Annihilation from Within by Fred Iklé (best interesting books to read .TXT) 📗

industrial mobilization would obviously not be about tanks, but about technologies for use against weapons of mass destruction—from vaccines to nuclear sensors. Assume, for instance, that prior to a stealthy use of a nuclear bomb, highly effective nuclear-detection technology had been developed but not yet mass-produced and deployed. At that point, the mobilization authority would empower the government rapidly to move from the production of consumer goods all the materials, plants, and workforce needed to produce thousands of these sensors.

4. GUARDING TERRITORIAL SOVEREIGNTY In times of domestic upheaval as well as in wars between nations, a country’s sovereign territory is the decisive arena. The military strategist Colin S. Gray puts it well: “The modern state is legally a territorial entity, and nearly everything that we care about deeply exists on land…. Human beings do not live at sea, or in cyberspace.”11 After an attack from within employing mass destruction weapons, the nation’s sovereign territory would be a contested arena. Unfortunately, democracies have become increasingly beholden to deeply flawed policies and various United Nation conventions that limit their ability to govern their sovereign territory.

The underlying facts of this predicament are well known, but their interpretation is a controversial topic. It triggers bitter clashes of conflicting ethical principles and disputes about multiculturalism, open borders, xenophobia and xenophilia, the merits of international law, and other hot-button issues.

The UN Asylum Convention affords a spectacular example of the new restrictions on countries’ control of their territory. The right of asylum has become an ethical imperative so compelling as to forestall discussion of its associated absurdities. Does flight from political repression qualify anyone for asylum? In principle, it should, according to the original concept of asylum. But in practice that is wholly impossible, since three billion people on this planet live under political repression. So the contrived limitation of the Asylum Convention is that the applicant must have managed to put a foot across the border of a host country. At that point, the host country’s asylum bureaucracy and international monitors take over, endlessly blocking any effort to weed out fraudulent claimants. In the United States and in Western Europe political elites with blinkered conscience defend the system because they can calmly ignore the three billion people living under repressive despots. These masses of people—oh, how convenient—are unable to meet the condition for claiming asylum, namely to cross the border of a magnanimous democracy.

But there have been occasions in which asylum seekers approach the territory of the wealthy democracies not just in small groups, but as rippling waves that look like harbingers of an immense flood tide. Instantly, the democracies on which these harbingers intrude become fearful and try to revise their asylum laws. Yet the UN asylum police and holier-than-thou legislators won’t allow this. Unable to change the law, the executive branches of the affected governments feel compelled to cheat audaciously. In 1992–93, throngs of Haitians sought to escape their nation’s turmoil and poverty by reaching American territory on any available vessel. The Clinton administration’s response was to intercept the ships fleeing from Haiti and to bribe the Haitian government to let the U.S. Coast Guard escort them back home before the would-be refugees could land and claim asylum under the UN Asylum Convention.12 Nations of the European Union have made similar deals with East European and African countries. When ships with smuggled immigrants from Asia approached American shores, the U.S. Government has intercepted the vessels and pleaded with Mexico, Guatemala, or Honduras to let the Coast Guard escort the ships to their countries where the less fastidious legal practices would sweep all the asylum claims into a wastebasket and allow quick repatriation of the whole human cargo. In 2005 the socialist government of Spain countered the flow of African asylum seekers by surrounding Ceuta and Melilla (the Spanish exclaves in Africa) with double fences, and made a deal with Morocco to take back any would-be asylum seekers who made it over the razor wires atop those fences.

These devious procedures for coping with the UN Asylum Convention unmask the present asylum policies as a hypocritical hoax. People who suffer the worst political repression—say, in North Korea, Burma, or the Darfur region of the Sudan—cannot escape from their prison-like existence; while the present asylum system discriminates in favor of migrants who want to leave their homes for economic reasons and can pay generous bribes to people-smugglers. Surely, this hypocrisy could be replaced by a more honest and more realistic human rights policy.

The origin of today’s asylum practices is the United Nations Asylum Convention of 1951. Voting for this UN Convention in 1951 was a gesture of atonement to acknowledge the inherited guilt of having abandoned refugees from Nazi Germany before and during World War II. And it was a painless gesture. The 1951 Convention applied only to people seeking asylum “as a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951.” But sixteen years later a Protocol was added to this Convention with staggering consequences. This 1967 Protocol created a vast, open-ended obligation to offer asylum to future refugees.13 It was drafted in the bowels of the United Nations by lawyers specializing in refugee matters and was adopted by the U.S. Congress and most European parliaments with minimal or no debate. A small bureaucratic conclave thus succeeded in changing global immigration policies by stealth, with huge and irreversible consequences for all democracies. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held its hearing on the Protocol on September 20, 1968. The State Department witness told the senators that the number of asylum seekers from Eastern Europe could not be predicted, yet he totally ignored the predictability of the immensely larger flow from the rest of the world. Sensing a cover-up, Senator John Sparkman, who chaired the hearing, asked the State Department witness: “I want to make certain of this: Is it absolutely clear that nothing in this protocol … requires the United States to admit new categories or numbers of aliens?” The State Department witness answered: “That is absolutely