An Interesting analysis from Progressive magazine: <A HREF="www.progressive">www.progressive</A>.org 

April 2003

Bush Trashes the United Nations
by Matthew Rothschild








On June 26, 1945, in San Francisco, the United Nations was born, and former 
Secretary of State Cordell Hull won the Nobel Prize for his efforts in 
creating the institution. He called the U.N. Charter "one of the great 
milestones in man's upward climb toward a truly civilized existence." Almost 
six decades later, George W. Bush has done more to reverse this upward climb 
than anyone in the postwar period. The audacity of Bush's Iraq war maneuvers 
and his crude bullying threatens not only the United Nations but the dream of 
world governance and world peace. This dream animated Woodrow Wilson and 
Franklin D. Roosevelt and hundreds of millions of people across the globe who 
saw the world torn asunder by the hideous wars of the twentieth century. 
Roosevelt called the United Nations a "world organization for permanent 
peace." Now in the early hours of the twenty-first century, Bush returns 
international relations to the raw power politics of the nineteenth century 
and abandons international law for the law of the jungle. The sign was clear 
back on September 12, 2002, when Bush first addressed the United Nations on 
the subject of Iraq. So relieved were member nations that the President 
deigned to appear before the international body that they seemed deaf to the 
insulting words he was hurling at them. "Will the United Nations serve the 
purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" Bush asked.At the time, 
even the French were praising Bush. He has resisted "the temptation of 
unilateral action," said France's foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin. 
Amr Moussa, Secretary General of the Arab League, said "the turn President 
Bush has taken in asking the United Nations to take up its responsibility is 
a good one." They apparently did not realize that Bush was engaging in a mere 
charade and that he was fully prepared to render the United Nations 
irrelevant himself.Bush tarred the Security Council with the brush of 
irrelevance for not enforcing previous resolutions Iraq had flouted. He 
repeated the charge at his March 6 press conference: "The fundamental 
question facing the Security Council is, will its words mean anything? When 
the Security Council speaks, will the words have merit and weight?"But Bush's 
insistence that the Security Council back up its resolutions is selective in 
the extreme. Iraq is not the only country to violate Security Council 
resolutions. In fact, it is not the country that violates the most 
resolutions. That distinction belongs to Israel, which has violated 
thirty-two Security Council resolutions. Turkey has violated twenty-four, and 
Morocco sixteen, according to Stephen Zunes, associate professor of politics 
at the University of San Francisco and chair of its peace and justice studies 
program. By comparison, Iraq has violated seventeen resolutions.Since Israel, 
Turkey, and Morocco are U.S. allies, Bush has not been browbeating the 
Security Council to make good on its word by threatening force against these 
countries. And you don't hear Bush talking about gathering a "coalition of 
the willing" to impose regime change in Jerusalem, Ankara, and Rabat. To see 
how outrageous Bush's action is, consider how Washington would have felt if 
Russia had told the U.N. Security Council that it was going to gather a 
"coalition of the willing" to impose regime change on those three countries. 
Bush, Congress, and the pundits would be condemning Russia as a reckless and 
renegade country. Today, the United States is that reckless and renegade 
country.Bush's essential message is, the United Nations is irrelevant if it 
doesn't do exactly what Washington demands. And Bush has chided the United 
Nations not to become another failure like the League of Nations, though the 
League of Nations collapsed, in part, because the U.S. Senate never ratified 
U.S. entry into the organization."Bush has made it abundantly clear that he 
feels the United Nations is just a nuisance," says John Anderson, head of the 
World Federalist Association, who ran for President as an independent in 
1980. "It's a very specious and hypocritical attitude to sigh and wonder 
whether the U.N. is going the way of the League of Nations when Bush himself 
has done everything in his power to see that this happens."A mere glance back 
at the U.N. Charter reveals how far from its letter and spirit Bush has now 
traveled. Article 2, Section 3, states that "all members shall settle their 
international disputes by peaceful means." And Article 2, Section 4, says, 
"All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat 
or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence 
of any state." Bush's entire discussion of "regime change," his mobilizing of 
more than 200,000 troops, and his constant threats of force since September 
are in clear violation of this article. And if he goes on and wages 
aggressive war, which is "the ultimate crime" in international law, according 
to Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, he could be tried 
in an international court. (In any event, Bush has been shirking his 
constitutional duty to enforce the laws, since treaties signed and ratified 
by the United States are supposed to be inviolable.)"If the U.N. Security 
