Mr.
Bush, Tear Down These Walls!
By Scott Ritter
27 April, 2007
TruthDig.com
“Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” With those six words, President
Ronald Reagan cemented his place in history. Uttered on June 12, 1987,
with America’s “Great Communicator” standing at the
base of the Brandenburg Gate, Reagan’s speech is seen by many
as signifying the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union’s hold
over Eastern Europe. Nearly two and a half years later, in November
1989, the Berlin Wall came crashing down, and with it decades of Soviet
domination over East Germany and the other nations that made up the
Warsaw Pact.
Reagan’s speech was
full of the flowery rhetoric typical of polarizing political addresses.
But it was also rooted in the principles and ideals at the very foundation
of America. Reagan wasn’t simply on a political stump, gushing
throw-away political promises. He was placing an ideological marker
on the ground, establishing a rallying point around which people from
all walks of life could assemble in the defense of freedoms not enjoyed
on the other side of the Berlin Wall. He pointedly noted, in comparing
the forces of democracy and those of communism, “… there
stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion:
Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among
the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.”
For Ronald Reagan, the Berlin
Wall represented the physical manifestation of the denial of freedom.
As such, the infamous barrier was in fact an impediment to prosperity,
reinforcing ancient hatreds among nations. Democracy didn’t automatically
emerge victorious with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, however. In
order for freedom to claim victory from the shadow of the Cold War,
prosperity would need to take hold, and peace would need to reign. And
indeed, in much of Europe since 1990 this is in fact the situation.
Regardless of what one may think about him as a person or president,
on this matter Reagan was right: Walls are a barrier to freedom, and
as such represent the antithesis of American values.
It is strangely curious that
many ideologues on the right wing of the American political spectrum
so openly identify with Reagan. As President Bush’s popularity
ratings continue to plummet, many old-time Republicans and political
conservatives wax philosophical about the “good old days”
when a real conservative held the highest office of the land. Yet these
are the same people who, when asked to comment point by point about
various aspects of the policies of the administration of President George
W. Bush, will defend the establishment of barriers dividing the Iraqi
city of Baghdad (as well as the parallel policy of fencing off entire
Iraqi villages and neighborhoods), the construction of a wall on the
border between the United States and Mexico, and the establishment of
a missile defense “shield” (nothing less than a wall projected
into outer space) over Europe. Reagan, a Republican president, rightly
noted that those who defend freedom must oppose walls. The present-day
Republicans seem to have forgotten this.
The ongoing policy of building
walls in Baghdad designed to segregate Sunni neighborhoods from Shiite
neighborhoods is as morally despicable as it is ineffective. The Soviets
built walls; the Nazis walled off entire communities, often as a precursor
to rounding up the segregated population and shipping it off to concentration
camps. History has rightly condemned both practices. The only modern
nation that actively incorporates the construction of walls as an aspect
of domestic and foreign policy is Israel, and its policy of apartheid
regarding the Palestinians is morally indefensible. That the party of
Ronald Reagan would willingly ally itself with those who embrace policies
so rightly and strongly condemned by America’s 40th president
speaks volumes to the moral vacuum it is operating in today. What is
the next step these erstwhile “Reaganites” propose to undertake
in Baghdad when the construction of walls fails to impede those who
fight for the liberation of their nation from the tyranny of a brutal
occupier? Concentration camps?
I was recently in the southern
Texas city of McAllen, where I was asked by a Hispanic-American what
my opinion of the proposed wall along the Mexican-U.S. border was. I
told her that I was from New York and as such lacked the intimacy of
comprehension about the reality of the immigration situation that someone
who lived right on the border might have. However, I said, as a New
Yorker I knew a few things about immigration. I’ve had the pleasure
of doing a few tours with a fire department in a city in upstate New
York, working in the heart of Main Street, USA. There one cannot help
but notice that the overwhelming percentage of people living and working
in the neighborhood in question is Mexican in origin and, upon a more
detailed examination, is from the troubled Mexican city of Oaxaca. While
they lived in Oaxaca, these people were racked by crime, poverty and
civil strife. In their new home in New York state, they operated as
law-abiding residents, paying their taxes and contributing to society.
I don’t know if their status in America was consistent with U.S.
immigration law. I do know that their presence is a necessary one if
this city is to complete the economic rebirth it is striving for. Just
ask the firefighters.
I have also taken the time
to read the inscription at the Statue of Liberty, one of New York’s—and
America’s—greatest monuments to the cause of liberty and
freedom. It would do well to repeat it here: “Give me your tired,
your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched
refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed
to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” This statement
is the very essence of what it means to be an American. I look at the
wall this administration is building along the border with Mexico, and
I feel nothing but shame toward a nation—my nation—that
can so easily turn its back on the very people for whom Lady Liberty
served as a beacon on their quest for freedom and liberty.
