Ian Williams

POLES APART
United Nations Opponents All at Sea Over Convention

Washington Spectator

by Ian Williams | November 1, 2007

 

Editor’s note: On October 4 Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute addressed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Smith drew on all the anathemas of the far right to attack a treaty the committee was considering. “Did anyone expect the Endangered Species Act to become a national land use planning act? Did anyone expect Superfund to become one of the most costly green pork barrel measures in history or that the Clean Water Act would compel the Corps of Engineers to ban development throughout any area that might have been or might become at some time a wetland?” With a logic alien to the majority of Americans, Smith was trying to persuade the senators to vote against ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. In this issue, Ian Williams looks at the funders behind the isolationist rhetoric and the prospect that their money will prevail in the U.S. Senate. Williams is an occasional contributor to the Washington Spectator and has covered the United Nations for The Nation and other publications since 1989.
THE NEED FOR INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION and the rule of law is nowhere more apparent than at the Poles, where global warming is melting ice caps at an unprecedented rate. In 1957, before American isolationism and exceptionalism resurfaced as potent political forces in Washington, the U.S. signed the Antarctic Treaty, which froze all the old territorial claims and kept the icebound continent free from military action and landgrabs. Fifty years later the only change is that more countries have signed on. It has been an extremely successful agreement.

In contrast, the North Pole is heating up in every sense of the word. Russian claims to a significant part of the Arctic seabed are finally speeding up the glacial progress of U.S. ratification of another very successful international instrument: the U.N. Convention on the International Law of the Sea (CLOS). Russia is making its Arctic claim under the CLOS, but the U.S., by refusing to ratify the CLOS, has no standing in the discussions.

The Pentagon and the White House, backed by maritime, oil and telecom lobbies, are pushing for CLOS ratification, but they find themselves battling the same retrograde element of flat-Earthers who have been taking potshots at the treaty since 1982, and who indeed have forced the U.S. delegation to the U.N. into a holding action.

The military and business lobbies’ near-universal support for the CLOS treaty has isolated and exposed the hard-core ideological—indeed faith-based—foundations behind this an other conservative causes. One can understand why lead makers have lobbied against banning lead in paints; tobacco makers against smoking restrictions; and oil and coal companies against carbon emission controls. Their rationale is self-interest. But the extremists who oppose the CLOS treaty have lost industry support in their fight against the treaty.

In September and October, at hearings held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the groups that spoke against ratification, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), were both known as prominent campaigners against the idea that human activity is a cause of global warming. Both groups now contrive to depict the CLOS as some sort of “stealth” version of the Kyoto Protocol—reminiscent of earlier farfetched accusations of an undersea land grab by the United Nations.

Last year Exxon—Big Oil’s last-ditch CLOS opponent—dropped its financial support for CEI. Yet the campaign against the treaty persists. Now that such opposition to a global treaty has been stripped of the veneer of the rational if amoral self-interest of the industry lobbies, the ideological core of the irrational campaign against multilateralism in any form is plain to see. Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 election, but the people like Richard Mellon Scaife who bankrolled him have remained a force on Capitol Hill, averting ratification of almost every multilateral agreement. They are still funding CEI and CSP, along with much of the conservative project they have kept on the road for decades.

The hard-core lobby now left in the field against ratification of the Law of the Sea treaty reveals the wacko money tail that has been wagging the Republican dog, and, more often than not, converting many Democratic politicians into fawning puppies. The process was described in an e-mail Mike Scanlon, a lobbyist who once worked for Tom DeLay, sent to his Indian tribal clients. It was released by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee when it was investigating disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Our mission is to get specifically selected groups of individuals to the polls to speak out AGAINST something. To that end, your money is best spent finding them and communicating with them on using the modes that they are most likely to respond to. Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. The wackos get their information form [sic] the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet, and telephone trees.
HATE-FEST FOR THE U.N.—In the Clinton era, groups like CEI and CSP, backed by mining companies, used a spurious “sovereignty” issue to campaign against what they termed a “U.N. land grab,” by which they meant listing U.S. national parks as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It was not the prospect of blue United Nations flags flying over the parks that upset them, but rather the red flag against strip mining up to the park’s boundaries.

