Much of the new issue of the Nation magazine is taken up with a single piece by Jonathan Schell, “One Last Time: The Case against the War.” It lays out with devastating accuracy the case against our imperial ambitions of the moment, while deftly dismantling the chain of logic that lies behind the Bush administration’s ostensible goal in an Iraq war — “disarming” Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. Schell’s purpose, however, is larger yet. He means to dismantle our mainstream vision of a world in which “proliferation” takes place only somewhere out there on the peripheries among rogue nations. These nations, he tells us, are but the distant atolls of “the Atomic archipelago,” whose underwater connections, were we to follow them, would lead us back to the great nuclear possessors of this world, to us, in fact. “The world’s prospective nuclear [chemical and biological] arsenals cannot be dealt with without attending to its existing ones. As long as some countries insist on having any of these, others will try to get them.” He calls on the movement against an Iraq war to become a movement for the abolition of such weapons. Don’t miss this piece. Tom
The Case Against the War
by Jonathan Schell
The Nation Magazine
March 3, 2003This autumn and winter, nuclear danger has returned, in a new form, accompanied by danger from the junior siblings in the mass destruction family, chemical and biological weapons. Now it is not a crisis between two superpowers but the planned war to overthrow the government of Iraq that, like a sentence of execution that has been passed but must go through its final appeals before being carried out, we have talked to death. (Has any war been so lengthily premeditated before it was launched?) Iraq, the United States insists, possesses some of these weapons. To take them away, the United States will overthrow the Iraqi government. No circumstance is more likely to provoke Iraq to use any forbidden weapons it has. In that event, the Bush Administration has repeatedly said, it will itself consider the use of nuclear weapons….
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This autumn and winter, nuclear danger has returned, in a new form, accompanied by danger from the junior siblings in the mass destruction family, chemical and biological weapons. Now it is not a crisis between two superpowers but the planned war to overthrow the government of Iraq that, like a sentence of execution that has been passed but must go through its final appeals before being carried out, we have talked to death. (Has any war been so lengthily premeditated before it was launched?) Iraq, the United States insists, possesses some of these weapons. To take them away, the United States will overthrow the Iraqi government. No circumstance is more likely to provoke Iraq to use any forbidden weapons it has. In that event, the Bush Administration has repeatedly said, it will itself consider the use of nuclear weapons….