Disarmament Diplomacy

Editorial

Vote if you Can: Otherwise, Pray

Rebecca Johnson

Sitting here in London listening to the Republican Convention in New York is a scary, helpless kind of thing to do late at night. More than with any other US election that I can remember, there's a feeling that the fate of the world will be decided on November 2, and there's not a thing we (the non-American non-voters) can do about it. It's that nightmare when you know that the car you're riding in is heading for a terrible crash and you desperately want to turn the steering wheel or push on the brakes but you're in the back a long way away and just can't reach. You shout so loud you can hear your voice booming in your head, but in your room in real life you are twisting in the sheets and whimpering 'no, no' in a barely audible whisper. And then you wake up bathed in sweat. Did it happen? Is everything smashed up beyond repair?

Overheated imagination no doubt: of course the fate of the world doesn't hang in the balance of one presidential election! Or maybe it does. If the US put weapons in space, for example, does anyone imagine others would not soon follow? Regardless of whether such weapons worked or not, crossing that threshold would make life on earth very much more vulnerable. The next four years could be decisive.

Much of the damage to international security from the past four years' policies could be mitigated if a strong president were immediately prepared to: face up to the tough decisions necessary to deal with climate change (too late to reverse); take nuclear materials out of circulation and reinforce verification and the full implementation of the treaties covering nuclear, chemical and biological weapons; and show ethical leadership to help restore confidence in international law and treaties promoting important norms on human rights and decency, including torture and the treatment of prisoners.

This issue of Disarmament Diplomacy offers a glimpse of what we might expect if Kerry gets elected. It doesn't sound particularly inspiring and if I were a teacher I'd want to write "could do better". The world is in such a mess that we don't only need a safe pair of hands; we need visionary policies and a bold, integrated approach - a kind of cooperative threat reduction programme for the whole Earth. Nevertheless, a safe pair of hands would be a reassuring first step towards security sanity, and we could at least continue to hope.

The journal also contains shocking analyses of how intelligence was mangled and manipulated on both sides of the Atlantic in order to market enough terror about fictitious weapons of mass destruction that people would buy the war on Iraq. Bush's team excelled at this task. He might seem to some to be a few cents short of a dollar intellectually, but George W. is cunning where it counts, and without the concerns and hesitations that might beset a more scrupulous leader. He got poor eager-to-please Tony Blair all tied up in knots.

Blair wanted desperately to preserve the Atlantic Alliance, the strategic imperative for all British Prime Ministers these past 50 years. He'd already proved how briskly he could transfer his affections from Bill to George, but this time the only way he could hang on to his end of the Atlantic rope was to let himself be dragged through corrupting untruths, a mizzen of lies and exaggerations, and over the bodies of thousands of Iraqi civilians and mounting numbers of British and American casualties. With Europe divided and the majority of British people opposed, the political stakes seemed higher for Blair than for Bush. Hence the need to compile those Really Convincing Dossiers. They were to show his sincerity, and proved he could lie for England. And to avoid the terrible sin of misleading Parliament, his first task was to mislead himself. So something else that needs restoring, on both sides of the Atlantic, is confidence in democracy, and for that we need honesty in office.

President Reagan said "trust, but verify". Bush doesn't want to trust or verify; he'd rather accuse and pre-empt. His record on real weapons of mass destruction is dismal. In 2001, the Bush administration killed off the chance of international verification for the Biological Weapons Convention. And last month, Bush's mouthpiece in Geneva told the Conference on Disarmament that her dangerously myopic government has decided against having verification provisions in a fissban treaty meant to prohibit the production of plutonium and enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. These are strange ways to behave for a president that just took slaughter and mayhem to an impoverished country on the pretext that we couldn't be certain it didn't have some mass destruction nasties tucked away.

Of course we can't just leave it up to the leaders. This is our world, and we have to take responsibility ourselves. I am hardly pinning all my hopes on John Kerry; but at the very least we need leaders that are honest, thoughtful and not afraid of complexity. It is not just the policies of the Bush administration that frighten me, but the aggression and contempt shown towards those who differ from or question them. It isn't just about our shared environment and collective security, important though they are, but whether our spirits could survive another four years of Bush. Since most of the world doesn't have a vote on November 2, I guess we'll have to pray.

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