddafi regime, he made no mention of the proposed no-fly zone.

The UN Security Council finished a first day of discussions on Libya Monday without reaching any consensus among its 15 members on a course of action beyond economic sanctions agreed to last month.

The French and British representatives pressed for the imposition of the no-fly zone. Before going into the closed-door session, French UN Ambassador Gerard Araud praised the resolution passed by the 22-member Arab League—over the opposition of Algeria and Syria—urging the Security Council to authorize the no-fly zone. “Now that there is this Arab League statement, we do hope that it’s a game changer for the other members of the council,” said Araud.

The purpose of the Arab League statement—which drew a nonsensical distinction between the use of military force to establish and enforce the no-fly zone and “military intervention”—was to provide a fig leaf for the imperialist powers to intervene in Libya, a former Italian colony.

The resolution, adopted by such champions of democracy and human rights as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Kuwait and Iraq, was praised by Obama and European leaders and received widespread media coverage. It supposedly proved the existence of “regional support” for imperialist intervention.

Virtually ignored, however, was a contrary resolution adopted Monday by the African Union opposing “any form of foreign intervention” in Libya and establishing a commission to “engage with all parties in Libya, facilitate an inclusive dialogue among them, and engage the African Union partners… for the speedy resolution of the crisis in Libya.”

The African Union resolution cited particular regional concerns in Africa, of which Libya is a part, including the plight of African migrant workers fleeing the violence and the “alleged use of mercenaries by the Libyan government.”

It likewise declared its support for the “territorial integrity” of Libya and said that it would make every effort to halt secession by any part of the country. Until 1951, Libya existed only as three autonomous provinces—Tripolitania, Fezzan and Cyrenica. There are concerns within Africa’s ruling elites that the crisis and any imperialist intervention could hasten the country’s fracturing along these lines, creating a precedent that could be repeated elsewhere on the continent.

After Monday’s Security Council session, Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said that while Moscow remained “open-minded” about the proposed no-fly zone, “fundamental questions need to be answered,” particularly how such a military action was to be implemented and by whom.

Similarly, German Ambassador Peter Wittig said that his government preferred to tighten economic sanctions adopted by the council on February 26 and that “questions are still unanswered” about the no-fly zone proposal. The previous day, Germany’s foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, voiced reservations about military action, declaring, “We do not want to get involved in a civil war in North Africa.”

Among the unanswered questions was apparently what precise role the Obama administration and the Pentagon are prepared to play in establishing and enforcing the no-fly zone. Washington has already sent five warships to the Libyan coast for purportedly “humanitarian” purposes. But Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other officials have warned that creating a no-fly zone would involve intensive bombing and a major commitment of US forces.

Reuters cited a diplomatic official on the Security Council as reporting that US Ambassador Susan Rice had stated that while Washington was “open” to discussing the no-fly zone proposal, it would not in and of itself halt the violence in Libya. She also said that the US “would only participate in a no-fly zone if the Arab countries in the region support it in a meaningful way.”

Diplomatic sources also said that Germany indicated it was open to proposals to arm the anti-Gaddafi forces. Earlier on Monday, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said that providing arms to those opposing the Gaddafi regime should be considered. Prime Minister David Cameron, however, rejected the idea, pointing out that it would violate an arms embargo imposed against Libya and that it was doubtful that anything could be done quickly enough to change the balance of forces.

Dominating the international discussions is mounting fear in the major imperialist capitals that a window of opportunity is closing, largely because of the advances made by forces loyal to the Gaddafi regime in suppressing the revolt.

Speaking before parliament, Cameron warned that “time is of the essence” in getting the no-fly zone in place.

“We would prefer to act as quickly as possible, and we want that our partners on the council have the same sense of urgency that we have,” France’s ambassador Araud declared after Monday’s session at the UN.

The concern expressed here is not over the shedding of Libyan blood, but rather over losing the pretext for initiating a direct imperialist intervention with the aim of installing an even more pliant regime in Tripoli and securing even more unfettered access to the country’s energy supplies. The fear among the major powers is that Gaddafi may succeed in reestablishing control over the country, depriving them of the pretense of intervening to halt bloodshed.

Military forces loyal to Gaddafi have reportedly advanced 125 miles eastward in the last several days, with the regime in Tripoli claiming to have re-captured the strategic oil towns of Brega and Ras Lanuf on Sunday.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the advance has triggered “spreading panic” in the eastern city of Benghazi, the stronghold of the revolt against the Gaddafi regime. The newspaper reported that rebel forces have “begun rounding up Gaddafi supporters,” and that Western aid groups and news organizations have begun pulling their staff out of the city to Tobruk, near the Egyptian border. Their fear is that Gaddafi’s troops might encircle Benghazi.

In a propaganda move aimed at taunting and threatening the Western powers, Gaddafi called in the Chinese, Russian and Indian ambassadors Sunday to offer an “invitation to firms from these countries to exploit Libyan oil,” according to the Libyan state news agency Jana.

Gaddafi’s right-wing dictatorship previously granted lucrative operating deals to such energy giants as US-based ConocoPhillips, Hess and Marathon; Italy’s ENI; France’s Total; and BASF-Wintershall of Germany, leaving much of the country’s oil and gas production under the direct control of foreign corporations.

Oil shipments from Libya have been cut off since February 19 as ports and large areas of oil production fell under rebel control.

 

 

  15 March 2011 commondreams.org

Our hearts go out to the people of Japan, who are suffering the horrendous effects of a massive earthquake and devastating tsunami.  Watching the news clips of the natural disasters in Japan makes us realize yet again the enormous power of nature and the limits of our capacities to control such power.  Large buildings, roadways and bridges buckled before the shockwaves of the earthquake.  Cars and trucks, even houses, seemed like small toys when they were swept away by the tsunami wave hitting the Japanese coastline.

In Japan, electric power has been knocked out for millions of people.  But the dangers are far greater than those associated with the temporary loss of power.  Some of Japan’s 55 nuclear reactors lost primary and backup power, which in turn led to core cooling problems, partial meltdowns and radiation releases within the reactor control rooms and into the atmosphere, with possibly far worse radiation releases still ahead.  Three of Japan’s nuclear power reactors have reportedly experienced explosions.  Some 200,000 people have been evacuated from around the damaged nuclear power plants.

So far, there has not been much reporting on problems with spent fuel storage pools, but these pools that hold used fuel rods could prove to be the most dangerous of all facets of the disaster.  They contain vast amounts of radiation, several times the amount in a reactor core.  If these spent fuel pools lose their cooling source, they could spew radiation into the atmosphere, creating a tragedy of even greater proportions than did the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the Ukraine.

The major lessons to be drawn from the tragedy in Japan are: first, nature’s power is far beyond our ability to control; second, the nuclear industry, in Japan and elsewhere, has arrogantly pushed ahead with their dangerous technology, assuring the public there is no reason for concern; third, the reassurances of self-interested nuclear “experts” are not to be trusted; and fourth, the nuclear power plant failures in Japan are a final wake-up call to replace nuclear power with safe, sustainable and renewable forms of energy.

