Half a victory at the UN

The US has been forced to go to the UN to prosecute its war against Iraq but it retains a thoroughly instrumentalist view of the world body.

Phyllis Bennis

IRAQ’s decision to accept the United Nations Security Council resolution passed unanimously on 8 November sets in motion a tightly scripted plan for UN arms inspectors to return to Iraq. Baghdad’s ambassador, Muhammad al-Douri, delivered his government’s acceptance letter to Secretary General Kofi Annan on 13 November, telling reporters, ‘We are prepared to receive the inspectors within the designated timetable.’

Despite an angry parliamentary recommendation to reject the resolution, Iraq’s acquiescence was widely anticipated. It reflects the relentless pressure brought to bear on the country, from the Arab League and from such Council members as Syria, France and Russia, as well as Washington’s escalating threats of war for ‘regime change’ virtually regardless of Iraq’s compliance.

In general, antiwar forces in the United States and around the world can claim the recent UN resolution as a partial victory. The resolution does not endorse the use of force; it redefines the Iraq crisis, at least in the international arena, as one of disarmament, not regime change; and it will at least delay a US attack. It provides a powerful tool to fight for US accountability to multilateralism and the UN. But it still reflects the heavy-handed domination of the UN and the rest of the world by the United States and ultimately sets the terms for war.

The real victory lies in the fact that the Bush administration felt it necessary to go to the UN at all. Only last summer the Pentagon’s ‘chickenhawks’ appeared to have derailed any UN-based strategy for Iraq. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff remained sceptical of war; polls showed less than a quarter of Americans supported attacking Iraq without the UN; and hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets. Washington’s closest allies, from Germany to Mexico and even Tony Blair’s own Labour Party, railed against growing US unilateralism. The superhawks didn’t want this resolution, but they lost.

That the anti-UN Bush administration took eight weeks to negotiate the terms of Resolution 1441 reflects the enormous international and domestic opposition to its planned war for oil and empire. The resolution puts additional pressure on Washington to at least appear to be acting in concert with the international community. While the Republican sweep of the midterm Congressional election will certainly further empower the Administration’s most unilateralist voices, diminishing US public support for a solo attack, bolstered by the UN resolution, may act as a brake on that trajectory.

Significant concessions

The United States made significant concessions to win support for its text. But backroom deals with France and Russia regarding oil contracts in a postwar Iraq were a big part of the picture. And the impoverished nation of Mauritius emerged as the latest poster child for US pressure at the UN. The ambassador, Jagdish Koonjul, was recalled by his government for failing to support the original US draft resolution on Iraq. Why? Because Mauritius receives significant US aid, and the African Growth and Opportunity Act requires that a recipient of US assistance ‘does not engage in activities that undermine US national security or foreign policy interests’.

Every Council ambassador, even the British, speaking after the unanimous vote, made clear that the resolution provides no authorisation for war. French ambassador Jean-David Levitte said it requires a Council meeting in the event of Iraqi noncompliance. ‘France welcomes the elimination from the resolution of all ambiguity on this point,’ he said. Mexico’s ambassador, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, was probably the most direct. Force is valid, he said, only ‘with the prior, explicit authorisation of the Security Council’.

Nothing in the resolution gives Washington the right to determine whether Iraq is in ‘material breach’ of its obligations, or to decide what to do if there is such a breach. But Washington claims exactly those rights, and no other country was prepared to defy the United States by demanding that the text explicitly reject that claim or to reassert the UN Charter’s clear statement that only the Council as a whole has the authority to make such decisions. For almost every country on the Council the vote was less about constraining Iraqi weapons than about constraining US power. Even Syria, acquiescing to French and Arab League persuasion and to US threats of vilification if Damascus voted no, joined the Council consensus.

Within days of the resolution’s passage, the first teams of inspectors arrived in Iraq, and began no-notice inspections. As more inspectors joined the early arrivals throughout December, the inspections became more rigorous, including one of a presidential palace near Baghdad. All the inspections went forward with full Iraqi compliance.

As the inspections began, however, the Bush administration continued its assertion that the Iraqi government would not tell the truth, that whatever was put forward in the required inventory of WMD (Weapons of mass destruction) programmes would be insufficient and/or untrue, and that the inspections were insufficient to determine Iraq’s WMD capacity.  And beyond the rhetoric, Washington continued its bombings in the so-called ‘no-fly’ zones in northern and southern Iraq, even escalating both the frequency and the breadth of those attacks. Iraq continued to lock on radar to the US bombers, though for the years of bombing (since 1998) they have never succeeded at hitting a plane. The US has continued to point to those failed anti-aircraft efforts as evidence that Iraq ‘continues to attack the US’ and has hinted that Washington may cite those instances as a material breach of the UN resolution. Other governments, at the end of negotiations over the resolution, made clear that Article 8, which states that ‘Iraq shall not take or threaten hostile acts directed against any representative or personnel of any Member State taking action to uphold any Council resolution’ specifically did not refer to the no-fly zones, but as it has done in the past the US rejected the Council majority’s view.

