Part of the Lethbridge Peace Network’s Contributions to the Worldwide Day of Solidarity for Global Peace, 20 March, 2004

Comments for Presentation at Lethbridge City Hall on the Occasion of the First Anniversary of the US-Led Invasino of Iraq

By Anthony J. Hall
Founding Coordinator of Globalization Studies
University of Lethbridge

In his State of the Union address immediately following the events of
9/11, US President George W. Bush announced to the world the
superpower’s terms for the strange ideological concoction it described
as the War on Terrorism. In words which harkened back to the United
States’ self-serving determination to polarize the planet during the
Cold War, Mr. Bush stated that all the people and governments of the
planet faced a single stark choice. Either we joined the United States
in its campaign or we would be viewed as being “with the terrorists.” As
I see it, this ill-conceived and unacceptable ultimatum was instrumental
in beginning the process that turned the tide of world opinion to the
point where the Bush regime is today today, March 20, 2004, the most
reviled and distrusted US government in global history.

Today we gather in Lethbridge to form our own small part of a new genre
of global protest, a new phase in the transnational expression of
political will necessitated by the lawless military extremism of
President Bush’s right-wing fundamentalist theocracy. We meet to
continue the work we began last year when we started to organize on a
truly global scale in order to assert our conviction that, with all its
imperfections, the United Nations must trump the United States as the
main venue of authority in the exercise of global governance. The rule
of law must pre-empt the rule of force in shaping how the people,
peoples, nations, governments and corporations of the world inter-relate.

On February 15 last year at least ten million of us gathered in hundreds
of communities around the world to demonstrate our conviction that we
could resist the imperial militarism of the United States while
concurrently standing as one against those who would kill or maim
innocent civilians to advance political objectives. We stood in
solidarity to manifest our determination to oppose the unleashing by the
Bush and Blair regimes of the murder of state terrorism to remove a
discarded American client regime. We stood in solidarity to express our
desire that all weapons of mass destruction, whose largest inventor,
manufacturer, and distributor is overwhelmingly the notorious
military-industrial complex of the USA, must be placed under the
regulatory authority of the United Nations. There is simply no
justification that, according to Chalmers Johnson, the US presently
maintains 5,400 multiple-megaton warheads atop intercontinental
ballistic missiles on land and sea, 1,750 nuclear bombs ready to be
launched from B-2 and B-52 bombers, 1,670 tactical nuclear weapons, and
an additional 10,000 or so nuclear warheads stored in bunkers in the
American empire’s heartland.

There can be no doubt that the positions of our global coalition, which
some
have dubbed the new superpower of transnational public opinion, are
working their way into the hearts and minds of average citizens around
the planet. The evidence is everywhere apparent. According to the Pew
Research Centre, for instance, global hostility to US foreign policy has
significantly widened and intensified since last year. There was broad
consensus in Canada that the Chretien regime, not the Bush surrogates in
Alberta’s Klein regime, was correct in keeping Canada out of the Iraq
fiasco. A Globe and Mail/CTV poll recently found that two-thirds of
Canadians believe President Bush “knowingly lied to the world” about its
true reasons for occupying Iraq.

This same view is beginning to be expressed even among the people and
governments of the former Soviet block in eastern European. These
countries are particularly vulnerable to US forms of blackmail to force
participation in the cynically titled coalition of the willing. And
then, of course, there are the very important developments in Spain, a
country that seems to be performing the same role as miners’ canary that
it played in the years leading up to the Second World War. In responding
to the victory of the government Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Bush
posse are trotting out their mantra that the new government’s demand for
a UN-led rather than US-led handover of sovereignty to Iraqis represents
a victory for terrorism. In fact, what the Zapatero regime is advancing,
is just the opposite. The Zapatero government is promoting the
pre-eminence of the rule of law in international affairs rather than a
continuation of the extension of American Manifest Destiny to global
proportions.

Mr. Bush, we deeply resent your ultimatum that by rejecting the military
imperialism of the United States we are somehow “with the terrorists.”