There are 440 commercial nuclear power plants in the world.  Of these, the US has 104, nearly twice as many as Japan.  Many of the US plants are of the same design as those that are failing in Japan.  President Obama’s 2012 budget calls for $36 billion in loan guarantees to subsidize new nuclear power plants.

California, known for its propensity for earthquakes, has two nuclear power plants, one at Avila Beach, north of Santa Barbara, and one at San Onofre, between Los Angeles and San Diego.  Both plants are located near major fault lines.  The Diablo Canyon power plant at Avila Beach is situated near the San Andreas and Hosgri fault lines.  The San Onofre plant is located less than a mile from the Cristianitos fault line.  Diablo Canyon is designed to withstand a 7.5 magnitude earthquake and San Onofre to withstand a 7.0 magnitude earthquake, but as Japan has shown us earthquakes can come in larger sizes.

We know that we humans cannot control earthquakes.  Nor can we control tsunamis or other natural disasters.  What we can control is our own technologies and we can say “No” to technologies that are catastrophically dangerous.  Natural disasters and nuclear power plants are a deadly mix.  Disasters intentionally caused by terrorists could also result in the release of radiation from nuclear power plants.

Mother Nature has given us a deadly warning that it is past time to end our reliance on nuclear power and invest instead in solar power, the only safe nuclear reactor that exists – 93 million miles from Earth.  The question is: Will the disaster in Japan open our eyes to the need for change, or will we be content to continue to tempt fate and simply hope that we do not become the next place on the planet where nuclear power fails catastrophically?

David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), an organization that has worked since 1982 to educate and advocate for a world free of nuclear weapons.

 

 

Since 2001, Americans have been living with a nightmare Arab, a Muslim monster threatening us to the core, chilling our souls with the cry, “God is great!” Yet after two months of world-historic protest and rebellion in streets and squares across the Arab world, we are finally waking up to another reality: that this was our bad dream, significantly a creation of our own fevered imaginations.

For years, vestigial colonial contempt for Arabs combined with rank prejudice against the Islamic religion, exacerbated by an obsession with oil, proved a blinding combination. Then 9/11 pulled its shroud across the sun. But like the night yielding to dawn, all of this now appears in a new light. Americans are seeing Arabs and Muslims as if for the first time, and we are, despite ourselves, impressed and moved. In this regard, too, the Arab revolution has been, well, revolutionary.

The Absence of Arab Perfidy, the Presence of God

For those same two months, jihadists who think nothing of slaughtering innocents in the name of Allah have been nowhere in sight, as millions of ordinary Arabs launched demonstration after demonstration with a non-violent discipline worthy of Mohandas Gandhi. True, rebels in Libya took up arms, but defensively, in order to throw back the murderous assaults of Moammar Gadhafi’s men.

In the meantime, across North Africa and the Middle East, none of the usual American saws about Islamic perfidy have been evident. The demonizing of Israel, anti-Semitic sloganeering, the burning of American flags, outcries against “Crusaders and Jews”—all have been absent from nearly every instance of revolt. Osama bin Laden—to whom, many Americans became convinced in these last years, Muslims are supposed to have all but sworn allegiance—has been appealed to not at all. Where are the fatwas?

Perhaps the two biggest surprises of all here: out of a culture that has notoriously disempowered women has sprung a protest movement rife with female leadership, while a religion regarded as inherently incompatible with democratic ideals has been the context from which comes an unprecedented outbreak of democratic hope. And make no mistake: the Muslim religion is essential to what has been happening across the Middle East, even without Islamic “fanatics” chanting hate-filled slogans.

Without such fanatics, who in the West knows what this religion actually looks like?

In fact, its clearest image has been there on our television screens again and again. In this period of transformation, every week has been punctuated with the poignant formality of Friday prayers, including broadcast scenes of masses of Muslims prostrate in orderly rows across vast squares in every contested Arab capital. Young and old, illiterate and tech-savvy, those in flowing robes and those in tight blue jeans have been alike in such observances. From mosque pulpits have come fiery denunciations of despotism and corruption, but no blood-thirst and none of the malicious imams who so haunt the nightmares of Europeans and Americans.

Yet sacrosanct Fridays have consistently seen decisive social action, with resistant regimes typically getting the picture on subsequent weekends. (The Tunisian prime minister, a holdover from the toppled regime of autocrat Zine Ben Ali, for example, resigned on the last Sunday in February.) These outcomes have been sparked not only by preaching, but by the mosque-inspired cohesion of a collectivity that finds no contradiction between piety and political purpose; religion, that is, has been a source of resolve.

It’s an irony, then, that Western journalists, always so quick to tie bad Muslim behaviour to religion, have rushed to term this good Muslim behaviour “secular.” In a word wielded by the New York Times, Islam is now considered little but an “afterthought” to the revolution. In this, the media is simply wrong. The protests, demonstrations, and uprisings that have swept across the Middle East have visibly built their foundations on the irreducible sense of self-worth that, for believers, comes from a felt closeness to God, who is as near to each person—as the Qur’an says—as his or her own jugular vein. The call to prayer is a five-times-daily reminder of that infinite individual dignity.

A Rejection Not Only of Violence, but of the Old Lies

The new Arab condition is not nirvana, nor has some political utopia been achieved. In no Arab state is the endgame in sight, much less played out. History warns that revolutions have a tendency to devour their children, just as it warns that every religion can sponsor violence and war as easily and naturally as nonviolence and peace.

History warns as well that, in times of social upheaval, Jews are the preferred and perennial scapegoat, and the state of Israel is a ready target for that hatred. Arab bigotry has not magically gone away, nor has the human temptation to drown fear with blood. But few, if any, revolutions have been launched with such wily commitment to the force of popular will, not arms. When it comes to “people power,” Arabs have given the concept several new twists.

Because so many people have believed in themselves—protecting one another simply by standing together—they have been able to reject not only violence, but any further belief in the lies of their despotic rulers. The stark absence of Israel as a major flashpoint of protest in these last weeks, to take a telling example, stands in marked contrast to the way in which the challenged or overthrown despots of various Middle Eastern lands habitually exploited both anti-Semitism (sponsoring, for instance, the dissemination through Arab newsstands of the long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and the plight of Palestinians (feigning sympathy for the dispossessed victims of Israeli occupation while doing nothing to help them, precisely because Arab dictators needed suffering Palestinians to distract from the suffering of their own citizens).

Not surprisingly, if always sadly, the Arab revolution has brought incidents of Jew-baiting in its wake—in late February in Tunis, for example, by a mob outside the city’s main synagogue. That display was, however, quickly denounced and repudiated by the leadership of the Free Tunisia movement. When a group of Cairo thugs assaulted CBS correspondent Lara Logan, they reportedly hurled the word “Jew” at her as an epithet. So, yes, such incidents happened, but what makes them remarkable is their rarity on such a sprawling landscape.

