U.S. rules for war on Iraq

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It appears that President George Bush II is going to attack Iraq no matter what happens in the United Nations or with public opinion in the United States. Personally, I think that a war at this time is a subversive act, one calculated to plunge the U.S. into deeper debt, deteriorating quality of life, and more hatred overseas.

But if Bush chooses to proceed, I propose some ground rules for Congress to impose.

1. The United States must stop trying to block self-determination for the Kurdish people, as we have been to date. There is even talk of allowing the Turks to occupy part of the Kurdish section of Iraq, in order to prevent Kurdish control of key oil areas and cities. This suggests that the Bush team has absolute contempt for the principles of democratic self-determination.

2. The United States must allow the United Nations secretary general to assume control of Iraq upon the fall of Saddam. A U.S. military dictator must not be imposed on the Iraqis since it would be a violation of international law. The United States possesses no authority to govern another country, nor does it have a good track record. Governance over Native American Nations, Puerto Ricans, Native Hawaiians, the Filipinos, the Canal Zone, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guam, and other areas run by the Marines, military commanders, or civilian bureaucrats all have been miserable failures or have proven to be very harmful to the peoples involved.

3. The talk of the United States establishing a sort of trust protectorate over Iraqi oil is a cruel joke given the record of trusteeship of Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Puerto Rican lands. Native Americans and Hawaiians lost most of their lands under U.S. "protection" just as the Iraqi people will lose their oil to British and U.S. petroleum conglomerates. Only the United Nations can be trusted to do an impartial job.

4. Protectorates are the first stage of colonies, as is shown by the record of both Britain and the United States. We do not want a global U.S. empire do we? We shall lose our own freedom and ideals if we embark on the chimera of world domination. We do not want either colonies or satellites, because they would destroy our Constitution and the meaning of our nationhood. Thus we must turn authority over to the United Nations and remove ourselves from Iraq to be replaced by troops from many countries as rapidly as possible.

5. All Iraqi prisoners must be treated as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions and none must be placed under the phony category of "enemy combatants." Native Americans know what the term "enemy combatants" does, because all Indigenous captives were treated that way from the 1770s through 1915. It deprives a prisoner of all human rights, all legal protections, and opens up the possibility of brutal treatment, torture, deprivation of habeas corpus, and detention without certain release.

6. The myth that the U.S. government may operate outside of the Constitution and its protections must be corrected. The Constitution either governs the actions of the United States government or it is a near-worthless piece of parchment, since any President may assert that "national security" requires the detention of "dangerous" citizens (i.e., Japanese-Americans then, Native Americans then, Arabs and Muslims now). Recently, a key GOP member of congress stated that the detention of citizen Japanese-Americans was correct; and now attorney general Ashcroft is asking for new powers to secretly detain still more people at the will of government officials.

7. The President and congress must guarantee that the torture and mistreatment of captives (prisoners) will be totally forbidden and that the CIA specifically and all other units of the United States will be ordered to halt all abuses of detainees, not only in Iraq, but in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Diego Garcia, etc.; and that detainees will not be turned over to other countries' secret police in order to be ortured.

8. The United States should dedicate $1 to the UN Relief Agency for each $1 spent on the military campaign, the money to be used for Iraq's reconstruction of infrastructure.

9. The United States guarantees that it will not use any radioactive materials, such as depleted uranium, or any chemical, biological, or other poisonous weapons, which would adversely affect U.S. personnel or Iraqi civilians.

(Jack Forbes is professor emeritus of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis.)