There is a precedent for congress refusing to allow U.S. acceptance of, and participation in, a major international agreement, one specifically designed to preserve peace and prevent war, after the President and his negotiating team played the key role in crafting the agreement.
It was 96 years ago. President Woodrow Wilson was being celebrated throughout Europe, where there was effusive gratitude for his vision that would prevent a hard-line belligerent nation from attacking its neighbors. The international community, for the first time, would be able to cooperatively and universally invoke harsh economic sanctions if a nation embarked on a buildup of dangerous weapons in violation of its agreements.
The shiny new League of Nations, conceived by the U.S. president, would assure that a war using weapons of mass destruction could not happen again.
But a few in Congress sowed the seeds of mistrust, distrust, and fear. They argued that America had no business interfering in the affairs of other nations when our role might prevent one nation from reacting militarily to a threat it perceived from another nation in its region.
Thus, the U.S. Congress blocked America’s participation in both the peace agreement that the American president had crafted, and in the structure he created to assure the ongoing maintenance of peace. So America was not there to fulfill President Wilson’s vision.
Things compounded. America was not there to moderate what became a punitive Treaty of Versailles. Thus, angry and vengeful voices in the region imposed impossible conditions when they could, as part of a tragic series of short-sighted moments with profound implications.
Neither was America there to take part in the League of Nations that could have stopped arms buildups and belligerence, but only if all the major powers – including America and its profittering industrialists – had worked cooperatively for peace.
Post World War I, the most formidable military powers pressed impossible conditions on the pariah of the time, Germany, because America had disengaged from the process and was no longer there to mitigate harsh absolutist demands.
How Germany reacted to impossible demands that it pay every other nation’s war costs should have surprised no one. It became a predictable outcome from the moment the U.S. congress blocked our participation. America was absent, and American industrialists were exploiting the situation. The regime of international agreements to maintain peace, and those failing, to impose harsh economic sanctions on a beligerent nation, could not work without an altruistic America.
How Germany used its rebuilt military capability is the subject of more recounts and analyses than any topic in human history. But these few specifics are useful here.
In the 1930s, the one nation that bore responsibility for everyone else’s debt instead resolved to marshall its resources, to rise from the ruin its people endured as a result of its last war, to build an overwhelming capability of offensive, destructive weapons, and along the way, to create a murderous scapegoatism unparalleled since the Biblical plagues and retributions.
The seeds of another war were planted because Congress had blocked American participation in the international agreements and structure that would have prevented war from happening.
The seeds of another war were planted because Congress had blocked American participation in the international agreements and structure that would have prevented war from happening.
And the seeds of another war were planted because Congress had blocked American participation in the international agreements and structure that would have prevented war from happening.
Of course, American capitalists happily and profitably interacted with everyone, even as weapons were developed and produced, tensions ratcheted up in the region, and oppression reigned that would eventually yield to mass murder. As it began to unfold, the League of Nations, aware of its limitations without American’s membership or support, did what it could, which of course wasn’t enough. The philosophy of the retaliatory belligerents prevailed over that of the vindictive belligerents, so war returned to the region – and with it, to the world.
Even with the outbreak of an overseas war that its own institutional negligence did so much to bring, the American congress still didn’t do much. Not until America was attacked. Then, in 1941, as happened again in 2001, scarcely anyone in the American congress could recall ever having been anything other than enthusiastically pro-war. Still, not wanting to ever be in that awkward place again, no one dared block President Franklin Roosevelt’s creation of the United Nations as a redux of the lost League, and this time, with full American involvement.
Sadly and all too obviously, we learn some of history’s lessons while wholly forgetting – or most often, cynically and manipulatively misapplying – other things that should be lessons.
Now fast forward.
The 1980s brought another overseas conflict, one tragically costly both in human deaths and lost opportunity for building a society that would better the lives of people. It was in a different region, one we knew only for the oil beneath its ground, but one with ancient roots as the cradle of civilization. Iran and Iraq fought a ten-year-long war against each another.
The U.S. nominally supported Iraq during that war, because we were still mad over the maddeningly embarrassing taking of our embassy staff as hostages during the Iranian Revolution – Americans taken hostage in an act of retribution for theU still resented U.S. overthrow, decades earlier, of the first-ever elected government of Iran, followed by the imposition of a dictatorship by the Shah and his regime that America allowed.
