[Peace-discuss] NYT: Yale "Law" Warmonger Oona Sheds Crocodile Tears for Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact

[David Swanson]

How Outlawing War Changed the World in 1928

By David Swanson
http://davidswanson.org/how-outlawing-war-changed-the-world-in-1928/

When I wrote a book <http://davidswanson.org/outlawry> about the
Kellogg-Briand Pact my goals were to draw lessons from the movement that
created it, and to call attention to its existence as a still-current law
being routinely violated — in hopes of encouraging compliance. After all,
it is a law that bans nations from engaging in war — the primary thing my
nation’s government does, with a half-dozen U.S. wars going at any time now.

Now Oona Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro have published *The
Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World*.
Their goals seems to be to show us how different and worse the world was in
certain ways before the Pact, and to claim for the pact enormous success
and general compliance.

I have learned a great deal from this phenomenal book, easily the best book
I’ve read in years. I could write an essay about each of its over 400
pages. While I agree with a great deal of it and strongly disagree with
certain parts, the two are easily separable. The brilliant sections are no
less valuable because of those sections that fall short.

This book constitutes the ultimate refutation of the childishly simplistic
notion that because World War II followed the outlawing of war in 1928 that
outlawing was a failure — a standard that as far as I know has never been
applied to any other law. (Has no one driven drunk since the banning of
drunk driving?) In fact, the very first prosecutions for violation of the
law, at Nuremberg and Tokyo, have been followed by a reduction in wars that
has most notably included the absence of any further wars waged directly
between wealthy well-armed nations — at least so far.

<https://i0.wp.com/davidswanson.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/scott.jpg>As
Hathaway and Shapiro show, the Peace Pact of Paris has so transformed the
world that it is hard to recall what preceded it. War was legal in 1927.
Both sides of a war were legal. Atrocities committed during wars were
almost always legal. The conquest of territory was legal. Burning and
looting and pillaging were legal.

War was, in fact, not just legal; it was itself understood to be law
enforcement. War could be used to attempt to right any perceived injustice.
The seizing of other nations as colonies was legal. The motivation for
colonies to try to free themselves was weak because they were likely to be
seized by some other nation if they broke free from their current oppressor.

Economic sanctions by neutral nations were not legal, though joining in a
war could be. And making trade agreements under the threat of war was
perfectly legal and acceptable, as was starting another war if such a
coerced agreement was violated. Raping a woman in war could be illegal, but
killing her could be in perfect compliance with the law. Killing was, in
fact, legal whenever deemed part of a war, and illegal otherwise.

Some of this may sound familiar. You may have heard Rosa Brooks tell
Congress that drone murders are acceptable if part of a war and crimes
otherwise, whereas torture is a crime either way. But the extent to which
the label of “war” is understood to permit killing today is limited greatly
in theory and significantly even in reality. And today war is understood to
license mass murder alone, whereas it used to give free rein for
participants to murder, trespass, break and enter, steal, assault, maim,
kidnap, extort, destroy property, or commit arson. Today a soldier can
return from a mass killing spree and be prosecuted for cheating on his
taxes. He or she has been given a license to kill and only to kill, nothing
more.

Demanding today that the U.S. Congress repeal the Authorization for the Use
of Military Force of 2001 and revert to its old practice of declaring wars,
rather than simply funding (and whining about) any wars a president wages,
may or may not be an effective means of curtailing warmaking, but it does
amount to demanding a return to a barbaric antiquity, a practice that when
it was used constituted an announcement that all would henceforth be
permitted as long as it victimized whichever people war was being declared
against.

To the very limited extent that the pre-1928 world had laws against wars,
they were only laws against particular atrocities. In other words, the
world in which Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch try to live
today, in which war is perfectly acceptable, but each inevitable atrocious
component of the wars is a crime: that was the best the West had to offer
from ancient times through 1928.

