The Global Test: an essay

[Selwynn]

The Global Test
by Selwynn

Following the first round of Presidential debates this election year, polls clearly indicated a decisive upset victory for Senator John Kerry. But in the immediate days to follow some political hay was made over his use of the phase “global test.” His comments were as follows:

Kerry: The president always has the right and always has had the right for pre-emptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the cold war. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control. No president through all of American history has ever ceded and nor would I the right to pre-empt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.

But if and when you do it, Jim, you've got to do it in a way that passes the test. That passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing. And you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

The problem with Senator Kerry’s statement is not his use of the phrase “global test.” It is his definition of the doctrine of preemption and his failure to understand that America has a larger responsibility to the world that simply acting unilaterally first, and then defending to the world the reasons for action second. This is how Kerry defined his idea of the “global test” during the debates.

John Kerry needed instead to point out that the President of the United States has not always had the "right" to use the term “preemption” in the way the Bush Administration has. The so-called “Bush Doctrine” is not the way it has always been in American political history; it is new. And it is important that we make that reality clear to the American public.

The age old doctrine (and the only doctrine of military intervention that can even remotely be considered just) is that we have the right to respond to clear and immanent danger in order to defend ourselves against a direct impending attack. If a country was fueling its strike missiles or we had armed nuclear subs entering American waters we can respond by taking them out first, not waiting for them to hit. Such a response to direct and immediate danger is rightfully considered defensive.

The Bush Administration has raped this doctrine by changing it to argue for the right to invade and take over sovereign nations that we do not particularly like or that have tactical and/or economic assets that we covet, even when that nation poses no clear or immediate danger of any kind. The “Bush Doctrine” justifies this aggressive posture by arguing that the fact that a country might one day possibly arrive at a place where it could conceivably threaten us gives us the right to act unilaterally without and accountability to the rest of the world to invade, attack and murder. That's ridiculous.

Bush's doctrine sneers and laughs in the face of the global community, and that is a very popular sentiment among a certain percentage of the country. There is no doubt that a certain element of the population sees its nation more like John Wayne or the Lone Ranger than as a government with ties and accountability to the world. Some people believe that we should do whatever we want everywhere in the world and be accountable to no one, even when our actions affect other sovereign nations. There is a word to describe this kind of action: tyranny.

Still other people argue that the fact that we were attacked on September 11th, has given us the justification to wage global war and take any action we see fit in the name of national defense against terror. But how do we avoid becoming terrorists ourselves? How do we rationalize murder and desolation of tens of thousands of innocent lives simply because a country might have been a “gathering threat” to us one day in the future?

Are we ready to argue that our national security justifies a policy if aggressive first-strike perpetual war and endless initiation of conflict? This perversion of the doctrine of preemption into militant nationalism and state aggression in the name of protection from any and all perceived threats is not new to Bush philosophy. The last time we heard this language was in 1938.

There must be a distinction made between action necessitated by clear and immediate danger, and action warranted due to a more long term growing threat. As former President Clinton said in this speech at the Democratic National Convention, "they believe we should act unilaterally when we can and multilaterally only when we have to." I stand along side form President Clinton in my belief that this is fundamentally wrong.

The "global test" should mean that we ought to work multilaterally when we can and unilaterally only when we must. These “must” times are few and far between, representing only instances of crystal clear immediate danger to the United States. It is arrogant, ignorant and insulting to take an attitude that says the United States has the right to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to the rest of the world, thereby affecting the lives of millions of people all over the globe without any input from the rest of the world.

The United States likes to talk about "Rogue States" that do not follow international law and do not participate in the global community. But the United States is a Rogue State; in fact it is probably the number one Rogue State in the world. America earns the title by ignoring international law, human rights laws, global governing bodies or anything else it doesn’t like any time it wants in the name of "national interests."

Saying that our actions should pass the global test is not bad or wrong - it's dead right. That does not mean that our actions should all be rubber stamped and approved by some international governing body. It does say however that we should involve the rest of the world in decisions that affect the whole world, earn their support, work multilaterally, honor international and human rights laws, and operate within the framework of a global reality, instead of operating as a rogue and reckless state.