To be sure, Arabs broadly identify with the humiliated Palestinians, readily identify Israel as an enemy, and resent the American alliance with Israel, but something different is unfolding now. When the United States vetoed the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the very thick of February’s revolutionary protests, to flag one signal, the issue was largely ignored by Arab protesters. In Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, the spirit of Arab revolt showed itself mainly in a youth-driven and resolutely non-violent movement to overcome the intra-Palestinian divisions between Fatah and Hamas. Again and again, that is, the Arab Muslim population has refused to behave as Americans have been conditioned to expect.

The Mainstreaming of Anti-Muslim Prejudice

Conditioned by whom? Prejudice against Arabs generally and Islam in particular is an old, old story. A few months ago, the widespread nature of the knee-jerk suspicion that all Muslims are potentially violent was confirmed by National Public Radio commentator Juan Williams, who said, “I get worried. I get nervous” around those “in Muslim garb,” those who identify themselves “first and foremost as Muslims.”

Williams was fired by NPR, but the commentariat rallied to him for simply speaking a universal truth, one which, as Williams himself acknowledged, was to be regretted: Muslims are scary. When NPR then effectively reversed itself by forcing the resignation of the executive who had fired him, anti-Muslim bigotry was resoundingly vindicated in America, no matter the intentions of the various players.

Scary, indeed—but no surprise. Such prejudice had been woven into every fibre of American foreign and military policy across the previous decade, a period when the overheated watchword was “Islamofascism.” In 2002, scholar Bernard Lewis’s book What Went Wrong? draped a cloak of intellectual respectability around anti-Muslim contempt. It seemed not to have occurred to Lewis that, if such an insulting question in a book title deserves an answer at all, in the Arab context it should be: “we” did—with that “we” defined as Western civilization.

Whether the historical marker is 1099 for Crusader mayhem; 1417 for the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, the first permanent European outpost in North Africa; 1492 for the expulsion from Spain of Muslims (along with Jews); 1798 for Napoleon’s arrival as a would-be conqueror in Cairo; 1869 for the opening of the Suez Canal by the French Empress Eugenie; 1917 for the British conquest of Palestine, which would start a British-spawned contest between Jews and Arabs; or the 1930s, when vast oil reserves were discovered in the Arabian peninsula—all such Western antecedents for trouble in Arab lands are routinely ignored or downplayed in our world in favour of a preoccupation with a religion deemed to be irrational, anti-modern, and inherently hostile to democracy.

How deep-seated is such a prejudice? European Christians made expert pronouncements about the built-in violence of Islam almost from the start, although the 7th-century Qur’an was not translated into Latin until the 12th century. When a relatively objective European account of Islam’s origins and meaning finally appeared in the 18th century, it was quickly added to the Roman Catholic Index of forbidden books. Western culture is still at the mercy of such self-elevating ignorance. That’s readily apparent in the fact that a 14th-century slander against Islam—that it was only “spread by the sword”—was reiterated in 2006 (on the 5th anniversary of 9/11) by Pope Benedict XVI. He did apologize, but by then the Muslim-haters had been encouraged.

Western contempt for Islam is related to a post-Enlightenment distrust of all religion. In modern historiography, for instance, the brutal violence that killed millions during paroxysms of conflict across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries is remembered as the “religious wars,” even though religion was only part of a history that included the birth of nations and nationalism, as well as of industrial capitalism, and the opening of the “age of exploration,” also known as the age of colonial exploitation.

 

“Secular” sources of violence have always been played down in favour of sacred causes, whether the Reformation, Puritan fanaticism, or Catholic anti-modernism. “Enlightened” nation-states were all too ready to smugly denounce primitive and irrational religious violence as a way of asserting that their own expressly non-religious campaigns against rival states and aboriginal peoples were necessary and therefore just. In this tale, secular violence is as rational as religious violence is irrational. That schema holds to this day and is operative in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States and its NATO allies pursue dogmatically ideological and oil-driven wars that are nonetheless virtuous simply by not being “religious.”

No fatwas for us. Never mind that these wars were declared to be “against evil,” with God “not neutral,” as George W. Bush blithely put it. And never mind that U.S. forces (both the military and the private contractors) are strongly influenced by a certain kind of fervent Christian evangelicalism that defines the American enemy as the “infidel”—the Muslim monster unleashed. In any case, ask the families of the countless dead of America’s wars if ancient rites of human sacrifice are not being re-enacted in them? The drone airplane and its Hellfire missile are weapons out of the Book of the Apocalypse.

The Revolution of Hope

The new Arab revolution, with its Muslim underpinnings, is an occasion of great hope. At the very least, “we” in the West must reckon with this overturning of the premises of our prejudice.

Yes, dangers remain, as Arab regimes resist and revolutionaries prepare to erect new political structures. Fanatics wait in the wings for the democrats to falter, while violence, even undertaken in self-defence, can open onto vistas of vengeance and cyclic retribution. Old hatreds can reignite, and the never-vanquished forces of white supremacist colonial dominance can re-emerge. But that one of the world’s great religions is essential to what is unfolding across North Africa and the Middle East offers the promise that this momentous change can lead, despite the dangers, to humane new structures of justice and mercy, which remain pillars of the Islamic faith. For us, in our world, this means we, too, will have been purged of something malicious—an ancient hatred of Muslims and Arabs that now lies exposed for what it always was.

James Carroll, bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword, is a columnist for the Boston Globe and a distinguished scholar-in-residence at Suffolk University in Boston. His newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has just been published. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Carroll discusses just how the Arab revolutions, the last acts of the post-colonial drama, punctured American myths, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Copyright 2011 James Carroll

 

 

 

16 March, 2011

Rachelcorriefoundation.org

On Wednesday, March 16th, we mark the eighth anniversary of our daughter Rachel’s stand in Rafah, Gaza, to protect the right of a Gazan family to be safe and secure in their home and the rights of all Palestinians to self-determination, freedom, equality, and security in the same measure as their Israeli neighbors.

Here in Olympia, Washington – our hometown and Rachel’s – our family, the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice, and our community will mark this anniversary with an event that emphasizes three components: community-building, education, and action. Strengthening community connections was important to Rachel when she lived and worked here in Olympia, but, also, beyond, as she embraced the world as her community. As we pursue a more just global community, we must arm ourselves with solid information and knowledge. Rachel believed this profoundly and emphasized in her writing from Gaza the importance of seeking and communicating the facts and doing so without exaggeration. And it is not enough for us to think and talk. We must, also, act. Indeed, it is because of Rachel’s action on March 16, 2003, that we pause to mark this day.

As we consider where Rachel would want us to focus now, Gaza still remains high on the list. The UN Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that the number of weekly civilian injuries in Gaza was recently higher than it has been for any week since May 2010. The number includes injuries to five children. During the week of February 20-26, imports from Israel into Gaza were only 36 percent of the average amount that entered weekly before Israel imposed its blockade of Gaza in 2007. Exports and movement of people in and out of the Strip remain severely restricted. Collective punishment of the 1.7 million residents of Gaza by the Israeli government and military continues. We must, therefore, continue to focus on improving their situation and ending the blockade and siege under which they have suffered for so many years.

