What Legitimacy? Which Rationality?:
A Reply from Nobody to George Bush’s
Address to the UN September 12, 2002
"[.
. .] a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.”
— George W. Bush Address to the U.N. General Assembly
Sept ember 12, 2002.
So says the President of
The United States of America. Who
decides when a regime is legitimate?
The President of the United States?
The dictator of Iraq? The United
Nations General Assembly? The people
living within the control of the regime?
The Christians? The
Muslims? Who decides?
Surely most of these rival
visions would claim to be able to make such a decision about what constitutes
or not a legitimate regime. But on what
basis is this decision made about legitimacy by any one of the rival
visions? Is there a standard to which
all of these visions adhere?
How does a regime loose
its legitimacy? President Bush’s speech
to the U.N General Assembly suggests that Iraq has lost its legitimacy by
ignoring United Nations Resolutions repeatedly over a 10-year period. Specifically it lost legitimacy by
1. Repression of its own people.
2. Not returning all prisoners from Kuwait and other
lands (including one US airman), or at least accounting for these missing
persons.
3. Engaging in “terrorist” activities such as attempting
to assassinate the Amir of Kuwait and a former American president, and openly
praising the attacks of September 11.
4. Withholding important information about its nuclear
program, it’s chemical weapons, and it’s long-range missiles that may be banned
by U.N. resolutions.
5. Using the oil for food revenues to buy missile
technology and military materials.
These are the claims Bush
made against Iraq in his speech. These
are the criteria he is calling on the United Nations to use to determine the
legitimacy of the Iraqi regime. This is
surely one way to measure such legitimacy.
So let’s evaluate it on it’s own terms.
1. Repression of its own people.
Name me one regime that has
not repressed it’s own people. At Kent
State University on May 4, 1970, 28 Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on a
crowd of 2,000 demonstrators against the Vietnam War leaving 4 dead, one
permanently paralyzed, and eight others wounded. During the first half of the 1950’s Senator Joe McCarthy of
Wisconsin led a long series of investigations into the lives of some 6.6 million Americans,[1]
thousands of these were “black-listed” which virtually destroyed their lives at
the time. One of those investigated was
Martin Luther King Jr. who was under constant surveillance form the FBI and the
CIA even at the time he was assassinated.
The black power movement was infiltrated by the CIA and FBI and
summarily neutralized through disinformation, snitches, and planting seeds of
suspicion within the movement about each other. The list goes on about US suppression of it’s own people, but
this list is enough to show that by this criteria of repressing it’s own
people, the United States of America is not a legitimate government.
2. Not returning all prisoners or at least accounting
for these missing persons.
Did the United States of
America account for all the missing persons it killed in the Gulf War? There are now reports of mass graves of
Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan, which the United States helped to capture, why
has the United States not accounted for these dead? Furthermore, the detainees in Guatanamo Cuba have not been
returned or charged with any crime yet they are being detained without any
charges or international law to uphold their being detained. I submit that under this criteria, the
United States of America is not a legitimate regime either.
3. Engaging in “terrorist” activities such as attempting
to assassinate leaders, etc and openly praising such attacks
Just this year in 2002,
the news media reported openly that the administration was announcing its plans
to allow the CIA to assassinate leaders of regimes and people it deemed a
threat. According to a New York
Times article in 1997 citing declassified documents the CIA made a
"disposal list" of at least 58 key leaders in Guatemala, and it
trained assassins to kill them.[2] During the Vietnam War there was the CIA's Phoenix Program,
which is estimated to have assassinated tens of thousands of people to destroy
the infrastructure there. The CIA is
known to have been involved with the assassination of the first prime minister of the
Republic of Congo Patrice Lumumba. The
CIA helped foment the coup and death of president Salvador Allende of
Chile. Both of these assassinations led
to a military dictatorship (Mubutu in the Congo and Pinochet in Chile) and to the deaths of tens of
thousands of people. This is only the
beginning of the known and admitted activities of the United States in
assassinating world leaders and engaging in terrorist activities. By this criteria as well, the United States
is not a legitimate regime.
4. Withholding important information about its weapons
of mass destruction.
Let’s begin by noting that
the United States is the only nation to have ever actually used an atomic
weapon on any nation. In those attacks
the casualties reached over 200,000 people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima most of which
were non-combatants according to international standards. Does the United States divulge all of its
weapons programs to the United Nations?
Absolutely not. The United States
continually researches weapons of mass destruction on a top-secret level. It has developed and still possesses chemical
weapons, nuclear missiles, and long-range missiles over the 150 km range. By this criteria the United States of
America is not a legitimate regime either.
5. Using revenues to buy missile technology and military
materials.
The Pentagon budget in
2002 reached $1,696 billion
according to the War Resisters league statistics. Almost half of every tax dollar Americans pay goes to the
military budget. This does not even
include the sale of out-dated military equipment to other nations like Israel,
which in turn goes back into the military pool. By this criteria the United States of America is not a legitimate
regime.
6. Not complying with International Laws or Treaties
Article 54 of the Geneva Convention prohibits attacks on
"drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works” yet
during the Gulf War the United States deliberately bombed such installations
resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people over the years.
The United States
intentionally attacked installations in Iraq containing dangerous substances
and forces in Violation of Article 56 of Geneva Protocol I of 1977. The results of these bombs were that U.S.
Soldiers came back to the States with the “Gulf War Syndrome.” As many as 20,000 troops became sick as a result of being
sent into a battlefield in which Coalition Forces had bombed chemical weapons
plants.
The United Nations
condemned the United States in 1989 for its military actions in Nicaragua,
which the United States ignored. In
July 2000, a United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization officially
urged the United States to stop military training activities on the Puerto
Rican island of Vieques. This has gone
ignored as well.
Of course it could be
argued that Iraq agreed to the resolutions, and it is unfair to hold the United
States accountable for things it has not agreed to. In response the United States does agree with the Geneva Convention,
which it violated in the Gulf War although it did not necessarily agree to the
United Nations indictments.
But the United States has
also agreed to treaties to disarmament, which it has broken. In the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty,
the United States and Russia agreed not to deploy nationwide missile
defense. In December 2001 the
United States broke this treaty under the Bush Administration with it's plans
to develop its Stars Wars Missile Defense System.
It
has also broken the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968. The treaty requires Non-Nuclear Weapons
States to refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons and in return, the Nuclear
Weapons States agree to pursue nuclear disarmament "at an early
date." The United States has not
pursued disarmament but has engaged in prolonging the life of its existing nuclear
arsenal, reconstruction of its nuclear weapons complex and designing new
nuclear warheads. According to this standard the United States is not a
legitimate regime.
Conclusion
According to every single
criteria that George Bush himself set forth for evaluating a regime’s legitimacy,
the United States of America fails at every point as well. This is only one criterion that we could use
to evaluate the United States. I tried
to use their own standards, but there are other standards. There are the standards of the Christian
faith of which this sight is mostly dedicated to. There are many articles on this site to help one evaluate the
Christian’s attitude toward the state and where the Christian’s loyalties lie. Obviously, the Church should point to it’s
own criteria, but this article is also meant to show that Christians can use
the standards with which others judge to judge as well. The measure with which you measure, you will
be judged by our Lord says.
This nobody author is Andy
Baker, a Mennonite living in New York City.