Mr.
Bush is abusing both the UN
and international law
By JONATHAN
POWER
October 14, 2001
LONDON - When George Bush senior went to war over Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait he secured a mandate from the UN
Security Council. Bill Clinton didn't bother with such a
resolution when he decided to bomb Belgrade, and now
America, although easily winning a vote at the Security
Council condemning the attacks on New York and
Washington, has decided not to ask for a resolution
authorising its bombing of Afghanistan.
It suggests that America has not changed its spots.
Commentators the world over have been hailing the end of
American isolationism. But peel off the outer skin and
the same old America of the last decade is there - doing
what it thinks is right, the way it wants, interpreting
the laws of the world community as it sees fit and then
having the gall to say, which at least it didn't before
this crisis, "if you are not with me you are against
me".
Washington fails to see that it would gain much more
support from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and even Iran
if it secured UN backing for its military campaign.
America has not gone to the Security Council for
authorisation for one simple reason - not because it
fears a veto this time - but because it doesn't want to
give the international community any hostages to fortune.
It wants to be free of any legal precedents or
constraints that might make life difficult for it on
another occasion. This is a different America from the
president's father's generation which fashioned the UN
after the savagery of two world wars and who rather
determinedly, if not always successfully, pursued the
goal of strengthening the UN and other international
institutions, and limiting the growth of nuclear weapons,
their testing and their spread to new would-be nuclear
powers.
Beginning with the Clinton administration, America
adopted a thoughtless, even insouciant, attitude to the
old responsibilities. Outmanoeuvred and undermined by a
body of opinion centred on the Pentagon and the
Republican Party, President Clinton bowed and bowed again
to the relentless pressure from the right for America to
pursue single-mindedly its own short-term interest.
Nothing illustrated this more than the fight over the
creation of an International Criminal Court to try war
crimes wherever they occur. It would be the ideal
institution to try captured members of Qaida who could
not expect today to find a jury in America who is not
prejudiced against them. Indeed, when the idea of the
Court was first floated in the early days of the Bosnian
war, Clinton was an enthusiastic supporter of it.
Yet by the time the final statutes had been drafted
and the UN assembled an international conference to
approve them, the White House, overwhelmed by a
formidable Pentagon campaign, was compelled to somersault
on its original full blooded support, demanding
impossible changes to the statutes that would have
exempted all U.S. military personnel from ever coming
under the Court's writ.
Thus, today, we confront an America, with wide Western
support, applying the law its way. Faced with this
horrendous crime against humanity America has chosen to
try and capture Osama bin Laden, in Mr Bush's words,
"dead or alive". There is no public discussion of where
to try him and certainly no push by America's allies to
compel America to be more forthcoming on the subject.
Indeed, one suspects that the attitude of the Bush
Administration is at least as careless of legal
principles as its predecessor.
Mr Clinton's National Security Advisor, Samuel Berger,
was quoted last week in the Washington Post in an article
on an earlier attempt to capture Mr bin Laden, saying "In
the U.S., we have this thing called the Constitution, so
to bring him here into the justice system I don't think
was our first choice. Our first choice was to send him
some place where justice is more streamlined." Three
colleagues of Mr Berger made it clear what Mr Berger
meant: "they hoped that the Saudi monarch King Fahd would
order Mr bin Laden's swift beheading."
All this, to say the least, is perturbing. It suggests
to the rest of the world that America has no confidence
in its own principles and values and that law is there to
be twisted and bent to serve immediate interests. It is
this attitude that provoked Spain's leading
anti-terrorist judge, Baltasar Garzon (who started the
legal ball rolling against General Augusto Pinochet and
who has been a thorn in the side of ETA, the Spanish
terrorist group) to write in an article in the Financial
Times last week, "we should not forget that we are
dealing with a horrible crime but the response
nevertheless requires due process. In its haste to
eliminate Mr bin Laden, the West seems to have forgotten
this fact. And that is serious".
More than any other occasion, this is the time to
apply the law, work through the UN and leave behind a
legacy of fair and honest international practice that
will attract the rest of the world to such values. At the
moment there is a real danger of large parts of the world
becoming cynical if not hostile to the West's so-called
commitment to the rule of law and the centrality of human
rights. The West, going to war, is shooting itself in the
foot.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
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