Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Workshop - The 'War on Terror'
Sunday 31st July 2005

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Phyllis Bennis

Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and representative of United for Peace and Justice, USA

Thank-you all for coming, I’m glad to have the opportunity to talk about the question of the impact of what is actually still called the global war on terror, although some in the White House are realising that it was failure as a propaganda exercise. The G.W.O.T. - the Global War On Terror - the ‘GWOT’ as we like to say, has become the centrepiece of the how the US likes to talk about its global strategy at the moment. It’s important that we recognise that one piece of what the US claims is true, perversely, and that is this notion that September 11 changed everything. I would say that they’re right about the context, they’re wrong about the date.

It’s not really September 11 that changed everything, it’s September 12 that changed everything. That was when the United States announced what it was going to do to respond. That response has in fact changed the very nature of domestic and global policy all around the world. As much as we can say the metaphor of the ‘war on terror’ is a stupid idea, like saying you’re going to have war on a specific tactic, nonetheless it has taken on a life of it’s own. It is indeed a war, being waged in the name of the ‘war on terror’. It is not a metaphoric war, it is a very real war with military victims all over the world.

To challenge that we need a global movement that challenges the war as it is being fought, as well as the domestic and international consequences of that war. If we look at the framework that the Bush administration has taken up from the beginning, this notion of September 11 being an act of war, this is what set the stage to the response being an actual war. We fought, but didn’t win, for a different definition, that it was not an act of war but a crime against humanity of enormous scope. But nonetheless a crime that should have been responded to with a call for international justice, not global war.

When I first realised I was going to be coming here to Australia, a friend of mine who lives here now said to me that it was very good that I was going to have the chance to be in a place for a while where what happens doesn’t have automatic impact all around the world. He was saying that what happens in Australia doesn’t have the same immediate global impact, as what happens in the US. What I think is really wrong about that statement is that it doesn’t take into account the global credentialling processes that Bush has put into process and that your administration is so important to. It’s very important that Bush can look to Howard and say “this is my partner, my ally, a part of my coalition”. This notion of a coalition, which we understand to be a coalition of the coerced, not a coalition of the willing, plays a crucial role in the US claim of legitimacy for this war. So don’t underestimate the importance of what happens in Australia. It does have global significance in this campaign.

Aside from killing millions of people, tens of thousands of them in Iraq alone, what this war has done is to erode the difference between the so-called democracies and the acknowledged dictatorships of the world. The things that are carried out in dictatorships without any apologies, like detention without trial, torture, indefinite detention, all of these things are now acknowledged to be carried out in these so called democracies of the West. This is being lead by the greatest democracy of them all, the US, in a way that was never acknowledged before. We know that many of the things that have happened in Guantanamo Bay, In Abu Graib, and other prisons around the world, have happened for many years in US domestic prisons, it’s not something new and different. It’s not something surprising that many of the prison commanders in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere have their training not because of this aspect of their current work, but because they worked as prison guards in the United States and took with them that level of brutality to a global stage.

It’s part of the militarisation of domestic and foreign policy in the US. When we’re looking at how we challenge it we have to come back to building a global movement to challenge all of the aspects of the so called ‘war on terror’, because it is a very real war on all of us. It has different aspects in different countries. In some countries it means being bombed and killed by US attacks, in all of our countries it means being under attack by our own governments, given a new impunity by the US.

The US has a long and sordid history of alliances with all kinds of dictators around the world in the name of fighting communism. What it has today is very much the same thing, alliances with the worst types of dictatorships, like Uzbekistan, where there were recently reports of a so called dissident who was arrested and tortured, and the torture included boiling him alive until he died. This is now a close ally of the US who just announced yesterday, that in six months they would like to ask the US, politely to give up their air base in Uzbekistan. As far we can guess this is because Condoleeza Rice had the temerity to issue a very mild statement of concern about the possible human rights uneasiness in Uzbekistan.

We need a strategy that is global to challenge this. I spoke about this on Friday night, I think some of you might have been there, the notion of a three-pronged challenge to war and empire. The three parts being:

1. Global civil society organised in the streets: organisations, trade unions, peace movements, social movements.
2. The few numbers of governments that we can put enough pressure on to say ‘no’ to the United States, whether it’s ‘no’ to going to war, or ‘no’ to using these kinds of tactics against their own citizens.
3. The United Nations - when there are enough governments to force the UN to do what it’s own Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights - a UN founding document - requires, which is to ‘stand against the scourge of war and the denial of human rights’.

