Stop the Next War Now (29 page)

We’re responsible for cocreating the world we want to see. Where there is love and consciousness in action, there is beauty, and there is peace. It’s time for the revolution of the heart.

“There is enough for all.The earth is a generous mother;

she will provide in plentiful abundance food for all her children

if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and in peace.”

—Bourke Coekran

OIL ADDICTS

ANONYMOUS

JENNIFER KRILL

Jennifer Krill is the director of the Zero Emissions Campaign at Rainforest Action Network.

Hi, my name is Jennifer, and it’s time for us all to admit that we have a problem: we are addicted to oil. The United States represents only 5 percent of the world’s population yet consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil. From the Middle East to Nigeria to Colombia, more than half of our oil comes from conflict regions. We are willing to topple governments to get more oil. We will risk the principles of democracy itself in order to get our fix.

Today we are fighting for access to oil, but our next war may occur because of our consumption of oil. According to a leaked Pentagon report, global climate change poses a greater threat to our peace and security than international terrorism. Global warming is melting ancient glaciers, warming the world’s oceans (thus raising sea levels), and intensifying catastrophic weather events. As frayed resources are pressed to the limit, climate change will provoke increased conflict.

If oil is such a dangerous substance, why do we continue to abuse it? We burn most of our oil for transportation—specifically for automobiles. One out of every seven barrels of oil globally is consumed on America’s highways alone. Carmakers that refuse to improve fuel efficiency are like dealers keeping us hooked. The worst culprit is the Ford Motor Company. Ford’s fleet has had the lowest average fuel efficiency in America for five years running. Ford’s gas-guzzling SUVs, like the Excursion and Expedition, get worse gas mileage than the Model-T did eighty years ago. But Ford is far from alone; think of General Motors selling a military vehicle (the Hummer) as a family car!

It’s time for a twelve-step program to break America’s oil addiction and halt global climate destruction.

What you can do as an individual:

1. Declare independence from oil. Walk, ride a bike, or take mass transit.

2. If you must drive, carpool and choose the most efficient vehicle you can.

3. Demand zero-emission cars. Tell the Ford Motor Company to stop driving America’s oil addiction. Take action now at www.jumpstartford.com.

What we all can do as a movement:

4. Separate oil from state. Get big oil money out of politics and get politicians to stop subsidizing big oil. Visit www.publicintegrity.org.

5. Green the grid. We cannot halt global warming without clean energy. Demand solar and wind alternatives. Find out how at www.seen.org and www.nrel.gov.

6. Support sustainable mobility. Help encourage bike lanes and mass transit and discourage sprawl in your community. Go to www.newrules.org for information.

7. Reform global finance. Get banks to stop making destructive investments in oil and fossil-fuel development. Instead, encourage them to join Citi-group and Bank of America and start supporting sustainable energy and transportation alternatives. Learn more at www.ran.org.

What Ford and the other carmakers must do:

8. Bring today’s cars into the twenty-first century. Existing clean-car improvements are sitting on shelves instead of in Ford’s engines. If Ford used today’s technology to clean up its internal combustion engine, its cars would get an average of 40 miles per gallon, a big improvement over Ford’s 2004 average of 18.8 miles per gallon.

9. Develop hybrid electric vehicles. The battery system in hybrids uses energy that most engines waste. But hybrids do still burn some oil, which carmakers could limit further with a “plug-in hybrid” option, allowing consumers to use solar-power electric batteries for short commutes and a gas tank for long trips.

10. Find other alternatives. Use intelligent alternative fuels like biodiesel and vegetable oil, or create solar-charged electric vehicles. With a simple conversion, diesel engines like those used by Mercedes and Volkswagen could run on vegetable oil. Full-electric vehicles plugged in to solar power offer an affordable zero-emission alternative.

11. Stop using hydrogen-fuel cells as an excuse to delay production of the easy alternatives above. To produce hydrogen, we must find an affordable, climate-neutral means such as solar power. Electric vehicles, available and on the road today, are a sustainable shortcut. We don’t need to wait a decade to begin our clean-energy revolution.

“While antiterrorism and traditional national security rhetoric will

be employed to explain risky deployments abroad, a growing

number of American soldiers and sailors will be committed to

the protection of overseas oil fields, pipeline, refineries, and

tanker routes. Inevitably, we will pay a higher price in blood for every

additional gallon of oil we obtain from abroad.”

—Michael Klare

BRING HALLIBURTON

HOME

NAOMI KLEIN

Naomi Klein, award-winning Canadian journalist and activist, is the author of
Fences and Windows
, and
No Logo
. She wrote and coproduced
The Take
, a recent documentary about the worker movement in Argentina, with her husband, Avi Lewis.The following is excerpted from an article published November 24, 2003, in the
Nation
.

Cancel the contracts. Ditch the deals. Rip up the rules.

Those are a few suggestions for slogans that could help unify the growing movement against the occupation of Iraq. So far, activist debates have focused on whether progressives should demand that the United States begin a complete withdrawal of troops, or that it cede power to the United Nations.

But the “troops out” debate overlooks an important fact. If every last soldier pulled out of the Gulf tomorrow and a sovereign government came to power, Iraq would still be occupied: by laws written in the interest of another country, by foreign corporations controlling Iraq’s essential services, by 70 percent unemployment sparked by public-sector layoffs.

Any movement serious about Iraqi self-determination must call for an end not only to Iraq’s military occupation but to its economic colonization as well. That means reversing the shock-therapy reforms that former U.S. occupation chief Paul Bremer fraudulently passed off as “reconstruction” and canceling all privatization contracts flowing from those reforms.

