America and the World: The Balance Between Dominance and Cooperation - Adelphi University

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure to be here.
I want thank Adelphi University and my good friend Steve Malito for making this event possible.
Of course with the war against Iraq underway, I'm sure all of our thoughts are with our soldiers and the sacrifices they and their families are making. I think it would be fitting if we each ask god to bless all those killed, injured and captured as POWs in a prayer for peace.
I for one have been up late every night since the war began. For I believe that the President's course of action will have far reaching consequences for the world, for the Middle East and most of all for the security of Americans at home and abroad.
Future generations of Americans will look back at this moment in history. Ultimately, they and the world will determine how this war changed the world, whether its costs in terms of lives, resources and lost opportunities was worth it and whether it made the world a more peaceful and stable place for us all?
As I think about America and the World: Global Dominance and Cooperation, one word comes to mind. The word is BALANCE.
Balance is one principle which lies at the heart of a wide range of challenges we as Americans face domestically.
It also captures one of my concerns about how the Bush Administration's policies are shaping how our nation relates to the world and perhaps more importantly how the world relates to you and I as Americans.
Regardless of your perspective or political affiliation, I think we all can agree that now more then ever, we as Americans must become more involved in discussing the foreign policy actions of our government and how those actions affect us locally.
Institutions of learning like Adelphi, must play a leading role in our society in raising the awareness of our young people and our future leaders, about complex global issues and challenges.
Ladies and gentleman, I sit on the House International Relations Committee and I think everyone here knows that while I support our troops 100%, I oppose the American unilaterally led pre-emptive war against Iraq launched by the Bush Administration.
Why? Because it reflects a wide range of serious imbalances in this Administration's approach to real world foreign and domestic policy challenges.
Imbalances in areas such as America's approach to combating the underlying root causes of international terrorism and how we use our foreign policy instruments of diplomacy and force. These and other imbalances not only threaten the institutions (The UN, WTO, IMF, etc), norms and laws which are the foundation of global order. They also threaten the political, economic and social security of Americans here at home.
While I want to focus my remarks on the larger foreign and domestic policy dimensions which go beyond the war with Iraq, I want to make a few specific comments about the war.
On Friday March 21st, I watched Secretary Rumsfeld outline the objectives of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He noted the following.
1. Protect Americans and the World. Given our global military capabilities, regional defense treaties, and Iraq's capabilities to be a threat, I am still not convinced that America or the "World" is in grave danger from threats posed by Saddam.
With no fly zones, economic sanctions, support for continued U.N. inspections and world wide anti-war protests, it is obvious that the "world" did not ask America to protect it from Iraq.
I have spoken to defense and intelligence officials from several of Iraq's neighbors, none of them ever said that Saddam was the greatest threat to their national security.
If Saddam's neighbors were truly in danger, why did most of them ask us to pay them to put US troops in their countries?
Our own CIA put out a report just a few days before our War Resolution vote saying that Hussein was so weak economically and militarily he was really not capable of attacking anyone unless forced into it. Hence, we should not be surprised that many in the world question the legitimacy of this war.
Regardless of what you hear about America being supported by a "global coalition of the willing", a more accurate description is that we are leading a "coalition of the few and undemocratic".
Of the 30- 35 members of this coalition: Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, south Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan.
Less than five are providing direct military support, eleven of the countries were measured to have "not free" or "partially free" democracies; seventeen were found to have high levels of corruption, and the U.S. State Department concluded that in eight nations, "The overall human rights situation remained extremely poor."
It makes you wonder how such a group truly represents a new international order of free nations, all committed to bearing the burden of protecting the world and building democracy in Iraq.
Particularly when so many in the world fear that war will hurt the global economy and could threaten the success of the upcoming trade negotiations in the WTO.
Friends we should be clear, in this war America is part of a minority not the majority. The rise in anti-American sentiments world wide after having a high level of global support after 9/11.
The loss of support from traditional allies, the closing of US embassies in a number of African countries, the booing of our national anthem in Canada.
