However one frames the debate, it is apparent to any fair minded and rational person that the invasion of Iraq, based as it was on misinformation at best, lies and deceptions at worst, was a mistake and should never have occurred. Certainly President Obama has made this claim on numerous occasions as well as many who had previously supported (and voted for) the war. After having acknowledged this fact, however, President Obama and others would have us forget the past as it serves, in their view, no practical purpose to rehash and moralize over things that cannot be undone. It will be the work of future historians, legal scholars, and philosophers, they argue, to untangle, interpret, and make judgments regarding the complex events and decisions that led to the invasion and characterize the occupation of Iraq. They warn that it is imperative at this crucial juncture that we deal with the matters at hand, that we act quickly and decisively in our national interest to ensure that our Country remains safe, that our goals in Iraq and Afghanistan are achieved, and that our sacrifice in blood and treasure is not for naught.
What President Obama and others who advocate such a position fail to appreciate is that we live in a Nation that understands and accepts the importance of the Constitution and the rule of law, both moral and International. Accordingly, we determine our behavior, how we conduct ourselves as a Nation, not only by what is in our national interest but also by what is right, not only by what we CAN do, but also by what we OUGHT to do. This is what we stand for as a people, the values we hold sacred as a nation. Consequently, to focus exclusively on “practical considerations” – present conditions and problems – considered in isolation and apart from the causal chain of events that led to the situation as it exists today is morally and legally unacceptable and incoherent and counter to the principles and values we believe must guide and determine our future course of action not only in Iraq, but in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere in the world as well.
By accepting that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a mistake we must accept all that such an admission entails. According to Just War Theory and International Law, the illegal and immoral use of violence and deadly force against a sovereign nation and its citizenry, constitutes aggression. Aggression is morally wrong and a war crime under International Law. Aggressors violate the rights of the aggressed to life, self-determination, and to live in a nation that enjoys political sovereignty and territorial integrity – sometimes referred to as the “rights of nations.” Aggressors are Unjustifiable Combatants. The victims of aggression have the privilege to assert their rights – to act in self and national defense. As such, they are Justifiable Combatants. Consequently, our invasion and occupation of Iraq is aggression, members of our military are aggressors – Unjustifiable Combatants – and those that struggle against us, the “insurgents,” are Justifiable Combatants asserting their right of self and national defense.
This is the reality of our involvement in Iraq, a reality entailed and implied by a recognition that our invasion was a mistake and should never have occurred. The “fact” that we may have had good intentions does not alter the moral and legal value of our involvement. “Mistaken” aggression is no less aggression, no less a war crime. “Mistaken” aggressors are no less liable to be resisted – warred against in self and national defense.
Yet despite the realization that the invasion and occupation in Iraq is aggression and despite our economy bordering on collapse, President Obama, and many of our fellow citizens, argue that we cannot just stop the killing and destruction and walk away. One important reason, they offer, is national security. We must end the chaos created by our aggression and restore stability in Iraq to ensure that it does not become a training ground and sanctuary for terrorists who wish us harm. A second reason, interestingly enough, is a moral one. Paradoxically, we cannot stop the killing and destruction in Iraq because we recognize our moral culpability and responsibility for our aggression. That is, we cannot just abandon the Iraqi people to the endless civil war and sectarian violence that would “inevitably” occur in the power vacuum created by our departure. Consequently, we are morally obligated to continue the killing and the destruction in Iraq for at least a few more years, in order to save the Iraqis from themselves and so they may enjoy the gift of freedom and democracy as recompense for our aggression. While the initial use of violence and deadly force against the Iraqi people may have been aggression, now, however, we are on solid moral and legal ground, as the continued killing and destruction entailed by our remaining, is humanitarian intervention. (General George Casey, the Army Chief of Staff, by the way, said recently that his strategic planning envisions combat troops remaining in Iraq and Afghanistan for as long as ten years).
This argument for the continued occupation of Iraq is clearly incoherent. It is as though our political leaders have accepted that the American public is incapable of rational thought and will accept any reason and justification for war as long as it is presented as furthering our national interest and feeds our national ego regarding our benevolence and moral superiority in the world.
It is time, therefore, long past time, that we show President Obama and the Congress that we will be duped no longer, that we are not a nation of sheep, and that we possess the ability to reason and think critically. It is time, therefore, long past time, that we accept the reality of what we have done and continue to do in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere in the world. We must stop the killing and the destruction now, not later. We must understand that bringing stability to the region is not about escalating violence, increasing the number of troops, or dropping more and larger bombs. Nor is it about searching out and destroying al Qaeda or the Taliban, or even capturing or killing bin Laden. Rather, it is about inclusiveness, diplomacy, understanding and dialogue. It is about doing the difficult work of reconciliation and of addressing the grievances that nourish radicalism. Most important, I believe, should we at long last recognize that the days of US unilateralism and imperialism are over and realize the necessity of involving and soliciting the assistance of area powers such as Iran, Russia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, China and India, not only will the world be a better and safer place, but perhaps for the first time in many years, we will begin to live according to the principles and values that we claim characterize our nation and of which we are so proud.
