For Randy Forsberg: “Dost Thou Not Know…With How Little Wisdom the World is Ruled?”

Chemical Weapons & Historical Memory: From Iraq to Syria

In brief background discussions with a number of the US and indeed world’s top experts on chemical and biological weapons and global security yesterday, a number of critical points, largely ignored by major media outlets in the US were stressed.

A key point is that although the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime certainly wouldn’t surprise anyone, the timing might. As of yet there has been no independent verification, by the UN Weapons Inspection team in Syria, that chemical weapons have in fact been used. That’s just one of the reasons why the head of the UN is asking for more time for the team and for the world to focus on diplomacy, not more violence.

To be sure, the Assad regime may be partly to blame for interfering with the inspectors, but why the rush to judgment by the US and its allies? For even if and when the verification of use happens, it’s quite another thing to verify who used the weapons, as the example of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran, in the early 1980s – which took years to verify – shows. Of course the US and its allies showed no such concern at the time as they were backing Iraq against Iran.

How quickly the great powers forget their own support for the use of chemical weapons

Yet these same powers, the US, the French and the British, aided by their regional allies, are now leading the charge against Syria, with all the moral outrage, strategic forgetting and lack of historical memory. How quickly the great powers forget their own support for the use of chemical weapons, a moral outrage indeed, one that they all totally supported at the time in their quest against Iran!

Security implications of possible US-led military strikes

If the US strikes Syria, especially in the absence of independent verification and UN Security Council resolutions, no matter what cover is provided by the Arab League – currently dominated by the Saudis and Qatar, both deeply involved in supporting the Syrian opposition – it will be rightly seen as illegitimate, and could have catastrophic and indeed incalculable consequences.

In addition, leading analysts and newspapers indicate that there are many in the US, Israel and among US allies who want to use this situation to send a message to Iran about its nuclear enrichment program and to lay the groundwork for eventual strikes against Iran. All of this will likely further escalate the ongoing conflict across the Middle East and Islamic world, increasing regional instability and could set the region further aflame, just like the US invasion of Iraq (Pillar, 2011).

The US invasion of Iraq has already played a major role in creating sectarian strife which continues to spill over into the Middle East, ripping it apart, in Iraq, the Syrian civil war and beyond. Qatar (which has provided some $3 billion in arms and cash), Saudi and US support for the Syrian opposition is already strengthening radical Islamist extremist armed groups, displacing the ordinary citizens driven to take up arms by the brutal Assad regime.

No one seems to have learned from previous disasters

Unfortunately for the world, no one seems to have learned from previous disasters of supporting the dictatorships that helped radicalize the Iranian revolution. Nor has the US or its allies learned anything from earlier supporting tens of thousands of radical Islamists to slay the then great Satan, the Soviet Union, after its invasion of Afghanistan, only to have them turn against the other great Satan, the US.

This new generation of violent extremists, many of whom were organized into the global jihad against the USSR, were to become increasingly radicalized in the context of the increasing presence of US troops in the Muslim world, US continued support for Middle Eastern dictatorship, replete with torture, not to mention the subsequent US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and ongoing US-supported occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel.

The hope of an informed public

The succession of disasters and related sectarian conflict –with some 130,000 killed in the Syria’s internationalized civil war alone, military dictatorship reestablished in Egypt replete with violent repression of the Muslim Brotherhood and the more secular left – continues to register in Syria, throughout the region and to varying extents across the globe. The disaster has been long in the making, since the region was carved up with the fall of the Ottoman empire and the first Arab Revolt, as oil became increasingly important to the strategic calculations of the great powers.

The only solution to the current intersection of national, regional and global crises, however unlikely, is a negotiated one, in Syria and beyond. The world today needs great power cooperation, including by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, most especially Russia and their regional allies, something agreed upon by some leading members of the US Establishment who understand the need for cooperative security, as well as by leading critics of US foreign policy.

Yet only an informed public, in the US and across the globe, has any hope of stopping the current race towards regional and global destruction, as the world approaches the 100th anniversary of one of the greatest catastrophes in world history, World War I, which decisively altered the 20th century and paved the way for the Russian revolution, the brutalities of Stalin and Hitler, World War II and the Cold War.

The world would do well to remember this earlier regional and global conflagration, also fed by strategies of preemption and preventive war, and ponder the question of how we can expect anything different from the 21st century, if the powers that be continue the same policies.

