U.S. Fails to Obtain U.N. Backing for Unilateral Actions in Iraq

by Ian Williams

Not for the first time, it is Alice in Wonderland time at the U.N. A disappointed U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright described the UN Security Council as “not very effective,” when it failed to take up a British-drafted resolution condemning Saddam Hussain’s move into Irbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian ambassador, whose threatened veto had derailed the resolution, laconically commented that some people seemed to think that effective meant that everybody else did what they wanted. Russia wanted any resolution to condemn the American bombing of Iraqi targets as well, which was obviously unpalatable to the U.S. representative. Ironically, the threatened U.S. veto against U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali seriously diminished Albright’s high moral ground when she expressed her indignation that a resolution supported by the majority of members could not get through.

Some Arab U.N. members were happy to contrast Ambassador Albright’s concern for the firm implementation of U.N. resolutions that don’t exist over Iraq, with her even firmer insistence that frequently reiterated resolutions on Palestinian issues should be regarded as a dead letter, not least when they concerned the Likud government’s pledge to expand settlements in the teeth of international law.

However, inconsistency is far from being an American monopoly. In August, the U.S. mission had provided information to the U.N. sanctions committee that suggested Iranian complicity with Iraq in evading the sanctions on oil sales. Ironically, this was followed by Iranian military incursions into Iraqi Kurdistan that gave Saddam Hussain the excuse to move on Irbil while retaining the backing of most of the Gulf states, chary at Teheran’s growing power.

The whole Irbil incident reflects the drawbacks of trying to run foreign policy as an adjunct of domestic election campaigns. The United Nations has never accepted that the exclusion zone in Iraq is anything other than a unilateral imposition by the Western allies. At the time that it was imposed, international lawyers at the UN looked up the precedents for “humanitarian intervention,” and discovered that the main such invocation was by Adolf Hitler, who justified his intervention in Czechoslovakia by alleging that Prague was persecuting the Sudeten Germans.

The welfare of the Kurds was the last thing on anyone’s minds.

Understandably, this was not a doctrine that could have gone down well anytime after 1939, so the then-U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar stuck his heels in on this matter. Even at the time, the welfare of the Kurds was the last thing on anyone’s mind. As TV pictures of the Iraqi army’s treatment of the Kurds hit the screens, recently deposed British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher harangued her insecure successor, John Major. He took the hint and called for action, and was followed by President George Bush, concerned at the unraveling of his triumphant Gulf war poll ratings. Paris, anxious not to yield a centimeter to the Anglo-Saxons, joined in, helped along by the long-standing concern of Mme. Mitterand for the Kurds.

However, the Western powers have not yet gone so far as to say it’s wrong to kill Kurds. No, they restricted themselves to saying that it’s wrong for Saddam Hussain to kill Kurds, and left open the question of the morality of other Kurd-killers. The murky origins of the exclusion policy are made obvious by its extremely partial execution. The allied air forces, flying from bases in Turkey, kept out the Iraqis, while allowing the Turkish and Iranian governments free rein to attack Kurdish villages—inside Iraq. None of them was willing to honor their post-First World War promises of an independent Kurdistan. That led to somewhat absurd ironies like the aborted British resolution that pledged to uphold the national sovereignty of Iraq while condemning Baghdad for moving onto its own territory.

It led to constant attempts by the U.S. agencies to use the Kurds as surrogate trouble makers against the local regimes, which has invariably ended up betraying the Kurds while tending to reinforce Arab perceptions of their struggle as a Western and hence pro-Israel plot. Indeed Massoud Barzani now cites Western hostility to independence for Kurdistan as the reason for his latest murky alliance with Baghdad.

The latest episode is unlikely to resolve any of the outstanding problems. Saddam Hussain is still in power, his nationalist credentials reinforced by the U.S. attacks, and he still has de facto control of Irbil. And reports of mass executions of Saddam Hussain’s rivals suggest that he is every bit as bloodthirsty now as when he was the darling of the West during the first Gulf war, the bitter conflict he unleashed with Iran.