Candidate Ronald Reagan violated the Logan Act when he temporarily sabotaged the release of those American hostages from Iran, then, as President Reagan, he took credit for the hostages’ release. That allowed him to happily brand Iran as a boogeyman ruled by nutjobs. Until he illegally co-opted them in his scheme to overthrow another elected government, this time in Nicaragua.
But the image of the Iranian ayatollahs and chanting hordes of hostage-takers was exploited to the exclusion of all else. So when the Iran-Iraq War started, of course we would root for and assist Iran’s enemy, Iraq.
We didn’t know a Shi’ite from a Suni, and being Americans, we didn’t give a shi’ite.
Naiive, typically American, we treated it like a tailgate party at the big football game for colleges we never attended, with as much regard for the outcome as for that game where we brought all the beer and won’t remember next season. But, hey, we needed to root for somebody as “our” team and allow ourselves to be distracted from, who was it, the Nicaraguans, or somebody, because it was “Morning in America.”
When the Iran-Iraq War was over, it was another football season, there were other bowl games, and yet another U.S. president was in office who told us he didn’t have “the vision thing.” But the man wasn’t gon’ do what wouldn’t be prudent, did.
Iraq, nominally last season’s U.S. friend-who-was-a-friend by being the enemy-of-an-enemy, grabbed its little oil-rich neighbor, Kuwait. That came because ever-greedy multinational oil companies operating in Kuwait had begun slant-drilling beneath Iraq’s borders, stealing oil that Iraq needed to recoup its war debts after a decade of trading death and destruction with Iran.
The balance of oil bank accounts being more important than Iraq being able to exploit its own oil, it was necessary to reshuffle our brackets. And to get in the game.
Iraq was twice invaded by the U.S. and its “me-too” coalition of nations interested in who would control and be able to buy the oil. In the second invasion, a decade after the first, the unelected presidential son of the president who lacked “the vision thing” embraced the neocon vision for wars to create a utopian Middle East. He used the incongruous and thoroughly dishonest excuse of the 9-11 attacks and nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” and “yellowcake from Africa” – both of which he knew were fantasies – as justification to out-do his daddy’s invasion of Iraq. That time, “regime change” was invoked.
And because war took the place of diplomacy, myriad patterns of dominoes were sent tumbling and are still falling with ghastly consequences.
At the risk of mixing metaphors, it has drawn us into a swirling vortex of our own creation, where forces operate that we understand poorly, if at all.
Our national experience simply does not allow us to comprehend religious-based differences that have been deadly for countless generations. But our failure to understand actions that nations deem essential for their own self-interest and military security is unforgivable.
Consider that Britain’s powerful navy of the 1930s, which had prevailed for hundreds of years, had to be countered by a highly capable weapon that could be built and deployed far more easily – thus, the proliferation of Germany’s U-Boats that very nearly won World War II.
Similarly, the Israeli army, with its unstoppable tank corps, could be countered by a highly capable weapon that could be built and deployed far more easily – battlefield nuclear weapons.
These examples are not new. Neither in the way things work with military counterforce planning, nor in regard to Middle Eastern nations’ resolve to stop Israel’s twice-demonstrated capability to expand its borders when it is attacked.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and John Boehner, with one voice, would have us believe that a nuclear weapons-capable Iran is a wholly new and shocking nightmare of unprecedented proportions. They don’t add that it would counter an Israel that has long had nuclear weapons.
When they talk about the horror of any Muslim nation getting a bomb that would then be used by any of many Muslim nations to attack Israel, they are wrong, and all of them know it. We’ve been down this road before.
When they talk about the horror of any Muslim nation getting a bomb that would then be used by any of many Muslim nations to attack Israel, they are wrong, and all of them know it. We’ve been down this road before.
And when they talk about the horror of any Muslim nation getting a bomb that would then be used by any of many Muslim nations to attack Israel, they are wrong, and all of them know it. We’ve been down this road before.
The fear of the “Islamic Bomb,” as it was called at the time, originated when the world ascertained that Pakistan was building nuclear weapons, culminating in several test detonations in 1998. There was breathless fear in the West that Muslim nations would all somehow be able to use it. Of course, that never made sense to anyone who studied it, and the decade-long Iran-Iraq War proved it. Most recently, there have been stories about Saudi Arabia buying the bomb from Pakistan, but the Saudis are the ones who paid for its development in the first place.
There is always heartburn whenever border tensions escalate between Pakistan and India, and different analysts will tell you that it is better or worse than it could be, because India, since 1974, also has had nuclear weapons. That will be important in a moment.