I fear these are all just the tips of the iceberg in symbolizing how alone we now are in this world. The consequences will be felt long after the war and in other political and economic arenas.
2. Disarm Iraq's Weapons, Capabilities and Delivery . If this war is showing us anything, in comparison to our armed forces we may have trouble finding much to disarm in Iraq.
How should we interpret the fact that our military forces in southern Iraq secured oil fields, before alleged weapons sites?
We know Iraq has some weapons and some capabilities to produce some weapons. After all, UN inspections were finding them, we once sold Saddam the pre-cursors for such weapons and Iraqi scientists who studied in the US are intelligent human beings. Does the war address this realities in the long term?
In terms of Iraq's capabilities to deliver weapons of mass destruction, past and present wars indicate that Iraq has limited capabilities to attack and defend itself. Many experts say that terrorists are more likely to obtain weapons and delivery systems from former Soviet Union countries and North Korea, not Iraq.
3. Gather intelligence on Iraq's links to global terrorism and weapons of mass destruction networks. It is amazing to note that one of the war's objectives is also one of the primary reasons for going to war!! Iraq's links to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. I thought we knew this to be true, otherwise why we would put the lives of American soldiers in harms way?
In spite of our best efforts and the overzealous desire of some Administration supporters to find such evidence (including Administration officials pressuring intelligence officers to make up such links), the CIA has reported that no such links have been found between Iraq and those who attacked us on 9/11.
As a former prosecutor, my reasonable doubts are based on the fact that we now know that the British intelligence report on Iraq's weapons used by Secretary Powell at the UN, was plagiarized from an academic journal and the documents cited by the Administration, as evidence of Iraq trying to buy Uranium were forgeries.
I also question why war is this Administration's solution for international weapons proliferation. Everyone knows that nations like North Korea, China and Russia are the leading sources of proliferation. Will war be used against these nations?
For an Administration so bent on preventing weapons of mass destruction from getting into the hands of nations which could threaten us and the world, why did it oppose adding an inspections treaty to the global Biological Weapons Convention last year?
4. Regime Change and Democracy. Neither I nor the majority of the world support Saddam Hussein. As an American, I'm even more ashamed that during the 1980s our government and over 20 US companies, joined several of our allied Arab and western governments and companies in providing billions in aid and exports of the products and weapons capabilities to Saddam's regime which are now cited as the reasons for war.
Given our history and present day track record of supporting undemocratic regimes throughout the world and in the Middle East to protect US interests, we should not be surprised that many around the world are skeptical of America's intentions.
When the Bush Administration talks of liberating the people of Iraq from a dictatorship, it is a weak attempt to give this war a just and moral image to the American people.
However we should understand that some of the leading skeptics, may be the Iraqi people themselves. Why?
Well don't you think that as "liberators" the Bush Administration might want to first apologize to the Iraqi people and to all Americans, for the fact that previous Administrations supported and armed Saddam while he was brutally killing his people? Particularly when some of the same individuals in Bush's cabinet, served in those administrations.
Don't you think that the Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north remember that at the end of the last gulf war, the first President Bush encouraged them to revolt and then allowed Saddam to crush them?
If Bush is truly serious about "liberating" the Iraqi people, creating a democracy in Iraq, and wants us to believe that such a development will be a domino for spreading democracy throughout the middle east region, then I think we need to remember a couple of things:
1. Americans should remember that many Iraqis have not forgotten that our ally Britain once brutally colonized Iraq in the name of civilizing and liberating the Iraqi people and used chemical weapons against them.
In fact British Secretary of War Winston Churchill once wrote the following regarding how the British should pacify Iraq: " I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against un-civilized tribes."
2. That a truly democratic Iraq might adopt anti-western positions, because economic sanctions and two wars have helped to turn Iraq once the most developed nation in the Arab world, into one of the poorest nations in the Arab world;
3. That the Iraqi Shiite majority might choose to have closer ties with Iran (a country Bush calls part of the axis of evil); and
4. That the Kurds in northern Iraq might choose to form their own state, which could lead to a confrontation with Turkey.