Council had been behaving in the way it ought to, it should have been saying 
all along that the United States was carrying out illegal acts by threatening 
force," says Stephen Shalom, professor of political science at William 
Paterson University in New Jersey. "The U.S. was in violation of the charter, 
and the council should have said so."Bush's contempt for the United Nations 
may have many victims, especially those Iraqi civilians who would lose their 
lives in any U.S. assault. But one other victim is the entire edifice of the 
United Nations, which cannot long stand while Goliath keeps stomping his feet 
on its foundation."We're seeing the end of the international system as we've 
known it since the Second World War," says Ratner."This is the most dangerous 
and depressing moment in my life," says Richard Falk, a professor of 
international law and practice at Princeton. "The United States is undeterred 
and undeterrable in the current situation. It repudiates any willingness to 
allow the United Nations to act independently, and it refuses to accept a set 
of restraints derived from international law. This is a free-fall 
situation."In late February and early March, Bush put the United Nations in 
an impossible bind. "He clearly has confronted the U.N. with an untenable 
dilemma of either being a rubber stamp for U.S. geopolitics or finding itself 
bypassed on a major threat to peace and security by the most important member 
of the institution," says Falk.Using Corleone-style tactics, Bush pulled out 
all the stops to gain support of the council. "What's unique is the scale and 
the audacity of the bribing," says Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute 
for Policy Studies and co-author of the group's report "Coalition of the 
Willing or Coalition of the Coerced?" Almost every country faced "coercion, 
bullying, bribery, or the implied threat of U.S. action that would directly 
damage the interests of the country," the report says. Many nations may 
remember what the United States did to Yemen prior to the Gulf War in 1991. 
"When Yemen, the sole Arab country on the council, voted against the 
resolution authorizing war, a U.S. diplomat told the Yemeni ambassador, 'That 
will be the most expensive no vote you ever cast.' Three days later, the U.S. 
cut its entire aid budget to Yemen," the report notes.Still, the resistance 
many countries put up was remarkable. From Turkey to Chile to Mexico, 
governments that Washington could usually rely on bucked the pressure, at 
least for a while. That was because of the astonishing, unprecedented global 
peace movement that demanded, in country after country, that leaders not give 
in to Washington."The 'coalition of the coerced' stands in direct conflict 
with democracy," the report adds. "In most nations, including those most 
closely allied to the United States, over 70 percent of the public opposes 
U.S. military action against Iraq."Washington further sullied its image by 
spying on Security Council members, according to a story the London Observer 
broke. That paper obtained a copy of a National Security Agency memo 
outlining its snooping to obtain "the whole gamut of information that could 
give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals 
to head off surprises."At press time, the vote of the Security Council had 
not yet taken place, and the outcome was in doubt. If it succeeded at this 
strong-arming, Washington would demonstrate that the Security Council has no 
effective power to stand up to the bullyboy on the block. "If the United 
Nations caves to the point of authorizing this war, Bush will have undermined 
it, and the U.N. will have abandoned its role of keeping the peace," says Jan 
Knippers Black, professor at the Monterey Institute of International 
Studies.And if Bush failed to win Security Council approval (if a majority 
voted against Washington, or if one nation exercised its veto, or if the 
United States withdrew the resolution), and the United States launched a war 
anyway, it would show, in a different way, that the Security Council is 
powerless to restrain the mighty.Bush was positively cocksure when asked at 
his March 6 press conference whether the United States had the right to 
attack Iraq without Security Council approval. "If we need to act, we will 
act, and we really don't need United Nations approval to do so," he said. "We 
really don't need anybody's permission." As a matter of fact, the U.N. 
Charter says the only time a country can act alone is "if an armed attack 
occurs against" it."Assuming Bush is going to war anyway, it's better to have 
the U.N. not give Bush the endorsement," says Shalom. "That will help 
galvanize opposition, and it will make it impossible for Bush to claim he's 
acting in conformity with international law or the will of the international 
community."The Security Council was set up to reflect the global power 
arrangements at the end of World War II, and those arrangements no longer 
exist. Roosevelt "viewed the Security Council as a direct extension of the 
Big Three wartime alliance," Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley write in 
FDR and the Creation of the U.N. (Yale, 1997). "In his view, Big Power 
cooperation was imperative for settling or suppressing conflicts between and 
among the lesser nations. . . . At the same time, he understood that there 