Rachel Corrie

Rachel would want us to remember the courageous activists whose lives were claimed this past year in nonviolent actions against Israeli policies and those who have found themselves in prison because of their nonviolent resistance. They are American, Palestinian, Turkish, Israeli, and from elsewhere. We had the privilege recently of meeting Ahmet Dogan, the father of Furkan Dogan, the 18-year-old American citizen executed by the Israeli military aboard the Mavi Marmara in international waters. We spent an evening in Istanbul with the wives, children, and grandchildren of others struck down on the same ship. We have followed the stories of Jawaher Abu Rahma. fatally injured by teargas during protest in the Palestinian village of Bil’in and of Ahmad Suliman Salem Deeb, the 19-year-old Gazan shot and killed as he participated in a demonstration against the no-go zone east of Gaza. We have read of the fishermen and farmers injured and killed while grazing their sheep and plying the waters just off the shore of Gaza. We have followed the Israeli court actions against our friends Abdullah Abu Rahma of Bil’in and Jonathan Pollack of Tel Aviv, imprisoned in Israel because of their leadership and nonviolent actions to resist Israeli confiscation of land and the continuing presence of the wall in West Bank villages. With admiration, we have watched the courageous pursuit of freedom and democracy unfold and spread throughout the Middle East. We have celebrated the victories and mourned the losses. In keeping with our memory of Rachel, we are listening to the voices of young people as they struggle worldwide to assert their visions for a democratic, free, and peaceful future – in Gaza, the West Bank, in the Sheik Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, in Kabul, Cairo, and beyond. We call on U.S. officials to listen, too. We ask for them to be consistent and strong in their demands that foreign governments and militaries be accountable for their actions, that they respect the right of people to assemble and protest, and that they respond only nonviolently to such protests.

On March 10, 2010, our family’s civil lawsuit against the State of Israel and its Ministry of Defense opened in Haifa District Court. In sessions spread over the course of the past year, we have heard from four of the internationals who stood with Rachel in Gaza in 2003 and, also, from state’s witnesses who include the bulldozer driver, commander, and the lead investigator in the military police inquiry into Rachel’s case. The testimony has often been disturbing. We have recently learned that the case will resume on April 3rd. Six state’s witnesses remain to testify, including commanders who were in charge on March 16, 2003. As our family continues our quest for truth and accountability for Rachel, we demand it for all the others, as well. We know that for there ever to be peace, there must be an airing and resolution of the grievances.

Some of you – in Madison, Wisconsin, Marin County, California, in Turkey, in the U.K. and elsewhere – have told us that you, too, plan commemorative events for March 16th or during the upcoming weeks. Thank you for remembering Rachel with us. As you do, we hope you will, keep in mind the community-building, education, and action so important to her. We hope, too, that you will recall those others who have stood and been struck down, those imprisoned for their nonviolent action, and those who carry on the work – and that you will do what you can to support them all. With events this week and beyond that keep compassion, humility, and love at their core, together, we will honor Rachel’s commitment and spirit.

With appreciation always and in solidarity with all who pursue justice,

Cindy and Craig Corrie

 

 

16 March, 2011

Huffington Post

Nuclear power was sold in the United States as being “Too cheap to meter.” This miracle power source that harnessed the might of the atom to light American homes and power their TVs was seen as a way to put a happy face on the horrors visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Lewis Strauss who chaired the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, the predecessor of today’s Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC), spoke of an era when “atomic furnaces” from fission and fusion reactors would provide clean, safe, reliable, abundant and cheap power for generations to come. It hasn’t been the panacea he foretold. In fact, it’s been a train wreck of accidents, cost overruns, nuclear weapons proliferation and an ever-growing waste problem that is always on the verge of being solved.

This hasn’t stopped the nuclear power industry from promoting its product as the safe, clean alternative to coal for a green future. Wrapping nukes in a green cloak and declaring their oneness with those concerned with climate change has helped to sway public opinion. The banks are still skeptical but the industry, like their friends on Wall Street, has turned to the government for support. The Bush and Obama administrations have kept the light on for nuclear power with loan guarantees, federal dollars for research and foreign policy initiatives like the treaty with India that forgave its transforming a research reactor into a bomb factory.

The impact on the industry of the Japanese reactors destruction as a result of the earthquake and tsunami may reverse the tide of support built by the nuclear industry. But trust me, they won’t give up. They’ll try to spin the disaster as proof that nuclear power is still safe and that if anything can be learned it’s that we need newer nukes, with more safety features, not alternatives. So, to arm the public with some mental shielding from the thought rays likely to be beamed by the misconstruers of fact and swayers of emotion here are 10 myths of nuclear power you need to know.

Myth #1: Nuclear power is safe.

The experience at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex, the Russian reactor at Chernobyl and the meltdown at Three Mile Island in the United States, the nuclear Trifecta, are the most well known nuclear accidents but there have been thousands of accidents and near misses that could have led to a disaster.

The biggest fear, in all of these cases, stems from the fact that a nuclear power plant has about as much radioactivity inside it as the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. There is more sitting in the adjacent pools where the used nuclear fuel rods are stored. In Japan, we’ve seen what happens when there isn’t enough coolant to cover the fuel rods. The rods start melting and, in a worst case scenario, the China Syndrome, the core melts down and breeches the containment facility. The heat build up can stop short of a China Syndrome but can get hot enough to melt the metal around the fuel rods and create a reaction that produces hydrogen gas that triggers an explosion. Which is what happened in Japan. Having redundant safety measures, a plan B, C and D, doesn’t mean they can’t all fail.

“The only safe nuclear reactor is 93-million miles away, the sun,” said Daniel Hirsch, president of Bridge the Gap, a nuclear policy organization.

Myth #2 Nuclear power will help us kick our addiction to foreign oil.

Senator Charles Schumer (D, NY) on last Sunday’s Meet the Press cited our need to get off of foreign oil as a strong reason for pursuing nuclear power. He’s wrong. We don’t use oil to produce electricity in the United States, we mainly use it to power our cars and trucks and to a much lesser degree, to heat our homes. Unless we’re proposing to put a nuke under the hood of our cars this “argument makes no sense,” said Hirsch.

Of course, if we all switched to electric cars we’ll need power to charge, them but this can be provided by wind, solar and other sources. We don’t need nukes.

Myth #3: Without nuclear reactors, the U.S. cannot hope to combat climate change.

It would be like “using caviar to fight world hunger,” said Peter Bradford, former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner and current staff member of the Environmental Law Center.

The least expensive and most productive way to reduce our carbon footprint is to be energy efficient, not to build expensive nuclear power plants.

“The money that was sunk into building the reactors in Japan should have gone into something that would really have helped us combat global warming like solar or wind power,” and improving the national energy grid so that it’s integrated, said Hirsch.