The world after 1928 was different. The outlawing of war reduced the need
for large nations, and smaller nations began to form by the dozens,
exercising their right to self-determination. Colonies, likewise, sought
their freedom. Conquests of territory after 1928 were undone. The year 1928
became the dividing line for determining which conquests were legal and
which not. And the Pact of course was central to the prosecution of (the
losers) of World War II for the crime of war. International trade has
flourished in the absence of legal conquest. While it is not even true,
much less a statement of causation, that nations with McDonalds do not
attack each other, it may be true that a world with a reduced risk of
attack, for better or worse, generates more McDonalds.

All of these positive changes have indeed come about as a result of a
treaty generally mocked when not ignored. But they don’t add up to the
positive view of the world pushed by people like Steven Pinker as well as
Hathaway and Shapiro. That positive view of a world ridding itself of war
comes about through selective statistics, also known as lies, damn lies,
and U.S. exceptionalism. In Pinker, deaths are radically undercounted, then
compared to the entire population of the world rather than the relevant
nation, or erased by re-categorizing them as “civil war” and therefore not
war deaths at all.

Hathaway and Shapiro recognize one U.S. coup (Iran) and war (Iraq) as if
none of the others have happened or are happening. The Nakba seems not to
exist. That is, the crime and the suffering it entailed do not get
mentioned, though the “Arab-Israeli conflict” does.

The authors refer to Iraq 2003-present as a war that in 2015 had “greater
than ten thousand” people killed in “battle-related” killing. (I’m unclear
which killings are excluded by “battle-related.”) Never do they mention
that “greater than one million” have been killed in that war
<http://davidswanson.org/iraq/>.

Since World War II, during what the authors call a “period of unprecedented
peace,” the United States military has killed some 20 million people,
overthrown at least 36 governments, interfered in at least 82 foreign
elections, attempted to assassinate over 50 foreign leaders, and dropped
bombs on people in over 30 countries. This extravaganza of criminal killing
is documented here <http://davidswanson.org/warlist/>.

<https://i0.wp.com/davidswanson.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/oona.jpg>The
United States killed some 5 million people in Southeast Asia in a war that
Hathaway and Shapiro mention only as an act of conquest by the North of the
South when the invaders finally fled. I arrive at that number using the
Harvard study
<http://www.healthdata.org/research-article/fifty-years-violent-war-deaths-vietnam-bosnia-analysis-data-world-health-survey>
from 2008 on Vietnam (3.8 million) plus Nick Turse’s case in *Kill Anything
That Moves* that this is a significant under-counting. Using 4 million for
Vietnam, I add 1 million for the combined hundreds of thousands killed by
the U.S. bombing campaigns in each of the two countries of Laos and
Cambodia (both rough estimates). I do not add in the 1 to 2 million killed
by the Khmer Rouge, though blame can be given to the United States (without
taking it away from anyone else) for that horror. While the United States
military did not kill all of the 4 million killed in Vietnam, there would
not have been a war, or certainly not a war resembling what the Vietnamese
call the American War without the United States.

For the past almost 16 years, the United States has been systematically
destroying a region of the globe, bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan,
Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, not to mention the Philippines. The
United States has “special forces” operating in two-thirds of the world’s
countries and non-special forces stationed in three-quarters of them. This
is the “period of unprecedented peace” that Hathaway and Shapiro describe
as threatened by Russia, China, and ISIS. (“Even as [the Pact’s] bright
promises have been fulfilled, other darker threats have rushed into the
void.” Guess who those are!)

Quite obviously one cannot fit everything tangentially related to the topic
of a book into a book. But to write about the problem of war without
mentioning the U.S. dominance of the field is a bias. There is a reason
that most countries polled in December 2013 by Gallup *called* the United
States the greatest threat to peace in the world. But it is a reason that
eludes that strain of U.S. academia that first defines war as something
that nations and groups other than the United States do, and then concludes
that war has nearly vanished from the earth, or is on its way out, and that
the greatest threats of war come from China, Russia, and ISIS.

Ironically, a brilliant analysis giving the Kellogg-Briand Pact its due
could probably only have been written by Americans — the rest of the world
viewing U.S. actions on war and peace with too much cynicism and
resentment. But anything written by Americans comes with American baggage.