This essay will shortly go up on my blog. Please feel feel to vist the blog and leave comments any time, at http://selwynn-blog.city.com

[madrchsod]

1. i think Kerry covered in

most of these ideas in his debate. he out lined his ideas on foreign policy thru out the debate but as we all know ,the devil is in the details

[Selwynn]

2. Right - not meant as attack on Kerry, just clarification of an idea....

I wish Kerry would have somehow mentioned how the doctrine of pre-emption has been perverted by Bush, but in 30 seconds I'm sure it probably wasn't possible.

[bloom]

3. "But the United States is a Rogue State"

I'm afraid that is true.

Bush said that the Iraq was preemptive self-defense and that "the enemy attacked us"

Which everyone with any sense knows is bogus - but I wish that Kerry had emphasized that idea of self-defense and not tried to justify preemption. At least he discussed bringing the UN in and being truthful and such - while Bush went on to sneer at International Law.

[bvar22]

4. All of the actions of the USA...

...will be submitted to the Global Test with or without bush*s or Kerry's permission.

We now live in a Global Community with instant Global Communications. All of our actions, especially those in the International Realm, will be reviewed by the World whether we like it or not.

Under bush*:
the actions in Afghanistan were generally supported as justified and honest.

the Invasion and looting of Iraq was correctly seen as unwarranted and criminal.

I agree with the World.
bush*/republicans can like it or lump it, but the Global smell test is a reality.

[bloom]

5. I think Bush* is saying "the World Can Go Fuck Itself"

...in a manner of speaking. And I'm afraid that his followers agree with him.

[Selwynn]

8. That's exactly what they say

[immoderate]

6. You nailed it.

Where Kerry also left an opening was with leaving the phrase "Global test" so ambiguous. It allows the opposition to question which entity Kerry would give our sovereignty to, when what should be emphasized is the sniff test: that our claims should be credible. Our reputation and prestige are so much more important than the short term political aims of the Bush bunch.

As a friend used to say, "Let's hook up the Bullshit meter."

--IMM

[MGKrebs]

7. Nice work Selwynn.

My perspective was that the 'global test" merely meant that in the end, you must show you were right to attack.

As an example: In a slightly different universe, Saddam actually DID have WMD's, and we had good intelligence that he was about to use them. But perhaps, for whatever reason, this intelligence could not be disclosed. In that case, you might go ahead and do the pre-emptive strike without international support, but you damn sure better be able to come up with the evidence of an imminent threat after you do.

Bush made a mistake by attacking. A huge mistake. He gambled and lost.

To me, the main thing that seperates leaders from everyone else is not that they are decisive, it is that they are RIGHT. When leaders make big mistakes, we are supposed to get new leaders.

Anybody can be decisive. There's no particular honor in that. The honor comes in recognizing when you are wrong and correcting your decision or stepping aside.

[Selwynn]

9. Check out this response I got and my rebuttal:

This was the comment left on my blog:

You have clouded your vision with unreasoned agruements. You true problem seems to be with the preemptive use of force. All of your arguements stem from this one thing. So, my question to you is this. You state that we should not use force unless we are "responding" to a direct and immediate danger. Should we have waited until we had clear evidence that Saddam had handed over chemical, biological, or possibly nuculear weapons one, two, perhaps three years after inspectors left that ended up on our shores. Not only ended up on our shores, but after those weapons had been used and possibly killed "tens of thousands"?

Or, does it make more sense to cut that threat off at the pass, and use force to prevent what is likely to happen in the future? The answer here is clear, preemption.

The only arguement you can espouse here is to dodge the question and talk about the lack of massive amounts, "stock piles", of WMD being found. This would be unacceptable given that every nation agreed that the weapons were there when we entered, and Iraq refused to prove to the demanding world of it had no WMD. In my belief it is because the did have them and they were likely transported or hidden very well. Only the future will tell.

This was my (probably too lengthy) rebuttal:

I will only respond to the question once, then you are free to have the last word. I don't get into fifteen page discussions on the comments section of my web-blog.

My response is:
The answer is not at all clear in favor of preemption, and I'm surprised you bring up Iraq, because it is the most perfect example of this. You are wrong when you state that every country in the world agreed that the weapons were there when we entered. In fact the UN Weapons inspectors and many other countries did not agree that the answer was conclusive at all. Iraq did not refuse to prove that it had no weapons of mass destruction, in fact it released an 1,800 page document detailing exactly what had happened to its weapons, over half of which was censored by the government and never released to the public. Fortunately the complete version was already available in Europe - the parts left out all detailed our weapons sales to Iraq and all the arming we provided for them.

