| Iraq singled out for defiance, but it’s
not alone
By MARGOT PATTERSON
In a speech delivered to the U.N. General Assembly Sept. 12,
President Bush challenged the United Nations to act quickly to disarm Iraq.
Calling Saddam Hussein’s regime “a grave and gathering danger,”
Bush said Iraq had defied U.N. resolutions and continued to develop weapons of
mass destruction.
Though singled out by Bush for censure, Iraq is hardly alone in
violating or ignoring U.N. decrees. Turkey, Morocco and Israel are all in
violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, while several African countries
have said they would abide by Security Council resolutions and then ignored
them.
The Security Council has passed more than 1,400 resolutions since
1945. According to Jim Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum, an
independent citizens’ organization that monitors the United Nations,
“the majority of resolutions, perhaps the overwhelming majority, have not
been respected.”
The most notable violator of U.N. resolutions is Israel, Paul
said, which continues to occupy parts of Palestine and Syria and was at one
time occupying portions of Egypt and Lebanon as well. Security Council
resolution 242 calls on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories while
resolutions 446 and 465 require Israel to withdraw from illegal settlements on
occupied Arab lands.
Enforcement blocked
“The United States systematically prevents any enforcement of
any resolutions regarding Israel. As far as the Security Council is concerned
as a body, it’s not too important because the United States keeps it from
being too important,” Paul noted.
Other cases of noncompliance include Morocco, which invaded the
former Spanish colony of Western Sahara in 1975 and remains in occupation
there; Turkey, which invaded Cyprus in 1974 and remains in occupation of the
northern one-third of the island in violation of U.N. demands that it withdraw;
and Indonesia, which in 1975 invaded and occupied East Timor shortly before
East Timor was slated to attain independence, but withdrew from the island in
1999. There are also U.N. resolutions relating to Kashmir, Angola, and numerous
other conflicts around the world.
According to Stephen Zunes, an associate professor of politics at
San Francisco University and Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in
Focus, the list of Security Council resolutions that Bush has charged the
Baghdad regime is flouting is shorter than the list of U.N. Security Council
resolutions currently being violated by U.S. allies.
“Not only has the United States not talked about invading
these countries, the United States has blocked sanctions or other means of
enforcing them and even provides military and economic aid that makes their
ongoing violations possible,” said Zunes.
Because the Security Council has not authorized the use of force,
the United States’ patrolling of “no-fly zones” in Iraq is
itself illegal, said Zunes, even though this is done in the name of enforcing
U.N. resolutions.
“Member states have spoken out against this clearly. [U.N.
Secretary General] Kofi Annan has said there is no such authorization for this
kind of action,” Zunes said. “If the United States could unilaterally
bomb Iraq for its violations, what’s to stop Russia from bombing Israel or
France from bombing Turkey or Great Britain from bombing Morocco? Those states
are also in violation of United Nations resolutions. That’s the logic the
United States is employing.”
Most decisions and recommendations by the United Nations take the
form of resolutions adopted either by the General Assembly or the Security
Country. While the resolutions enacted by the General Assembly have some
standing in international law, only those resolutions passed by the 15-member
Security Council are legally binding. The five permanent members of the
Security Council possess veto power over any resolution and consist of the
United States, Great Britain, France, Russia and China. Their number on the
Security Council is augmented by 10 rotating members who are elected for a
two-year term.
In demanding that the United Nations do more to hold Iraq
accountable, President Bush is taking an unusual step. Historically, the United
Nations has been reluctant to enforce its own decrees, and when it has done so
has usually preferred economic coercion via sanctions to military force. Since
the United Nations was founded following World War II, it has imposed sanctions
in 14 cases: Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Haiti, Iraq, Liberia,
Libya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Sudan
and the former Yugoslavia.
“The usual problem is getting any state to be willing to
enforce a resolution,” said Jeffrey Laurenti, executive director of policy
studies at the United Nations Association of the United States of America.
“The United States by and large has been as reluctant as most to see that
resolutions were complied with. Certainty, this is true of Angola, Sierra
Leone, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Rwanda. You often have a marked disinclination
even of the Security Council’s guarantor powers to put their own powers on
the line in enforcement.”
Though President Bush challenged the United Nations to in effect
put up or shut up to compel Iraqi compliance with its resolutions, Laurenti
said many think the United Nations is, in fact, putting up when it applies
economic sanctions to Iraq.