The *Lusitania* was attacked by Germany without warning, we’re told,
despite Germany literally having published warnings in New York newspapers
and newspapers around the United States. These warnings were printed right
next to ads for sailing on the *Lusitania* and were signed by the German
embassy. Newspapers wrote articles about the warnings. The Cunard company
was asked about the warnings. The former captain of the *Lusitania* had
already quit — reportedly due to the stress of sailing through what Germany
had publicly declared a war zone. Meanwhile Winston Churchill is quoted as
having said “It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores
in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.” It
was under his command that the usual British military protection was not
provided to the *Lusitania*, despite Cunard having stated that it was
counting on that protection. Much of Hathaway and Shapiro’s book is devoted
to the pre-1928 responsibilities of neutral nations to remain neutral.
Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned over the U.S. failure to
remain neutral. That the *Lusitania* was carrying weapons and troops to aid
the British in the war against Germany was asserted by Germany and by other
observers, and was true. Of course sinking the *Lusitania* was a horrible
act of mass-murder, as was loading it up with weapons and troops to ship to
a war. Behavior on all sides was reprehensible. But the authors only
provide one side, only slightly mitigated by a footnote.

Occupations are meant to be temporary we’re told, despite the unlikelihood
that the authors would dare make such an assertion in Kabul. The U.S.
military *now has *approximately 8,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, plus
6,000 other NATO troops, 1,000 mercenaries, and another 26,000 contractors
(of whom about 8,000 are from the United States). That’s *41,000* people
engaged in a foreign occupation of a country over 15 years after the
accomplishment of their stated mission to overthrow the Taliban government.
The Department of so-called Defense has informed the U.S. Congress that it
will soon produce yet another new plan for “winning” in Afghanistan. No
plans for ending the occupation have been forthcoming or even requested.
When the U.S. occupation of Iraq “ended,” troops and mercenaries remained.
That they were invited back by the Iraqi government hardly excuses their
actions, including the destruction of Mosul this past summer.

The single biggest threat to the peace on earth that was established in
1928 turns out to have been, according to Hathaway and Shapiro, the 2014
vote by the people of Crimea to re-join Russia — an action that of course
involved zero casualties and has never been repeated because poll after
poll shows the people happy with their vote. The authors produce no written
or oral statement from Russia threatening war or violence. If the threat
was implicit, there remains the problem of being unable to find Crimeans
who say they felt threatened. (Although I have seen reports of
discrimination against Tartars during the past 3 years.) If the vote was
influenced by the implicit threat, there remains the problem that polls
consistently get the same result. Of course one of the many U.S.-backed
coups unnoticed by this book had just occurred in Kiev, meaning that Crimea
was voting to secede from a coup government. The United States had
supported the secession of Kosovo from Serbia in the 1990s despite Serbian
opposition. When Slovakia seceded from Czechoslovakia, the U.S. did not
urge any opposition. The U.S. (and Hathaway and Shapiro) support the right
of South Sudan to have seceded from Sudan, although violence and chaos
reigned. U.S. politicians like Joe Biden and Jane Harman even proposed
breaking Iraq up into pieces, as others have proposed for Syria. But let’s
grant for the sake of argument that the Crimean vote was problematic, even
horrendous, even criminal. Its depiction in this book as the single biggest
threat to peace on earth would still be ludicrous. Compare it to a trillion
dollars a year in U.S. military spending, new missiles in Romania and
Poland, massive bombing of Iraq and Syria, the destruction of Iraq and
Libya, the endless war on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S.-Saudi
devastation of Yemen and the creation of famine and disease epidemics, or
the explicit threats to attack Iran. I’m sure your average American would
rather visit “liberated Mosul” than “annexed Crimea,” but should we deal
with facts or slogans?

<https://i1.wp.com/davidswanson.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/theinternationalists300.jpg>Hathaway
and Shapiro give S. O. Levinson and the outlawrists of the 1920s their due
for what they accomplished, but the authors view the world as 2017 CNN
consumers. They favor “defensive” wars. They fault Trump for suggesting
that NATO be scrapped. They maintain silence on NATO’s aggressive
expansion, as well as on U.S. military bases ringing the globe. In fact
they make this blatantly false statement: “The United States, United
Kingdom, and France . . . took no new territory after the war.”

