The US needs to rejoin the world as a full member. US Exceptionalism is
not recognised outside the US as valid, and, in a globalising world, it is
not only a mistake, but destructive and dangerous.
1. The comprehensively unacceptable military doctrine of "Full Spectrum
Dominance". The Pentagon last July issued the most recent update of the US
Joint Chiefs of Staff's Joint Vision - i.e. "Joint Vision 2020" - which
elaborates their plans for "Full Spectrum Dominance 2020":
http://www.dtic.mil/jv2020. This involves just what it says - Full Space
Dominance, Full Information Dominance, Full National Missile Defenses, and
so on, plus the capability to conduct two major wars simultaneously: in
the Middle East and in the Far East.
2. Refusal to pay its full dues to the United Nations (the present
situation is absurd, with an individual, Ted Turner, part-funding the US
dues).
3. The right claimed to use military force otherwise than according to the
provisions of the UN Charter.
4. Refusal to join the International Criminal Court (current signature
allows participation in organisation, without intending to ratify.
5. Refusal to rejoin UNESCO.
6. Refusal to sign the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
7. Refusal to sign the Anti-Personnel Mine Convention.
8. Refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban.
9. Continued development of sub-treaty level nuclear warheads and
dedicated platforms.
10. A history, still only partly acknowledged, of CIA involvement with
criminal dictatorships.
11.Proposals to breach the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
12. Claims to a controlling leadership role in NATO (whose original
functions were fundamentally altered at the Washington Conference in April
1999) over the level and kind of defence arrangements of both NATO and EU
member states.
13. and to carry NATO veto powers over into the European Rapid Reaction
Force.
14. Use made of NATO's Partnership-for-Peace programmes for US commercial
and other interests (as in the Caucasus and Central Asia).
15. Determination to circumvent "Kyoto" commitments while continuing to
pollute at an unparalleled rate.
16. Misuse of the World Trade Organisation:
a. To benefit US Corporations.
b. To continue subsidising them.
c. To increase the scope of its remit in their interests: all at the
expense both of other developed countries and of the less developed;
together with the export of violence-dominated entertainment and
propaganda justified as "free trade" and "freedom of speech".
17. Continuing military occupation of parts of Japan and of South Korea
despite local objection (note that North Korea has indicated US Forces
might remain in a unified Korea to provide protection against Japan).
18. The development and use of weapons incompatible with international
conventions - depleted uranium, cluster bombs, etc., etc.
19. Active political and financial support for Israel's nuclear and other
WMD proliferation, for its nuclear-capable platforms, and for its
Anti-Ballistic Missile programmes, coupled with real-time
space-surveill-ance information.
20. Vetoes in the UNSC in support of Israel's breaches of international
law.
21. Unlawful destruction of the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan and of
"camps" in Afghanistan.
22. Unlawful threats - successfully objected to by neighbouring states -
to "take out" North Korea's nuclear plant (as Israel had unlawfully taken
out Iraq's in 1981).
23. Requests (all apparently refused) to Central Asian governments for
bases from which to attack targets in Afghanistan.
24. Smuggling of weaponry to Croatia, etc., through Albania in breach of
UN arms embargoes, and testing by US firms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,
etc., in Albania.
25. Mrs Albright's secret commitments, given in February 1999 to Hashim
Thakis and the Kosovo Liberation Army, to US funding of the KLA and to
eventual independence for Kosovo (whence today's impunity from UN
authority for former-KLA criminality in Kosovo); equally Ambassador
Holbrooke's concurrent, according to Lord Gilbert intentionally
unacceptable, proposals to Milosevic of March 1999. (Compare these with
Ambassador Glaspie's remark to Saddam Hussein immediately before his
invasion of Kuwait that "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts,
like your border dispute with Kuwait", which could have been seen as a
"green light".)
26. Establishment of a massive non-NATO US military base, Camp Bondsteel,
in Albania.
27. The insertion of US military forces, equipment and funding into
Colombia as part of the Anti-Drug War, in despite of all other Latin
American governments' objections.
28. "Echelon", the Anglophone intelligence gathering system involving the
United States, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which the
European Parliament has recently publicised and condemned on the grounds
that it is likely to be engaged in commercial and political espionage on
European states, firms, and individuals, as well as general military
espionage.
Apart from the US refusal to cooperate with the greater part of the
international community, many US domestic policies are incompatible with
Human Rights, with Democracy, and above all with the Justice that the
United Nations was set up to establish at the end of the Second World War.
All of these policies are based on the belief that in the course of its
Global Engagement, the US has an unquestionable right - duty almost - to
determine other countries' foreign, commercial and defence policies,
including those of the European Union members. It is as if our differing
interests were to be accounted disloyalty to the United States.
(Surprisingly, the Conservative Party's devotion to Britain's national
sovereignty does not lead them to object.)
Clement Attlee's remarks (on the subject of his decision to) when he set
up the British Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell - the beginning of the
UK's nuclear weapons programme in October 1945 may be recalled:
© Elizabeth Young, 2001.