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Hearings Set for Law of the Sea
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Unilateralists are getting ready to squirm. The date for the first hearing on the Law of the Sea convention has been set for September 27, when government witnesses will testify. In October, treaty opponents and business representatives (all supporters) will testify in a second hearing.
As I've written before, everyone with an interest in the use and navigation of the oceans -- the military, environmental organizations, and all ocean industries -- strongly favor U.S. accession to the treaty. That means the point in question with Law of the Sea is whether recognizing, strengthening, and adhering to international law can ever be advantageous to the United States. For those of us who believe that it is usually so -- and according to polls, we represent about 2/3 of all Americans -- this fight will take on special significance.
The small, far-right opposition faces an uphill battle to block ratification, but then again, these battles can be unpredictable. These same folks were ramped up ten years ago against a treaty with similar momentum and importance (the Convention on Biological Diversity) and won. And deck was similarly stacked against the good guys who opposed John Bolton's nomination, yet twice we prevailed.
Stay tuned.
-- Scott Paul
Note:For some interesting reading today, be sure to check out Sebastian Mallaby's very good piece in the Post on energy policy. Also, those of you intrigued by the UN Emergency Peace Service proposal should see the coverage in last week's Forward, in which, importantly, the tough but fair UN critic Ed Luck gives UNEPS his blessing.
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More interesting than Mallaby is George Lakoff, who took Alan Greenspan’s oil pitch and hit it out of the park yesterday. He targets those who eagerly accepted Bush’s propaganda and betrayed the trust of the American people by willfully ignoring the real objective of the war in Iraq (and the upcoming one in Iran). http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/lakoff/iraq-and-the-betrayal-of-trust
“It was not just the Bush administration that betrayed the trust of the American people. There has been and continues to be collusion. If you knowingly aid and abet betrayal, you too are a betrayer. That includes those in Congress who have supported the administration's deceptions, and the right-wing THINK TANKS, media outlets, and pundits...And then there is Betrayal by Negligence: Journalists who simply used the administration’s deceptive framing when the facts undermining those frames were readily available.
"Vital interests" is a code word, and what we seem to have here is Betrayal by Code Words. One of the main vital interests is oil. As Alan Greenspan said in his new book, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."
Yes, oil! The word is hardly ever mentioned in discussions of Iraq. The main event is oil.â€Â
Robert Weismann add that, “Henry Kissinger echoes this view in his op-ed. ‘Iran has legitimate aspirations that need to be respected,’ he writes -- ‘but those legitimate aspirations do not include control over the oil that the United States and other industrial countries need.’â€Â
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-weissman/greenspan-kissinger-oil_b_64659.html
Will Steve, as an “enlightened†realist, finally level with his readers and admit that WMDs, terrorism, freedom and democracy, and military threats to America are but a secondary concern designed to distract Americans from the real, critical issue? I doubt it.
But it would be nice to have more people with influence finally identify the true objectives of American foreign policy. Then we could have an open and honest discussion about America’s energy consumption problem. How much blood must we spill to feed our SUVs? So far, it’s a million Iraqis and counting. Iraqi deaths now rival those in the Rwandan genocide and in the Cambodian killing fields. And the Iraqi nightmare is poised to continue indefinitely. Will ten million foreigners, mostly Muslim, be enough? A hundred million? And how much global warming will be attributed to our wars and our insatiable appetite?
Once we’ve identified our problem and its costs, can’t we find a better solution? Of course we can. But it all depends on coming clean about the addiction and clearly outing the real American foreign policy agenda.
It would also be nice to know exactly why so many have felt such a need for so long to be “good Germans†and betray the American people by supporting false pretenses and ignoring the real problem.
Does Experience Matter? (Clinton and JFK didn't think so)
This Video Is Showing That Obama can be president because two fmr presidents were
where he is right now, history proves experience makes an either worse president( nixon, bush, vp dick cheney, defense sec.rumsfeld)
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