I want to end by affirming my hope that the American people will throw
off the weight of the oppressive Bush regime in order to rise to the
challenge of the great international responsibilities resting on the
United States at this crucial moment in global history. Last year on
March 16 the Lethbridge Network for Peace sent a delegation to visit our
counterparts in Montana to deliver our plea that the rule of law should
be made to prevail over the rule of force in international relations. In
going onto American soil to deliver our message, we attempted to
demonstrate our solidarity with the many American citizens who fervently
disagree with the military extremism presently dominating the global
posture of the United States. In our manifesto we encouraged the people
and government of the superpower to promote the principle that the
rights and freedoms proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence of
1776 are inherent to the constitution of all human beings on the planet,
including, for instance, the citizens of Iraq, Gaza and the West Bank,
Haiti, Venezuala, Chechnya, Tibet, and Canada. May a free confederacy of
self-determining peoples replace the tyranny of unilateralism on planet
where the primary agency of control is presently the vast arsenals of
WMD- weapons of mass destruction-- whose violent deployment is mostly
dependent on the domestic political whims of single superpower.

PEACE ACROSS THE BORDER:
A Statement of Principles Bringing Together Members of the Global Network for Peace at the Sweetgrass Crossing of the International Boundary Joining Canada and the United States, 16 March 2003

Shortly after the horrific tragedy of 911, President George W. Bush
announced to the world in his State of the Union address that everyone
on the planet faced a single stark choice. We were told, either we
actively back and support the global police interventions of the Bush
regime or we would be viewed by his government as being “with the
terrorists.” The rapid mobilization of many tens of millions of citizens
throughout the planet to protest the US-led invasion of Iraq is
indicative of the huge magnitude of the international rejection of the
false dichotomy inherent in this ultimatum. Mr. Bush, we are part of an
unprecedented display of globalized and mobilized political will intent
on demonstrating we are neither with your regime nor are we with the
terrorists. Instead, in the tradition of the non-aligned movement, we
are seeking to invest the international system with elements of genuine
multilateral democracy. This movement, which locates the central
mechanisms of global governance in the United Nations rather than the
United States, is inconsistent with the present structure of world order
based on the systematic and obsessive unilateralism of a single, heavily
militarized superpower.

We are heartened by the realization that there are many millions of
law-abiding citizens in the United States who share our conviction. They
share with our global peace network the determination that we must usher
in a new era of human history, one where the planet will be governed
through the democratic exercise of the rule of law rather than the rule
of force as is presently the case. The current status quo, which
emphasizes might over right, concentrates unimaginable power over the
destiny of all human beings in the domestic political whims and in the
global military machinations of a single, unrivalled superpower. The
prospect, therefore, of a US-led invasion of Iraq, outside the laws of
the United Nations, is indicative of how far the United States
government has deviated from the underlying principles of its founding.
In revolting with armed violence against the very Crown authority in
which the sovereignty of Canada continues to be vested, bold intentions
were announced by the founders of the United States that the rights and
freedoms proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence were inherent to
the constitution of all human beings.

It is in the spirit of this promise of liberation for all of humanity
that we come to the border as members of the Lethbridge Network for
Peace, a small but significant division in the Global Network for Peace.
We come to meet with like-minded activists from Montana, a jurisdiction
where the world’s superpower harbors vast arsenals of weapons of mass
destruction in a plethora of missile silos. Like all other military
arsenals, these nuclear weapons should be subject to a globally uniform
regime of United Nations’ inspection. No single country, no matter how
massive its military, economic, or political clout, should be above a
global rule of law governing the protection of human rights through the
international regulation of all weapons of mass destruction.

We come to pass our petition directed at the White House to our friends
in the country of our neighbors to the south. We come to pass our
petition across the forty-ninth parallel, the site of the worlds most
famous and celebrated undefended border. We come to the place that the
Aboriginal inhabitants of this part of the world have historically
referred as the Medicine Line. It is this Medicine Line that the freedom
fighter, Sitting Bull, along with four thousand of his supporters,
crossed when they sought asylum after defeating the US army in 1876 at
the Battle of Little Bighorn. This Indian victory over the US Army
occurred in the course of Indian attempts to counter the powerful
currents of Manifest Destiny in order to defend their own Native lands
from appropriation by the world’s emerging superpower. We come to the
Medicine Line with the view that, in developing our global peace
movement, we must seek to elaborate all sorts of face to face, people to
people exchanges and collaborations across many borders, political,
religious, economic and cultural. While we must do so with due regard
for the national sovereignty of our respective governments, this duty
should not deter us from creating our own transnational venues of
cooperation to usher in the era an of democracy in global governance, an
era when the rule of law is made to prevail over the rule of force as
exercised by the obsessive unilateralism of a single superpower.

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