Perhaps, since today the world commemorates the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr., the apostle of revolutionary nonviolence, we could honor his memory and all those who sacrificed for civil rights and fought for jobs, peace and justice, by pursuing diplomacy and peace, not violence.

Select Bibliography
Evrand Ibrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, & the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations, New York: New Press, 2013.

James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Noam Chomsky, Interview with Mohamed Al Attar, June 2013 http://www.lb.boell.org/downloads/chomsky_-_final_english.pdf
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, New York: Harper Collins, 2012.

Congressional Research Service, “Syria’s Chemical Weapons: Issues for Congress,” August 20, 2013 http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/213001.pdf
Congressional Research Service, “Armed Conflict in Syria: U.S. & International Response,” June 14, 2013 http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/195385.pdf
Javed Ali, “Chemical Weapons & the Iran-Iraq War: A Case Study in Noncompliance,” The Nonproliferation Review/Spring 2001 pp. 43-58 http://cns.miis.edu/npr/pdfs/81ali.pdf
Benhabib, Seyla, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents & Citizens, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Browning, Christopher R., The Path to Genocide, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Browning, Christopher R., The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942, University of Nebraska, 2004.
Financial Times, “Qatar: Emirate to Empire: Qatar Funnels Billions of Dollars to Syria’s Rebellion: Gulf State Took Aid Lead; Saudi’s Sparked into Action; Western Role Dwarfed,” Roula Khalaf & Abigail Fielding Smith, Friday, May 17, 2013, pp. A1, 4
Randall Forsberg, “Confining the Military to Defense as a Route to Disarmament,” World Policy Journal, Volume 1, #2, Winter 1984, pp. 285-315.
Randall Forsberg, “Behind the Facade: Nuclear War and Third World Intervention,”The Deadly Connection: Nuclear War and U.S. Intervention, ed., Joseph Gerson, Philadelphia, PA: New England Regional Office of the American Friends Service Committee, 1986, pp. 24-35.
Randall Forsberg, ed., The Arms Production Dilemma: Contraction and Restraint in the World Combat Aircraft Industry, Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.
Fawaz Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global, Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 2009.
Fawaz Gerges, Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy, Mariner Books, 2007.
The Guardian, “UK & US Finalise Plans for Military Strikes Against Syrian Regime,” Nicholas Watt, Julian Borger, Nick Hopkins & Paul Lewis, Tuesday, August 27, 2013 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/27/uk-us-strikes-syrian-regime
Shane Harris & Matthew Aid, “CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as he Gassed Iran: The U.S Knew Hussein Was Launching Some of the Worst Chemical Attacks in History—and Still Gave Him a Hand,” Foreign Policy, Monday, August 26, 2013 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/25/secret_cia_files_prove_america_helped_saddam_as_he_gassed_iran)
Joost Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq & the Gassing of Halabja, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Michael Isikoff & David Corn, Hubris, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.
Paul M. Lubeck & Tom Reifer “The Politics of Global Islam: U.S. Hegemony, Globalization and Islamist Social Movements,” in Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, ed., Globalization, Hegemony & Power:  Antisystemic Movements and the Global System, Boulder, Co: Paradigm Publishers, 2004, pp. 162-180.
Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland & Poles in the Second World War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Kevin Narinsy, The Political Economy of Grand Strategy, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Vali Nasr, “Back to the Future for US Policy in Egypt and Syria,” Al-Monitor, July 31, 2013 http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/07/back-to-future-for-us-policy-in-egypt-and-syria.html
New York Times, “Saudi Arabia Vows to Back Egypt’s Rulers: Undercutting Leverage of U.S. Over Cairo,” Rod Nordland, Tuesday, August 20, 2013, pp. A1, 8.
New York Times, “American Sees Dark Side of Syrian Rebels,” C.J. Chivers, Friday, August 23, 2013, pp. A1, A6.
Douglas Newton, “‘This Black Horror of Inconceivability’: Dissenters in British Foreign Policy & Britain’s Rush to War, July-August 1914,” in Bernard Mees and Samuel P. Koehne, eds., Terror, War, Tradition: Studies in European History, Australian Humanities Press, Unley, South Australia, 2007, pp. 17-40.
Douglas Newton, “The Lansdowne “Peace Letter” of 1917 & the Prospect of Peace by Negotiation with Germany,” Australian Journal of Politics & History, Special Issue: Writing Europe’s Pasts: Germany’s Twentieth Century; Guest Editor: Christian Leitz, Volume 48, Number 1, March 2002, pp. 16-39.
Douglas Newton, British Policy & the Weimar Republic, 1918-1919, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997.
Douglas Newton, “The Promotion of Militarism & the Origins of the First World War: Some Evidence From Britain,” Teaching History, January 1982, pp. 27-109.
Robert Pape & James K. Feldman, Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism & How to Stop It, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Paul Pillar, Intelligence & U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, & Misguided Reform, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Tom Reifer, Mapping Comparative Colonialities, Genocides and “Holocausts”: Towards a New Research Agenda, Podcast of talk at Conference on “Reorienting the World: DeColonial Horizons, Hosted by the Centre for Muslim and Non-Muslim Understanding, University of South Australia, March 22-23, 2011, published in Transnational Institute News, September 1, 2011.
Paul Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Paul W. Schroeder, “Stealing Horses to Great Applause: Austria-Hungary’s Decision in 1914 in Systemic Perspective,” in Holger Afflerback & David Stevenson, eds., An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I & European Political Culture Before 1914, Berghahn Books, 2007, 2012, pp. 17-42.