was no mechanistic remedy for unresolved conflict between Big Powers."But now 
the other "Big Powers" are not so big anymore. The Soviet Union has vanished. 
Britain and France are nowhere near as strong as they were at the time of the 
founding. China is not yet a full rival to the United States. And so 
Washington thinks it can have its way.The old system was not perfect, by any 
means. The very establishment of these five permanent voting members on the 
Security Council was undemocratic. If the world body really wanted to be 
fair, it would have no permanent members and simply would rotate members 
through the council. But the establishment of the Security Council with the 
so-called Big Five each having veto power was a realistic bow to the 
powerful. "The main lesson he [Roosevelt] drew from the League failure was 
that responsibility for world peace depended exclusively on the few nations 
that possessed real power and that they must 'run the world' for an 
indefinite transitional period," Hoopes and Brinkley write.As the permanent 
members of the Security Council divided into Cold War blocs, they didn't run 
the world very well. Only by luck and icy nerves during the Cuban Missile 
Crisis did the two superpowers spare the world from nuclear annihilation. And 
many regional conflicts raged, most notably in the Middle East, Southern 
Africa, Central America, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent.Nor is 
Bush by any means the first President to flout the United Nations. The United 
States was able to gain U.N. approval for the Korean War only by a fluke: The 
Soviet representative was boycotting the Security Council at the time. And 
Truman acknowledged that he was ready to bypass the United Nations if need 
be. "No doubt about it," he said years later when asked if he would have gone 
to war against Korea without U.N. approval, according to Hoopes and 
Brinkley.The United States waged war against Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos 
without formal approval of the Security Council. It also attacked, among 
others, Panama, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, and Libya, and it 
destabilized many more countries without such approval. "Bush's unilateralism 
has plenty of precedents," says Noam Chomsky. But it has taken "a long step 
beyond" where previous Administrations have gone. "Its forthright declaration 
that it intends to rule the world by force" amounts to a kind of 
"fanaticism," Chomsky says.Even Presidents who were flouting the United 
Nations tried to bow to international norms, Falk says. No one up to George 
W. Bush has been so reckless in disregarding the institution. "What worries 
me most is the absence of limits on Washington," Falk says. "We live in a 
unipolar world, you have the United States intent on pursuing a global 
dominance project, and there is no countervailing power. The Cold War, at 
least, had the international benefit of a countervailing force. You were not 
as dependent on the law. There is a greater dependence on international law 
in a unipolar world." But Bush acts as though he is not bound by that 
law.Franklin Roosevelt warned: "We shall have to take the responsibility for 
world collaboration, or we shall have to bear the responsibility for another 
world conflict." But Bush has disdained, and dispensed with, "world 
collaboration," and so world conflict is on the horizon.What are the 
consequences of Bush's trashing the United Nations? "The unilateral path is 
horribly destructive, and almost certain to be self-destructive," says Falk. 
"As a precedent, it's horrible: An endless number of countries could invoke 
this kind of preemptive logic. China could use it against Taiwan, and it 
could lead to a nuclear war between India and Pakistan."William Hartung of 
the World Policy Institute shares this fear. "Every regional tyrant will feel 
free to do to its enemies--internal and external--what Bush and his clique 
are doing to Iraq," he says.It also gives other nations a clear indication 
that their own self-interest lies not in taking issues to the United Nations 
but in establishing facts on the ground. North Korea's game of nuclear 
chicken may not be the aberrant action of a crazy ruler but a rational 
response to Washington's aggressiveness. Such actions may increasingly be the 
norm in a lawless future.Even for U.S. security, the approach is 
counterproductive. "It will cause an international backlash, generate more 
suicide bombings, lead to more religious and political extremism, and 
possibly cause a fundamentalist takeover in Pakistan or Egypt," says Falk. 
"It could be a geopolitical disaster."Such a disaster is what impelled the 
career foreign service officer John Brady Kiesling, who was serving in the 
U.S. embassy in Greece, to resign from the State Department on January 27. 
"The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with 
American values but also with American interests," he wrote in his 
resignation letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell. "Our fervent pursuit 
of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that 
has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the 
days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most 
effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our 
current course will bring instability and danger, not security."The flexing 
