Voice of Revolution

Self-Defense Does Not Include
Raids on Sovereign Nations

The U.S. military is engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. From U.S. military bases inside Afghanistan it now routinely launches murderous raids inside Pakistan. This lawless behavior has now extended to an attack on Syria from a U.S. military base in Iraq.

The U.S. military dictators try to justify their wars and raids as “self-defense.” They have even gone so far as to cite Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, as a legal basis to invade sovereign states. Article 51, contrary to sanctioning pre-emptive wars and military raids on sovereign states, enshrines the right of self-defense to all member states. According to Article 51, it is the peoples of Syria, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan that have the legal and moral right to engage in self-defense and resistance against U.S. military aggression.

The terrorist crime on September 11, 2001 is used by the U.S. as an excuse to act with impunity against sovereign nations. Using 9/11, the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Once those wars were underway, the U.S. military doctrine of self-defense was extended to include self-defense from “insurgents and terrorists” resisting the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

One million Iraqi refugees from the U.S. invasion and occupation have fled to Syria. It is understandable that many of them want to return to Iraq to take up arms to fight the U.S. military and end its occupation of their homeland. Are Syrians and their government responsible for this phenomenon? Certainly not. The unprovoked U.S. aggression against Iraq caused the problem and gave rise to the refugees and resistance fighters.

The U.S. military doctrine claiming self-defense from resistance fighters crossing the borders from Pakistan and Syria also includes dark threats against Iran. This forms a pattern of extending wars and aggression from one situation to another using the U.S. military doctrine of self-defense from those resisting its aggression. This constant enlarging of U.S. military self-defense extends from wherever it has established a military base or is engaged in any form of political, economic, diplomatic or -civilian activity. In other words, self-defense in the imperialist mind of the U.S. military dictators includes the entire globe. This has destroyed the legal definition of self-defense and turned it into a tool of aggression, occupation and exploitation.

The U.S. military thinks it can act with impunity against international law and civilized norms because it is defending its self-interest within the entire world and because it possesses military superiority with regards to weapons of mass destruction, especially air and naval power.

The U.S. military doctrine of self-defense is a form of the medieval dictum that “might makes right.” It can only lead to endless regional wars and a catastrophic world war. This doctrine is self-serving and one-sided as the U.S. military protects within its borders those who are engaged in acts of terrorism against other sovereign states such as Cuba. Anti-Cuban criminals who openly admit their terrible deeds are protected by the U.S. military and not brought before a court of law. Some of these criminals have been given high official positions within the U.S. state.

According to the U.S. military doctrine of self-defense, the Cuban government and people would be justified in launching military raids in Florida to root out the terrorist gangs that have attacked Cuba on numerous occasions. The Cuban government, as an enlightened and responsible member of the international community, does not follow the U.S. military doctrine of self-defense but the United Nations doctrine, which requires that sovereign states work out their differences peacefully through established international legal norms and institutions. Cuba has called on the U.S. to bring the anti-Cuban terrorists to trial or extradite them to a third country for trial but the U.S. military has refused to do so. Even so, the Cubans persist in trying to resolve the problem peacefully through legal international norms and institutions.

The U.S. military doctrine of self-defense is a weapon of U.S. empire building and must be rejected and all aggression carried out under this banner opposed.

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Gates Expands U.S. Right to Defend Against Plots
Thom Shanker, New York Times, October 28, 2008

(President Elect Barack Obama is considering keeping Robert M. Gates as Secretary of Defense. This is an indication that Obama also plans to utilize "self-defense" to justify aggression against those designated by the U.S. as "tearing the world down." — VOR Ed. Note)

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on October 28 that the United States would hold “fully accountable” any country or group that helped terrorists to acquire or use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. The statement was the Bush administration’s most expansive yet in attempting to articulate a vision of deterrence for the post-Sept. 11 world. It went beyond the cold war notion that a president could respond with overwhelming force against a country that directly attacked the United States or its allies with unconventional weapons.

“Today we also make clear that the United States will hold any state, terrorist group or other nonstate actor or individual fully accountable for supporting or enabling terrorist efforts to obtain or use weapons of mass destruction — whether by facilitating, financing or providing expertise or safe haven for such efforts,” Mr. Gates said.

The comments came in an address in which he said it was important to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal as a hedge against what he described as “rising and resurgent powers” like Russia or China, as well as “rogue nations” like Iran or North Korea and international terrorists.

By declaring that those who facilitated a terrorist attack would be held “fully accountable,” Mr. Gates left the door open to diplomatic and economic responses as well as military ones. And, to be sure, the United States has acted forcefully before against those who sheltered terrorists, with the invasion of Afghanistan to oust Al Qaeda and its Taliban government supporters after the attacks of Sept. 11.

His speech here before the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was the latest signal that the administration was moving in its closing months to embrace more far-reaching notions of deterrence and self-defense.