We can’t spend money on everything we should spend it on solutions and not on technology that creates more problems.

Myth #4: The U.S. is in the midst of a nuclear renaissance.

We’ve had a nuclear bubble but “when builders came to realize the costs it started to dissolve,” said Bradford.

The myth of the nuclear renaissance has been an effective public relations ploy of the nuclear industry but we’ve seen the operators at the Calvert Cliffs, Maryland reactor pull out and the backers behind a proposed reactor in Houston, Texas have also pulled out. Things are sputtering.

“If this is what the original renaissance looked like then we never would have had Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci,” said Hirsch.

Myth #5: Without new nuclear reactors, we won’t have enough power in the United States.

Dave Freeman, who calls himself the “green cowboy,” knows something about large-scale power generation. He ran the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the municipal power department in Sacramento and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP). He says this is completely false. The best way to generate new power for the long term is not to build nukes but to invest in large scale solar and wind, coupled with natural gas as a transition in the short term.

The problem has been coordinating the power produced when the wind blows and the sun shines, distributing the power and storage. There are solutions to all of these. “You need to link up the disparate sources to compensate for when the wind is blowing and the sun isn’t shining,” said Hirsch. He also pointed to new ways that we can store excess energy in batteries or use it to create hydrogen, which can also be employed as a power source.

The problem is “old people have forgotten about the dangers of Three Mile Island and young people never knew,” said Freeman.

Nuclear power is a limited resource dependent on mining compared to solar power. An unlimited amount of solar power exists, “which would you choose,” asked Freeman?

Myth #6: Why not fund nuclear power just to make sure we do have enough power since there’s practically no risk of losing any money with government loan guarantees?

The nuclear industry has asked for loan guarantees from the Federal government because the banks looked at the risk and took a pass. With the loan guarantees in hand the companies can get financing and if they default, or walk away from the projects (which is what happened before) the taxpayers will be stuck with the bill. “It’s the same as if you defaulted on your mortgage and the Federal government had to step in to pay the banks back,” said Hirsch.

The problem is that these plants are so expensive, and it’s not clear that they’d ever be profitable even with guarantees, that the likelihood of companies abandoning the effort mid way through is pretty high. Look at what’s happened at Calvert Cliffs and in Houston.

Myth #7: The nuclear industry’s past problems were caused by overzealous environmentalists, regulators and the public’s fear after Three Mile Island.

“The industry’s problems were the result of trying to build too many plants too quickly,” said Bradford.

The industry couldn’t compete in the marketplace in the US or anywhere else in the world. This is why it turned to loan guarantees that shift the risk to the taxpayers.

Pacific Gas and Electric (PGE) ignored the environmental concerns of one group, The Mothers for Peace, when it was building a reactor near Diablo Canyon in California. The Mothers said that the plant was situated on an earthquake fault and the company just plowed ahead. The Mothers were right and PGE had to go back and retrofit the plant to increase its safety.

“The safety of millions was put at risk to hubris,” said Hirsch.

Myth #8: Nuclear power will be an important source for jobs and economic development.

It’s true that building the reactors does create jobs, but these disappear when the reactor is complete. And there are staff positions for running the reactors, providing maintenance and security but not enough to warrant the high costs and risks. Building an alternative energy industry is a much better long-term proposition that will create more jobs in manufacturing and stimulate exports. People will need to build the windmills, the photovoltaic cells, install them, maintain them and even replace them as they wear out.

Ironically some fear that building new nukes will chase jobs away because electric rates will have to dramatically increase to pay them off. “No state ever created a net increase in jobs by raising electric rates to commercial and industrial customers. Such a policy drives jobs out of many businesses to create relatively few permanent jobs at the new reactor,” said Bradford.

Myth #9: France has found solutions to all of nuclear power’s problems.

France is pointed to as demonstrable proof that nuclear power can be affordable and safe. While it’s true France gets about 75% of its electricity from nuclear power and that it has avoided a large scale disaster but we don’t know very much about their accident record since its industry is nationalized and run behind a veil of secrecy. We’ve been told that Japan runs its program much better than France, so we can only assume that there have been problems.

One has to believe that their aging reactors are just an “accident waiting to happen,” said Hirsch. “They are just playing a game of Russian roulette.”

Many point to their ability to make nuclear waste disappear into easily stored glass balls while we continue to battle over where to bury our waste that piles up in temporary storage ponds next to the reactors.

“In high level waste, they are no further along than anybody,” said Hirsch. “They just dissolve the waste in highly toxic acid and store it in warehouses in the glass. Which is still radioactive and the glass eventually disintegrates and has to be replaced.”

The famous scene of 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley lovingly holding one of the glass balls came to mind. “That was just a prop,” said Hirsch.

They also reprocess their fuel to create new fuel but this still leaves “most of the radioactivity to be disposed of,” explained Bradford.

It also adds to the costs of the producing nuclear power which is one reason French electric rates are 20% above U.S. rates despite subsidies, according to Bradford.

One big problem is that the French reprocessing creates plutonium that adds to the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.

Myth #10: The growth of civilian nuclear power won’t promote the spread of nuclear weapons, or as it’s called, proliferation.

There is no “peaceful atomic power. If promoting nuclear power you are promoting bombs,” said Freeman.

According to Victor Gilinsky, a former NRC commissioner, the “main obstacle to obtaining nuclear weapons is the material. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of America’s nuclear program, feared that countries could too easily start with a civilian power program and then build a bomb. He proposed that an international authority handle all nuclear material. Eisenhower reversed course and launched the Atoms for Peace program that spread civilian nukes around the world and taught the basics of nuclear engineering to people in countries like Iran. This boosted the earnings of the contractors but laid the groundwork for weapons programs in all the countries that obtained nuclear weapons after the first five nuclear powers. There’s “too much greed and too little fear,” said Gillinsky. All civilian nuclear programs create spent fuel that can be reprocessed into weapons grade plutonium. This is what Iran, North Korea, India and Pakistan have done.

It doesn’t take much. At first you needed a chunk of plutonium about the size of a softball now it’s down to the size of a golf ball. “If a country has done its engineering, it can take about a week to go to a bomb,” said Gillinsky. “Safeguard inspections are too late.”

Currently there are plans to build new nuclear power plants throughout many unstable parts of the world like Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kazakhstan and more.

We need to stop looking at nuclear power and concentrate on real clean energy sources like wind and solar. But these aren’t really fun challenges for scientists. Building a solar collector or an improved windmill is boring compared to unleashing the power of the atom. Especially, dabbling in that chimera — the real Holy Grail — fusion power. Can’t beat that for a fun brain twister, one that’s sucked up countless billions of federal research dollars but is still “the power of the future.” While scientists like to do what’s hard, exotic and new, people want and need what’s simple, effective, reliable and affordable.

To paraphrase President Eisenhower’s speech about the Military Industrial Complex, every dollar we spend on nuclear power is stolen from developing real solutions to our energy needs. Nuclear power, once touted as “too cheap to meter” is really too expensive and dangerous to use.

