President Bush’s announcement of a cooperative agreement with India on nuclear power generation technology should have come as no surprise. As early as 2001 the Bush Administration was looking at ways of expanding the American relationship with India. The 2004 India-U.S. Next Step initiative suggested a ‘presumption of approval’ for American dual use nuclear equipment exports to India, and that policy is essentially what the Bush Administration’s agreement with India attempts to accomplish.

However, the Administration’s initiative is not legal under current American law, and poses a significant danger of collapsing the core obligations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT) – the central source of authority for global non-proliferation, and the very treaty under which the Administration currently seeks to refer Iran to the Security Council. In order for the Administration to open India to American exports of nuclear technology, the Congress will have to pass a concurrent resolution waiving several provisions of the Atomic Energy Act. (for details Download CRS Report).

There are significant reasons why Congress should not do so. The most salient being the damage it would do international reliance on core commitments of the NNPT, and the resulting encouragement of nuclear proliferation and regional escalation, especially in Asia.

Political science professors Poole and Rosenthal analyze the political behavior of Congress over time using Roll Call votes to determine the relative position of representatives on a basic liberal-moderate-conservative scale. The results of the their study confirm what many would intuit; that American politics is becoming increasingly polarized, and the views of elected officials have become more extreme.

The data sorts officials by a single score reflecting their voting patterns. The lower a score, the more liberal the official; the higher, the more conservative. This ranking separates the parties with perfect accuracy, except for a few outliers who persist in marginally hostile districts. For Arizona in the 109th Congress, the data shows that several of Arizona’s representative are among the most extremely conservative in the nation – I would contend far more conservative than the mainstream of even the Republican electorate. The Arizona Delegation is ranked here, with #1 being the most liberal member of the House, and #435 being the most conservative.

Another leader in the ‘Coalition of the Willing’, Hon. John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, has apparently had his eyes forced open and is now seeing reality more clearly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more heartfelt description of a man’s conscience moving him from advocating for and participating in an atrocity, to having deep and fundamental doubts about the wisdom and utility of the whole enterprise.

John Howard is certainly no peacenik; he has been one of President Bush’s most reliable allies on Iraq. A crack of this size in the Coalition represents an unavoidable challenge to the continued legitimacy of American military prescence in Iraq. Democratic leaders and candidates should certainly seize upon this statement an its contents to push harder for complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.

Of course, I and others like me, will disagree still with Howard that the invasion could ever have been a success if only executed with greater planning and intelligence. I think that the very idea of invading another country that was not an immediate military threat to us or our allies is not only a stragetic blunder of monstrous proportions, but monstrously immoral.

The poor fiction that our government honestly thought Iraq an immediate threat to international peace and American security is now revealed as a tissue of barely plausible lies, as was apparent to so many from the begining. Like any enterprise founded upon lies and mendacity, Bush’s Iraq policy had to collapse under its own weight with such a false foundation. The tragedy, and the horrible crime, of Iraq is the thousands of our fellow citizens and innocent Iraqis claimed and maimed by that collapse. Bush is a criminal fully culpable for all those honored dead, and all those still yet to die as his monster lumbers forward inexorably. He deserves the same fate as that criminal Ossama bin Laden, for he surely has as much innocent blood on his hands, if not more.

The world took another step closer to accepting the hard and terrible truth that Iraq has been a tragic mistake with Howard’s appologia. Tomorrow, perhaps it can start to step past such a passive definition, and begin to see it for what it truly is: one of the greatest war-crimes of our time.

12 March 2006

TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER
THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP
ADDRESS TO THE DEAKIN SOCIETY, MELBOURNE
"REFLECTIONS ON THE SITUATION IN IRAQ"
 
 During our recent celebrations of the Coalition’s ten years in power, I have, as Prime Minister, been publicly reflecting on our Party’s many great achievements, as was appropriate to do. But on this occasion, among old friends and senior colleagues, I wish to share some unsettling thoughts about the situation in Iraq.