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CounterPunch
September
13, 2002
Bush at the U.N.:
"Diplomacy"
in the Age
of the American Empire
by Robert Jensen and
Rahul Mahajan
In the age of American empire, this is what diplomacy
looks like:
After months of open expressions of contempt
for international law and disregard for the opinions of other
nations (allies and enemies alike), the U.S. president deigned
to appear before the United Nations on September 12. In the hectoring
tones of an annoyed parent scolding a fussy child, George Bush
explained that he would be happy to go to war with the endorsement
of the Security Council but that he does not consider such endorsement
necessary. The United Nations can have a role, the president
conceded, but if it makes the wrong decision it will be "irrelevant."
For this cynical maneuver, the emperor
was applauded, at home and abroad. For this abandonment of any
real commitment to multilateralism, all praised Bush the New
Multilateralist.
The implications of this are frightening,
long term and short, but at least now it's all out in the open.
The approval of the U.N. Security Council and Congress will be
easier to secure after Bush's pious posturing.
World leaders, apparently desperate to
save some scrap of dignity in the face of the president's condescension,
suggested that this blatant rejection of any role for the United
Nations beyond the cosmetic was a "positive" step (Norwegian
Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik) that showed how Bush had
recognized the "central role" of the United Nations
(French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin).
Meanwhile, back in the homeland, politicians
rushed to the microphones to pronounce the speech "brilliant"
(Sen. Joe Biden, a Democrat) and "a powerful and convincing
indictment of Saddam Hussein and the grave threat he poses"
(Sen. Joseph Lieberman, another Democrat). The fact that Bush
offered no new evidence or arguments in the course of "making
his case" seemed to matter little to Lieberman, or anyone
else.
Perhaps the most telling moment in the
speech came when Bush said he wanted the United Nations to be
"effective, and respectful, and successful." A text
posted by the Associated Press almost immediately after Bush
delivered the speech (from an advance copy provided by the White
House, one assumes) used the word "respected" instead
of "respectful." Did Bush intend to say that he hoped
the U.N. would be respected? Or did he want to tell the U.N.
that its effectiveness and success depended on being respectful
(to Bush and the United States, one assumes)? Was it a Freudian
slip, or a conscious choice?
Perhaps it does not matter, for the rest
of the speech was unambiguous: The empire has served notice that
the world's governing body can either act in accord with the
empire's wishes, or step back and watch the empire do its work.
The work, of course, is the bloody work
of war against Iraq.
In the coming days, U.S. diplomats will
hammer out a Security Council resolution that gives Iraq some
specified amount of time (probably no more than a few weeks)
to open up to unlimited weapons inspection of unprecedented intrusiveness
or face military action. If Iraq refuses, the war will come sooner.
If it accepts inspections, the war will be later, after the United
States finds a new pretext. But Bush -- along with Cheney and
others in the administration -- has made it clear the war will
come, inspections or not.
Bush's case against Saddam Hussein is
based on the Iraqi leader's disregard for U.N. Security Council
resolutions calling on Iraq to disarm and respect human rights.
It certainly is true that the Iraqi regime has long denied basic
political and human rights to its citizens (including when Hussein
was a valued U.S. ally in the 1980s). And while there is no clear
evidence about the current state of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction,
it is plausible that Iraq has attempted to reconstitute some
of those programs.
Although much of the administration's
rhetoric is overwrought -- sometimes bordering on the hysterical
in claims that Saddam is on his way to a nuclear strike against
the United States -- there is no doubt the Iraqi regime is a
menace, to its own people today and possibly to the region in
the future.
Bush pointed out that Hussein has used
chemical weapons in the war against Iran and on Kurdish citizens
in Halabja, but failed to point out that at that time he was
a U.S. ally; Hussein has been bold enough to use such weapons
only when he had the United States to protect him from serious
international sanction, as U.S. officials at the time did.
Hussein's Iraq has refused to fully comply
with Security Council resolutions, but it is hardly alone in
this. It is not a secret that Israel stands in violation of Security
Council resolutions, among them SCR 242 calling for withdrawal
from the West Bank and  Gaza. Thirty-five years later, the United
States' response to that violation remains massive economic and
military aid that allows Israel to remain defiant.
As a permanent member of the Security
Council, the United States has the right to veto resolutions
it doesn't like. Though the United States' illegal invasion of
Panama in 1989 drew condemnations around the world, no Security
Council resolution would be passed calling on the United States
to withdraw, hence no need for the United States to violate such
a resolution.
