Long, Hot Summer

[ Update: Think Progress’s Ben Armbruster reports, “One day before its gulf oil rig exploded, Mariner Energy said ‘Obama is trying to break us’ with the deepwater drilling moratorium,” even though the platform that exploded today was not affected by the moratorium. Think Progress says the Associated Press is now reporting that, contrary to earlier statements (echoed below), the Vermilion Oil Rig 360 was in production at the time of the explosion. The New York Times now reports that “Mariner said that during the last week of August, the platform had produced about 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas a day and 1,400 barrels of oil and condensate.” ]

[ Original post begins here: ] The Times-Picayune and New York Times report that at about 9:30 a.m. today an oil platform (not a rig) exploded off the coast of Louisiana, 80 to 90 miles south of Vermilion Bay, and 13 workers abandoned the rig and are in the water, wearing protective immersion suits to prevent hypothermia. The U.S. Coast Guard is responding with helicopters to rescue the workers. The workers will be taken to Terrebone General Medical Center in Houma.

Bob Warren of the Times-Picayune writes:

Coast Guard Petty Officer Casey Ranel said the rig is around 90 miles south of Vermilion Bay and that a helicopter earlier today reported that it was in fire “and that there was smoke and there were people in the water.”

The Vermilion Oil Platform 380 is owned by Mariner Energy in water about 340 feet deep (thus it is not affected by the Obama administration’s moratorium, which applies to projects more than 500 feet deep). Texas-based Mariner, one of the largest independent oil and gas firms in the Gulf of Mexico, currently has 195 active drilling leases. The platform is apparently in exploration mode and not producing oil and gas, according to the Department of Homeland Security. [This appears to be in question, as noted above.] The rig is on fire. One worker is injured, but all workers are accounted for. No leak is known of at this time (12:45 EST). The platform is about 200 miles west of BP’s Macondo site where the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers. (Three months after that explosion, in late July, a barge hit an abandoned well in Mud Lake, part of Barataria Bay about 10 miles by water from Golden Meadow, Louisiana, releasing a gushing of oil and natural gas that took days to seal.)

Click here for video of reports by MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer and Anne Thompson with brief comments from Coast Guard chief John Edwards and an update on an investigation of the blowout preventer on the BP Macondo well. At the same time, Hurricane Earl is churning up the Atlantic, projected to be about parallel with the North Carolina / Virginia border by 8:00 a.m. Friday.

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[ Click here for LNW’s coverage of the BP oil spill. ]

[ AP photo above; MSNBC map below. ]

After all the luminaries at the fab Rising Tide conference this weekend we didn’t think we could be any more dazzled, until yesterday at the New Orleans airport we bumped into FEMA administrator W. Craig Fugate and his wife on their way back to Washington following the president’s speech. Sweet serendipity. We talked for a few minutes, told him Levees Not War has hailed his appointment as FEMA administrator—a return to the good old days of experience + competence that FEMA knew during the 1990s—and asked if we can interview him sometime. You see, Mr. Fugate, Levees Not War has interviewed Ivor van Heerden and Mark Schleifstein and other experts on the environment, infrastructure, and public safety, and we’d sincerely love to hear what you have to say after more than a year on the job. Mr. Fugate (pron. FEW-gate) graciously agreed, and we’ll be following up soon. In the meantime, you can see Deborah Solomon’s interview with “The Storm Tracker” in the Aug. 29 New York Times Magazine. He was tickled to hear that we used a photo of him paddling in his kayak (below), his home away from home; this may be why he agreed to an interview. Before parting, we wished each other a boring hurricane season.

A FEMA Administrator Who Tweets

Fugate, a former fireman and paramedic, directed Florida’s Division of Emergency Management from 2001 until his appointment to FEMA in 2009. Until 2009, James Lee Witt, FEMA administrator under President Clinton, was the most well qualified and admired director in the agency’s otherwise troubled history since its founding in the Carter years. Witt had been the emergency director for the state of Arkansas, and praise for his nimble and proactive emergency preparedness and response was bipartisan and pretty well unanimous. Florida native Fugate’s familiarity with hurricanes, however, certainly surpasses that of his celebrated predecessor, and he has won praise for, among other things, his insistence that individuals and families do as much as possible to help themselves by stocking up with emergency supplies and working out a plan for evacuation and communications. See his tweets about preparedness and staying alert about oncoming tropical storms here at In Case of Emergency, Read Blog.

Never anticipating we’d bump into him in an airport, we wrote here in May 2009 after Fugate was confirmed:

Obama’s nomination of Fugate to head FEMA exemplifies a restoration of trust in government and illustrates the difference between Democratic and Republican views of how elected officials should function. It is because Obama has largely chosen very highly qualified individuals for the federal agencies that Americans are consistently reporting to pollsters a renewed confidence in the integrity of government and a sense that the nation is moving in the right direction.

Stay tuned for more Fugate and FEMA reporting. Till then, you can read previous Fugate posts and our interview with Chris Cooper and Robert Block, authors of Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security, which explains in compelling detail why FEMA and public safety demand a competent, experienced administrator, and what happens when those qualities are lacking. (Cooper and Block were the keynote speakers at the first Rising Tide conference in August 2006.)

Fugate for FEMA: “Semper Gumby”—In an Emergency, “The Calmest Man in the Room”

More Praise for Craig Fugate as FEMA Director-Nominee

Fugate Confirmed for FEMA: Help Is on the Way

Interview with Christopher Cooper and Robert Block, authors of Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security

New Orleans blogger Clifton Harris, right, receives the Ashley Morris Memorial Award from emcee George “Loki” Williams, center, and Mark “Oyster” Moseley. Photo courtesy of M. Styborski. Cliff Harris’s writing also appears in the new book A Howling in the Wires: An Anthology of Writing from Postdiluvian New Orleans (Gallatin & Toulouse, 2010). The motto of Cliff’s Crib is “Embrace Your Potential and Be Productive. Long Live the Lower Ninth Ward.” Warm congratulations to Clifton Harris. Read his blog and buy the book. We have. [The coveted Ashley Award, named in honor of the legendary, larger-than-life Ashley Morris, is presented each year to a blogger who has made outstanding contributions to writing about post-Katrina New Orleans. Ashley Morris, Ph.D., who died in 2008, was one of the founders of the Rising Tide conference and an inspiration for the Treme character Creighton Bernette, played by John Goodman.]

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Liveblogging follows, with earliest panels at bottom. (“Treme” panel not included, sorry. For good coverage of that, see Machelle Allman’s Watching Treme.)