Similar arguments threaten to sink the Law of the Sea treaty. The CSP’s Frank Gaffney, who writes a column for the Washington Times, got himself into more convolutions than a chambered nautilus as he shifted from calling for total legislative prostration before President Bush and General Petraeus over Iraq, to total disregard for the views of the Pentagon and the White House over the Law of the Sea treaty. Retired Chief of Naval Operations Vernon Clark has described the treaty to the Foreign Relations Committee as “a Magna Carta for the oceans that guarantees navigation freedoms throughout the world’s largest maneuver space.” In contrast, Gaffney fulminated that the “transies” have “created organizations that will be used to implement that world view—a redistributionist, socialist and fundamentally hostile to the United States view.” The U.S. view, is ipso facto that of the Scaife-funded conservative think tanks.

On the face of it, the unprecedented concatenation of a Republican President, the former Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Richard Lugar, and a Democratic majority in the Senate should make ratification of the sea treaty inevitable. But the Senate Foreign Relations hearings on the treaty may as well have been conducted in an octopus’s garden in the shade for all the public exposure they got. Which implies that the Scanlon strategy may be under way: to “bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them.” Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), one of the major opponents of treaty ratification, was able to get thirty of his colleagues to sign on to a resolution against “U.N. Global taxes” this January, which is a bit like getting them to sign a resolution against the tooth fairy.

While the sane majority stays silent, the mailboxes of GOP senators will be flooded with letters and e-mails from black-helicopter-spotting backwoodsers who have decided that the goal of the supporters of sea-law ratification “is nothing less than the establishment of world government at the expense of traditional sovereignty.”

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM—It should be evident that the oceans, which cover two-thirds of the globe, need the internationally accepted legal system that the Convention on the International Law of the Sea provides. The sea is the main highway for of all the world’s nations. It is the source of food for many people. And for everybody, the oceans are the priceless resource on which life on Earth depends.

Former Canadian minster of state for external affairs Mark MacGuigan described the convention’s global scope:

The Conference is not merely an attempt to codify technical rules of law. It is a resource Conference: it is a food Conference; it is an environmental Conference; it is an energy Conference; it is an economic Conference; it is a maritime-boundary-delimitation Conference; it is a territorial-limitation and jurisdictional Conference; it is a transportation, communications and freedom-of-navigation Conference; it
is a Conference which regulates all the uses of the ocean by humanity. Most important, it is a Conference which provides for the peaceful settlement of disputing the oceans. It is, in other words, a Conference dedicated to the rule of law among nations.
Since the convention was completed in 1982, 155 states have ratified it, including Britain, Japan and similar oceanic allies—as well as China and Russia. But not the U.S.A.

Until CLOS came into force, there was little anyone could do to police the world’s seas, as they were beyond the jurisdiction of individual nation-states. Indeed, attempts to unilaterally enforce jurisdiction have brought nations to the brink of war in the past. For much of the last century there was no consensus even on what constituted territorial waters. Historically, many states accepted a demarcation of three miles from shore, the outside range of a cannonball. Some did not even accept that. Other countries claimed twelve and by the time the convention was first negotiated, many countries claimed 200 miles. Just as many disputed the concept itself, as the principle of extended territorial waters was in conflict with customary principles of freedom of navigation. Each claim and counterclaim hazarded a shooting war to determine whose claim was more valid.

The convention was the result of intense negotiations in which a constant balancing of interests allowed all parties to feel that they had made substantial gains. The U.S. was not only deeply involved in the drafting, but the other parties did their best to keep it involved in the negotiations, despite the U.S. Senate’s refusal to ratify it. The Law of the Sea is a comprehensive package with no reservations allowed. To claim the legal backing of one part of the convention, countries had to sign on to all seventeen parts, 320 articles and nine annexes. Signatories cannot cherry-pick for parts they like and disregard clauses they find inexpedient.

