| Defeat of the CTBT | Patois '63 | 10/15/99 |
"And the polls indicate that a vast majority of the American people supported the test ban treaty."
And the vast majority of Romans thought it was cool to pit the Christians against the lions. The Germans elected Hitler to the Reichstag. England hailed Chambelain has a hero. So what? The vast majority of American people are more concerned with the Jon Benet Ramsey soap opera than the CTBT. The three network the next morning did not even mention the CTBT defeat until the second half hour, and then it was strictly the pro-Admin line worrying about what the world would think?
We elect our representatives to stay informed and do the right thing. They did in this case.
1. We are one of the few nations that will hold ourselves to the terms of a properly ratified treaty.
2. Future belligerent and/or rogue nations will not be so inclined.
3. What will we do when we discover a violation? Call the UN 911 number? Embargo? That works so well....... By that time, the genie is out of the bottle.
4. What we really want is to freeze the number of nations with nuclear weapons capability, so we can maintain hegemony, and control those that have it. The treaty does not accomplish this. Its says you can not test what you've built. We don't have the cajones to admit that we want hegemony.
5. When we found that Iraq was violating its UN sanctioned ban on WMD, what did our leadership do? We cried and shed crocodile tears, and ordered, sub-rosa, that the embarrassing inspections be stunted or stopped. What would we do to a major adversary, such as a China? Zip, zero, nada. We'd wring our hands and check the channels for the latest on the Jon Benet story.
6. Treaties require a super-majority of 2/3 to insure that its not just the whim of the party in power or a populist fad.
7. How come a failure of the Republican's to achieve a 2/3 impeachment tally was proof that the Republican's were out of touch with the American people, but a failure of the Democrat's to achieve a 2/3 treaty approval, or even a majority, is not proof that the Democrat's are out of touch with the American people.
Mr. Clinton's team negotiated this treaty without a sense of the Senate based only on his view of the world, and the behavior of nations. This is not some domestic program that's a matter of moving money toward one constituency and away from another. It's national defense and it's forever. He gambled and lost. Let's move on.