Hence, it will be interesting to see how this Administration actually handles the desires of Iraq's people to not only be free of Saddam, but free to choose their own future based on their own interests, not US interests. Afghanistan will be a good example of how this Administration keeps its promises about helping to rebuild Iraq.
Personally, I fear that a protracted US military occupation of Iraq, in the name of our security and interests but at the expense of democracy, will be necessary to manage these contradictions. However such an occupation will ultimately produce even more problems for us, the region and the world.
I've digressed too long on Iraq. Let me now turn to the primary points I wanted to share about the concerns I have with this administration's unbalanced foreign and domestic policy approaches to our security, and the consequences that these approaches may produce for us all.
The events of 9/11 have shown us how inter-connected the world is in the 21st century. We find ourselves living in a global economy with greater levels of trade and investment.
But also in a world with greater global challenges (poverty, injustice, conflicts, failed states, and the HIV-AIDS pandemic), which America and the world must address. Some of these issues also help to create conditions conducive for terrorism.
Terrorism is a global symptom of some of the global challenges and it will require global solutions. As the world's super power America's role will be key. However three issues are apparent to me for us to play the kind of role necessary.
1. I question the Administration's foreign and domestic policy balance in how it approaches real world challenges and the security of Americans at home and abroad.
2. In spite of our global military power, there are real limits to what it can do without the help and cooperation of others.
3. Our government has to learn from previous mistakes in our foreign policy actions to better balance how America supports peace, stability and democracy, while pursuing US interests.
Unfortunately, in each of these areas I fear the Bush Administration's foreign and domestic policies are unbalanced, fail to recognize the limits of unilateralism, and reflect a failure to learn from the past. On the foreign policy side.
1. With so much focus on the war against Iraq, we as legislators and the American people can't lose sight of this administration's true rationale for such a war.
I know my friends at FOX news won't like me saying this, but if you watch their coverage of the war in Iraq, they have a banner which reads, "War Against Terror." However, FOX is wrong!
The war against Iraq is not part of the war against terrorism. The war against Iraq is a test case for applying the Bush Administration's new national security strategy based on a doctrine of global military dominance, the principle of using preemptive military force, and a blurring of the war on terror!
The world is fighting with us in the war against terrorism. We are part of a global coalition in fighting Al Qaeda. Many of the successes in that war, are the result of working with European nations like France and Germany and Islamic nations like Egypt, Malaysia and Pakistan.
Yet they and most of the rest of the world are not fighting with us in a war against Iraq. They don't believe Saddam is linked to Al Qaeda and hence Iraq is not a part of their war against terror.
2. The Bush Administration presented the preemption based national security strategy in 2002, as a new way to respond to new threats posed to America in the new post September 11th world.
However, many of the elements of the strategy are actually old ideas of using preemptive military force found in the 1992 Defense Planning Guide. A document authored by current Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who served in the first Bush Administration.
Why is the Bush Administration repackaging old ideas which were rejected a decade ago, as a new policy approach to respond to new threats?
The preemptive doctrine of the Bush Administration, claiming the right to unilaterally strike anyone, anywhere and anytime we feel someone has the capability to be a potential threat, is clearly inconsistent with international law, threatens global security, hurts development in poor countries and has flawed premises.
As the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in Geneva said last Tuesday; "An invasion of Iraq based on a preemption would be illegal and tantamount to a war of aggression".
If other nations like China, India or Pakistan adopt this rationale, substituting the use of preemptive military action for negotiations to resolve conflicts, the Bush doctrine could become a catalyst for greater instability in the 21st century.
The doctrine is also flawed because even as we spend more on defense then the next 19 nations combined, using it unilaterally globally is still limited by our dependence on others for military bases, overflight and shipping rights, and help with security.
Future generations will judge whether this doctrine and war in the name of regime change or peace, actually caused irreparable damage to global peace, security, human rights and democracy.
3. One of the many reasons why I worry about this war against Iraq, is because I fear it will make Americans less safe at home and abroad as opposed to more secure.