The question has never been whether Saddam
is a nice guy, but rather how to deal with his regime. The U.S.
strategy to date -- under Bush I, Clinton and Bush II -- has
been to offer disincentives rather than incentives.
Beginning under the first President Bush
and continuing in the Clinton years, U.S. demanded Iraqi compliance
with weapons inspections but also said that even if inspections
certified that Iraq to be clean of weapons of mass destruction,
the economic sanctions might well stay in place "in perpetuity."
In other words, the message to Hussein was: Comply with the rules,
but your punishment will never end.
Finally, after manipulating the inspections
process to provoke a confrontation by demanding the right to
inspect sensitive sites, inspectors were pulled out on U.S. orders
-- not evicted by Iraq -- in December 1998 right before the United
States launched cruise missile strikes on Iraq. Not surprisingly,
Iraq has not been eager to allow inspectors to return, especially
after it was revealed that what Iraq had long contended was true
-- the United States had used inspectors to spy on the Iraqi
regime.
Bush I and Clinton had always talked
"regime change," but after 9/11/01 Bush II upped the
ante by stating openly that such change likely would come through
a U.S. war. The United States continued to demand inspections
while at the same time saying that even a completely clean inspections
report would not deter the United States from direct intervention
to topple Hussein. In other words: Comply with the rules, but
we will bomb you anyway.
Saddam Hussein is a thug, but even a
thug can see the obvious. It is clear that Hussein is most concerned
with his own survival, and to date the United States has given
him every reason to continue on a path of defiance. If you are
told the most powerful nation in the world will wage war on you
no matter what you do, what incentive is there for anything less
than defiance and preparation for war?
At this point, perhaps the only thing
that Bush and Hussein have in common -- besides a shared contempt
for the United Nations -- is a desire for war. One can assume
Hussein sees no other path open for himself at this point.
The reason that Bush -- and with him
a certain stratum of elites in the United States -- might want
war is equally clear: Iraq has the second largest proven oil
reserves in the world, just behind Saudi Arabia. After putting
up with Hussein for more than a decade after the Gulf War, the
time seems ripe to American hawks to go further than mere "containment."
Bringing down Hussein and replacing him with a compliant leader
along the lines of Hamid Karzai (the United States' hand-picked
puppet in Afghanistan) will allow indefinite military occupation
and further solidify U.S. control well into the future.
Shoehorning such a war on Iraq into the
rubric of the "war on terrorism" makes such a war easier
to sell to a U.S. public frightened by the reality of terrorism
and the rhetoric of the Bush administration. The rest of the
world (perhaps with the exception of Tony Blair) is not taken
in by such rhetoric, but to the Washington crowd the rest of
the world is not of great concern. Old ideas about building coalitions
are unattractive when the officials of the empire believe they
can go it alone; as Donald Rumsfeld has put it, "The mission
must determine the coalition. The coalition must not determine
the mission." Other nations may express concerns, but in
the end, force carries the day.
Bush said that the United States "has
no quarrel with the Iraqi people, who have suffered for too long."
The problem is that he has no quarrel with them and also no concern
for their fate. Assuming that Hussein is not going to simply
pack up and leave quietly when U.S. forces arrive, it is sensible
to assume there will be a war of some duration and that the U.S.
military will use its preferred tactics -- high-altitude bombing
to "soften up" areas before ground troops go in, which
guarantees high levels of civilian casualties; the use of indiscriminate
weapons such as cluster bombs; and the deliberate targeting of
civilian infrastructure such as electrical-power generation and
water facilities. Whether the military will discover Iraqi underground
bunkers that can only be reached with "bunker buster"
tactical nuclear warheads is unknown.
An attack on Iraq will have nothing to
do with stopping terrorism. It will have nothing to do with the
liberation of the Iraqi people. And it will be only marginally
concerned with weapons of mass destruction.
Instead, this will be a war to extend
and deepen U.S. control over the energy-rich Middle East, the
single most important source of strategic power in an industrial
world that runs on oil.
Bush and others in his administration
have made it clear for some time that they desperately want this
war. Many in the antiwar movement have felt desperately alone
in the quest to stop the war.
After Bush's U.N. appearance, it is clear
that, in some sense, we are alone. Other nations have signaled
they will not take risks to derail the empire. U.S. politicians
have shown they will not take the lead to challenge an imperial
president.
The burden of stopping this war of empire
rests where it always has, on the shoulders of the citizens of
the empire who are willing to organize against it.
Robert Jensen
is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas and author
of "Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream."
He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
Rahul Mahajan
is the author of "The
New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism." He can
be reached at rahul@tao.ca.
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