Paul W. Schroeder, Systems, Stability, & Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe, edited with an introduction by David Wetzel, Robert Jervis, & Jack Levy, eds, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.
Paul W. Schroeder “World War I as Galloping Gertie: A Reply to Joachim Remak,” in Paul W. Schroeder, Systems, Stability, & Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe, edited with an introduction by David Wetzel, Robert Jervis, & Jack Levy, eds, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004, pp. 137-156.

Paul W. Schroeder, “Embedded Counterfactuals & World War I as an Unavoidable War,” in Paul W. Schroeder, Systems, Stability, & Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe, edited with an introduction by David Wetzel, Robert Jervis, & Jack Levy, eds, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004, pp. 157-193
Paul W. Schroeder, “Epilogue: Transformation or Evolution: Linear or Catastrophic?,” in Peter Kruger & Paul Schroeder, eds, in cooperation with Katja Wustenbecker, “The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848”: Episode or Model in Modern History?, LIT VERLAS Munster, 2002, pp. 323-332.

Schroeder, Paul W., “Romania & the Great Powers Before 1914,” Revue Roumaine dhistoire, Volume 14, Issue 1, 1975, pp. 39-53.
Bernard Semmel, Imperialism & Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought 1895-1914, New York: Anchor Books, 1960, 1968.
Jack Snyder, Progress & Power, New York: Routledge, 2012.
Jack Snyder & Keir A. Lieber, “Correspondence: Defensive Realism & the “New” History of World War I,” International Security, Summer 2008, Volume 33, No. 1, pp. 174-185, pp. 185-194.
Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization & Nationalist Conflict, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000.
Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making & the Disasters of 1914, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler & Stalin, New York: Basic Books, 2010. John Steinbruner, “Realism, Strategic Interest, and Moral Responsibility Regarding Iran”, (CISSM Policy Brief, September 2012 http://www.cissm.umd.edu/papers/files/iran_policy_brief__091712.pdf
John D. Steinbruner, “Cooperative Security”, (Entry in the International Encyclopedia of Political Science, October 2010)
John Steinbruner, Elisa D. Harris, Nancy Gallagher, Stacy M. Okutani, Controlling Dangerous Pathogens, (CISSM, March 2007)
John Steinbruner and Nancy Gallagher, “Constructive Transformation: an Alternative Vision of Global Security”, (Daedalus, Summer, 2004).
John Steinbruner and Nancy Gallagher, “Prospects for Security Transformation”, (CISSM Working Paper, July 2004).
John Steinbruner, Principles of Global Security, Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2000.
John D. Steinbruner & William W. Kaufmann, “International Security Reconsidered,” Robert D. Reischauer, ed., Setting National Priorities: Budget Choices for the Next Century, Brookings, 1997, pp. 155-196.
Wall Street Journal, “A Veteran Saudi Power Player Prince Bandar Works to Build Support to Topple Assad,” Adam Entous, Nour Malas & Margaret Coker, Sunday, August 25, 2013 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323423804579024452583045962.html
Washington Post, “Imminent U.S. Strike on Syria Could Draw Nation Into Civil War,” Ernesto Londono & Ed O’Keefe, Tuesday, August 27, 2013 http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/imminent-us-strike-on-syria-could-draw-nation-into-civil-war/2013/08/27/d780e0f6-0f59-11e3-bdf6-e4fc677d94a1_story.html?hpid=z1