Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The following are excerpts from remarks by Linton F. Brooks, administrator of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, to the 2004 Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference, June 21, 2004.
The following are excerpts from remarks by Sam Nunn, co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, to the 2004 Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference, June 21, 2004.
Before attention is lost in the controversies over the war itself and in the challenges of its aftermath, the UN must capture, clarify, and publicize the record of international inspections in Iraq: for itself, for member governments, and for the public.
The Bush administration plans to make significant additional cuts in the size of US troop deployments in South Korea. Such reductions may leave North Korean leaders with the impression that it is their recently enhanced nuclear capabilities that are driving the American withdrawal and embolden the reclusive state to take provocative actions in the months before to the US election.
Many in the U.S. who supported the Iraq war are now backing away from it. They blame the debacle on unforeseeable mistakes by the Bush administration. But the failure in Iraq also reflects deeper flaws in US political culture - the belief in the possibility of successful adoption of democracy by all the peoples of the world and simultaneous contempt for the cultures and opinions of those peoples.
If America engages in any more imperial military adventures like the one in Iraq, the long-term consequence may be the collapse of Western democracy, or of the globalized economic system on which American imperial power rests, or both. Patriots and democrats should be doing everything in their power to devise new strategies that will avoid such devastating outcomes.