An outstanding example of the elaborate balance of interests is found in the convention’s pioneering concept of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), which codifies the conditions for states claiming a 200-mile maritime zone, or more in some circumstances, as Russia is now doing. States can make such claims for exploration and exploitation of economic resources, but cannot impede the right of passage of vessels and aircraft of other nations. At the same time the convention codifies a twelve-mile territorial limit and an additional twelve-mile “contiguous zone.” Charts and claims to territorial seas must be lodged with the U.N. in New York. And to claim such rights, nations have to accept the right of innocent or transit passage for vessels. Yet as part of the delicately balanced structure of rights and obligations, coastal states can make regulations about shipping lanes and air routes in order to ensure safe passage.

The EEZs confer obvious advantages, not least of which is unchallenged title to 87 percent of the world’s known undersea hydrocarbon reserves. The coastal shelves are also home to most of the world’s major fisheries. I remember smiling when the U.N. began discussions, over a decade ago, on “highly migratory and straddling fish stocks.” The cumbersome phrase evoked images of fish with fins turning into legs as they made their awkward way to land. Today, there are now little or no “wild” fish on the fish slab. The convention was too late to save, for example, the cod. But it may not be too late to save other species.

It was evident that ocean-bed mining could lead to environmental despoliation, and even military conflict over competing claims. So the convention makes it illegal to mine the deep-sea bed without permission of the International Sea Bed Authority, and no country is supposed to begin mining without ratifying the convention. The issue is moot because economics and technology have not advanced as far as people feared or hoped twenty years ago. U.S. objections to mining restrictions were substantially met in a 1994 redraft. Yet while no one is currently mining the seabed, the prospect of regulation when mining inevitably begins has the conservative groups fuming about socialism.

Seemingly they prefer anarchy.

INCONVENIENT TRUTHS—When whole shorelines can be devastated by the activities of passing ships leaking oil or dumping waste, the question of rules and jurisdiction becomes crucial. On the other hand, if coastal states can impede or detain passing foreign ships, there is an almost unlimited prospect of dangerous disputes, and, at the very least, an impediment to commerce. The convention allows coastal states to inspect and take proceedings against ships suspected of violating anti-pollution regulations. Yet CEI and CSP witnesses at the Foreign Relations Committee inverted the logic of that provision and warned that debris washed into the Gulf of Mexico from Katrina would lay the U.S. open to prosecution if the convention were ratified. If debris washing into the Gulf is an unlikely cause of action, there are ample grounds for prosecuting many people over the government’s response to the hurricane. Internationally, however, there is no real mechanism. And the free-enterprise right to dump garbage, oil and bilge on the high seas has somehow become part of U.S. sovereignty.

LAW, NOT WAR—The very first case to be brought to the Hamburg-based International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea could have been designed to prove the need for multilateral jurisdiction. In 1997 the MV Saiga, an oil tanker registered in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, owned by Cypriots, chartered by Swiss, managed by a Scottish company, officered by Ukrainians and crewed by Senegalese, had been bunkering fishing vessels off the coast when patrol boats from the Republic of Guinea seized the ship and detained the crew. Guinea claimed a customs zone that extended 250 miles from its coast. In the past, no serious legal remedies existed, and there was the ever-present threat of war to resolve such issues. The Tribunal was able to secure the release of the ship and crew on payment of a bond, and after consideration, it threw out the Guinean claim and ordered the ship and its crew freed. Under the convention, Guinea was not entitled to claim more than 200 miles for its exclusive economic zone.

FIRST WAVE?—For decades, conservative ideologues have rallied their forces and their receptive audiences on Capitol Hill to reflexive rejection of the United Nations and any other multilateral agency or convention. The U.S. refusal to ratify the International Criminal Court, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the conventions on landmines, women’s rights and child soldiers, and the Kyoto Protocol, let alone to pay U.N. dues in full and on time, has devalued American diplomatic standing and made a mockery of Washington’s attempts to preach to other so-called “outlaw” states. The Goldwater-era ideologues lurking behind this diplomatic war on the rest of the world have been able to hide behind other groups. The wackos are now in the spotlight.