One day before the 8 December deadline, Iraq submitted to the Council a massive, 12,000-page and five CD-ROM inventory of its chemical, biological and nuclear facilities, including all civilian production. While it was still being studied as TWR went to press, its presentation already fuelled major controversies between the US and the United Nations.

Iraq provided two complete copies of its report to the UNMOVIC inspection team in Baghdad. One of the two was divided, with the nuclear section sent to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna for analysis, while the chemical and biological sections were sent to UNMOVIC at UN headquarters in New York. The second, complete, set also was sent to New York for presentation to the Security Council. The Council had agreed, unwillingly and under enormous US pressure, that only the five permanent members of the Council, who are also the five official nuclear powers, would be given copies of the complete text. The other Council members would be provided with an edited version, from which all references to ‘how-to’ information regarding nuclear weapons would be excised. Several countries, including Norway and Syria, expressed sharp disagreement to this two-tier approach to Council members, but accepted it.

However, when the document was actually handed over to the ambassador of Colombia, the Council’s rotating president, he went even further. He immediately turned and handed it over to John Negroponte, the US ambassador to the UN, who took the single copy in existence and sent it to Washington for copying before even the other four permanent members were able to see it. US Secretary of State Colin Powell had visited Colombia just two days earlier, offering a huge increase, reportedly of $700 million, in US military assistance to Bogota in return for agreeing to hand over the report.  As a result, the US had sole and secret access to the document for almost a day; there is no information yet about whether the version provided to the rest of the Council (or even the Table of Contents distributed by Washington to the press) in fact is identical to the original except for the weapons information.

A serious problem

UNMOVIC chief Hans Blix also said he does not intend to make public the section of the report detailing the companies and countries that provided Iraq with the foundations of its weapons systems. Blix said it would compromise the willingness of companies to cooperate with UNMOVIC in tracing components. It is a serious problem, however, because it is in this section that the vital role of the US and key US allies, including France, Germany, the UK and others, is likely documented. According to the Table of Contents, the section on chemical weapons includes a separate section on ‘Foreign technical support’; that is likely to include German companies known to have provided Iraq with chemical components. In the biological section, however, at least in the table of contents distributed by Washington, there is no reference to a separate section on foreign technical support. This omission would leave out the longstanding US and UK support of Iraq’s biological programmes throughout the 1980s, during which time the US sold seed stock for anthrax, E. coli, and other deadly germs, while UK companies reportedly provided the growth medium for growing the stock. 

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called the US seizure of the document ‘unfortunate’ and ‘wrong’. Council ambassadors are said to be furious. The US move represents one of the most egregious examples in history of US domination of the UN by its own power to bribe, threaten and punish.

And at the end of the day, despite all the bickering over language and the fighting over access to Iraq’s report, there is no evidence that the Bush administration has any intention of basing its go-to-war decision on what the UN resolution actually says, what is included in the report, or even on what the inspectors find or don’t find. If it is looking for a pretext, the super-tough inspection requirements provide plenty. Within 48 hours of the resolution’s passage, US and British jets again bombed the unilaterally declared ‘no-fly’ zone in southern Iraq. Further, there is no explicit commitment that if Iraq fully complies, the crippling economic sanctions will finally be lifted.

The United States has been forced to go to the UN, but it retains a thoroughly instrumentalist view of the United Nations Ð in which the global organisation’s relevance and authority are defined by proximity to Washington’s positions. The newly emboldened Republicans continue to claim that UN decisions do not ‘handcuff’ any US decision for war. There is still danger that US pressure will force a second-stage Council decision endorsing a war, whatever the inspectors find. But if UN leaders begin to use their bully pulpit in defence of the Charter’s insistence on nonmilitary solutions, the combination of international UN legitimacy, massive global opposition to war at both the governmental and popular levels and the pressure of a growing antiwar movement in the United States may be able to raise the price of this war above what even this administration is willing to pay.                                     

Phyllis Bennis is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Her most recent book is Before & After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11^th Crisis (Interlink). She is also author of Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN.