I was in Prague in November 1989 and covered the massive, nonviolent resistance as a newspaper reporter that ended the communist reign.  The great tradition of Czech defiance from the heroic stand the Czechs took in 1968 to the courage I witnessed during the Velvet Revolution is on display again, led by Jan Tamas and Jan Bednar. They ask for nothing more than a voice in their own affairs, the right of the Czech people to determine their future, in short, the basic freedoms of a democratic state. I stand with them in their struggle and send my support and encouragement and thanks. These missiles, as they know, will not make Czechs or Americans or anyone else safer. These missiles are part of the of the vast American imperial project, designed to project American power outwards.

Those who seek to build missile systems in the Czech Republic do not seek cooperation between states or work to strengthen international diplomacy. George Bush's administration has shredded, violated or absented America from its obligations under international law. He has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, backed out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International Criminal Court, walked out on negotiations on chemical and biological weapons and defied the Geneva Convention and human rights law in the treatment of detainees. Most egregiously, he launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public.

The president is guilty, in short, of what in legal circles is known as the "crime of aggression." And if we as citizens, here and abroad, do not hold him and the U.S. government accountable for these crimes, if we do not actively defy these efforts to build a world that speaks only in the language of violence, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have terrifying consequences. For a world without treaties, statutes and laws is a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, will be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. This new order will undo five decades of international cooperation. It will thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. A rule-based world matters. All peoples must be free to determine their own destiny, to free themselves from the yoke of oppression, whether that comes in the form of a ruthless communist party, a Soviet occupation or the establishment of the American war machine on Czech soil. If we demolish the fragile and delicate international order, if we permit the United States to create a world where diplomacy, broad cooperation, law and the democratic right of self-determination are worthless, if we allow these international legal systems and democratic expressions to unravel, we will further erode the possibility of cooperation between nation-states and push the world closer to the bullying, tyranny and perpetual war so many great Czech citizens have sacrificed and fought so hard to defy.

Jan Tamas and Jan Bednar are great Czech patriots. I wish a few more of the citizens in my own country had their fortitude and courage.

Chris Hedges

Christopher Hedges is a journalist and author specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics. He has spent nearly twenty years as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Central America, Africa and the Balkans and has reported for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and the New York Times. In 2002 Christopher Hedges received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism and was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times' coverage of global terrorism. He has written several books including, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges



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