On February 10, Council for a Livable World’s executive director, John Isaacs, along with leaders of 66 other national organizations, sent a letter to the Obama Administration requesting a review of U.S. policy on landmines and cluster bombs. The U.S. has so far refused to sign international treaties banning cluster munitions and landmines.

Key segments below, or click here to read the full letter.

In early December, as half of the world’s governments signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions in Oslo, a spokeswoman for your Transition Team said that you would “carefully review the new treaty and work closely [with] our friends and allies to ensure that the United States is doing everything feasible to promote protection of civilians.”

We welcomed this statement. We write now to urge you to launch a thorough review within the next six months of past U.S. policy decisions to stand outside the treaty banning cluster munitions, as well as the treaty banning anti-personnel landmines.

…Reconsidering these two treaties – and eliminating the threat that U.S. forces might use weapons that most of the world has condemned – would greatly aid efforts to reassert our nation’s moral leadership.

Click here to read the full letter.

 

While it is far too early to make predictions about the 2010 elections there are several early developments worthy of attention.

Click through to the full article for an analysis of upcoming special elections and a list of declared open seats.

Special Elections
Appointments in the new administration have triggered several special elections earlier in the election cycle than is typical.

California 32: Hilda Solis was appointed Secretary of Labor.  This seat is reliably Democratic – the winner of that primary, which will not be scheduled until Solis is approved by the Senate, will likely win the general.  The Democratic candidates are state Senator Gil Cedillo, county Water Director Ed Chavez, Board of Equalization Chair Judy Chu, and Obama Transition Team member Emanuel Pleitez.  No Republicans have registered to run.

Illinois 05:  This very crowded race to replace Rahm Emanuel is also likely to be won by the victor of the Democratic primary, to be held on March 3rd.  The front-runners appear to be state Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, Cook Co. Commis. Mike Quigley and state Rep. John Fritchey.  Feigenholtz has received an EMILY’s List endorsement.  Fritchey and Quigley have accused Feigenholtz of conducting polling that included slanderous questions about them.  Low voter turnout and public disgust with the Chicago political machine in the wake of the Blagojevich scandal could combine to create a surprise winner in this race.

New York 20:  This race to replace Kirsten Gillibrand, who was appointed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat, is the one current special election that will be competitive in the general election.  Gillibrand won in this traditionally Republican district in 2006 by defeating a scandal-plagued incumbent.  She held the seat by 57% in 2008 in part due to her prodigious fundraising.  With her 2006 victory, the district has been trending ever-so-slightly blue.  Obama won 51% in 2008 (Bush won 54% in 2004 and 51% in 2000).  The general election candidates have already been decided, because under New York laws, local party leaders select the candidates rather than holding a primary.  The Democratic candidate is Scott Murphy, a venture capitalist, fundraiser and former Missouri gubernatorial aide.  The Republican candidate is State Assembly Minority Leader John Tedisco.  Tedisco does not live in the district and is currently shopping for a house in-district.  This election has been scheduled for March 31st.

Open Seats
A number of retirements have been definitively announced:

AL-07    Davis, Artur    D
FL-12    Putnam, Adam    R
IL-18    LaHood, Ray    R
KS-01    Moran, Jerry    R
KS-04    Tiahrt, Todd    R
MI-02    Hoekstra, Pete    R
TN-03    Wamp, Zack    R

President Barack Obama has earned justified praise all over the world for announcing that he will close the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba within a year. This military colony has incarcerated hundreds of people seized in the U.S. – Afghan war of 2001-02 and the Iraq war that began in 2003. Because Guantánamo is outside the United States, the U.S. has argued that these so-called “unlawful combatants” are not subject to the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. They have not been tried and some have been tortured.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro praised Obama after his election as “honest” and “noble” but on January 29 he demanded that Obama return Guantánamo to Cuba “without conditions”. Castro said, “Maintaining a military base in Cuba against the will of the people violates the most elemental principles of international law….. Not respecting Cuba’s will is an arrogant act and an abuse of immense power against a little country.”

The United States does maintain an important naval station at Guantánamo Bay covering 28,000 acres. The site was leased to the U.S. in 1903 by a treaty that was renewed in 1934. Since 1960, the Castro government has refused to accept the token annual rent of $5,000 from the U.S. and has repeatedly pressured for the return of the base.