Despite American bluster, it seems almost certain that the oil-for-food deal that has been so laboriously agreed to will eventually go ahead. While the U.S. government suggested that the deal was “suspended” as punishment, the U.N. has been very explicit that it has just been “delayed,” because of fears for the safety of the monitors who were to ensure compliance, and that the delay contains no punitive aspects at all—since Iraq has not broken a U.N. resolution by attacking its own territory. So it seems that, discreetly, the oil-for-food deal will start flowing, and then perhaps the U.S. delegations will condemn Boutros-Ghali for doing what he has to do.

Bosnian Elections Play Supporting Role for U.S. National Elections

Electoral politics are equally clear in the madcap rush to hold elections in Bosnia in the teeth of evidence from all impartial sources that the conditions do not exist for a free and fair election. To summarize, the party of wanted war criminals Karadzic and Mladic still controls half the country, and in that half even the Serb opposition is in deep danger. None of the war criminals have been arrested by the NATO forces, and none of the Muslim or Croat refugees has been allowed to return. In the meantime, the Serb authorities have forced Serb refugees to register to vote in ethnically cleansed towns like Srebrenica so that they can claim a post-mortem election victory. This latter aspect has taxed the patience even of the compliant international monitors, which is why the municipal elections have now been postponed.

In the process, 10 days after the elections, on Sept. 24, the final sanctions come off Belgrade, despite President Slobodan Milosevic’s crucial role in starting and prosecuting the war, and his present role in frustrating the prosecution of war criminals wanted by the U.N.’s tribunal in the Hague.

The national elections were seen in Dayton as a means of uniting the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but the Serb authorities have made it plain that they see them as legitimizing their separation from their neighbors. Their intentions are best illustrated by the way the Serb authorities are making a sick joke of the arms control provisions. According to Bosnia’s U.N. representative, Muhamed Sacirbey, the Republika Srpska has claimed exemption for 60 tanks that they need for museums and another 60 that they need for Research and Development for their non-existent tank manufacturing industry.

But if conditions are not free and fair enough for the municipal elections, why should they miraculously become so for the national elections? Because the national elections that really count are in the United States, is the only answer. The debilitating effect of this is being seen at most levels of American diplomacy. The U.S.’s powers of persuasion are diminished every time it asks other states to sacrifice their own national interests for the re-election of a president. Why should the government of Turkey or Saudi Arabia go out on a limb to defy the sentiments of their own populations on behalf of a White House that will not confront its own opposition in Congress or its own foreign policy lobbyists?

U.S. Threats Unite World Diplomats Behind Boutros-Ghali

Even close Western allies now are making statements defending Iraq’s use of self-defense against U.S. air attacks. Symptomatic is the dispute over Boutros Boutros Ghali’s second term as U.N. secretary-general, where the ineptitude of the White House in threatening to veto him has united almost the entire world’s diplomatic corps in his support. Madeleine Albright’s attempts to raise the issue on the agenda of the Security Council in August met a complete blank wall with her colleagues, none of whom shared her enthusiasm. Even U.S. diplomats now admit that the U.S. cannot nominate a replacement, because American support for any candidate, no matter how worthy or outstanding, would guarantee a retaliatory veto. American diplomats have scoured the world looking for allies for the sack Boutros-Ghali campaign, but are discovering that the almost total absence of U.S. overseas aid, among other things, has deprived the U.S. of leverage.

Of course, whether this is a good or bad thing depends on your point of view. There is little doubt, however, that U.N. decisions of the kind the George Bush, James Baker, Thomas Pickering team could get past the Security Council now face an uphill battle, with even America’s best friends now prepared to challenge U.S. policies. For the sake of the Palestinians, as all the deferred issues from the Oslo accords come up for discussion, one can only hope that the strength to stand up to the U.S. extends beyond issues of narrow national interest to the upholding of U.N. decisions on Palestine.