Recently the head of the
U.S. Missile Defense Agency, Gen. Henry Obering, made a visit to the
Czech Republic, where he lobbied hard for Czech political approval of
the basing of a U.S. antimissile radar system on Czech soil. “We
believe that this radar in the Czech Republic will protect European
allies and our deployed forces in the region against what we see as
a growing Iranian missile threat,” Obering told Czech politicians.
This was a curious statement, seeing that the only two missile systems
currently deployed in the Middle East that could possibly threaten Europe
are the Shavit missile, an Israeli system with a range of over 4,000
kilometers, and the Chinese-made CSS-2 intermediate-range missiles currently
in the inventory of Saudi Arabia, possessing a range of between 3,000
and 4,000 kilometers. Iran’s Shahab-3 missile, still in the developmental
stage, has a range of between 1,300 and 1,650 kilometers. The distance
between the northern Iranian city of Tabriz and Prague is 2,850 kilometers.
“We did an analysis of the trajectories from Iran into Europe
and from Iran into the U.S. and it turned out that Poland and the Czech
Republic are the two nations ideal for the interceptors and long-range
radar, respectively,” Gen. Obering said.
Poland, even farther from
Iran than the Czech Republic, is another Eastern European nation being
courted by the United States as a base for its ostensible “anti-Iranian”
ballistic missile shield. There is no threat to Europe from Iran’s
missiles. There is, however, a threat to American Middle East policy
if Europe and Iran are able to find common diplomatic ground. America’s
missile defense shield appears better designed to sink European-Iranian
rapprochement than it is to shoot down any Iranian missile.
While there is no doubt that
Iran’s missiles do not, and cannot, threaten either Europe or
the United States (Obering’s precise calculations notwithstanding),
there is in fact no doubt that the proposed missile defense system upsets
the delicate strategic balance between the United States and NATO on
the one hand and Russia on the other. One of the spinoffs of the rapprochement
between Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Michael Gorbachev was the
implementation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which
did away with two entire classes of ballistic missiles (intermediate
and short-range) that collectively threatened all of Europe with nuclear
holocaust. Much of present-day Europe’s economic prosperity stems
from the free flow of ideas and commerce between its newly expanded
borders and post-Soviet Russia. The construction of the U.S. missile
defense shield in Europe would in fact place the Russians at a strategic
disadvantage, something the American designers of the missile shield
know full well.
The expansion of NATO in
the aftermath of the Cold War has been a very sensitive subject for
Moscow, which has watched as the Warsaw Pact collapsed and the borders
of the NATO alliance have expanded adjacent to the soil of Mother Russia.
The United States, which has been at the head of this aggressive expansion,
has repeatedly told the Russians that they have nothing to fear from
NATO. The reality is quite different. The expansion of NATO right up
to Russia’s borders creates not only the perception but also the
reality that the U.S. and Europe are hemming Russia in. Russia is not
feeling the pressure from “Old Europe,” the traditional
core of NATO, but rather “New Europe,” the former nations
of the Warsaw Pact, which still chafe in memory of the Soviet yoke.
The United States has perfected
the art of “divide and conquer” politics, using the expansion
of NATO as wedge politics within Europe, isolating and weakening Europe’s
traditional centers of political and economic strength (France and Germany
in particular). The Bush administration’s effort to install a
missile defense shield represents a “wall” of sorts being
constructed between Europe and Russia, one that will inevitably compel
the Russians to withdraw from the INF Treaty and build a new generation
of nuclear-tipped missiles that will be targeted at European cities.
But it also represents a deliberate effort to build ideological “walls”
across Europe, weakening that continent’s ability to stand up
to the United States as a singular political and economic entity. America
once fought a revolution to free itself from ideological and physical
tyranny imposed by an imperialistic power from across the ocean. It
is high time that the citizens of Europe recognize that the United States,
through its various policies, including NATO expansion and the so-called
missile defense shield, is guilty of the same charges we Americans once
leveled at the British.
Walls, ideological or physical,
on the ground or in space, do not, as Reagan noted, facilitate the cause
of liberty and freedom. They restrict it. By walling in the Iraqi citizens
of Baghdad, by walling out the immigrants who seek solace within our
borders and by partitioning off Europe from Iran and Russia, the Bush
administration has become that which America once renounced. All freedom-loving
Americans who embrace the cause of liberty and justice for all must
rally around the ideals put forward by Reagan when standing next to
the Berlin Wall, and declare to the usurper currently sitting in the
White House: We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom
and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only
strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Bush administration
can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically
the cause of freedom and peace. Mr. Bush, if you seek peace, if you
seek prosperity for the United States and the world, if you seek liberalization,
then tear down these walls!
Scott Ritter
was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991 and a United
Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author
of numerous books, including “Iraq Confidential” (Nation
Books, 2005) and “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2006)
© 2007 TruthDig.com
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