Do US War Crimes Doom the World to Endless War and Chaos? |
On May 24, Iran rejected President Trump’s latest fake peace deal, confirming that he had misrepresented what Iran had agreed to and that the two sides are still very far apart, on nuclear enrichment, on control of the Strait of Hormuz, on peace in Palestine and Lebanon, and on lifting US sanctions, paying war reparations, and Iran’s $100 billion in frozen assets.
Iran’s conditions for a peace agreement are necessarily uncompromising, in response to the US record of using negotiations as cover for sneak attacks, and the charade of one-sided “ceasefires with Israeli characteristics,” in which the US and Israel routinely ignore and violate every ceasefire they agree to, including the present ones in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.
Since no agreement with the United States or Israel is worth the paper it’s written on, it’s hard to imagine an agreement that would really protect Iran from future attacks. Without a more radical change in US policy, the United States and Israel will keep attacking Iran, in open violation of the UN Charter, no matter what they all agree to.
The only effective ways Iran has found to protect its land and its people are to build strong military defenses, including the capacity for devastating retaliation, and to retain control of the Strait of Hormuz, regardless of the impact on the world’s oil and gas supply and the global economy. By attacking Iran, the United States and Israel forced it to defend itself and triggered a war that is reshaping the Middle East and possibly the world.
The final sinking of the neocon dream in the troubled waters of the Persian Gulf provides the US and the world with a historic chance to recommit to a more peaceful and democratic international order.
Losing this war is forcing the United States to finally start reevaluating the neoconservative tactics it has blindly substituted for a rational US foreign and military policy since the 1990s: sanction; threaten; bomb; kill; destroy; occupy; escalate; leave countries mired in violence and chaos—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Palestine and Lebanon—never admit defeat; never question American exceptionalism or superiority.
The systematic US disdain for the rule of international law that undergirds this policy appears to make peace impossible in today’s world. But the final sinking of the neocon dream in the troubled waters of the Persian Gulf provides the US and the world with a historic chance to recommit to a more peaceful and democratic international order.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has effectively exempted itself from the entire system of treaties, international laws and agreements that are supposed to govern international affairs, starting with the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force between countries, and the Geneva Conventions, which protect civilians, prisoners-of-war and wounded soldiers and sailors from the impacts of war.
These treaties were drawn up and universally adopted in the wake of the Second World War, to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” as the UN Charter says in its preamble. President Roosevelt returned from his Yalta conference with Churchill and Stalin in 1945 to tell a joint session of Congress that they were designing the United Nations as a “permanent structure of peace.”
“It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed,” FDR told Congress. “We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join.”
The UN Charter codified and strengthened the age-old common law prohibition against international aggression, and the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy in the 1928 Kellogg Briand Pact, which German leaders tried at Nuremberg were sentenced to death for violating.
However, amid overblown Western triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, a new generation of US leaders, like Madeleine Albright and Dick Cheney, came to see the UN Charter and Geneva Conventions as obstacles to their ambitions to further expand US global power by more widespread and unrestricted use of military force.
Believing that the new imbalance in military power freed them from compliance with post-1945 treaties and conventions based on the hard-earned wisdom of past leaders in two world wars, the US and its allies unleashed their armed forces to attack and invade other countries, torture, rape and kill prisoners, and massacre civilians.
US officials assumed that the new military imbalance so greatly favored the United States that neither the UN, international courts, other powerful countries, nor even the entire people of the world could enforce the rules of international law and the laws of armed conflict on the United States if it chose to ignore them.
It is ironic, and........