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Why Can’t We Get Some Dam Safety in New Orleans? | Presentation by Tim Ruppert

3:40 Denial of killing potential of failed levees results in low standards of expectations for levee strength. Levees are considered to only protect property, not human life. The 100-year flood model is an inadequate standard of measurement that leaves N.O. and other human settlements exposed to unacceptable risk of flooding and death. ASCE advocates a risk-based assessment of levees—in other words, let’s calculate how many people would die if this levee fails (the same way dams’ failure is measured and risk-assessed). “When levees fail, people die.” We’re going to have to push Congress to act as though failed levees are every bit as threatening to human safety as failed dams are. 3:30 About 43 percent of Americans live in areas protected by levees. What it means to public safety when dams and levees are perceived as being different from each other. Begins with Johnstown Flood of 1889. Is there really any difference between a dam failure and a levee failure? National Dam Inspection Act passed in 1972, and WRDA (Water Resource Development Act) both distinguished between dams and levees. Dams are considered a life safety system—they usually hold higher levels of water than levees do. Levees are not considered life safety systems; it is assumed or expected that all people living within a levee-protected area are able to evacuate, though we know this is not actually true. 3:20 Why Can’t We Get Some Dam Safety in New Orleans? Presentation by Tim Ruppert, engineer and N.O. blogger (Tim’s Nameless Blog)

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Politics Panel: Peter Athas, Jason Berry, Clancy Dubos, Jeff Crouere, Stephanie Grace, Jacques Morial

3:05 What will Jindal do? He is looking beyond the governor’s mansion. Run against Mary Landrieu? Crouere and Dubos agree that Jindal won’t finish out his term. That is why the next lieutenant governor’s race will in effect be the next governor’s race. Dubos says he will cut the budget to the bone and then go around the country to Iowa or Florida and talk about how he cut the budget. He doesn’t care about the people of Louisiana; he cares about how his actions look on his resume. Jindal refuses to sign any revenue increase, so cuts will get worse. Stephanie Grace says that what happens to the state’s universities in the next couple of years will send a message to the rest of the nation of what Jindal stands for. 3:00 Jason Berry says a progressive media is needed to help build Democratic, progressive party, candidates, through spreading progressive ideas. As it is, we’re breeding Republicans. Even here in the most progressive urban city in the state there’s really only one progressive paper [Gambit].

2:50 Audience member asks what the hell is wrong with the Democratic party in this state? How did a novice Republican (Joseph Cao) win the 2nd Congressional District? Dems don’t field good candidates—why not? Jacques Morial says the Dem leadership has been terrible for years. State Dem party has been impotent for years. Jeff Crouere says Democrats would do better if they had more conservative, appealing candidates in the John Breaux mode. 2:35 Discussion of Vitter’s reelection chances in November. Jacques Morial says Vitter is “a confirmed hypocrite and a whoremonger and he’s a criminal. He used a telephonic device to break the law.” Clancy Dubos says that Vitter could have been indicted as a co-conspirator in the Deborah Jeane Palfrey “D.C. Madam” case. Very suspicious for Palfrey to have hanged herself. Jason Berry says that Palfrey signed an affadavit with her attorney that she would commit suicide. General agreement that Charlie Melancon has been running a lame campaign against David Vitter, and that Vitter has been lucky. Melancon is running against Vitter, but Vitter is running against Obama. 2:25 Jeff Crouere thinks Cao will have a good chance of winning reelection. He is ethically clean and has done enough with the Obama administration to please local voters but also enough along Republican lines to keep the GOP contributions coming in. Clancy Dubos is more skeptical about the GOP’s kindness toward Cao who has been too independent for Republicans’ liking. Jacques Morial thinks that Cao will pay the political price for voting against the health care reform bill. His reasons for voting against the health care reform bill don’t hold water—there was nothing to the allegations of making abortion more likely, and he knew it—and though he claimed part of his no vote was on the basis of religious convictions, all the Roman Catholic organizations dealing with health care such as the nurses group were pushing for the health care reform bill. Still, he voted against it and his constituents will hold him accountable. 2:00 Politics Panel begins with Peter Athas (moderator), Jason Berry, Clancy Dubos, Jeff Crouere, Stephanie Grace, Jacques Morial Jason Berry has been investigating Democratic candidate Cedric Richmond and allegations of a slush fund, and asks why the local mainstream news media have not been investigating. The panel discussion begins with a bit of a bombshell that seems to embarrass several panel members. If Cedric Richmond wins 2nd Congressional District primary today, he will face Republican Anh “Joseph” Cao.

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Environmental panel (left to right): Len Bahr, Rob Verchick, Steve Picou

12:40 Verchick: Necessary to understand the cost of adapting to climate change. We’re going to adapt one way or another, and the question is whether we’re going to do it expensively (in ways that are more costly and maybe more clumsy than necessary), or more methodically, based on science, and by planning for the future. Some remedies are too expensive and actually create more greenhouse gases and other adverse consequences. Bahr: Public officials need to be frank with people, homeowners, close to the coast, and to base the policy on science. Some retreat from the Louisiana coast will be necessary, and elected officials have a hard time telling homeowners they’re going to have to move. If we build a levee here, there could be other adverse effects that make the construction not advisable. Verchick: There are simple, practical things we can do, such as installing permeable streets, or roof gardens, focus on small things people can do that have multiple benefits that don’t necessarily make people agree or not with the reality of climate change. Even “deniers” or the indifferent can do practical things that help alleviate. 12:30 Climate change is about more than coastal land loss and rising sea level. Other serious consequences are extreme weather, heat waves, excessive rain. Mayor Landrieu has spoken often and eloquently, often off-the-cuff, impromptu, about environment and climate change. Steve Picou says that the new environmental administrator bodes well. The new mayor is serious about environmental issues. Len Bahr: New Orleans is a coastal city, and is becoming more so every day. Told Mayor Nagin that N.O. needs to remember that it is a coastal city, and we need to be able to evacuate rapidly in case of hurricane, as with high-speed rail system. Said this 6 months before Katrina. Nagin listened but didn’t seem to recognize the threat. Bahr blames Gov. Jindal for anti-science mentality. The state has many highly skilled scientists whose talents and knowledge are not being tapped for expertise after this BP oil spill. 12:20 Rob Verchick: Making decisions about long-term when you have lots of moving parts is hard to do when you have a static model, with probability, risks, etc. That sort of equation is in a lot of what we do, but it doesn’t work for climate change planning and response, events with low probabilities but very high takes, so-called “black swans.” New York City has one of the best programs, planning structure for adapting to climate change, and Miami has been proactive, too, but New Orleans is not planning enough, or receiving enough expert assistance, to prepare for effects of climate change, rising sea levels. 12:15 Len Bahr, editor of LaCoastPost.com: Our Louisiana delegation signed a letter to President Obama about 5 years after Katrina (posted at LaCoastPost), yet most of La. delegation is in complete denial of climate change and its ecological risks. 12:10 Rob Verchick on leave from Loyola, now working at Environmental Protection Agency. Of the three cities most at risk from climate change (natural disasters + rising sea levels) are Miami #1, next New York City, and New Orleans third. Humans are building in environments where development is not ecologically advisable, and destroying “green infrastructure” of mangrove forests, wetlands, so we’re losing our natural infrastructure at an alarming rate. We need to learn how to protect and restore the environmental infrastructure that helps blunt storm surge, prevent mud slides, etc. Why are we allowing natural infrastructure, so much more essential to long-term security and stability than the bridges, levees, and roads we usually think of as infrastructure. 12:00 Environmental panel. Steve Picou, moderator. Len Bahr of LaCoastPost.com and Rob Verchick of Loyola University and the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Keynote speaker: Mac McClelland, human rights reporter for Mother Jones

11:45 Public responsibility for reporting on safety of seafood . . . testing for safety of dispersants in Gulf waters. The U.S. is not testing for safety of water, dispersant levels in the water. No reporter wants to be the one to print that the seafood is not safe. 11:30 Mac had originally come to write an article for Mother Jones on public defenders. Then the oil spill happened. Not so surprising that BP wasn’t being cooperative, but what is surprising is that the Obama administration has been secretive and not so cooperative. In a lot of cases they did not have the information we were looking for, such as the number of cleanup workers. Coast Guard says the numbers you’re looking for are BP’s numbers. We can ask, but sometimes they don’t get back to us. This is the Coast Guard. Coast Guard was disseminating BP’s numbers and not fact-checking, not overseeing. It was easier to get information from secretive Burma than it has been from BP or U.S. agencies. Misinformation and spin. 11:15 Keynote speaker: Mac McClelland, human rights reporter for Mother Jones Reporting in the national media in years since Katrina has not kept up with the facts here in New Orleans. Outside of Louisiana everyone thinks “everything’s fine” because they’re not seeing images and accurate on-the-ground reporting from the real world in New Orleans. The oil spill is reported to have dispersed, to no longer be a problem. Everyone wants to hear that it’s all fine now, in part because the truth is so sad or depressing. . . . “I’m contractually obligated to tweet. I can’t tell you how many tips and leads I get from Twitter, how many ideas I’ve gotten from Twitter followers.”