Camillo “Mac” Bica, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is a former Marine Corps Officer, Vietnam Veteran, long-time activist for peace and justice, and the Coordinator of the Long Island Chapter of Veterans for
Peace and Justice Post 
Israel’s Indiscriminate Use of Indiscriminate Weapons
June 5, 2009On May 9, Israel announced to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York that it would release a set of maps showing where cluster munitions had been dropped by the Israeli Defense Forces during the IDF military incursions into South Lebanon in July-August of 2006.
There has been some speculation in Washington about the timing of the release, coming as it did two days prior to the arrival in the U.S. of Israel’s new Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his first official visit, and first “face to face” with President Obama.
The near three-year delay in release of the maps has been costly. The United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center of South Lebanon (MACC-SL), which is primarily responsible for defusing and removal of the cluster bomblets, estimates that approximately ½ to one million of these remain unexploded in South Lebanon, and that 30 people have been killed and some 203 have been injured since the termination of hostilities in August, 2006.
The MACC-SL figures for total cluster munitions used by the Israeli Defense Forces correspond closely with information given by the Israeli Defense Forces to Ha’aretz reporter Meron Rapoport and published in an op-ed on September 13, 2006. For this piece, Rapoport interviewed numerous soldiers and officers to the level of battalion commander.
He was told that cluster munitions were delivered primarily by IDF MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System) units, but also by bombs dropped from aircraft and shot in shells fired by 155mm artillery. Some of the other artillery shells used were phosphorous rounds. The MLRS units alone fired 1,800 cluster rockets containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets, the vast majority of which, according to the IDF officers and soldiers he interviewed were fired into villages in South Lebanon, near the Israeli border, in the last 10 days of the operation.
Cluster munitions, however delivered, are by definition “indiscriminate” weapons prohibited by Article 50 of the 1977 Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. In the summer of 2006, these indiscriminate weapons were used indiscriminately and often against Lebanese villages which were “civilian objects” as defined by Article 52 of the Protocols.
Perhaps the most accessible and comprehensive history to date of the military operations conducted by Israel in the summer of 2006, is “Eyewitness Lebanon: An International Law Inquiry,” published by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in 2007. As the title indicates, this study focuses directly upon those aspects of the operations which constituted violations of international law, and upon those individuals with general and local command authority who committed the violations, and are named in the study.
The vast majority of the cluster munitions used by Israel in July-August 2006 military operation in South Lebanon were provided under U.S.-Israel military assistance grants which are governed by the 1952 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement (TIAS 2675) between the two countries, which includes this section:
The sanctions which are the muscle in all such U.S. military assistance agreements with countries involved in concessionary sales, are contained in the Arms Export Control Act (AECA). As detailed in a 2005 report to Congress by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), there had been three possible violations of the AECA by Israel prior to the 2006 invasion of South Lebanon:
There were two other instances: the 1976 air rescue mission at Entebbe, Uganda, and the 1985 bombing of PLO Headquarters in Tunis where the Ford and Reagan Administrations, respectively, simply reported that U.S.-provided aircraft to Israel had been used, but no violation of relevant military assistances were deemed to have occurred.
Given this history of U.S. presidential and congressional attentiveness to Israel’s implementation of military assistance agreements in the past, those Israelis in the government and military involved in the gross misuse of American weapons in South Lebanon by the IDF in the summer of 2006, and the Bush Administration which looked the other way, did more than break the U.S.-Israel military assistance agreement; to paraphrase Mark Twain, they threw it down upon the ground and danced upon it.
Ironically, the reaction to the crimes in South Lebanon was far more rigorous in Israel. Defense Minister Amir Peretz ordered an internal IDF inquiry into the use of cluster munitions (particularly) in the last weeks of the operation, and the Knesset launched an investigation of its own. As testimony was taken, responsibility began to climb up the chain of command, and within days of the beginning of the investigation, it became clear that heavy MLRS and artillery strikes had, according to Haaretz (again, Meron Rapoport) dumped between 1.2 million (IDF figures) and 3 million (UN estimates) cluster bomblets on the densely populated areas in South Lebanon, near the Israeli border.
It got worse. Phosphorous shells had been used. United Nations demining staff who moved into South Lebanon to begin the clean-up discovered that the vast majority of cluster bombs used by the IDF had been taken from older stocks of US weapons (again, concessionary sales) and not from plentiful IDF supplies of newer, Israeli-made weapons.
The difference was that the high dud-rates of the former made the work of demining far more dangerous for both Lebanese and UN troops — and insured that the Lebanese farmers and their children would be maimed and killed for many years to come.
And then the questions began to be asked about the Geneva Conventions. Article 50 of the 1977 protocols specifically prohibit “indiscriminate attacks” which are not directed at a specific military objective, and may be expected to cause incidental loss of or injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects. Sooner or later, senior Israeli military and civilian leaders will be called to account in the Hague.
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Tags:cluster munitions, Geneva Conventions, Israel, Israeli Defense Forces, phosphorous rounds, South Lebanon, Stephen Green
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