“Some would say that the economic sanctions have already been
proving the U.N.’s relevance. It’s not for one country to decide
whether the U.N.’s methods of enforcement are relevant but up to the full
membership of the council to evaluate the threat,” Laurenti said.
With the exception of Haiti in 1994 when the United Nations
authorized the use of force to remove the threat posed by Haiti’s military
junta, Laurenti said the United Nations has authorized military force only in
cases where armed conflict is already taking place -- Korea in 1950; Kuwait
1990-91; Bosnia and Herzegovina episodically from 1993-95. Authorization to use
force was extended to France’s intervention in Rwanda after the massacres
and to Italy’s operation in Albania in 1997.
“It will be unprecedented to go to war to compel Iraq to
disarm,” said Laurenti. “The sanctions and the resulting misery of
the Iraqi populace have been the enforcement arm on Iraq to come clean, and the
shattered conventional military in Iraq. They haven’t been able to rebuild
their conventional forces, thanks to the sanctions.”
U.N. analysts and observers said despite the initial opposition of
many countries around the world to a preemptive strike on Iraq, the United
States seems to be gaining ground in its bid to gain United Nations approval
for an attack.
Jack Patterson, Quaker representative to the United Nations, said
the model for the kind of carrot and stick diplomacy the United States is
carrying on can be found in Chapter 17 of The Politics of Diplomacy by
former Secretary of State James Baker, titled: “All Necessary Means.”
The chapter details the run-up to the initial Security Council resolution on
the Gulf War, and Patterson said a similar process is taking place right now.
“Our sense is that [Bush] has got the votes lined up, and he will have
used all the coercion or inducements necessary to get the votes. … Our
speculation is there will be only two negative votes, and that’s Mexico
and Syria and everyone else will at least go along by abstaining,”
Paul at the Global Policy Forum said the United States is the only
country powerful enough to compel the United Nations to go along with its
desires.
Feeling the heat
“This war is about oil and access to oil. It’s been the
hope of certain countries, namely Russia, France and China, that they would
gain important oil access in the world’s second-largest country in terms
of proven oil resources. The United States is saying to them, look, the game is
up, we’re going to throw Saddam out and if you want access to Iraqi oil at
all, you’re going to have to go along with us,” said Paul.
According to one nongovernmental analyst who wished to go unnamed
but has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years, Saudi Arabia and Russia have
a disincentive to accept a U.S. attack on Iraq, but with Russia in desperate
need of a loan from the International Monetary Fund and Saudi Arabia feeling
the heat from the United States, both may feel they have no choice but to
accede to U.S. plans.
“There’s a whole oil game in terms of the pricing,”
the analyst added. “If we’re in control of Iraq oil following a
successful invasion, we might arrange that the Saudi percentage of our oil
decrease and Iraqi oil increase and there will be pressure brought to bear on
the price of oil.”
Russia possesses untapped oil reserves that are among the largest
in the world, he said, and the United States can play the Saudis off against
the Russians. “With Iraq in play and in the United States pocket, the
United States would have immense leverage over both of them.”
Patterson at the Quaker United Nations office said the vast
majority of the members of the U.N. Security Council and General Assembly would
prefer a resolution along the lines of French President Jacques Chirac’s
proposals for a two-step solution to Iraq. The first step would be a strong
resolution seeking Iraq’s unconditional acceptance of weapons inspectors
and compliance with other U.N. resolutions and then some time for Iraq to
comply. The second step would be another resolution of the Security Council
related to consequences that might or might not be military if Iraq does not
comply with the first resolution. The United States does not favor a second
step approach, preferring to remain as unfettered as possible.
The French are pushing their approach, said Laurenti, because if
the United States attacks Iraq, France would prefer it attack within the
framework of the United Nations rather than unilaterally.
“Once they concluded they couldn’t stop Bush, they want
to make it as legal as possible and set a different standard from what the
Washington hawks would have as their goal: locking in American supremacy for
the entire century by showing that no one can defy the United States and its
awesome military,” Laurenti said.
Margot Patterson is NCR senior writer. Her e-mail
address is mpatterson@natcath.org
Related Web sites
Global Policy
Forum
www.globalpolicy.org
Quaker United Nations
Office
www.afsc.org/quno.htm
United Nations Association of the
United States of America
www.unausa.org
United Nations
Security Council
www.un.org/Docs/scinfo.htm
National Catholic Reporter, September 27,
2002
|