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10:45 a.m. Central Time Public Safety panel We’re live-blogging from the Rising Tide 5 conference on the future of New Orleans held at the Howlin’ Wolf, 907 South Peters Street. The first panel is on Public Safety, moderated by Peter Scharf, with Jon Wool of the Vera Institute of Justice, Allen James of Safe Streets, Strong Communities; Susan Hutson, independent police monitor of NOPD, and NOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas (left). The new superintendent is making a good impression as a serious, well-educated and well-trained professional. There is much discussion of the Danziger Bridge shootings, and question of whether the shooting represented an anomaly, or whether it was normal. Serpas acknowledges that since the mid-1990s what had been a department of occasional individual bad behavior (Antoinette Franks, etc.), in the following years there grew a culture of secrecy, a systemwide failure. Allen James of Safe Streets, Strong City says that the underprivileged in New Orleans would say that the Danziger shootings were not an anomaly. The fact that this case was covered up for five years is only attributable to a thoroughgoing culture of secrecy, and this is perhaps more disturbing than the shootings themselves. Allen James gets a round of applause when he says that it’s hard to have a first world–quality police department that is going to do much good for the community of a third-world-style city (referring to Mark Folse’s question) when the economy is so weak and unemployment levels and opportunities are so few.

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We’ll be in New Orleans for Rising Tide 5—and you’re invited too. First, on Friday afternoon, we’re embarking on a boat tour of Barataria Bay southwest of New Orleans—thanks to friendly connections at the Plaquemines parish government, Loyola University, and the EPA—to see the BP oil spill’s effects on the Louisiana wetlands. Photos, reporting, and possibly video footage to come soon.

Rising Tide Volunteer Community Service Friday Aug. 27

Volunteers are pitching in with a food drive to assist the Second Harvest Food Bank of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana, packing food boxes from 9:00 a.m. until noon, on Friday, August 27, at Second Harvest’s Elmwood warehouse at 700 Edwards Avenue (map). If you can’t make it to this event, please consider contributing to Second Harvest to help hundreds of families who have seen their jobs and livelihoods evaporate since the BP oil spill. Each year, Second Harvest provides emergency food assistance to nearly 263,000 people, including approximately 82,000 children and 40,000 seniors across 23 south Louisiana parishes.

Rising Tide program for Saturday Aug. 28

The Howlin’ Wolf, 907 South Peters Street

Details about participants here.

8:30 | doors open

9:30 | Opening remarks

9:45 | Public Safety panel : Brian Denzer, Susan Hutson, Allen James, Peter Scharf, N.O. Police Chief Ronal Serpas, Jon Wool

11:00 | Keynote speaker: Mac McClelland, human rights reporter for Mother Jones

12:00 | Environmental panel : Steve Picou, Len Bahr, Robert Verchick

2:00 | Politics panel : Peter Athas, Jason Berry, Jeff Crouere, Clancy Dubos, Stephanie Grace, Jacques Morial

3:15 | “Why Can’t We Get Some Dam Safety in New Orleans?” Presentation by engineer Tim Ruppert

3:45 | Presentation of 2010 Ashley Morris Memorial Award

4:00 | “Down in the Treme” panel : Maitri Erwin, Lolis Eric Elie, Eric Overmyer, Becky Northcut, Dave Walker, Davis Rogan

Also happening in New Orleans

New Orleans area Katrina anniversary events (NOLA.com)

President Obama to speak at Xavier University Sunday, Aug. 29, to commemorate 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

New Orleans C.A.R.E. Free Clinic | Tues. Aug. 31–Weds. Sept. 1 at Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, 900 Convention Center Blvd. Volunteers needed and welcome! Register to volunteer: www.regonline.com/nolacare | Patients call 1-877-236-7617

Historic New Orleans Collection : Katrina + 5: Documenting Disaster | May 12–September 12  |  Williams Gallery, 533 Royal Street

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]]> http://www.leveesnotwar.org/?feed=rss2&p=3337 0 http://www.leveesnotwar.org/?p=3292 http://www.leveesnotwar.org/?p=3292#comments Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:56:42 +0000 Levees Not War http://www.leveesnotwar.org/?p=3292 “The World Trade Center Site will forever hold a special place in our City, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves—and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans—if we said ‘no’ to a mosque in Lower Manhattan. . . . We would betray our values—and play into our enemies’ hands—if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists—and we should not stand for that. . . . there is no neighborhood in this City that is off limits to God’s love and mercy.” —Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Aug. 3, 2010

“We desire therefore in this case not to judge least we be judged, neither to condemn least we be condemned, but rather let every man stand and fall to his own Master. Wee are bounde by the Law to doe good unto all men, especially to those of the household of faith.” —Remonstrance of the Inhabitants of the Towne of Flushing to Governor Peter Stuyvesant, December 27, 1657 (alluded to by Mayor Bloomberg)

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” —First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, 1791

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Ordinarily this blog would have no reason to comment on the building of an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan—the subject doesn’t naturally pertain to our core mission of infrastructure, environment, and peace (especially for New Orleans and environs). But these are not ordinary times, and this is no longer an ordinary religious-freedom issue.

The uproar over Park51, commonly known as the “Ground Zero Mosque,” has reached national security–threatening levels of madness. What we find most troubling about the furor is that the hate speech against Islam generally—blaming all Muslims, including the 5 to 7 million Muslim Americans, for the crimes of al Qaeda on 9/11—is making it easier to justify war on the Islamic world, to continue fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond. (Recall the WWII internments of Japanese-Americans and the atomic bombings made politically and morally more palatable by persistent demonization of “the Jap” as subhuman.) Most insane and threatening of all is that the broad-brush insults of Muslims validate Osama bin Laden’s claims that America hates Islam and that therefore all Muslims should fight against “the Crusaders.” Do Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin really want to do bin Laden’s recruiting work for him?

[The manufacture of the controversy cannot be understood without seeing Atlas Shrugs, the blog of author and activist Pamela Geller, executive director of a group called Stop Islamization of America (“a human rights organization dedicated to freedom of speech, religious liberty”) and coauthor of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America (foreword by John Bolton). Salon’s Justin Elliott explains how Geller pushed Park51 from being unremarkable when announced to being suddenly seen as a dire threat to America.]