of sheer brute force that so typifies the Bush policy gives terrorists and 
other nonstate actors the message that the superpower cannot be restrained by 
traditional, legal channels but only by "asymmetrical" and extralegal means. 
Ratner at the Center for Constitutional Rights says the Bush approach, "in 
terms of our security and safety, is fatal." He worries the United States 
will alienate its allies in the war on terrorism, and that "by not using 
international law and peaceful methods, it will bring about a huge 
radicalization in parts of the world that are going to terrorize us further." 
Ratner says the United Nations may never be the same again. "Like F. Scott 
Fitzgerald after his nervous breakdown, who said he was like a plate that was 
glued back together and was no good for serving dinner on but useful only for 
snacks, the U.N. will be used for noncontroversial issues, but when it comes 
to the use of force, it will be a cracked plate," Ratner says.The final cost 
of this policy is internal. "It could destroy democracy at home," Falk 
argues. "The rising tide of opposition here and abroad will play into 
fearmongering and an expansion of government control over citizen rights. 
There is a kind of proto-fascist dimension to the current set of 
circumstances." Falk says he usually is loath to throw the term "fascism" 
around. "But you have this crackdown, coupled with a consolidation of 
military power and a messianic view that the United States is the bearer of a 
benevolent future that justifies exterminating those who stand in the way," 
he explains. "You have the convergence of religious evangelicals in the White 
House with geopolitical fundamentalists like Richard Perle and Paul 
Wolfowitz. We have never had this mixture of religious and secular extremists 
so close to the core of governmental power."Given the U.S. manipulation of 
the United Nations, there may be some progressive people who wonder why we 
should even bother with it. But not bothering would be a mistake."We should 
support the U.N. and international law for the same reasons we support 
democracy and other values," says Chomsky. "The fact that they are trampled 
to dust and treated with contempt by power centers does not mean that these 
values and institutions should be tossed into the ashcan of history."Chomsky 
and other observers take note of the one hopeful sign in recent months: the 
rise of the massive international peace movement. "We should never rest hopes 
in institutions," says Chomsky. "I have to admit that the basic truth of the 
matter appeared in the lead paragraphs of a front-page story in my favorite 
newspaper, The New York Times, a couple of days after the demos: The Times 
reported that there are now two superpowers on the planet, the U.S. and world 
opinion. Our hopes should rest in the second superpower."Bennis of the 
Institute for Policy Studies says this second superpower can find a home at 
the United Nations. "People throughout the world are looking at the U.N. as 
part of this global anti-war movement." More hopeful than most, she believes 
Bush already may ironically be pushing the United Nations to assume a new, 
more powerful role. "He's trying to do enormous damage," she says. "But the 
ferocity of his attack has had exactly the opposite result. Right now, the 
United Nations is not only more relevant but is gaining more backbone because 
of Bush's blatant actions. The United Nations has a somewhat new identity as 
the centerpiece of the global movement against the U.S. empire. It's exactly 
where the U.N. belongs: organizing the defiance of the world against the 
superpower."There will come a day when the United States is no longer king of 
the hill, when other powers arise to challenge Washington for dominance. The 
Roman Empire lasted 500 years. The British Empire lasted almost 400 years. 
The Soviet Empire vanished within seventy-five years. The 1,000 Year Reich 
lasted barely more than a single decade. The American Empire will fade, as 
well. At such a time, it would be in the interest of the United States to 
have still standing an institution that can act as a buffer against war.But 
Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld can't imagine that day, and so they can't 
imagine that need. They foresee, explicitly in their new strategic doctrine, 
indefinite U.S. military preeminence, and they are eager to go to war 
"preemptively" whenever another nation attempts to vie for power against the 
United States. The founders of the United Nations, in the words of the 
charter, created an institution to save succeeding generations from "the 
scourge of war." But Bush does not consider war a "scourge." He uses it as a 
favorite tool to ensure the predominance of the United States, and thus he 
denies the basic purpose of the United Nations.Matthew Rothschild is Editor 
of The Progressive. 


    
    
    



"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are 
evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
 - Albert Einstein
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change 
the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead 
"When the government fears the people, you have liberty. When the people fear 
the government, you have tyranny." 
- Thomas Jefferson
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" 
- Edmund Burke 

    
    

    

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