How can such an ambitious goal be achieved? Easy: by showing that Bremer’s reforms were illegal to begin with. They clearly violate the international convention governing the behavior of occupying forces, the Hague Regulations of 1907 (the companion to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, both ratified by the United States), as well as the U.S. Army’s own code of war.

The Hague Regulations state that an occupying power must respect “unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.” The Coalition Provisional Authority has shredded that simple rule with gleeful defiance. Iraq’s constitution outlaws the privatization of key state assets, and it bars foreigners from owning Iraqi firms. No plausible argument can be made that the CPA was “absolutely prevented” from respecting those laws, and yet the CPA overturned them unilaterally.

On September 19, 2003, Bremer enacted the now-infamous Order 39. It announced that two hundred Iraqi state companies would be privatized; decreed that foreign firms could retain 100 percent ownership of Iraqi banks, mines, and factories; and allowed those firms to move 100 percent of their profits out of Iraq. The
Economist
declared the new rules a “capitalist dream.”

Order 39 violated the Hague Regulations in other ways as well. The convention states that occupying powers “shall be regarded only as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile State, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct.”

Bouvier’s Law Dictionary
defines
usufruct
(possibly the ugliest word in the English language) as an arrangement that grants one party the right to use and derive benefit from another’s property “without altering the substance of the thing.” Put more simply, if you are a house sitter, you can eat the food in the fridge, but you can’t sell the house and turn it into condos. And yet that is just what Bremer is doing: What could more substantially alter “the substance” of a public asset than to turn it into a private one?

In case the CPA was still unclear on this detail, the U.S. Army’s Law of Land Warfare states that “the occupant does not have the right of sale or unqualified use of [nonmilitary] property.” This is pretty straightforward: bombing something does not give you the right to sell it. There is every indication that the CPA is well aware of the lawlessness of its privatization scheme. In a leaked memo written on March 26, 2003, British attorney general Lord Peter Goldsmith warned prime minister Tony Blair that “the imposition of major structural economic reforms would not be authorized by international law.”

So far, most of the controversy surrounding Iraq’s reconstruction has focused on the waste and corruption in the awarding of contracts. This badly misses the scope of the violation: even if the sell-off of Iraq were conducted with full transparency and open bidding, it would still be illegal for the simple reason that Iraq is not America’s to sell.

The UN Security Council’s recognition of the United States and Britain’s occupation authority provides no legal cover. The UN resolution passed in May 2003 specifically required the occupying powers to “comply fully with their obligations under international law including in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907.”

According to a growing number of international legal experts, this means that if the next Iraqi government decides it doesn’t want to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Bechtel or Halliburton, it will have powerful legal grounds to renationalize assets that were privatized under CPA edicts. Juliet Blanch, global head of energy and international arbitration for the huge international law firm Norton Rose, says that because Bremer’s reforms directly contradict Iraq’s constitution, they are “in breach of international law and are likely not enforceable.” Blanch argues that the CPA “has no authority or ability to sign those [privatization] contracts” and that a sovereign Iraqi government would have “quite a serious argument for renationalization without paying compensation.” Firms facing this type of expropriation would, according to Blanch, have “no legal remedy.”

The only way out for the administration is to make sure that Iraq’s next government is anything but sovereign. It must be pliant enough to ratify the CPA’s illegal laws, which will then be celebrated as the happy marriage of free markets and free people. Once that happens, it will be too late: the contracts will be locked in, the deals done, and the occupation of Iraq permanent.

Which is why antiwar forces must use this fast-closing window to demand that the next Iraqi government be free from the shackles of these reforms. It’s too late to stop the war, but it’s not too late to deny Iraq’s invaders the myriad economic prizes they went to war to collect in the first place.

It’s not too late to cancel the contracts and ditch the deals.

“There is a revolution under way that will take us toward a distributed

energy system based on efficiency and progress in photovoltaics, fuel

cells, wind power and microturbines. It can be slowed by

shortsightedness driven by greed, but it cannot be stopped.”

—David Orr

ENDING POVERTY,

ENDING TERRORISM

BENAZIR BHUTTO

Benazir Bhutto is chairperson of the Pakistan People’s Party and a former prime minister of Pakistan.This essay first appeared in the
Guardian
,August 9, 2004.

While the world focuses on the war against terror, the war against poverty slides onto the back burner. Since the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the world has seen the political rise of those on the religious margins coupled with a growing gap between the rich and the poor.

There appear to be groups in both the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds who believe that a clash of civilizations is needed. The Christian fundamentalists believe that Christ will be resurrected once the people of the Jewish faith are resettled on the banks of the Euphrates. The Muslim extremists believe that the Mahdi will arrive when the battle between Muslims and non-Muslims intensifies.

Extremist groups are rising in the Muslim world, in India, in America. They spew hatred against Muslims, or Jews, or Christians. The extremists are united in hate, in intolerance, and in sparking religious wars where they can prosper.

This political scenario is threatening to undo the entire global social fabric built since the end of the Second World War—one based on the tolerance between different faiths, races, genders, and cultures. A clash of civilizations can lead to Armageddon, where there will be no winners on earth. But perhaps the religious extremists are not searching for winners on earth.

The challenge for the world community is to emphasize the values of tolerance, moderation, and interfaith understanding, on which rest the pillars of a less violent world. However, the World Trade Center attack and the events in Iraq have made that more difficult. The former led to suspicion against Muslims and a loss of civil liberties; the latter, to a countersuspicion from Muslims as to the real purposes of the war in Iraq. The inability to find weapons of mass destruction and the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib undermined the reasons given for the Iraq war.