The site in question is occupied by a former Burlington Coat factory that was damaged on 9/11. The building dates back to the 1850s. The owners of the property, Feisal Abdul Rauf, a graduate of Columbia University, and his wife Daisy Khan, plan to build a Sufi Islamic cultural center—not a mosque—modeled on the (Jewish) 92nd Street Y, a prominent cultural and fitness center in New York City. (Sufis are well known as the most peaceful and “cosmic” of the varieties of Islam—they are like the opposite of extremist or violent. Think of the Persian poet Rumi.) The Park51 board includes Christians and Jews along with Muslims. The plans call for classrooms, a 500-seat auditorium, a restaurant, a memorial to the victims of September 11 (some of whom were Muslim, as were some of the first responders), a prayer room but not a mosque, and so on. Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam of a mosque in TriBeCa for nearly 30 years, vice-chair of the Interfaith Center of New York and the author of “What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America,” has conducted “sensitivity training” for the FBI. He is famous as a peaceful moderate. His wife, Daisy Khan, runs the American Society for Muslim Advancement, which she co-founded with Rauf. (When she appeared on Fox News in December 2009 to talk about the center, Laura Ingraham said, “I like what you’re doing.”) Rauf and Khan are precisely the kind of Muslims America should welcome and encourage. Harassing them and demonizing their project, telling them and others of their faith that they don’t belong here sends a very bad signal to the Muslim world and reinforces their suspicion that America is at war with Islam.

Where Is George W. Bush When You Need Him?

This is precisely why President Bush was careful to clarify publicly, repeatedly, that the U.S. is fighting al Qaeda, not Islam. “Islam is peace,” he said. Where is he now? Maureen Dowd writes (almost pleadingly), “W. needs to get his bullhorn back out.” At the time Bush said these things, we were not confident his heart was really in it, but he was right to reinforce the message, and it would do a lot of good for America as a United States if he would resurface to try to cool the hostility. (See Joshua Holland’s disturbing report at AlterNet about an epidemic of anti-Islamic hate spreading across the U.S., nearly 10 years after September 11.)

Muslims are as much a part of our City and our country as the people of any faith and they are as welcome to worship in Lower Manhattan as any other group. —Mayor Michael Bloomberg

What the right-wing demagogues don’t seem to understand—or do they just not care?—is that in exchange for a few votes they’re making things worse for the nation and for the troops they claim to support. For recruiting and hate-stimulation purposes, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda need the United States to be seen demonizing Muslims, being at war with Islam. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes, “Osama abhors the vision of interfaith harmony that the proposed Islamic center represents. He fears Muslim clerics who can cite the Koran to denounce terrorism.” Similarly, President Obama’s speech at Cairo University in June 2009 was exactly what the al Qaeda recruiters do not want; they recruit more members (often resentful unemployed youth) when Newt Gingrich compares the builders of the Islamic cultural center to Nazis. As Robert Scheer writes in “Ground Zero for Tolerance”:

Just ask Gen. David Petraeus, who is leading the war without end to win the hearts and minds of Muslims in Afghanistan, how helpful it is to the Taliban for American politicians to identify all Muslims with terrorism. Or to the theocratic leaders of Iran who justify their hard line with the insistence that the U.S. is obsessively anti-Muslim.

(About Gen. Petraeus, Frank Rich writes that no one is listening to his sales pitch as he goes from one media outlet to the next, trying to sell a longer stay in Afghanistan. “Poor General Petraeus. . . . No one was listening and no one cared. Everyone was too busy yelling about the mosque.”)

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent whose duties included interrogating suspected terrorists, writes in Time magazine, “From a national security perspective, our leaders need to understand that no one is likely to be happier with the opposition to building a mosque than Osama bin Laden. His next video script has just written itself.”

A Question of “Sensitivity”

Now, it should be said that Park51’s proximity to Ground Zero is certainly not ideal; even many supporters of the owners’ right to develop the center would be happier if it were a little farther way from the sore spot. But how far? There are already several functioning mosques in the neighborhood. There are also functioning strip clubs (the Pussycat Lounge, New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club). Park Place is two blocks north of the former World Trade Center site; in Manhattan, two blocks can feel like a long distance, with every inch of real estate filled with shops, bodegas, bars, newsstands, liquor stores, parking garages, etc. Furthermore, the Landmark Preservation Commission voted unanimously to give the center the green light, and Community Board No. 1, the local council that represents the area, voted 29 to 1 to allow the building. The locals don’t seem to mind. As the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg points out, the objections to the Islamic center seem to intensify more the farther you get from the neighborhood. (His “Zero Grounds” is one of the most fair-minded pieces we’ve read about the issue.) Those who assert that Imam Rauf and Daisy Khan should “show sensitivity” to the families of 9/11 victims have a reasonable point, but should remember that Muslims, too, died at Ground Zero.

So, how far away would be far enough to satisfy the opponents? And for how many more years must “they” keep their distance from the hallowed ground? It’s been nearly ten years.

We understand many people have become upset about this matter, upset and even outraged, but has it occurred to thoughtful opponents that the whole “mega-mosque” controversy is a manufactured distraction in an election year? The United States is sinking in intractable economic turmoil. One political party is trying fitfully, sometimes lamely, to pass legislation that will alleviate the suffering, while the other party is actively opposing any and all efforts to repair the damage, much of which that opposition party caused while it was in power. The nation’s crises are many, and they are profound. Is a struggle against a cultural center for Muslims really what Americans need to be pouring our passions into right now? It should be clear that the right wing of the GOP (is there any other part?) encourages this hollering, expecting votes without having to offer any serious, constructive program for generating economic recovery, jobs, or helping people afford to stay in their homes or pay for their health care? They are trying to get people to the polls through fear and hatred.

How many of the Republicans who profess undying loyalty to the sacred memory of 9/11 and its heroes voted for funding for medical treatment for Ground Zero rescue workers and residents of New York City who suffered lung ailments and other illnesses from the toxic dust and debris? Twelve. Twelve out of 178 Republicans in the House of Representatives. The New York Times reported on July 29 that “243 Democrats and 12 Republicans supported the measure; 155 Republicans and 4 Democrats opposed it.”

Of course, these right-wing attacks on the mosque are also an attack on President Obama (derided by the despicable out-on-a-Limbaugh as “Imam Obama”). MediaMatters.org shows that the right-wing media are relentlessly pushing the false accusation that Barack Obama is a Muslim: more people believe this now than before he was elected president.

(To their credit, some responsible conservatives such as Congressman Ron Paul, former solicitor general Ted Olson—whose wife was onboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11—and New Jersey governor Chris Christie have urged their fellow Republicans to tone down the anti-Muslim rhetoric.)

In our own little house of worship we’re praying that the angry citizens among us will soon come to their senses. Fellow Americans, you’re being used. Years from now this episode is not going to be one of America’s proudest moments. Those who stand up for tolerance and cohabitation, especially when it’s unpopular, are the heroes, the defenders of liberty. Those who exploit public fears should be ashamed, and many later will be. The dead in military cemeteries may have crosses, crescents, or stars of David over their names, but they all served their country with equal devotion and courage. Let’s not endanger further the soldiers and sailors who are still serving.

(The photo above shows the mother of Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, who was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart in Operation Iraqi Freedom, mourning at his grave in Arlington National Cemetery. Gen. Colin Powell hinted that he wept when he saw this photograph in the New Yorker. The sight of this photograph, amid the anti-Islamic vitriol that was erupting at McCain-Palin rallies in September 2008, was one of the factors that influenced the former Secretary of State to come out and publicly endorse Barack Obama on Meet the Press. Secretary Powell said to Tom Brokaw:

I’m also troubled by . . . what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards—Purple Heart, Bronze Star—showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life. Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way.