The U.S. helped the people of Cuba liberate themselves from the Spanish overlords in 1898. While they had the power to do so, the U.S. did not directly annex Cuba only because of its pretensions to being an anti-imperialist nation, an important political issue at that time. However, Cuba was forced to grant the U.S. special privileges to intervene in Cuban affairs at any time which we did in 1906, 1912, 1917, and 1920 by landing our Marines. The revolution led by Castro ended that arrangement.

The U.S. has more than 700 military bases in 130 countries, arrangements entered into willingly by the nations concerned. When a country asks us to leave, that request is within their right under international law. To ignore such a demand would call into question U.S. motives and raise the spectre that the bases were forced upon “little countries” by military or economic pressures. The only superpower has a basic interest in maintaining international law and could enhance its position as world hegemon by giving up Guantánamo Bay as the host country requests.

Because no superpower, ancient or modern, has ever surrendered its military and economic preeminence voluntarily, it would be unrealistic to ask the U.S. to do so. But there are ways of leading, even dominating, that lessen the resentment of those led. One method is the use of “soft power” to promote education, health care, infrastructure, etc instead of spending money and manpower on military bases that flaunt superpower occupation and offend local nationalist sentiment.

This post originally appeared on Relentless Liberal on Sunday, February 8, 2009.

If you follow national security you know that the first Monday in February is the big, big day when the President typically submits his defense budget requests to Congress. And Monday night is the long, long night when people like Travis Sharp, our resident defense analyst, fight the paper monster to deliver us a cute, little brief we can all actually read and understand. (Ed: Travis does not endorse use of the word “cute” or “little” to describe his brief).

But this year Sharp has so far been spared the heroic duty, as the Obama administration delayed submission of its defense spending request to take an “exhaustive line-by-line” look at the federal budget. So, to kill some time he prepared a new report that documents the skyrocketing recent growth in defense spending, catalogs calls for budget cuts by key policymakers, looks at the complicated procedure the fiscal year 2010 budget is set to follow, and provides background information on four weapons systems to watch in 2009.

Speculators expect the new President to file for a $527 billion request for fiscal year 2010, 10 percent less than a $584 billion fantasy budget suggested by the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the Bush administration. Critics of defense thrift are already up in arms. “It doesn’t make fiscal sense to cut the defense budget when everyone is scrambling for measures to stimulate the economy,” Robert Kagan argued in today’s Washington Post. On Iran, he added that “the already-slim chances of success will grow slimmer if Iranian leaders believe that the United States may soon begin pulling back from their part of the world.”

In reality, these arguments make little sense. First, military spending may provide some economic stimulus, but there are other types of spending – such as on infrastructure – that would better jumpstart the U.S. economy.  Second, Obama has shown no sign of withdrawing from Iran’s neighborhood. Quite the opposite, in fact – Obama has pledged unprecedented engagement in the Middle East. Of course, it helps to remember that the United States is on track to spend 99 times more than Iran on defense in 2009.

Statements by administration officials reveal that the President is actually intent on making defense budget choices that will boost the U.S. ability to wage stabilization and reconstruction missions such as those we face in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are the missions that the United States is likely to face in the Middle East and around the world in the years ahead. And, just in case, the U.S. military’s unmatched supremacy in naval and air forces will provide insurance against any potential big-state challengers.

So the ax instead may fall this year on expensive toys such as the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor, which hasn’t performed a single mission in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and the Navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer, a vessel originally designed to support land-based troops but that now is more appropriate for blue-water open naval warfare.

Other candidates for resizing are the Army’s Future Combat Systems and the missile defense system, which has yielded mixed results in various operational tests. During the campaign, then-candidate Obama promised to “responsibly deploy missile defenses that would protect us and our allies,” but “only when the system works.”

John Isaacs, along with leaders of 12 other peace and security groups, sent a letter today to Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu, congratulating him on his appointment, and urging him to prevent the development of new nuclear weapons.

Click here to read the letter.

John and the other leaders identified in the letter than President Obama has repeatedly affirmed his support for nuclear weapons control, discussing the need to “lessen the nuclear threat” in his Inauguration speech and stating his support for the goal of a “world free of nuclear weapons” during his campaign. They recognized that,

In this historic administration, you and your department will have a unique opportunity to put into place policies that move the United States toward President Obama’s goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.

Council for a Livable World and its coalition partners with the Campaign for a Nuclear Weapons Free World are working tirelessly to pursue this agenda in 2009.

Click here to sign the petition and join the movement.