Michael Rose is a Documentary filmmaker

Many thanks to Peter A. Bradford, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission whose presentation “The Myths of the Nuclear Renaissance” inspired this piece.

Follow Michael Rose on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MichaellRose

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2011-03-15

NEW YORK – Mediterranean countries are experiencing turbulence unseen since the era of decolonization and independence. Popular revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have swept away entrenched autocracies. Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi is holding on by the skin of his teeth, and political leaders in Algeria and Morocco are scrambling to maintain authority.

Can a Mediterranean space nurtured by shared democratic values, interests, and hopes emerge from this maelstrom?

The Mediterranean countries are home to 475 million people – 272 million Europeans, including 20 million Muslims, and 200 million non-European Arabs and Jews. It now seems possible that the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), the mechanism that French President Nicolas Sarkozy set up in 2008 to increase regional cooperation, may actually step up to the challenge of reclaiming the region’s past as the cradle of reason, tolerance, and humanism. The UfM could offer a model for coexistence to a world injured by dictatorship and fear of Islamic fundamentalism.

Rising tensions in Europe over what has ominously crystallized as “the Muslim Question” has made it all too easy to forget that there was a time when Islam – a more tolerant and inclusive civilization than it appears to be in the post-9/11 West – was fully a part of European life.

Today, no less than yesterday, Mediterranean people – Muslims, Christians, and Jews –share inescapable geopolitical, demographic, and economic realities. They should remind themselves that demonization, exclusion, and division are not the only options – and should not be the region’s destiny.

Among Sarkozy’s main interlocutors at the birth of the UfM in 2008 were Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Now that they are gone, so is their limited and limiting approach to international dialogue, based almost exclusively on state-to-state relations without any significant input from civil society.

It is sad to note that European leaders sometimes adopt such narrow positions, too, responding to the short-term demands of electoral politics instead of facing the challenges of long-term strategic thinking. Sarkozy, too, has fallen prey to this trend. Indeed, in February, he declared that multiculturalism was a “failure,” adding, “Our Muslim compatriots should be able to live and practice their religion like anyone else…but it can only be a French Islam, not just an Islam in France.”

Sarkozy, of course, did not define what he meant by a “French Islam.” But the comments were widely interpreted as an echo of pronouncements a few days earlier by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of the far-right National Front party.

Cooler heads should look, instead, to Muslim Spain, Al-Andalus, which shone in Europe from the eighth century until the fifteenth century – a fertile period of cultural brilliance that paved the way for the Western Renaissance, as well as an inspiring paradigm of convivencia, or coexistence.

Integrating the Mediterranean world into a tolerant community that ensures the peace and prosperity of all its peoples can happen today, because it has happened before. Such an achievement would offer the world a needed alternative to the increasingly questionable model of economic globalization.

Looking at Europe from a distance, it is tempting to see a continent receding from the world stage and in conflict with itself and with its past. Yet the reality is more nuanced. Today’s Europe is filled with potential, provided that the Mediterranean region harnesses the forces and wealth implicit in such initiatives as the UfM.

Two important features of both the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions will be significant in assessing the chances for a renewed Mediterranean Union.

First, the large and effective use of social media in both countries revealed remarkable technological savvy and creativity among the young. More significantly, it displayed this generation’s unprecedented level of political awareness and activism. Indeed, the test of success of any new Mediterranean structure will be the degree to which it meets the aspirations and scrutiny of this young, politically aware generation throughout the region.

For the same reasons, a new Mediterranean union could be a framework for a new moral vibrancy, informed by the same universal values that mobilized the young in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond – freedom, individual responsibility and accountability, transparency, tolerance, solidarity with the weak and oppressed, justice, gender equality, and other fundamental human and democratic rights.

In light of this hopeful trend, how long can Europe’s obsession with Islamic fundamentalism hold sway? How long can the so-called “Muslim Question” be used as a tool to defeat political adversaries? Many young European voters, who may know better, will most likely not look kindly at such opportunistic tactics.

Finally, one would hope that the concept of belonging to the same Mediterranean family could bring about new solutions to old conflicts – for example, offering Palestinians and Israelis alike the healing that both peoples desire, but which the dying old Arab order failed to achieve.

The great philosophers of the Enlightenment would not hesitate to endorse the moral consciousness expressed in the postings that flooded cyberspace during the Tunisian revolution. Moral secularism at its best was on full display from the rugged streets of Sidi Bouzid to the imposing refinement of Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis.

This renewed sense of belonging to the same human family and the same moral universe resonated profoundly with Mediterranean Europeans, who found, in the claims and expectations emerging on the opposite shore, echoes of their own unfulfilled claims and expectations.

Mustapha Tlili is a research scholar at New York University, founder and director of the NYU Center for Dialogues, and a member of Human Rights Watch’s advisory committee for the Middle East and North Africa.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011. www.project-syndicate.org

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/mtlili2/English

 

 

Published: March 17 2011 23:55 | Last updated: March 17 2011 23:55

The belated US decision to support Anglo-French proposals for a Libyan no-fly zone seems no more than a cynical gesture.

Washington concedes that merely grounding the Tripoli regime’s aircraft and helicopters may not change outcomes.

But the situation today is where it always was: once Muammer Gaddafi showed himself determined to fight, only direct ground intervention by the US and its allies would have enabled the ill-armed rebels to prevail.

Monopoly possession of organised force gives tyrannies a decisive advantage, unless they either lose the support of their own soldiers or are vulnerable to diplomatic pressure from Washington, as Colonel Gaddafi is not.

True, his forces are so weak that a small western army could crush them. But that is not the point. The important difficulties are political, moral and diplomatic.

Throughout this crisis, western leaders have looked foolish. France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy crippled himself by appearing hostile to the insurgents both in Tunisia and Egypt. His subsequent change of direction to lead a charge against Col Gaddafi impresses no one.

David Cameron has exposed his inexperience. The decision to deploy armed SAS soldiers in Libya to protect a wildly implausible liaison mission to the rebels was pointless unless the force was empowered to use its weapons. Their capture and subsequent release was a gratuitous embarrassment. Thereafter, for a British prime minister presiding over draconian cuts in his own armed forces to posture ahead of the US in favour of military action invited the ridicule that it received, not least in Washington.

The first principle for any nation using force is to ensure it succeeds. But in Iraq and Afghanistan the west has learnt that unseating regimes is relatively easy; the hard part is to promote acceptable alternatives.

The intelligence failure in Libya, and indeed across the Maghreb, has proved absolute. Western leaders know almost nothing either about the Libyan insurgents or about what is happening on the ground. It would be madness to commit US and allied forces to destroy Col Gaddafi, with no notion of what would follow.

To be sure, local goodwill for western assistance in supplanting the Libyan tyranny would quickly dissipate. The most powerful single strand in opinion throughout the Muslim world is bitterness about America’s continuing support for Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.