When Senator John F. Kennedy was running for president in 1960, he was dogged by questions about his Roman Catholic faith. Would he take orders from the Vatican?  Would he serve Rome first, then America? He tried repeatedly to answer questions and put the matter to rest, but still concerns remained, intensified by direct mail campaigns sympathetic to Republican candidate Richard Nixon. One of the greatest speeches of JFK’s political career was his address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12, 1960, where he addressed head-on what he called “the so-called religious issue.”

“. . . For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew, or a Quaker, or a Unitarian, or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s Statute of Religious Freedom. Today I may be the victim—but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.”

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A rare—indeed, unprecedented—personal note, in the first person singular

I have known a good number of friends who are Muslim or whose parents moved to the U.S. from Arabic-speaking lands—friends from Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Morocco (the barber Aziz from Casablanca), including some girlfriends in and around college. I used to live in Baton Rouge, where Louisiana State University normally has about a 10% population of international students. A fair number of these are petroleum engineering students from Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. When I worked at a restaurant in the 1980s the waiters included Shahram who went by “Shawn,” and gave me tapes of beautiful Persian music, and “Tony” who, when asked, told the customers he was from Italy . . . After work we would go to, appropriately, the International House of Pancakes near campus and meet up with some of their friends, and drink from the bottomless urns of IHOP coffee and smoke and talk about everything. They said there was no family in Tehran that had not lost someone to the Shah’s dreaded SAVAK secret police.

The concerns expressed above about freedom of worship and safety and security are concerns not only in the abstract but for individuals I’ve known—kind, intelligent, humorous, often devout but not always noticeably religious. They love America as much as anyone else, and sometimes appreciate its freedoms more than the native-born Americans realize because they’ve seen the difference. “They” is not the right word, for “they” are “we.”

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The last combat troops have left Iraq, as a convoy of the 4th Stryker Brigade rumbled in the wee hours of August 19, 2010, from Iraq toward U.S. bases in Kuwait. At the end of August, Operation Iraqi Freedom will end and 50,000 advisory and security troops will remain in Iraq until the end of 2011 for a new phase to be known as Operation New Dawn. (May we have a new dawn in the United States, please?—or is it not “morning in America” anymore?)

Michael Gordon of the New York Times reports here on how the U.S. State Department, with about 2,400 civilian employees protected by up to 7,000 private security guards, will continue the training of Iraqi police and assist with political stabilization and other functions—including counterterrorism—in an effort to help Iraq rebuild without the presence of U.S. combat troops. The 2,400 civilian State Department employees will work at the Baghdad embassy and regional outposts in Mosul, Kirkuk, and at consulates in Erbil and Basra. Gordon writes:

The startup cost of building and sustaining two embassy branch offices—one in Kirkuk and the other in Mosul—and of hiring security contractors, buying new equipment and setting up two consulates in Basra and Erbil is about $1 billion. It will cost another $500 million or so to make the two consulates permanent. And getting the police training program under way will cost about $800 million.

So, the combat forces are withdrawing, returning to the Homeland. Some soldiers will get to rejoin their families after a long time away—we wish them well—and others will have to redeploy in maybe six months to Afghanistan, where Obama’s surge continues.

Where’s That “Mission Accomplished” Feeling?

It is surely a good thing that the combat forces are withdrawing from Iraq, but why don’t we feel any pleasure or pride? What has been accomplished, aside from doubling the price of a gallon of gas and making Iran the main power in the region? The soldiers themselves surely feel some pride and relief, and after all their hard work they deserve more than a good cigar. But what have we gained? Where is the security? The United States is immeasurably poorer, more weak and divided than when this war began—economically, socially, politically. As of this writing, 4,415 American soldiers are dead; tens of thousands are wounded, many critically, missing limbs, and some with unimaginable brain and neurological injuries, and alarming numbers have committed suicide: 27 in July alone, 32 in June. (In addition to all the Iraqi dead—estimates are around 100,000—there have been 179 British dead and 139 from other Coalition nations.) And then there’s the psychological, soul damage the soldiers suffer, and the broken marriages, the frayed family relationships, the children who have grown from infants to eight- and ten-year-olds hardly even knowing their fathers or mothers who have been away on multiple deployments and come home virtually strangers with scant job prospects here in the Homeland. But Saddam Hussein is no longer in power, so maybe it’s all worthwhile.

Meanwhile the war in Afghanistan—the one that began in October 2001—goes on and on, with 2,005 dead and casualties increasing in frequency, while General David Petraeus with tacit administration backing begins a P.R. campaign to tamp down expectations of withdrawal from that war despite the president’s promise—or strong suggestion, sort of—that U.S. forces would begin pulling out of that interminable war by July 2011. (At the same time, Aug. 17, professional alarmist and provocateur John Bolton—whom George W. Bush’s appointed as U.N. ambassador—warns ominously that Israel has “only eight days left” in which to strike Iran’s Bushehr nuclear facility to stop Iran from acquiring the capacity to build a nuclear plant. This neocon campaign will go on . . .)

Frayed Flags

The wars since 2001 have cost over $1 trillion, with over $740 billion spent in Iraq and $325 billion in Afghanistan. Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that the Iraq War will ultimately cost $3 trillion when all health care costs over the soldiers’ lifetimes are factored in. The continuing cost of the State Department’s mission in Iraq was hinted at above, but how much more will the U.S. spend on that nation? How many more lives will be lost, and how much more national wealth that could be spent on jobs programs for the millions of unemployed and the rebuilding of America’s crumbling infrastructure?

One positive sign of increasing congressional unwillingness to continue funding the wars was seen in the recent vote on $59 billion in appropriations for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. On July 27 the House of Representatives voted 308 to 114 (148 Democrats and 160 Republicans in favor, and 102 Democrats and 12 Republicans opposing). Last year the “no” votes came from 32 Democrats, so opposition has increased by 82 votes and is becoming bipartisan. Please go to our Political Action page and contact your members of Congress to urge them to wind down the wars and appropriate your tax dollars for use here at home for the public good. National security begins at home.

We welcome the troops back from Iraq, and hope that most of them will get to stay home and build good relations with their families and communities. We hope the U.S. government will give them the health care and psychological counseling they need and deserve. And we hope a good many of them will join us in the anti-war movement to bring the Afghanistan war to a close so we can begin to rebuild our own war-torn land. As President Obama said at West Point last December when he announced the 30,000-troop increase, “we must rebuild our strength here at home . . . . the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”

Let’s hold him to that pledge—and his promise to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in mid-2011.

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See also:

WikiLeaks’s Afghan War Diary: A “Pentagon Papers” for Our Time

Deeper into Afghanistan: 360 Degrees of Damnation

Afghanistan: More Insane Than a Quagmire

Declare Independence from Endless War

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Frayed flag photograph by Geneviève Hafner: Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2002.

Some of this gets a little technical—but it’s a technical matter, after all—so you can skim the excerpts if you like. The main point is that the experts took the questions seriously and took time to answer, and their replies show they’ve been thinking quite extensively about these issues.

We wrote last week:

Countdown to Zero is excellent but not perfect. We had questions about some important practical issues that were raised but not dealt with. The film advocates bringing all world nuclear stockpiles down to zero. (Agreed.) But the film also explains that nuclear power plants produce fissile material (as in the case of Iran). So, does the film also advocate elimination of nuclear power? How is the danger posed by production of fissile materials through ordinary operation of nuclear power plants to be managed? Unless we missed something, the film said nothing about what should be done about nuclear power plants. Presumably terrorists or their would-be suppliers could also get their hands on fissile material—or is that somehow not possible? There is still the question of what to do about Iran, or what threat may be posed by Iran or other possibly hostile or unstable nations possessing nuclear power plants, or the fissile material produced by them. Would France, for example, have to shut down its nuclear power plants, the source of most of its electricity?