During World War II the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of
Koho’alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to
leave. The island has been devastated
<http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/hawaiibombs.htm>. In 1942, the U.S. Navy
displaced Aleutian Islanders. Those practices did not end in 1928 or in
1945. President Harry Truman made up his mind that the 170 native
inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had no right to their island in 1946. He had
them evicted in February and March of 1946, and dumped as refugees on other
islands without means of support or a social structure in place. In the
coming years, the United States would remove 147 people from Enewetak Atoll
and all the people on Lib Island. U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing
rendered various depopulated and still-populated islands uninhabitable,
leading to further displacements. Up through the 1960s, the U.S. military
displaced hundreds of people from Kwajalein Atoll. A super-densely
populated ghetto was created on Ebeye.

On Vieques <http://warisacrime.org/vieques>, off Puerto Rico, the U.S. Navy
displaced thousands of inhabitants between 1941 and 1947, announced plans
to evict the remaining 8,000 in 1961, but was forced to back off and — in
2003 — to stop bombing the island. On nearby Culebra, the Navy displaced
thousands between 1948 and 1950 and attempted to remove those remaining up
through the 1970s. The Navy is right now looking at the island of Pagan
<https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/05/16-0> as a possible
replacement for Vieques, the population already having been removed by a
volcanic eruption. Of course, any possibility of return would be greatly
diminished.

Beginning during World War II but continuing right through the 1950s, the
U.S. military displaced a quarter million Okinawans, or half the
population, from their land, forcing people into refugee camps and shipping
thousands of them off to Bolivia — where land and money were promised but
not delivered.

In 1953, the United States made a deal with Denmark to remove 150 Inughuit
people from Thule, Greenland, giving them four days to get out or face
bulldozers. They are being denied the right to return.

Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500
to 2,000 inhabitants of Diego Garcia, rounding people up and forcing them
onto boats while killing their dogs in a gas chamber and seizing possession
of their entire homeland for the use of the U.S. military.

The South Korean government, which evicted people for U.S. base expansion
on the mainland in 2006, has, at the behest of the U.S. Navy, in recent
years been devastating a village, its coast, and 130 acres of farmland on
Jeju Island in order to provide the United States with another massive
military base.

None of this is mentioned in Hathaway and Shapiro’s book, or of course in
the database called Correlates of War that they drew data from. The U.S.
role as dominant military force on earth is simply missing. The arms trade
in which the U.S. leads the way and a half dozen nations dominate the
arming of the globe makes no appearance. But China’s efforts to claim
islands in the South China Sea are as threatening to the authors as to
Hillary Clinton at a Goldman Sachs event, if not more so.

Shapiro and Hathaway might argue that “forced expulsions” are a product of
hard borders, which are a product of outlawing war. Tony Judt wrote: “At
the conclusion of the first world war it was borders that were invented and
adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place. After 1945 what
happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception, boundaries stay
broadly intact and people were moved instead.” But niether this nor
anything else I’ve seen constitutes a serious claim or evidence that forced
expulsions were fewer or nonexistent prior to 1928. What of the forced
expulsion of so many Native Americans? But, increased or decreased or
continuing at a steady pace, these crimes, these acts of war, these
conquerings of territory, do not make it into the book. Instead we’re
falsely told that the United States takes no new territory. Tell that to
the residents of Vicenza, Italy, or any of dozens of towns around the world
where U.S. military bases are forcibly expanded against the will of the
people living there.

As a result of the authors’ exceptionalist view of the world, and perhaps a
focus on written law, Hathaway and Shapiro find shortcomings in the
Kellogg-Briand Pact by looking at its words rather than looking at our
failure to comply with them. They believe the Pact leaves open (does not
provide permission but simply fails to address) the option to wage war over
territorial disputes, as well as the option for non-state actors to wage
war. The former depends on the idea that the Pact only banned aggressive
war, rather than all war — decidedly not what the Outlawrists intended.
They — the originators of outlawry — intended to ban war entirely, with no
exception for the common excuse of territorial disputes. The latter, the
ability of non-state actors to wage war, depends on irrational fear
mongering around enemies, such as ISIS, generated by the counterproductive,
blowback-producing, routine violation of the Pact by S.O. Levinson’s own
nation, the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.