It is irrelevant whether this is just, or reflects a misplaced sense of priorities. It is a core political reality, depriving the west of moral authority throughout the region. If American troops displaced Col Gaddafi, within weeks they would either abandon the country to anarchy or find themselves the objects of popular hostility as they grappled with the hideously familiar problem of which factions to put in charge.

I am not an opponent of interventions on principle. The UK government’s recent defence review prompted widespread scorn, and its swingeing cuts well-founded dismay, precisely because it seems likely that this country will wish to participate in some future western military operations, while lacking means convincingly to do so.

But grown-up governments do not indulge emotional lunges, committing warplanes as if sending a donation to Oxfam. They make cool calculations about self-interest. The American people have no appetite for a Libyan adventure. This week’s poll in The Washington Post shows that almost two-thirds now elieve the Afghan war is not worth fighting.

In shaping future western strategy and foreign policy, it seems essential to disengage in Iraq and Afghanistan before contemplating any further overseas military action. The west should lead a vigorous offensive designed to bring down Col Gaddafi by economic and financial siege. The legitimacy of his regime, always precarious, now seems irreparable. Even the Russians and the Chinese, though unwilling to use force, will have difficulty justifying a resumption of business as usual with him.

Some people regard containment as a synonym for infirmity, and today wring their hands at Col Gaddafi’s military success. But the boy scout ethic that characterised Tony Blair’s leadership of Britain, driven by eagerness to do good deeds in a naughty world, is discredited by experience.

The west can do much more to show its repugnance towards dictatorships. But both the US and its allies know it is folly to deploy their own forces against perceived wickedness, unless their own vital interests are at stake and their intervention is likely to enjoy legitimacy within a given region. Neither of these propositions holds good in Libya.

The writer is an FT contributing editor

 

 

 

17 March, 2011

The Nation

The combined devastation of Japan’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant explosion begs the question: Doesn’t Mother Nature provide enough forces of destruction without humans adding one of our own?

The horrible and heartbreaking events in Japan present a strange concatenation of disasters. First, the planet unleashed one of its primordial shocks, an earthquake, of a magnitude greater than any previously recorded in Japan. The earthquake, in turn, created the colossal tsunami, which, when it struck the country’s northeastern shores, pulverized everything in its path, forming a filthy wave made of mud, cars, buildings, houses, airplanes and other debris. In part because the earthquake had just lowered the level of the land by two feet, the wave rolled as far as six miles inland, killing thousands of people. In a stupefying demonstration of its power, as the New York Times has reported, the earthquake moved parts of Japan thirteen feet eastward, slightly shifted the earth’s axis and actually shortened each day that passes on earth, if only infinitesimally (by 1.8 milliseconds).

But this was not all. Another shock soon followed. Succumbing to the one-two punch of the earthquake and the tsunami, eleven of Japan’s fifty-four nuclear power reactors were shut down. At this writing, three of them have lost coolant to their cores and have experienced partial meltdowns. The same three have also suffered large explosions. The spent fuel in a fourth caught fire. Now a second filthy wave is beginning to roll—this one composed of radioactive elements in the atmosphere. They include unknown amounts of cesium-137 and iodine-131, which can only have originated in the melting cores or in nearby spent fuel rod pools. Both are dangerous to human health. The Japanese government has evacuated some 200,000 people in the vicinity of the plants and issued potassium iodide pills, which prevent the uptake of radioactive iodine. The U.S. carrier USS Ronald Reagan had to change course when it sailed into a radioactive cloud.

The second shock was, of course, different from the first in at least one fundamental respect. The first was dealt by Mother Nature, who has thus reminded us of her sovereign power to nourish or punish our delicate planet, its axis now tipping ever so slightly in a new direction. No finger of blame can be pointed at any perpetrator. The second shock, on the other hand, is the product of humankind, and involves human responsibility. Until the human species stepped in, there was no appreciable release of atomic energy from nuclear fission or fusion on earth. It took human hands to introduce it into the midst of terrestrial affairs. That happened sixty-six years ago, also in Japan, when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time, Harry Truman used language that is worth pondering today. “It is an atomic bomb,” he said. “It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.” Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, referred to the atomic bombings by implication when he stated that the current crisis was the worst for Japan “since the Second World War.”

For some years afterward, atomic energy was understood mainly to be an inconceivably malign force—as the potential source of a sort of man-made equivalent of earthquakes, and worse. In the 1950s, however, when nuclear power plants were first built, an attempt began to find a bright side to the atom. (In 1956 Walt Disney even made a cartoon called Our Friend the Atom.) A key turning point was President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace proposal in 1953, which required nuclear-armed nations to sell nuclear power technology to other nations in exchange for following certain nonproliferation rules. This bargain is now enshrined in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which promotes nuclear power even as it discourages nuclear weapons.

As Ira Chernus has chronicled in his book Atoms for Peace, the proposal paradoxically grew out of Eisenhower’s distaste for arms control. He had launched a nuclear buildup that would increase the U.S. arsenal from 1,436 warheads at the beginning of his two terms to 20,464 by the end. His strategic nuclear policy was one of “massive retaliation,” which relied more heavily on nuclear threats than Truman’s policy had. Arms control would have obstructed these policies. Yet Eisenhower needed some proposal to temper his growing reputation as a reckless nuclear hawk. Atoms for Peace met this need. The solution to nuclear danger, he said, was “to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers” and put it “into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace”—chiefly, those who would use it to build nuclear power plants. Of course, the weapon never was taken out of the hands of soldiers, but the basic power of the universe was indeed handed over to nuclear power engineers, including Japanese engineers.

The long, checkered career of nuclear power began. The promise at first seemed great, but the problems cropped up immediately. The distinction between Disney’s smiling, friendly atom and the frowning, hostile one kept breaking down. In the first place, the technology of nuclear power proved to be an open spigot for the spread of technology that also served the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In the second place, the requirement of burying nuclear waste for the tens of thousands of years it takes for its radioactive materials to decline to levels deemed safe mocked the meager ingenuity and constancy of a species whose entire recorded history amounts only to some 6,000 years. Finally, the technology of nuclear power itself kept breaking down and bringing or threatening disaster, as is now occurring in Japan.

The chain of events at the reactors now running out of control provides a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control. Nuclear power is a complex, high technology. But the things that endemically malfunction are of a humble kind. The art of nuclear power is to boil water with the incredible heat generated by a nuclear chain reaction. But such temperatures necessitate continuous cooling. Cooling requires pumps. Pumps require conventional power. These are the things that habitually go wrong—and have gone wrong in Japan. A backup generator shuts down. A battery runs out. The pump grinds to a halt. You might suppose that it is easy to pump water into a big container, and that is usually true, but the best-laid plans go awry from time to time. Sometimes the problem is a tsunami, and sometimes it is an operator asleep at the switch. These predictable and unpredictable failings affect every stage of the operation. For instance, in Japan, the nuclear power industry has a record of garden-variety cover-ups, ducking safety regulations, hiding safety violations and other problems. But which large bureaucratic organization does not? And if these happen in Japan, as orderly and efficient a country as exists on Earth, in which country will they not? When the bureaucracy is the parking violations bureau or the sanitation department, ordinary mistakes lead to ordinary mishaps. But when the basic power of the universe is involved, they court catastrophe.