Meanwhile, right next door to the Iraq we were serially invading was, and is, Iran. The place with the cartoonesque ayatollahs we enjoy ridiculing and who we don’t like because of the hostage thing, with the people who don’t like us for overthrowing their elected government and sticking them with a dictatorial Shah. (Never mind that they stuck themselves with dictatorial mullahs when they overthrew the Shah.)
We need to acknowledge the charicatures to get past them, because there is a key point here.
Iran is aware, as is the rest of the world, that the U.S. has never attacked any nation that has nuclear weapons.
Ergo, if you think the U.S. might attack you – and you have heard a U.S. senator and presidential candidate parody an old surf music song into “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran” – it makes sense for you to take steps to prevent being attacked. Especially after seeing the neighboring nation, with whom you had been at war for a decade, invaded and conquered by the same U.S. that had helped them fight against you.
So it’s complicated? Sure, but not beyond understanding, and not beyond historical comparison.
Pakistan: “Islamic Bomb”-? No. Perception of existential need.
Iran: probably the same motivation, until very effective U.S.-led economic sanctions and tough diplomacy made them re-evaluate their needs and priorities.
In the second decade of the 21st century, international relations are more complicated than ever before – with mega-giant corporatism supplanting traditional power structures of governments and nationalism. Though, then as now, it’s still mostly about egotistical empire builders with a sense of entitlement and unbridled greed. Nowadays in the West, they carry corporate logos instead of regimental colors bedecked with battle ribbons.
And that is so different from the beheading zealotry of 12th century absolutists who see no contradiction in using cyber crime to buy high tech weapons on international markets to kill the infidels who build all the computers and satellites and high tech weapons.
In this complicated world, we have precious few opportunities to prevent conflict long-term, or even avoid conflict where a powder keg is about to blow. We live in a world where, more now than at any time since the end of World War II, nations cannot prevent innocent people being killed and survivors becoming dispossessed refugees. Terrorists, “fighters” for nebulous causes, rebels, insurgents, stateless zealots, drones that hunt them, all seem new.
Are they really that different? Different from armies in uniforms, because they are stealthy, blend in, and go to ground? Or different from marauding banksters who cause market meltdowns so they can plunder the wreckage?
It begs an answer, because there is never a shortage of self-styled power elite whose desire to control something is devoid of all realization of the death and destruction their machinations cause.
So it is not unprecedented that we, the people, are faced with the need to force the American congress to accept a deal for peace crafted by the American president and wanted by the vast majority of the world.
A U.S. Congress in 1919-1920 blocked America’s opportunity to lead the young twentieth century into a world of international agreements, toward cooperative actions to prevent war. And it used to be a singular great irony that it was the American president who had been the architect of it all, of what became the road not taken by America, when the rest of the world was ready to embrace it.
Instead, the world got war.
And now we are in an age when nuclear proliferation could, with absolute suddenness, make moot all else. The multiplicity of vital efforts to save civilization from the catastrophic impacts of climate change, of sea levels that will rise to inundate the lands where 70% of humans now live, of reckless compromise of the planet’s biodiversity, of growing challenges to human liberty and freedom – all could mean nothing if imperfectly interlocking alliances react to a single attack as the world reacted to an assassination in 1914.
The old fear, that a single nuclear detonation could cascade into the end of the world, is too simplistic. Now we see that a single attack aimed at crippling the nuclear capability of an aspiring nation could bring apocalypse.
And so we come full circle. We have an American president who has led the way, through tough, innovative, dogged diplomacy to establish an international agreement specifically designed to prevent a belligerent nation from stockpiling weapons that could devastate other nations in its region and trigger global conflict. And we have a U.S. congress that might block America’s participation, and rob the world of the opportunity for peace.
We must not allow Benjamin Netanyahu and his saber-rattlers in Israel and those in America’s congress, who have proven their pledge to be naysayers for the sake of opposing this president, to prevail. We must not allow them to falsely compare Barack Obama with Neville Chamberlain.
We must instead force an accurate historical comparison as part of necessarily maintaining the climate for the American public to fairly comprehend the deal reached with Iran. And we must enable everyone to remember what happened the last time an American president was the architect of a peace that the American congress sabotaged.
It will require that each of us lobby Congress for peace. Or we may become all too familiar with how things failed the last time an American congress forced the nation to forsake its role in the world community.
Larry Wines
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The TRUTH will set you FREE.
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