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Challenging
the United Nations
By
Richard
Falk
Visiting Distinguished Professor, Global Studies,
University of California, Santa Barbara and Milbank
Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton
University
TFF
associate
March 19, 2003
Kofi Annan was certainly correct to repudiate
President Bush's contention that unless the Security
Council lends support to American warmaking, it will
follow the League of Nations down the path to futility.
Indeed, the greater danger to the UN is to go along with
the US demands or even to respond to the impending war
with calculated indifference. It should be remembered
that the League failed primarily because of its impotence
in the face of aggressive warmaking by Japan, Italy, and
Germany during the 1930s that led to the subjugation of
such weaker states as Manchuria, Abyssinia (later
Ethiopia), and Czechoslovakia. In the end, the UN will
rise or fall to the extent that it opposes uses of
international force that are in violation of the UN
Charter, whether these uses are by large countries or
smaller ones.
It is not the moment to commend the UN uncritically
for seeming to stand up against the US global juggernaut.
It needs to be remembered that the plausibility of
mounting this war threat derives from imposing a punitive
peace on Iraq after the end of the Gulf War in the form
of Security Council Resolution 687. It was part of this
"peace" that validated the continuation of harsh
sanctions on an Iraqi people already devastated by war,
with its water purification system deliberately
destroyed. Sanctions in such an atmosphere produced
hundreds of thousands of deaths among innocent children
over the course of the 1990s, leading successive UN
relief administrators of high repute (Denis Halliday,
Hans von Sponeck) to resign in Iraq as a protest against
UN endorsed policies deemed "genocidal" in their
impact.
The UNSC has been in the last several weeks seeking to
rein in the US Government without taking a principled
stand. It fifteen members unanimously endorsed SC Res.
1441 that has set the stage for the debate about
inspections as a prelude to a war against Iraq without
ever facing the fundamental question as to whether the
Charter authorizes such a recourse to war even if Iraq
fails to disarm. After all, Iraq's sovereignty has been
continually violated since 1991, including by
unauthorized bombing runs in the "no-fly zones"
unilaterally established by the US/UK, and many other
countries have developed weapons of mass destruction
without becoming the target of coercive disarmament. To
deny Iraq the option to defend itself under the pressure
of American threats seems to deny a country its most
sovereign rights.
True, the Baghdad regime has committed Crimes Against
Humanity and Crimes Against Peace, and in an ideal world
its leaders would be apprehended, punished, and removed
from power, but that does not make the case for war,
especially at this time. These past crimes were mainly
committed when Iraq was treated by Washington as a
strategic ally, and although this does not operate as an
excuse, it helps us get a sense of proportion. There is
no urgency of the sort that seemed to justify the Kosovo
War in 1999 to save the Albanian Kosovars from a growing
Serb threat of ethnic cleansing. Beyond this, the scale
and tactics of an Iraq War are likely to inflict massive
civilian casualties, and produce dangerous instabilities
in the region and beyond.
It seems reasonable to expect more from the Security
Council than a green or yellow light when it comes to
warmaking that cannot be convincingly justified as
self-defense in accordance with Article 51 of the
Charter. The Security Council all along should have
indicated its refusal to authorize war as a solution to
the Iraq Crisis, and coupled the renewal of inspections
with an explicit reservation relating to the
authorization of the use of force. Of course, a
principled UNSC stand would have undoubtedly led the US
Government to proceed to war without a UN mandate, its
earlier predisposition in any event. It should be
remembered that when Bush unveiled the preemptive war
doctrine in June 2002 at West Point he never even
mentioned the UN, the American strategic move being
designed from the beginning to be based on "a coalition
of the willing and the coerced" managed directly from the
White House and Pentagon. The UN detour came about when
Republican stalwarts warned Bush that there would be
political trouble without a stronger case for casis
belli, and encouraged the new president to demand
coercive inspection via the UN, and if refused or
resisted, to be in possession of a better political basis
for war than what would have existed if no effort was
made to gain UN backing.
Taking this indirect path to war was always
controversial among the Bush inner circle, which never
for a moment was prepared to submit their Iraq policy to
the discipline of international law or the independent
authority of the United Nations. Finally, a compromise
was adopted within the US Government: a diktat to the UN
to give Washington a green light with respect to the war
or the US would go to war on its own and declare the UN
"irrelevant." The UNSC responded timidly with its own
opportunistic compromise in the form of 1441, seeking to
preserve their relevance by imposing some conditions on
the authorization to make war, but never quite saying so.
The US Government retained the option, which it is likely
to use, that Iraq was warned in 1441 of "serious
consequences" in the event of "material breach," and that
this language provides a sufficient mandate. Others will
object, but the assumption is that the American public
will go along once the war commences, especially if it
manages a quick victory with few American casualties.
I think the peoples of the world are entitled to
expect more from the UN in such a situation. The reliance
on leading governments to resist an abandonment of
international law and the Charter guidelines has been
shown to be a precarious way to uphold the primary role
of the UN as the principal agency of war prevention in
the world community. The quality of the Security Council
debate, as well as the inadequacy of 1441 as a framework
for war/peace decisions, suggests the importance of
giving the peoples of the world a more democratic voice
on the global stage than what is now provided by
governmental representation. Such governments as Spain,
Italy, and Britain are defying huge multiparty majorities
to gain geopolitical favors by supporting the United
States. A genuine Global Peoples Assembly, within or
without the UN, would give an entirely different slant to
the Iraq debate, and greatly strengthen the political
weight of an advocacy of peace. If there is one lesson to
be learned from the impending catastrophe of the Iraq War
it is the need for global democracy that conceives of the
global rule of law as a vital source of restraint for the
well being of the peoples of the world, and is prepared
to mount a civil struggle on behalf of such a
law-governed world.
©
TFF & the author 2003
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