The problem is not that another backup generator is needed, or that the safety rules aren’t tight enough, or that the pit for the nuclear waste is in the wrong geological location, or that controls on proliferation are lax. It is that a stumbling, imperfect, probably imperfectable creature like ourselves is unfit to wield the stellar fire released by the split or fused atom. When nature strikes, why should humankind compound the trouble? The earth is provided with enough primordial forces of destruction without our help in introducing more. We should leave those to Mother Nature.

Some have suggested that in light of the new developments we should abandon nuclear power. I have a different proposal, perhaps more in keeping with the peculiar nature of the peril. Let us pause and study the matter. For how long? Plutonium, a component of nuclear waste, has a half-life of 24,000 years, meaning that half of it is transformed into other elements through radioactive decay. This suggests a time-scale. We will not be precipitous if we study the matter for only half of that half-life, 12,000 years. In the interval, we can make a search for safe new energy sources, among other useful endeavors. Then perhaps we’ll be wise enough to make good use of the split atom.

Jonathan Schell is the Doris Shaffer Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale. He is the author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People, an analysis of people power, and The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.

Copyright © 2011 The Nation

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17 March, 2011

Countercurrents.org

Saudi Arabia’s decision to send troops to Bahrain to put down an uprising in the neighboring country is not going to prevent the Arab spring of 2011 from blooming in the dessert kingdom.

The Saudi invasion, made on the “invitation” of Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and after the visit of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, will most probably backfire.

In a full-scale assault on Wednesday launched at dawn in Pearl Square, the center of the uprising against the Khalifa regime, Saudi soldiers, with other foreign and local mercenary security forces, with no previous warning, attacked sleeping, peaceful protesters, killing many and injuring hundreds.

But Saudi Arabia’s dream of becoming a regional power is almost certainly going to turn into a nightmare very soon.

Saudi Arabia is nothing but a client state, like many other Persian Gulf monarchies, whose regimes consider their natural, primarily energy, resources as family property and make little distinction between national and personal wealth. They have used these resources to buy support from their own subjects and influenced politics in some other countries in the region.

For about a century, the family of Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud, founder of the absolute monarchy, built palaces on sandy hills without knowing that one day there would be desert storms raging in the region. Now they are about to be blown away.

According to a recent Reuters report based on U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks, the royal stipends in the mid-1990s ran from about $800 a month for the lowliest member of the most remote branch of the family to $270,000 a month for one of the surviving sons of Ibn Saud.

“Bonus payments are available for marriage and palace building,” according to the cable, which estimates that the system cost the country, which had an annual budget of $40 billion at the time, some $2 billion a year.

The king is lavishing the national wealth on members of the royal family while ordinary people are struggling to make ends meet, resulting in widespread resentment.

Saudi Arabia should focus on improving the lot of its own people instead of invading other countries.

The Arab spring of 2011 has arrived, and the rulers of Saudi Arabia must realize that even vast wealth cannot stop the changing of the seasons.

Gul Jammas Hussain is a Pakistani journalist based in Tehran, Iran.

 

16 March, 2011

Al Jazeera

At least six people are reported dead and hundreds injured after security forces in Bahrain drove out pro-democracy protesters from the Pearl Roundabout in the capital, Manama.

A 12-hour curfew came into force at 4pm in areas of the city including the Pearl Roundabout, the Bahrain Financial Harbour, and several other buildings which have recently been targets of protests.

By then, most of the area had been cleared after troops backed by tanks and helicopters stormed the site – the focal point of weeks-long anti-government protests in the tiny kingdom – early on Wednesday, an Al Jazeera correspondent said.

Multiple explosions were heard and smoke was seen billowing over central Manama.

Hospital sources said three protesters had been killed and hundreds of others injured in the offensive, the Reuters news agency reported. Three policemen were also reported dead.

Our correspondent said the police backed by the military attacked the protesters from all sides and used tear gas canisters to disperse the crowd.

Protesters, intimidated by the numbers of security forces, retreated from the roundabout, he said. By 5pm the area was quiet, although a few people remained on the streets. A helicopter circled overhead.

Bahrain’s youth movement had called for a mass demonstration on Wednesday afternoon but it was unclear whether protesters planned to regroup elsewhere in the city.

Bahrain’s main opposition Wefaq party has called off protests, saying it is too dangerous to continue. There are fears that a small gathering could result in a high level of casualties, our correspondent said.

Wefaq has advised people since this morning to avoid confrontation with security forces and to remain peaceful,” a Wefaq official told Reuters.

Ali Al Aswad, a Wafaq member, told Al Jazeera that the government used Apache helicopters to shoot at peaceful protesters.

He said the situation was very bad and Bahrain was heading towards a disaster. “The security forces are killing the people, we call upon UN to help us,” Aswad said.

State of emergency

The move by the security forces came a day after a state of emergency was declared on the island and at least two people were killed in clashes in the Shia suburb of Sitra outside Manama.

An order by the king “authorised the commander of Bahrain’s defence forces to take all necessary measures to protect the safety of the country and its citizens,” a statement read out on television on Tuesday said.

Hundreds of Saudi-led troops entered Bahrain on Monday as part of a Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) initiative to help protect government facilities there amid an escalation in the protests against the government.

It was not immediately clear if Wednesday’s security crackdown involved Saudi troops.

Syed Al Alawi, a witness, told Al Jazeera that troops were surrounding the Salmania hospital and not allowing doctors and nurses to enter.

Calling for help, Alawi said: “The GCC troops are for fighting against foreign forces, instead they are targeting the people of Bahrain. What’s our fault, we are asking for our legitimate rights.”

At least 500 protesters have been camping at the Pearl Roundabout in central Manama as part of their demonstration.

The small kingdom with a dominant Shia majority has been swept by protests over the last several weeks. The protesters, alleging discrimination and lack of rights, are seeking political reforms.

The arrival of foreign troops followed a request to members of the GCC from Bahrain.

The United Arab Emirates also sent about 500 police to Bahrain, according to Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the Emirati foreign minister. Qatar, meanwhile, did not rule out the possibility of its troops joining the force.

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al-Thani, the Qatari prime minister and foreign minister, told Al Jazeera: “There are common responsibilities and obligations within the GCC countries.

International concern

The US, which counts both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia among its allies, has called for restraint, but has refrained from saying whether it supports the move to deploy troops.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, who was speaking in Egypt, said Bahrainis must “take steps now” towards a political resolution of the crisis.

Iran, meanwhile, has warned against “foreign interferences”.

“The peaceful demonstrations in Bahrain are among the domestic issues of this country, and creating an atmosphere of fear and using other countries’ military forces to oppress these demands is not the solution,” Hossein Amir Abdollahian, an official from the Iranian foreign ministry, was reported by Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency as saying.