Why? Because the war jeopardies the critical help we are receiving from many nations, particular the moderate Muslim nations, in protecting Americans from known Al Qaeda terrorist threats around the world.
Our own State Department has stated that success against Al Qaeda comes more from cooperation with others, than from our military power. Attacking Iraq will likely make it harder forMuslim governments to continue to partner with us in intelligence sharing and counter-terrorism activities, because such cooperation is opposed by the majority of their citizens.
4. This last point also relates to the Administration's ideas that unilateral war can be used to bring peace and ultimately promote democracy. At a minimum, this assertion is questionable and is also potentially dangerous.
As I watch government security forces violently crack down on popular civilian protests to US policies in friendly Arab nations like Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, and Lebanon I wonder how these developments help foster democracy in the region?
I would argue that America must learn that if we continue to pursue our interests in the region, in ways which are opposed by the majority in the region, asking governments to support us requires those governments to oppose the will of their citizens.
If we then support those governments in denying the rights of their citizens to protest, are we helping democracy or perpetuating a lack of democracy which helps to radicalize those protests in ways which strengthen extremists?
For example, as we all watched the TV images of the first night of the "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad with what was estimated to include 600 cruise missiles, costing a halfmillion dollars each, I kept asking myself if we had just created a $300 million dollar recruitment video for Osama Bin Laden?
Even if I'm wrong, that's $300 million spent in a few hours, 25% of what the Bush Administration requested to spend all of next year, for its new global development assistance program the Millennium Challenge Account. Where is the balance? Allow me now to turn to the domestic front.
1. Ladies and gentleman, in my view, to seriously talk about the security of Americans in a balanced manner we can't just talk about threats from terrorism. The security of Americans also depends on access to jobs, housing, health care and education.
It requires government policies which support long term growth and strengthens the competitiveness of our firms and workers.
Hence, when we talk about the runaway fiscal budget and trade deficits of our nation(which this Administration seems to be ignoring) I also see these as threats to the security of Americans.
Wars costs money and this war is going to cost the American tax papers or their children a great deal of money. The President will finally reveal his estimates of the costs in his supplemental budget request to the Congress this week.
First, the Bush Administration's FY2004 starts with a budget deficit of approximately $350 billion. That deficit does not include one cent for the war against Iraq.
Current estimates say that we have spent $20 billion to build up for the war. That running the war will cost $9 billion a month. After the war ends, we are looking at approximately $50 billion per year in occupation and reconstruction costs.
Plus we have to throw in the money being paid in additional aid to Egypt, Jordan and Israel. Now, maybe all of these costs could be justified in the name of the security of Americans.
However, we should note that all of this, the billion dollars a day we spend on defense plus the deaths of American soldiers, and the additional anti-American sentiments being generated are the costs of fighting a regime which has a total military budget of about $1.4 billion, less than three-tenths of 1 percent of ours.
2. President Bush has stated that after we spend US tax dollars to destroy Iraq, we will spend US tax dollars, plus their oil, to help rebuild Iraq. There is talk about other nations and the UN helping to pay the rebuilding costs. That remains to be seen.
With that being said, I note that the Bush Administration seems to have a real plan for how to finance the reconstruction of Iraq. A plan that speaks volumes in comparison to their domestic budget plan.
For example: The Administration has already solicited closed uncompetitive bids from 5 companies, including Vice President Chaney's former company Halliburton's Kellogg Brown and Root for $900 million in USG funded contracts.
In addition, a democratic colleague of mine from Illinois (Rep. Emanuel) noted on the house floor last week that the administration's postwar budget request would build more housing, more schools, and go further in providing health care for pregnant women in Iraq, than the Republican proposed budget provides for Americans at home.
For example, Medicaid provides insurance coverage for over one-third of the live births nationally here, yet Medicaid is scheduled for a $95 billion cut. In Iraq after the war, maternity care will be guaranteed for 100 percent of the population.
Under education, the U.S. budget cuts Head Start for 28,000 children, cuts education spending by 8 percent, zeroes out 40 new programs, like technology and Star Schools. In Iraq, there will be guaranteed books and supplies for 100 percent enrollment of 4 million children in Iraq.