On Monday, senior officials justified a weekend attack against a suspected Iraqi insurgent leader in Syria by saying the administration was operating under an expansive new definition of self-defense. The policy, officials said, provided a rationale for conventional strikes on militant targets in a sovereign nation without its consent — if that nation were unable or unwilling to halt the threat on its own. By law, the new president must conduct a review of the nation’s nuclear posture, and Mr. Gates’s address could be viewed as advocating a specific agenda for the next occupant of the White House.

The first public indication that the administration was expanding the traditional view of nuclear deterrence came in a statement by President Bush in October 2006 that followed a test detonation of a nuclear device by North Korea. Mr.

Bush said North Korea would be held “fully accountable” for the transfer of nuclear weapons or materials to any nation or terrorist organization.

The president was not as explicit then as Mr. Gates was on Tuesday in saying that the administration would extend the threat of reprisals for the transfer of nuclear weapons or materials to all countries, not just North Korea. Mr. Gates also expanded the threat to nations or groups that provide a broader range of support to terrorists.

Early this year, in a little-noticed speech at Stanford University, Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, also spoke of how the president had approved an expanded deterrence policy.

In his speech Tuesday, Mr. Gates argued for modernizing the nation’s nuclear arsenal because “as long as other states have or seek nuclear weapons -- and potentially can threaten us, our allies and friends -- then we must have a deterrent capacity.” Although Mr. Gates earlier this year fired the Air Force secretary and chief of staff after the discovery of shortcomings in the service’s stewardship of nuclear weapons and components, he stressed that the nuclear arsenal was “safe, secure and reliable.” “The problem is the long-term prognosis — which I would characterize as bleak,” he said.

Veteran weapons designers and technicians are retiring, and Congress has not voted for the money to build replacement warheads for an aging arsenal that can be produced without abandoning the nation’s unilateral moratorium on nuclear tests, he said. To that end, he endorsed a comprehensive test ban treaty if adequate verification measures could be negotiated. Mr. Gates praised efforts to reduce the number of warheads, and predicted that the United States and Russia would at some point conclude another agreement limiting their arsenals.

(David E. Sanger contributed reporting.)

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New Doctrine Calls for Nation-Building

The U.S. Army’s future likely will be geared toward nation-building rather than conventional warfare, officials said. The new doctrine also says so-called “fragile states” that propagate terrorism and strife are the greatest threat to U.S. national security, the Washington Post reported.

The doctrine holds that in coming years, U.S. forces will be called to protect populations and rebuild countries rather than engage in direct combat. Those “stability operations” will last longer and contribute more to the military’s success than “traditional combat operations,” says the Army’s new Stability Operations Field Manual, a copy of which was obtained by the newspaper.

“This is the document that bridges from conflict to peace,” said Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell IV, commander of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the manual was drafted. He said the U.S. military “will never secure the peace until we can conduct stability operations in a collaborative manner” with civilian government and private entities at home and abroad.

(Source: United Press International)

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Afghanistan Conflict Rapidly Worsening: U.S. Report

The U.S. administration has launched an urgent review of policy in Afghanistan as intelligence officials warn of a “downward spiral” in efforts to stabilize the country, U.S. newspapers reported. Officials familiar with a draft National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan, said it casts doubt on the ability of the Kabul government to stem the resurgence of Taliban, the New York Times said. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters that she had not seen the NIE but said “we have asked for the intelligence community to take a look, it’s important that it do so.

“I would just cite that Afghanistan is a difficult place. It has made progress since 2001. We have all talked about new circumstances that have arisen there, and we are doing a review to see what more we can do,” she added. The NIE report combining analyses of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies is due for completion after the U.S. presidential election in November. “The classified report finds that the breakdown in central authority in Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the government of President Hamid Karzai and by an increase in violence by militants who have launched increasingly sophisticated attacks from havens in Pakistan,” the Times said.

The report says heroin trade “by some estimates” accounts for 50 percent of Afghanistan’s economy, the Times said. According to the Washington Post, “analysts have concluded that reconstituted elements of Al-Qaeda and the resurgent Taliban are collaborating with an expanding network of militant groups, making the counterinsurgency war infinitely more complicated.”

“As the U.S. presidential election approaches, senior officials have expressed worry that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is so tenuous that it may fall apart while a new set of U.S. policymakers settles in,” the Post said. Spurred by the report, the White House has launched a review of Afghanistan policy “fast-tracked for completion in the next several weeks,” the Post said. It said President George W. Bush’s senior advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, had instructed Pentagon and State Department officials to “return to the basic questions” such as “what are our objectives” and “what can we hope to achieve” in Afghanistan. Lute is heading to Afghanistan with a team of specialists to assess the situation there, according to the New York Times.

The National Intelligence Estimate describes a Pakistan-based extremist network with three elements: Pakistani extremists allied with Kashmiri militants; Afghan Taliban; and traditional tribal groups in western Pakistan that assist the other groups, the Post said. “Al-Qaeda, composed largely of Arabs, and increasingly, Uzbeks, Chechens and other Central Asians, is described as sitting atop the structure, providing money and training to the others in exchange for sanctuary,” the Post said. A U.S. counterterrorism official told the daily there is competition between the groups but their interests increasingly overlap and “they understand the need to support one another.”