In Hathaway and Shapiro’s view, I am simply wrong about what the
Outlawrists meant, and defensive wars were not being renounced. But my
point is not to comment on how some senators interpreted what they were
ratifying, but rather to recall the better-developed thinking of the
originators of and promoters of the idea of outlawing war. I quoted
Levinson in *When the World Outlawed War:*

“Suppose this same distinction had been urged when the institution of
duelling [sic] was outlawed. . . . Suppose it had then been urged that only
‘aggressive duelling’ should be outlawed and that ‘defensive duelling’ be
left intact. . . . Such a suggestion relative to duelling would have been
silly, but the analogy is perfectly sound. What we did was to outlaw the
institution of duelling, a method theretofore recognized by law for the
settlement of disputes of so-called honor.”

By failing to focus on what the Outlawrists wanted, rather than on what
governments made of their creation, the authors conclude that in 1928
nobody had really considered what to replace war with, how to resolve
disputes without wars. They also conclude that the U.N. Charter made the
Pact a “reality,” rather than weakening it. But many knew full well the
need for new types of nonviolent sanction, for global courts, for moral and
economic tools, for disarmament, and for cultural changes still eluding us.
Levinson drafted implementing legislation to make advocacy for war a
felony. The U.N. Charter’s loopholes for “defensive” and “authorized” wars
have made the U.N. — which has the second-largest imperial army now
deployed on earth — a tool of warmaking, rather than peacemaking.

The authors fault the Pact for protecting weak states from invasion,
allowing them to become failed states, creating warfare. But it takes more
than protection from attack to damage a country. It often requires weapons
dealing, the propping up of dictators, and the foreign exploitation of
people and resources. Surely eliminating these further evils would be
preferable to reinstating the evil of conquest.

Where Hathaway and Shapiro’s book shines, despite all the red, white, and
bluism, is in its analysis of the replacement of war with alternative
systems of security, something I’ve also looked into
<http://worldbeyondwar.org/alternative>. They propose, in particular,
recognition of and expansion of what they call outcasting. The name is
derived from the ancient practice on Iceland of punishing a law violator by
making them an outcast from society. “The law was effective,” Hathaway and
Shapiro write, “even though there were no public institutions of law
enforcement, because outlawry turned *all* Icelanders into law enforcers.”
Based on this model, the authors describe the manner in which institutions
like those handling international mail or trade create compliance with
standards through the threat of banishment.

Of course extending the powers of corporate trade organizations to allow
their lawyers to rewrite nations’ domestic laws is not desirable or
necessary. And outcasting is only one tool in the tool chest of a non-war
system. But what if the United Nations were replaced with or evolved into a
democratized nonviolent club of peacemakers, using unarmed peaceworkers,
and maintaining the threat of banishment from its ranks? What if the world
had an independent court in place of the ICC, which the authors say can
prosecute “aggression,” but which in reality cannot do so without the
approval of the U.N. Security Council?

More importantly, what if we had a *global culture* that allowed us to
confront the evil of war without nationalized biases? What if we took the
accomplishments of the Kellogg-Briand Pact as motivation to see the vision
of its creators through to the end: the abolition of all wars and
militaries?
Book video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlSy1CuwP3k

Radio:
https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-scott-shapiro-and-oona-hathaway-on-how-outlawing-war-changed-the-world

Video of event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6X2N0aaK3s&t=10s


-- 

*David Swanson *is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is
director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org.
Swanson's books include *War Is A Lie <http://warisalie.org/>*. He blogs at
DavidSwanson.org <http://davidswanson.org/> and WarIsACrime.org
<http://warisacrime.org/>. He hosts Talk Nation Radio
<http://davidswanson.org/taxonomy/term/41>. He is a 2015, 2016, 2017 Nobel
Peace Prize Nominee.

Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson <http://twitter.com/davidcnswanson>
and FaceBook <http://www.facebook.com/pages/David-Swanson/297768373319#>.
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