Teacher quality programs in America are cut by $9.3 billion, but 25,000 schools in Iraq will be rebuilt and renovated at standard levels of quality.
In terms of housing, the Republican budget only has enough dollars for 5,000 new affordable housing units; yet in Iraq, the plan is for 20,000 new units of housing.
Under Transportation, highway funding in America is cut by $6 billion over the next 10 years. In Iraq 3,000 miles of new roads will be rebuilt.
I am not against the reconstruction budget for Iraq. If you want to help build democracy, that should be the commitment of our country. In fact, I seriously hope America will keep such promises 5 and 10 years from now.
On top of all these deficits and all of the promised extra expenditures, I have not even included the huge question of the Bush Administration's proposed trillion dollar tax cuts, some of which I could support if they helped the majority of Americans.
Once again I ask, if this is really about the security of Americans where is the balance? Let me end with these points.
Some in the Bush Administration believe that the United States must not only be more powerful than others or the most powerful in the world, we must be absolutely powerful.
However, such thinking fails to recognize the global and domestic imbalances and insecurities that would be produced by such thinking in today's inter-dependent world. I am not the only one who has such questions. Let me share with you a couple of quotes:
"A U.S. attack on Iraq is a prescription for the decline and fall of the American empire.'' Charlie Reese, a staunch conservative.
"An invasion of Iraq is likely the most thoughtless action in modern history." Paul Craig Roberts, who was one of the highest-ranking Treasury Department officials under President Reagan and now a nationally syndicated conservative columnist.
"The issue before us is not whether the United States should end the regime of Saddam Hussein, but whether we as a Nation are prepared to occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years." James Webb, a hero of Vietnam and President Reagan's Secretary of the Navy.
"President George W. Bush's speech on Iraq is significant mostly because it reveals that he long ago made a decision for war and has always viewed the inspection process as an impediment to war to be overcome rather than a means to avoid war. War was always his first option." Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow with the Cato Institute.
"It is very much against every conservative tradition to support preemptive war. I do sincerely believe the true conservative position, the traditional conservative position is against this war." Congress John Duncan's Conservatives Against a War with Iraq Statement on the House Floor - February 26, 2003.
I offer these comments just in case anyone thought I was a bleeding heart liberal!! But seriously, If America uses its power to preemptively strike others, then the American people must understand that it will:
1. Weaken one of the greatest sources of America's power, the moral legitimacy of how and when we use our military strength;
2. Coupled with the Bush Administration's hostility towards multilateral non-proliferation efforts, (including our rejection of adding an inspection regime to the global Biological Weapons Convention), it gives other states an incentive to either acquire or speed up the development of weapons programs as a deterrent to a US preemptive attack. This will not lead to greater global stability or enhance the security of Americans at home and abroad.
Not only does a national security doctrine of preemption indicate a dangerous devaluation of diplomacy as an instrument of foreign policy. In addition, I believe it is a disservice for the strongest nation in the world to adopt such a policy, because it represents a policy of fear.
I am convinced that if it were not for the climate of fear in America after 9/11, sustained by repeated terrorist warnings, President Bush would not have been able to make a convincing case to the American people justifying a unilateral pre-emptive war against another country that was not preparing to attack us.
It troubles me that America's moral authority to work for peace may be reduced in the world. The Bush Administration seems to truly believe that using precison guided bombs and missiles makes war humane and that war can be fought in the name of peace. Both kinds of thinking will likely be copied by others as a rationale for increasingly resorting to the use of military force in the name of peace.
Friends, we can use our strength to provide leadership in the world via cooperation, or via military dominance. It is the unbalance towards the latter which may extend our power, but it will make Americans less secure at home and abroad.
However, if we choose balanced approaches and use all of our policy instruments in cooperation with the world to address our security needs and global challenges, we can make positive changes at home and abroad.
The long term security of Americans is better served by global peace, development and democracy, not simply extending our military power to pursue an unbalanced concept of US interests. Thank you.