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Motives in the U.N.

Amir Taheri (archive)
September 28, 2003
Townhall.com

General De Gaulle called it “the gadget”. The late Pakistani leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto branded it “a club of queer trades.” And, more recently, President George W Bush warned that it had become “irrelevant”. And, yet, the United Nations has just opened its annual general assembly in New York with as much stiff upper lip as it could master.

The war in Iraq shook the UN to its foundations by highlighting its contradictions.

The issue was not whether or not the United States and Britain should go to war without express authorisation from the Security Council. Similar interventions had taken place before, most recently in the Balkans where NATO, led by the US, took military action to save the Muslim peoples of Bosnia and Kosovo from extermination by the Serbs.

Nor was “regime change” the issue.

The Tanzanian army that ended Idi Amin’s reign in Uganda had no Security Council mandate. Nor was Vietnam mandated by the UN to march into Cambodia and overthrow the Khmer Rouge. France has engineered several regime changes in former African colonies without asking anyone’s permission.

The Iraq issue was special for several reasons.

This was the first time that the Security Council, was used in attempts to prevent the enforcement of its resolutions. Since 1990 the council had passed 18 mandatory resolutions, often unanimously, concerning Iraq, but had done little to enforce their essential provisions.

Some members, notably France and Russia, pretended that taking action against Saddam Hussein was illegal. But they did not have the courage to test that view by tabling a draft resolution to that effect.

At the same time the US and the UK, which asserted their duty to enforce the council’s resolutions, also shied away from testing their view in an open vote.

Even when the war had began, those opposed to it lacked the courage to seek an emergency session of the Security Council, as in so many other cases before, to call for a ceasefire. Nor has any council member presented a draft resolution seeking an end to “ the occupation ”of Iraq.

The council has ended up with two opposite positions, which, in moral terms at least, means none at all.

Worse still, those who opposed the war did so for reasons that had little to do with Iraq’s dispute with the UN.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose country happens to be a Security Council member by rotation, initially supported action against Saddam. But he was in the middle of a difficult general election. At one point pollsters told him that only an anti-war position might get him enough votes among German women to ensure a narrow victory.

Overnight he changed his position to re-emerge as a vocal opponent of action against Saddam. With his re-election assured, Schroeder moved away from his opposition to the war, welcomed Saddam’s demise, and tried to repair the damage done to US-German relations by sending German troops to Afghanistan to release the GIs for service in Iraq.

Russian opposition, too, had little to do with Iraq as such.

The Russians tried to butter their bread on both sides.

They cultivated ambiguity on the issue to secure concessions from the US-UK coalition, including a free hand in Chechnya and the promise of a share in the future, and as yet problematic, Iraqi oil.

The French position was still more interesting.

For them the question was not whether or not Saddam should be forced to comply with the UN resolutions. The question was how to fight the “ the American hyper-power.”

This is how French scholar Gillaume Parmentier puts it: ” The reason why France articulates its concern {about American hegemony} more strongly than others is that France’s history has been one of resisting to monopolies of power in Europe.”

He recalls how France became a nation-state despite attempts by the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope to dominate Europe.

“Resistance to foreign empires is deeply ingrained in French political culture,” Parmentier asserts.

Was the US seeking a “monopoly of power in Europe” by toppling Saddam? Is the US comparable to the Holy Roman Empire and the Popes of the Middle Ages or the Nazis in the 20th century?

Parmentier forgets France’s own bid for a monopoly of power in Europe under Napoleon. And need one mention that France signed the Munich pact with Hitler?

Echoing Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, Parmentier shows that France’s opposition to military action against Iraq was prompted not by the merits of the issue but as part of a broader strategy of “ resisting American hegemony”.

In other words France would not have been aggrieved if Iraq were liberated by Luxembourg and Lichtenstein, rather than by the US and the UK.

The case of Iraq shows that various powers could use the Security Council, which is supposed to be an instrument of international will, to serve domestic political agendas that have nothing to do with the issue at hand.

Schroeder probably did not wish the Iraqis to suffer under Saddam’s tyranny for decades. What Schroeder was concerned about was getting the extra women’s vote he wanted. Vladimir Putin was equally uninterested in the Iraqi issue as such. He wanted carte blanche in Chechnya and a future share in Iraqi oil. Jacques Chirac, too, was not really concerned about Iraq. Unable to develop a meaningful foreign policy, he exploited the issue as an opportunity to thumb his nose at the American “hyper-power.”

(Opponents of the war could, of course, use a similar argument against the US and the UK. They could argue that Washington and London , too, didn’t care about the sufferings of Iraq under Saddam and acted to topple him to serve their own interests.

Such an argument, whether sustainable or not, would only reinforce the contention that the Security Council has creased to exist as an instrument of international decision-making. )

Until the row over Iraq broke out, the Security Council, thanks to the veto given to its permanent members, could say either yes or no to action on urgent issues of international life.

The Iraq issue introduced a new answer that is neither yes nor no. It exists in Japanese as “ mu” , which means : “unask your question”, and in Persian as “bari” which means “ referred to God”.

Kofi Annan is trying hard to “mu” and “bari” things. But there is something rotten in the organisation symbolised by its glass tower in New York.

Amir Taheri is an Iranian author of 10 books on the Middle East and Islam. He's reachable through www.benadorassociates.com.

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