It turns out that we did miss something. Bruce Blair, one of the experts appearing in the film, explained in an e-mail that neither the film nor Global Zero stand in opposition to nuclear power plants. He continued:

We do however emphasize the need to strengthen safeguards against the potential diversion of “civilian” facilities to weapons purposes. Those safeguards would take various forms: more authority for IAEA inspectors to conduct inspections anytime and anywhere; multilateral partnerships in running the facilities (especially uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing centers); international management of the entire “civilian” fuel cycle from uranium mining to waste processing; and international fuel banks (nations forgo indigenous national fuel production and rely on supplies of nuclear fuel (LEU [low enriched uranium] in particular for civilian power plants) from an international consortium with spent fuel returned to the source (to guard against extracting plutonium from the waste); and new proliferation-resistant technologies such as thorium-based reactors.

In addition, new enforcement mechanisms must be developed to deal with cheaters who would break out of their NPT [Nonproliferation Treaty] obligations and begin to produce materials for nuclear weapons. [On this point, Blair wrote in a separate e-mail, “Global Zero emphasizes that safeguards must be greatly strengthened through additional protocols and international management and international fuel banks to close the NPT loophole that allows countries like Iran to pursue nuclear weapons breakout capability under the guise of a nuclear commercial peaceful program.”] A cheater would not be allowed to utilize nuclear technology provided in good faith to it during its period of compliance with the treaty. Technology assistance garnered under false pretenses would have to be surrendered.

In short, we view the civilian nuclear fuel cycle today to pose unacceptable risks of diversion and nuclear weapons breakout, and further expansion of this industry will only exacerbate the problem, and therefore it is critical to strengthen international control over the cycle.

Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione noted that although the film does not directly address the troublesome issues of cost, waste, and safety of nuclear energy, near the end it does discuss the key issue regarding proliferation. His remarks deserve to be quoted in full:

From a proliferation perspective, the problem with nuclear power is not the reactor, it is what goes into and comes out of the reactor.

The same facilities that enrich uranium to low levels for fuel can enrich it to high levels for bombs. The same facilities that reprocess the spent fuel for disposal can reprocess it to produce plutonium for bombs. This is the problem with Iran today: Not the reactor at Bushehr, but the uranium enrichment plant and the plutonium reprocessing plant. The Iranians say this is just for fuel. Do you trust them? Or, for that matter, do you trust Vietnam which, under a deal now being negotiated with the US, would be allowed to build their own uranium enrichment facility?

The solution to this is discussed in Countdown. It is to put all fuel fabrication facilities under international control (as Truman proposed in 1946) or multinational control (as the Europeans do with the URENCO fuel facilities in UK, Germany and the Netherlands). And, as the film says, to guard all stockpiles of enriched uranium and move to eliminate as much of the material as possible.

Note: It is not possible for terrorists to, say, raid a power reactor and get material for a bomb. The radiated fuel is far too deadly to touch. It requires massive machinery to take the fuel out and a massive facility to reprocess it to extract the plutonium. On the other hand, terrorist could raid a research reactor in, say, Argentina, and take out the highly enriched uranium fuel that is used in many of these small reactors to produce medical isotopes. This is a major terrorist risk and is discussed in some detail in the film.

For more on all this, I suggest checking out Matt Bunn (in the film) and his excellent report: Securing the Bomb at the Harvard Belfer Center project, Managing the Atom.

These experts’ advocacy of strong safeguards and inspections directed by international agreements and monitoring organizations all sounds good to us—we would love to see this in action—yet we worry about the realistic likelihood that nations will comply with these conditions. They know the community and the issues much better than we do, and it’s true that we’re disillusioned by too many years of Cheney-and-Rumsfeld-neocon mentality controlling things (why should the U.S. be constrained by any international agreements?), but it seems to us that the individual nations participating in such cooperative arrangements would be agreeing to surrender considerable autonomy in exchange for security. Mr. Cirincione points to Vietnam’s insistence on being “allowed to build their own uranium enrichment facility.”

These ideas are soundly reasoned and appear workable on paper, but is it politically practicable when we can’t even get the Senate to agree to formerly Republican-proposed “cap and trade” energy measures (which were originally proposed by Republicans and advocated by McCain-Palin 2008)? In the current political climate—toxic and partisan to the extreme—it is hard to imagine how the American public can be assured that conservatives’ inevitable complaints about surrender of autonomy are exaggerated. Woodrow Wilson faced the same resistance when he was urging the nation to support the League of Nations in 1919 . . . The U.S. never joined.

Bruce Blair acknowledges that it’s going to be tough to persuade American participation in multilateral nuclear security arrangements, “but a nonpartisan consensus is beginning to gell that the threat of proliferation and terrorism demand new measures. The UAE model is a good illustration of the kind of progress that we can and must make. (It is developing a nuclear power program but promised to participate in a fuel bank arrangement in lieu of its own fuel cycle effort.)”

Well, we admire their commitment to projects that may well save us all, and we pray that their sane vision prevails.

“You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one . . .”

Nuclear Weapons, No. But Yes to Nuclear Power?

We ask these questions about nuclear power because, quite to the contrary of anything we would have expected “once upon a time,” we have opened our minds a little to nuclear power as a reasonable alternative to coal-powered generation of electricity. (You have to burn a pound of coal to keep a 100-watt bulb burning for 10 hours.) There are some solid, sane reasons why nuclear power plants are viewed with skepticism, but under conditions of serious and strict governmental (not private) regulation and oversight, this means of generating power can be done well. It is not the only answer, but rather one of a suite of options for alternatives to coal-burning generation of electricity, along with solar, wind, geothermal, and other methods yet to be developed to their full potential. The key consideration is that generation of electricity should not contribute further to global warming.

For more about how nuclear power just may be “the power to save the world” (at least from catastrophic intensities of global warming), see Gwyneth Cravens’s book by that title, Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy. (She was a longtime skeptic and anti–nuclear power activist.)

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See Countdown to Zero’s spread-the-word action page.

Valerie Plame Wilson in the New York Daily News: “A World Without Nuclear Weapons: Ex-CIA Agent Valerie Plame Wilson Says We Need to Make It Real”

Check out The Ploughshares Fund, a grantmaking foundation “dedicated exclusively to security and peace funding” worldwide for more than 25 years. See also Global Zero, founded by Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute. An organization of more than 200 political, military, business, religious and civic leaders, Global Zero is working “for the phased, verified elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide.”

Soon we’ll have more about the New Start treaty signed by President Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in April. It is presently in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and will be brought for a vote later this year, likely after the midterm congressional elections. (See “Hiroshima, 65 Years On.” We spoke with a committee staffer this week and will be following up soon; we’ll keep you apprised. Stay tuned.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BfjpU_yHw0

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The text of the commercial, running in various media markets in Louisiana, goes like this:

We know how David Vitter handled his “serious sin.” And when David Vitter’s staffer violently abused his girlfriend, Senator Vitter let him keep his job—working on women’s issues. David Vitter on women: he voted against equal pay for equal work; against coverage for mammograms; even against protections for women raped on the job. David Vitter: for women, his “serious sin” isn’t even his worst.

