Dan Kovalik - No More War: How the West Violates International Law by using Humanitarian Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests

Copyright 2020 by Dan Kovalik

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-5107-5529-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-5530-7

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Printed in the United States of America

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the memory of Father Miguel DEscoto Brockmann, M.M. Father DEscoto, a Maryknoll priest and Liberation Theologian, served as the first Foreign Minister of the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and later as president of the UN General Assembly. He also served briefly as Libyas UN ambassador in the final days of the Gaddafi government. Amongst his many accomplishments, Father DEscoto was the moving intellectual force behind Nicaraguas groundbreaking case against the United States before the International Court of Justicea case dealt with in depth in this book. While Nicaragua won this case, it has yet to receive the justice due under it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As I write this book, I am reminded often that I stand on the shoulders of giants. My views on the issue of humanitarian intervention have been greatly inspired and molded by the works of Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Diana Johnstone, and Jean Bricmont, who have been writing on this subject for decades. This book would not have been possible without their prior work. I hope that, by writing this book, I introduce new readers to these great minds and I carry forward their amazing legacy with my own unique insights.

I also wish to thank my son Joe who, using his ample computer skills, helped me put together the Index.

[The US] is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.
Dr. Martin Luther King (1967)

[The United States] is the most warlike nation in the history of the world.
Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States (2019)

The law locks up the hapless felon who steals the goose from the Common, but lets the real felon loose who steals the Common from the goose.

Author unknown, from lyrics of an old English labor song critiquing class

CURRENTLY, THE US IS ILLEGALLY bombing seven countries, imposing crippling illegal sanctions on a number of others, illegally dispatching Special Forces units to 70 percent of the worlds countries, and overthrowing or attempting to achieve illegal regime change in others with markedly selective humanitarian intervention. It has 800 military bases positioned in seventy countries. What the hell?

They say peace is priceless. But peace is impossible in a predatory capitalist society. Bipartisan support for military spending and war earnestly continues, with little resistance. The totally rigged political system is not capable of reversing course, because its deep function is to continue and expand the obscene oligarchic profit system. It is part of it. The government bombs; the people shop. Disappointingly, these days it matters not who is elected president, or to the Congress. To understand this is a precondition for movement toward revolutionary nonviolence.

The Monday, December 12, 2019, Washington Post published an explosive report, The Afghanistan Papers, disclosing that the Pentagon wasted $1 trillion of the US tax dollars in a deliberate effort to lie and mislead the US American public in a war the military knew was unwinnable but kept that knowledge secret. We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didnt know what we were doing, according to Gen. Douglas Lute, who oversaw the US war under Presidents Bush and Obama. Another Pentagon Paperstype revelation, but apparently so what? But this we do know: lots of components of the military-industrial-intelligence-banking-Wall Street-Congressional-corporate media complex made lots of money on the longest war in US history, and it still continues.

Despite this, on Wednesday, December 14, only two days later, 188 House Democrats joined a nearly united Republican caucus to pass a comprehensive $738 billion military spending bill that continues endless wars, including Yemen, as well as funds for Trumps Space Force. Even more insane, Congress rewarded the war bureaucracy with $22 billion more than it had asked for. So what if 775,000 troops were dispatched to Afghanistan, killing 2,300, wounding 21,000, while murdering 150,000 Afghans? And now, we may be on the verge of but another war, this time with Iran. Words cannot express my horror at all this.

My own robot-like obedience to patriarchal authority in Viet Nam simply continued a several-millennia pattern. There have been 14,600 reported major wars documented over the past 5,600 years, proving perhaps that war is the original sin of humanity.

Consistent with the nearly 15,000 major wars over the past 5,600 years, there have been 8,400 treaties made since 1500 BCE. This does despite some that temporarily ameliorated tensions.

In analyzing the futile efforts of treaty making, British historian and sociologist F. J. P. Veale cites the highly touted 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact. A serious effort to restrain wars, it was nonetheless terribly flawed because political leaders continually justified exemptions incorporated into the self-defense provisions of the Treaty. It was violated at least ten times in its first two decades by a number of the 63 nations who had signed it.

Veale noted that the Nuremberg Principles derived from the 194546 Nuremberg Trials (where my uncle was a young Army lawyer investigator) were a magnanimous effort to prevent further heinous crimes like those committed by Germany. Yet it, too, was severely flawed because it established the dangerous precedent of victors justice. All restraints on horrific future warfare were removed, because it exempted the war crimes of the US and its allies, most notably all the bombings of civilian targets in England and Germany, but worse, the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The number of civilians murdered by Allied bombings in Germany and Japan far exceeded the bombing casualties of the Axis. Ironically, the signing on August 8 of the London Agreement and Charter authorizing Nuremberg occurred only two days after the August 6, 1945, atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and one day before the August 9 plutonium bombing of Nagasaki. The exception of aerial bombardment as a war crime assured the continuance of global lawlessness.