In that context we have to reclaim the use of international law. This means we have to study it and understand it and use it for our own methods, not simply say international law is a tool for them, for governments to use against us. They will use it against us, and they do but that does not mean that it’s not a tool that we can claim back and use to mobilise internationally to fight against this kind of abuse of our communities.

We need to look at the specific things we need to challenge. Torture. We don’t have a better tool than the international convention against torture that prohibits actually torture in the sense of serious physical or mental abuse, but also prohibits cruel and degrading activities. If a government says boiling somebody alive isn’t really torture there’s enough to incorporate all of what is going on here. It’s a tool for governments and for social movements as well. We have to grab it and use it. We can’t just point to it but we need to know how to use it.

One of the best examples of this has been around creating international war crimes tribunals on Iraq. The concluding tribunal, which involved 20 different countries, was held in Istanbul. It was very powerful, not because it concluded with Bush, Blaire and Howard being marched away in handcuffs - we don’t have that kind of power yet - but because it provided a serious, legally based, evaluation of the illegality of this war. It didn’t just say “this war was terrible and lots of people died”, it took that as a matter of course. What they looked at was what were the real violations of existing international law and asserted that as something that is within the framework of civil societies and social movements to uphold. So we set the stage for what will in the end, be an end to this kind of international impunity.

The link between the international human rights tribunals on Iraq and the International Criminal Court, for instance, is a very close one. Individuals and institutions are permitted to provide intelligence to the ICC asking for investigations and indictments. It’s on that basis that you have Henry Kissinger being forced to ask the State Department every time he travels whether or not the country he wants to visit might have charges against him. This is a very important development in recent years. The Pinochet precedent has made it very much more difficult for US backed dictatorships to get away with their crimes. We have to look to institutions like the UN, the International Criminal Court, and international law as weapons in our own fight. And we have to figure out how to use them.

If we look, for example, at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Graib and other prisons and the abuses that have been so typical right from the beginning. We would not know about this if it was not for the soldiers leaking the photographs and exposing the US. This has allowed for the moral deficit of the US to build a huge hole in the credibility of the US in the so-called global war on terror. If we look for a way to challenge what is going on in Abu Graib, Guantanamo Bay and the other prisons we can look directly to the Convention Against Torture, the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremburg precedents, all these international legal instruments, as instruments for our fight. We’re not just out there saying “it’s wrong and we don’t like it” because it’s not only wrong, it’s illegal. And that gives us a hugely strengthened capacity in our organisations to say we are not going to stand by while our governments become illegal perpetrators of this violence, outlaw states, rogue states.

I think that most Americans, and I imagine most Australians, do not want to live in a rogue state, do not want to live under out-of-control governments. They want to live under states of law as we always imagined we did. We find out that we are not a government or country of laws, we are a country of outlaws. We are ruled by outlaws and this is the basis for our challenge. The global war on terror can be defined as a permanent preventative war. That is itself illegal. It can’t be described as ‘preemptive’, or ‘preemption’ because there was no ‘emption’, there was no imminent threat from Iraq. Whatever threat there had been from Afghanistan had already been used up at the World Trade Centre. There was no longer an imminent threat. None of these wars are lawful. They are the ones who are illegal. Our are communities are not.

The key to our mobilisation must be to bring the communities most directly affected – Muslim, Arab, South Asian communities and immigrant communities in general who are the most directly targeted in these attacks into the centre of the peace movement. It’s that intersection that will give us the strength to fight back and the strength to reclaim our democracies.

Further resources

Institute for Policy Studies

www.endtheoccupation.org

Overseas campaigns

United for Peace and Justice , USA – www.unitedforpeace.org

Stop the War Coalition, UK – www.stopwar.org.uk

Philippines BAYAN (New Patriotic Alliance) - www.bayan.p

Anti-war campaigns in Australia

Victorian Peace Network www.vicpeace.org

Peace Tasmania www.peacetasmania.org

Sydney Peace and Justice Network www.nswpeace.org

Queensland Peace Network www.qldpeace.org

NOWAR SA (South Australia) www.nowar-sa.net

ACT NOW (Canberra) www.actnow.canberra.net.au

No War Alliance, Western Australia www.nwawa.org

Medical Association for the Prevention of War (Aust.) www.mapw.org.au/iraq/iraq-index.htm

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