See Charlie Melancon’s “Serious Sins” web site. Click here for Talking Points Memo’s article about the ad, and Vitter’s commercial that prompted Melancon to bring out the big guns (linking Melancon with “millionaires and illegals”). TPM comments, “No Wallflowers in This Race.”

Charlie Melancon, a Democratic congressman for Louisiana’s 3rd congressional district, is running for United States Senate. Levees Not War strongly endorses his candidacy and will be pushing for him between now and the November elections.

Why did the U.S. have to use the bomb twice? Did we have to use it at all?

The legend, or conventional wisdom, is that if President Harry Truman (below) had not pulled the trigger, American forces would have had to launch a bloody, costly land invasion of Japan. This is possible, though no major U.S. military offensive was slated to begin before November 1, 1945, and the Soviets, our allies against Nazi Germany, had promised to help with a ground war. What was the hurry?

In hindsight, it is difficult to imagine the bomb not being used, after a $2 billion investment and six years’ work, even if Japan were not already seriously weakened and soon to collapse. When President Truman was first briefed about the existence of the atom project on April 24, 1945 (two weeks after FDR died), his first response was to sit down; he had received the generals standing up. He ordered a search for other options, with one committee composed of soldiers and civilians, and the other of scientists. Both panels met twice, on May 31 and June 1, and reached the same conclusion. A committee of scientists including J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi told Truman that they could devise “no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.” Meanwhile, Truman’s generals were pressing him to let them move forward with plans for a massive land invasion of the Japanese home islands.

One consideration was that the Soviet Union had promised at the Tehran conference in late 1943 and again at Yalta in February 1945 to join the fight against Japan within three months after the European war ended (May 8). Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall had pushed hard for Soviet help against Japan, knowing that the combined pressure of U.S. and Soviet forces would likely compel the Japanese to surrender. (Even among those who knew about the ultra-top-secret Manhattan Project, it was uncertain whether the new weapon would work until it was tested in mid July 1945.) Until the bomb was proven, the only way to crush the Japanese army was to fight it, and General Marshall preferred to let the Russians do a lot of the heavy lifting. There were reservations, however, about Soviet involvement: American officials did not want to have to share defeated Japan with the USSR the way the Allies were already sharing postwar Germany, divvied up into four military occupation zones: American, Soviet, British, and French.

Historian Stephen Ambrose in Rise to Globalism (1971) surveys a range of plausible reasons why the U.S. nuked Japan. One interpretation is that the bomb was used not to change the military equation “but to keep Russia out of the Far Eastern postwar settlement rather than to save American lives.” It is the view of Gar Alperovitz in Nuclear Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (1965) that the U.S. used the bomb as a means of intimidating the Soviets, a gambit to show the USSR that it should not think about advancing farther into Europe, from which U.S. and British troops were already being demobilized in great numbers. Alperovitz quotes a diary entry by Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal describing Secretary of State James F. Byrnes as “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.” (But for a strong rebuttal of Alperovitz and a good overview of the issues, see Alonzo Hamby, “The Decision to Drop the Bomb” [1997].)

It was on July 16, on the eve of the Potsdam conference (July 17–Aug. 2), that the Trinity test in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, demonstrated that the new secret weapon could work; then the U.S. knew that it didn’t need Russia anymore. Aafter a conversation with Secretary of State Byrnes on July 23, Winston Churchill noted, “It is quite clear that the United States do not at the present time desire Russian participation in the war against Japan” (Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, 49).

The Potsdam Declaration, issued to Japan on July 26, demanded unconditional surrender; the return of all conquests taken since 1895 to their former owners; promised humane treatment and freedom of speech and religion; and offered “a new order of peace, security and justice” and participation in world trade relations. The alternative, the declaration warned, would be “prompt and utter destruction.” The Japanese premier, Admiral Baron Kantaro Suzuki, rejected the declaration as a rehash of old proposals that was unworthy of notice, beneath contempt. After Japan’s rejection, Truman gave the go-ahead.

A witness of the Trinity test and the Nagasaki bombing, New York Times writer William L. Laurence, described the 5:30 a.m. blast at Alamogordo:

. . . a sunrise such as the world had never seen, a great green supersun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than eight thousand feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling luminosity. Up it went, a great ball of fire about a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it expanded, an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years. For a fleeting instant the color was unearthly green, such as one sees only in the corona of the sun during a total eclipse. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies had split. One felt as though one were present at the moment of creation when God said, ‘Let there be light.’ (New York Times, Aug. 7, 1945)

After the Aug. 6 bombing of Hiroshima, Japan did not immediately respond or signal its intentions. Around dawn on Aug. 9 word reached Tokyo that the USSR had declared war against Japan. That day, the Red Army launched an offensive against Japanese forces occupying Manchuria. Later in the morning came word that a second nuclear device had exploded over Nagasaki. The emperor and premier Suzuki and civilian advisers acknowledged that surrender was inevitable and the Potsdam Declaration must be accepted, but the military was sworn to protect the emperor’s honor.

Even after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it took days and nights of prolonged, strenuous arguments among the Japanese military elite and Emperor Hirohito to agree to surrender. Even though American popular opinion was strongly against letting the emperor remain on his throne, Truman knew that removing or harming him would throw Japan into social and political chaos: the emperor would be safe. Hirohito was willing to acknowledge reality and surrender, but three principal military officials, war minister Anami, army chief of Staff Umezu, and navy chief of staff Toyoda, demanded that the U.S. allow Japanese officers to disarm their own troops, try war crimes in Japanese courts, and limit the occupation in advance. The U.S. rejected these terms. Hirohito recorded a broadcast to the Japanese people, who had never heard his voice before, announcing capitulation. “We charge you, Our loyal subjects, to carry out faithfully Our will.”

The emperor had spoken, and celebrations broke out all over America—most famously in New York City’s Times Square—but in Japan pockets of insubordinate military officers were plotting to overthrow the government and resist the enemy. Rebels murdered the general commanding Hirohito’s Imperial Guards Division, and other insurgents tried to assassinate Japanese premier Suzuki and members of his cabinet. General Anami committed hara-kiri, as did Admiral Takijishi, founder of the Kamikaze Corps. Even when the U.S.S. Missouri steamed into Tokyo Bay for the surrender ceremony, insurgent fighter pilots at Atsugi airfield were in their cockpits getting ready to strafe and dive-bomb Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur and the other Americans. The were reached just in time by Prince Takamatsu, Emperor Hirohito’s younger brother, and talked out of their suicide mission. The surrender ceremonies on September 2 went smoothly. (See William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, 386–87.)

Truman later said, “The final decision of where and when to use the atomic bomb was up to me. Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used” (Ambrose, 51).

Push the Senate to Pass New Start Treaty

The narrative above does not seek to justify the use of nuclear weapons in 1945 or at any other time, but only to briefly sketch the historical circumstances surrounding the decision to use the bomb against Japan. We think that two uses of nuclear weapons are two too many. We want to see the United States renounce the first-use policy it has maintained for the past 65 years.

We also want to celebrate the Hiroshima–Nagasaki anniversary for the rest of the year by calling senators and pressing them to support the New Start nuclear agreement with Russia that has been stalled in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since its signing in April. As mentioned in our Aug. 6 Hiroshima post, President Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, who seem to genuinely like each other and have built a good working relationship (comparable to Reagan’s with Gorbachev), signed an arms reduction treaty known as New Start. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by John Kerry, will be putting the New Start treaty up for a vote, likely after the midterm congressional elections in November, at which time senators will likely be less cautious about voting for the treaty. Treaties need two-thirds approval in the Senate, so to pass the Democrats will need at least 8 Republicans to vote for it. The Democrats have 59 senators (but why count Ben Nelson of North Dakota?)—let’s make that 58. We’ll have more details to come about which Republicans may be persuadable and which Democrats need to be “warmed up.” Two calls today to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s press office have not been returned, but we’ll keep trying.

