When Yemen voted against attacking Iraq in 1990, the United States government described its vote as ”the most expensive ‘no’ in history”. Yemen may have been a member of the United Nations Security Council, but with a per capita income of about 2% of that in the US, its diplomatic rights were no match for the dollar’s might.
After its refusal to back the Gulf War, the US cut off its aid and pushed to make it a virtual pariah state. Now the UN risks being used as a fig leaf for the military pretensions of the US and Britain.
Having argued that bombing Iraq without UN authorisation would be illegal, we must now explain why bombing with UN blessing would be immoral. While it was right to insist that the US acts within the auspices of the UN, it was wrong to raise false hopes that the UN would be capable or willing to prevent a military attack.
The UN is anything but perfect. Its structures are outmoded, its methods are undemocratic and its record of restoring, defending or establishing democracy around the globe is weak. As such the resolutions that emerge from it reflect the balance of power among those within it. As globalisation has accelerated over the past decade, for example, we have seen the ascendancy, with the UN, of the representatives not of nations but of capital.
In 1999 UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told the Business-Humanitarian Forum: ”The business community is fast becoming one of the UN’s most important allies — that is why the organisation’s doors are open to you as never before.” Two months later the UN Development Programme accepted $50 000 from 11 multinationals in return for privileged access.
As Yemen found out to its considerable cost, the UN operates according to the golden rule — that those who have the gold make the rules. Those without are left to fend for themselves.
Nonetheless, the existence of the UN, founded on humanitarian principles, has proved an irritant to the great powers. And never more so than now.
After September 11, President George W Bush’s adviser on foreign affairs, Condoleezza Rice, asked senior staff at the National Security Council to think about ”how do you capitalise on these opportunities” to change US foreign policy. The answer was a strategy that would formalise the US’s role as the most powerful rogue state in the world — like a well-armed vigilante, acting in its own interests and outside of the law, alone where necessary and with others where possible. In this context forcing the US to the UN’s negotiating table applied an important brake.
This was an achievement.
Whatever problems there may be with the UN resolution passed last week, it does not authorise force. This is not because Blair supported Bush, but because nobody else did. Isolated from the rest of the world, the Americans felt it too great a risk to go it alone and went to the UN. Were it not for that, we would almost certainly now be at war. The return of the inspectors should also be welcomed. The world will be a safer place without weapons of mass destruction.
So, for the moment, talk of preemptive strikes has been quashed, and regime change is being qualified. Moreover, the inspectors’ return represents a principle the US had tried to bury alive: that before there can be prosecution, there must be proof.
How long that moment will last is a moot point. If forcing the US to negotiate was an achievement, the outcome of those negotiations was most certainly not a victory.
The case against war remains as strong as ever. There is still no evidence that Iraq is an immediate threat to the rest of the world — nor have links to September 11, Bali or other recent terrorist atrocities been established. Yet last week’s resolution was packed with blatant tripwires, unrealistic timetables and intrusive rules — which no sovereign power would accept in normal circumstances — and a potentially lethal fudge, which the US and Britain may well choose to interpret as a mandate for war.
While it has slowed the US and Britain down, it has not altered their course. Even as they cloak themselves in the legitimacy conferred on them by the UN’s imprimatur, they insist they are just as happy to act without it.
Great play has been made of the fact that the French insisted on the substitution of ”and” for ”or” in one part of the text. But all of this amounts to little more than antics about semantics if the Americans are going to bomb anyway.
The biggest threat to the UN’s credibility now is not Saddam Hussein, but Bush. The American position, endorsed by Britain, is cynical. The Americans support multilateralism when multilateralism supports them. When global rules prove inconvenient — be it Kyoto, steel tariffs or the chemical weapons test-ban treaty — they are happy to do without them.
Mirroring that cynicism will do those who oppose the war no good. Our problem with the UN resolution should not be that it fails to meet our pragmatic demands, but that it is not based on the principles that would give it credibility. There is no contradiction between calling on the US to act within international law and insisting that international law should be applied fairly, adhered to universally and executed consistently. If Iraq is in material breach of UN resolutions, then Israel is no less so. If the rights of UN inspectors are sacrosanct, then the rights of asylum seekers, under the universal declaration of human rights, are no less so either.
Yet so long as a few pick and choose which laws should be followed or flouted, then none can have confidence that legality has any relevance over and above what you can get away with. So long as the UN is prey to bribery and bullying, then the resolutions that it passes will have no more moral authority than the cheques that are drawn on its account. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002