The world community overwhelmingly wanted a different avenue than war. Our "intelligence" was wrong and mostly likely sexed up for political purposes, something which even our own administration admits. Rumsfeld, Colon Powel, and now President Bush himself have all acknowledged that we were wrong on our claims about Iraq.

You're belief that they were transported or hidden doesn't stand up to factual scrutiny, and as I said even our own administration doesn't make that claim - they admit (on the record) that they were wrong.

What has our unilateral preemptive invasion and occupation of Iraq (without majority world support) gotten us? It has gotten us 1,050+ US soldiers dead, but not before they found out that the reasons they were sent there in the first place were all lies. They have gotten an absolute disaster in Iraq, with our own CIA analysts saying that free elections in Iraq in January is a pipe dream and that all out full scale civil war is a 50/50 chance. We have killed tens of thousands of civilians when there was no clear and immediate threat to us. The war has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars with no end in sight, and we have alienated and estranged most of the world based on our actions.

Your question about whether or not it is better to strike first than to sit around and wait until it is too late (obviously that is a simplified paraphrase, but I believe a fair one) is simple to answer. Two wrongs don't make a right. And going around the world annihilating other people because they "might" threaten us in the future is no different than the philosophies of the most evil and vile regimes of history.

The sacredness of human life is too great to kill innocent millions on the off chance that we might prevent some non-imminent but possibly future attack. You need to accept the fact that we cannot make ourselves 100% safe from all thread and remain a nation committed to justice and morality. It is always possible that we may not see clear evidence of a truly immanent threat until it is too late. But that is the price we pay for being JUST. It is not just by any accountable standard to "guess" that someone might one day in the future be a "gathering threat" and then justify the slaughter of that person, city, nation, etc. in the name of that hypothesis.

No one said doing what's right is easy. But doing what's right means that we act in self-defense when we have clear and incontrovertible evidence of a clear and immediate specific threat. It does not mean that we take the "we nuked you just in case one day you might decide to do something against us" approach. That is simply impossible to describe as anything other than unjust.

Not only is it unjust, but its totally ineffective. Our unilateral action in Iraq based on hyped up evidence not largely discredited to which our own government admits was wrong has resulted in countless lives lost and a political and humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq - it has made us and the region less safe, not more safe from the threat of violence, and has become a breeding ground for hatred and terror.

That is the other fallacy of the concept of militant strike-first aggression in the name of security - it rarely makes anything actually more secure. Anyway, to close my rebuttal, I respond that the choice is clear, if one is concerned about morality and justice. You cannot simply murder countless numbers of people on the off chance that maybe, hypothetically they might one day possibly decide to harm us. Doing that is nothing short of a tyranny.

Nothing is either or. As I said in my original writing, there are times where we must act preemptively. But the criteria for that action should be extremely specific. The problem with policy today, is that the line between when we should act unilaterally and when we should act preemptively has been "flip-flopped."

Under the best traditions of this great nation, we have worked multilaterally as our rule and unilaterally only when extraordinary circumstances required it. We have acted preemptively only as a course of last resort and only when faced with a clear and obvious threat of imminent danger.

Under the Bush Administration, that tradition has been reversed. We not act unilaterally as a matter of course, and multilaterally only when our backs are against the wall, or when we realize we've blown it so bad we need the international community to rescue us. And we act preemptively not in a defensive posture, but in an offensive, aggressive posture where we strike first and ask questions later.

Unfortunately, as we have seen, and as we will continue to see as this nation keeps tarnishing its status as a "just" nation by its aggression - the questions matter.

A national policy of multilateralism except in extraordinary circumstances of immediacy, and a doctrine of defense and response rather than aggression and rogue offense is not only what works best, it is what is morally right.

Have a great day,
Sel

[Selwynn]

10. The guys response to my rebuttal:

"Just thought I would tag in for the last word, as you have allowed.

We did what is right and continuing to monday morning quarterback the situation will not change the fact."


That was it. I guess when confronted with overwhelming reason and evidence, they only choice people like this is to say "blah blah, I am right and nothing you say matters." :)