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]]> http://www.leveesnotwar.org/?feed=rss2&p=3162 0 http://www.leveesnotwar.org/?p=3119 http://www.leveesnotwar.org/?p=3119#comments Fri, 06 Aug 2010 21:36:09 +0000 Levees Not War http://www.leveesnotwar.org/?p=3119 Today, August 6, is the 65th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. Nagasaki was nuked on Aug. 9. The bombs killed some 90,000 to 160,000 in Hiroshima and some 60,000 to 80,000 in Nagasaki, with half the deaths occurring in the first day, even the first millisecond, of the blast. Over the following months and years, thousands died from burns and radiation sickness.

Read Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe’s compelling op-ed in today’s New York Times, “Hiroshima and the Art of Outrage.” A friend of Oe’s mother was an eyewitness to the blast; she only survived because she was protected behind a large brick wall:

Moments before the atomic bomb was dropped, my mother’s friend happened to seek shelter from the bright summer sunlight in the shadow of a sturdy brick wall, and she watched from there as two children who had been playing out in the open were vaporized in the blink of an eye.

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Last night we went to see Countdown to Zero, a powerful new documentary written and directed by Lucy Walker and produced by the folks who brought us An Inconvenient Truth. Despite the film’s serious subject, it’s not a downer: it’s actually positive, affirmative, and you walk out feeling more hopeful. (You may have read about Countdown to Zero a few weeks ago in our tribute to Greenpeace co-founder and anti–nuke-testing activist Jim Bohlen.) Click here for a photo gallery of the film.

Enlivened by the commentary of such experts and officials as Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert McNamara, Valerie Plame Wilson, Joseph Cirincione, and others, including a U.S. army officer who literally worked down in a nuclear silo with his finger on the button, the film gives a concise overview of the history of the atomic bomb and the reasons why it’s outlived its usefulness and should be eliminated from all arsenals.

The narrative shows how the bomb was developed in ultra top secret Manhattan Project in the early 1940s (even Vice President Harry Truman didn’t know about it until he became president upon the death of FDR in April 1945), and following the detonations over Japan, the bomb prompted misgivings and remorse, evoked most eloquently by nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who recalled the Trinity test in New Mexico (pictured above) in July 1945, just weeks before Hiroshima:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

Even more than the errors, SNAFUs, and near misses that the nuclear nations have brought us, the dangers on which the film concentrates are those posed by non-state actors such as Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Valerie Plame Wilson, whose CIA job was nuclear nonproliferation, explains the hair-raising dangers of theft, illicit sales, and secret transportation of fissile materials in Central Asia and elsewhere around the globe. The “loose nukes” floating around the former Soviet Union will chill you—a tennis-ball-size amount of uranium could destroy a large city—and will make you thankful we have a president who has made it a priority to reduce the nuclear stockpiles through a signed arms reduction agreement with Russian president Dmitri A. Medvedev. (Barack Obama was working and speaking on nonproliferation as a U.S. senator.) The New Start treaty, signed with Medvedev in April, needs a two-thirds vote and will likely have to wait until after the 2010 midterm elections; Obama and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry need at least 8 Republican votes. Then Obama and Biden will push for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that was adopted by the U.N. in 1996, has been ratified by 153 countries, but was rejected by the U.S. Senate in 1999. It remains to be ratified by China, India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan, which are not expected to sign until the U.S. does.

A poignant passage concerns the 1986 summit between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, where the leaders, who genuinely liked and trusted each other, almost came to an agreement on abolishing by 50 percent or even 100 percent their nations’ nuclear stockpiles. This was the closest the world has ever come to complete nuclear disarmament, but Reagan’s insistence on the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), along with undercutting concerns raised by advisers Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman, helped scuttle the possible agreement. (There were other concerns, as well, including the security of U.S. allies in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe. For more on the Reykjavik Summit, click here for an account by Soviet aide Gyorgy Arbatov, and see Frances FitzGerald’s Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War and Implications of the Reykjavik Summit on Its Twentieth Anniversary by Sidney D. Drell and former secretary of state George P. Shultz, who was there.)

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Aerial shots of New York, London, and other cities are shown overlaid with concentric-ring blast circles like bull’s-eyes depicting the zones of damage as experts’ voices explain how immediately civilians and buildings would be incinerated . . . The film draws to a close with a scene of New York City’s Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve—the gold standard of “terrorist target” for a sensational mass murder—with everyone looking happy and festive (and muted) as Radiohead’s “Reckoner” plays hauntingly.

One observation: There is a complete and remarkable absence of anyone from the George W. Bush administration—unless you count Ms. Wilson, whose “nonofficial cover” (NOC) was blown by I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, in retaliation for her husband Joseph Wilson’s incendiary NYT op-ed, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa” (July 6, 2003), which disputed Bush Inc.’s claims that Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium for weapons of mass destruction. Is the Bush people’s absence because they were not invited to speak (we doubt this) or because they simply did not wish to participate in a film advocating a disarmament they sought to subvert and avoid? (In 2001 Bush pulled the U.S. out of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia.) Or maybe it’s because the former president always pronounced “nuclear” as “nucular.”

(Speaking of Valerie Plame: Never before has nuclear nonproliferation looked like such an attractive career option! We once had an opportunity to talk with her and her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, at a party in Washington, and they are as nice and down-to-earth—and as handsome a couple—as you could want. We hope to meet them again some day. We recommend their books (which we’ve read): his The Politics of Truth: A Diplomat’s Memoir: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity [2004], and her Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House [2007]. Warning: about one-third of her book was redacted—blacked out—by the CIA’s refusal to allow her to say where she was, what she was doing, even when she took care not to disclose security-related secrets. Mrs. Wilson told us the CIA was just giving her a hard time to be spiteful [our words, not hers]; there was no security-protection reason for the delays and forced redactions.)

Countdown to Zero is excellent but not perfect. We had questions about some important practical issues that were raised but not dealt with. The film advocates bringing all world nuclear stockpiles down to zero. (Agreed.) But the film also explains that nuclear power plants produce fissile material (as in the case of Iran). So, does the film also advocate elimination of nuclear power? How is the danger posed by production of fissile materials through ordinary operation of nuclear power plants to be managed? Unless we missed something, the film said nothing about what should be done about nuclear power plants. Presumably terrorists or their would-be suppliers could also get their hands on fissile material—or is that somehow not possible? There is still the question of what to do about Iran, or what threat may be posed by Iran or other possibly hostile or unstable nations possessing nuclear power plants, or the fissile material produced by them. Would France, for example, have to shut down its nuclear power plants, the source of most of its electricity?

We have sent queries to the film company and to a few of the participants, and have received some initial replies. We will report as soon as we get some answers. Stay tuned.

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See Countdown to Zero’s spread-the-word action page.

Also check out The Ploughshares Fund, a grantmaking foundation “dedicated exclusively to security and peace funding” worldwide for more than 25 years whose board of directors includes Joseph Cirincione, president; former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel, and Iranian-born author Reza Aslan. One of its policy experts, Dr. Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute, also appears in Countdown to Zero.

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