The Law of the Sea ratification presents a unique opportunity to break the conservative hold on multilateralism. If the Senate cannot ratify the convention with the White House, the Pentagon and former Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee onside a Democratic majority, then Americans had best resign themselves to being all at sea in the world of international law. It is just possible that the extremists who see the U.N. as a world government about to occupy and disarm the United States could thwart the two-thirds vote required in the Senate for the treaty to be ratified. For years they’ve succeeded in keeping the convention off the Senate floor despite support from the Foreign Relations Committee. For irrationality to triumph, all that’s needed is for sane men and women to do nothing.

 

The Washington Spectator, July 15, 2006
ALIEN NATION: America’s Curious Hatred of the United Nations
By Ian Williams

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MaximsNews is also carrying the full article.

In Max Frisch’s play The Fire Raisers, the respectable Herr Biedermann prefers to accept the palpably thin excuses that his tenants offer as they haul wagonloads of incendiary materials into his house, because that is easier than taking any action.
Something like that is happening now. While the congressional and media types who magnify molehills of U.N. peccadilloes into mountains of scandal often piously invoke the need to reform the United Nations, their real and often overtly stated intention is to overthrow the world organization, its charter, and the whole corpus of international law, multilateral treaties and conventions that support its purpose. Insofar as they have a transitional program, it is to undermine the principles behind the institution, and bend it to conform to Washington’s increasingly flexible perceptions of international law.
There is an Anglo-Saxon tendency to defer to people who hold sincere and fervent beliefs, so perhaps it is worthwhile to establish the essential irrationality of these U.N. detractors, measuring them not against any highfalutin ideas of international peace and brotherhood, but against the interests of the United States that Congressman Henry Hyde (R-IL), Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) and the like so often invoke.
ORPHANING THE U.N. To begin with, the United Nations was essentially a creation of the United States, designed to American specifications, and has largely served American interests. Washington usually gets what it wants from the U.N.,and especially so when what it wants is consonant with international law. More to the point is that the U.S. veto effectively stops the U.N. from ever doing anything that Washington does not want.
In years past, the U.N. has blessed the first Gulf War, maintained sanctions against Iraq and Yugoslavia, and, more recently, begun to put the squeeze on Syria, all at the behest of Washington. Even though it failed to win the organization’s support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. shortly afterward persuaded the Security Council to let it have some Oil for Food surpluses and confiscated Iraqi funds.
There is some consolation in the fact that the U.N. baiters still feel the need to disguise their intentions, because despite the concerted media assault on the U.N., polls consistently show that a majority of Americans tend to support it. However, they tend to be diffident in their enthusiasm. In the missing question box at the end of most polls, they tend to tick “No” or “Undecided” if asked “Are you going to do anything about it?”
In contrast, for a significant and vociferous minority of their compatriots mention of the United Nations switches off the higher mental faculties in the same way that “terrorism” does. What they see is not a complex organization and process for helping the peoples and nations of the world take common or concerted action against global problems. They see a bogeyman, something to frighten children at night, or more usually, to get eccentrics to write checks for the causes of those preying on the fears. Since all human life is on the agenda somewhere in the U.N. system, the organization has considerable potential to incite many of the more excitable citizenry into paroxysms of rage.
Birth control, abortion, guns, (other people’s) weapons of mass destruction, attacks on Israel, U.N. Heritage sites, child soldiers, the Law of the Sea: there is no end to the perceived threats to American sovereignty.
COURTING THE WACKO VOTE American “exceptionalists,” from the neocons like Richard Perle to the paleocons like John Bolton and his former patron Jesse Helms, are not talking idly. They firmly believe that the U.S. does not have to follow any externally mandated rules, and they can call upon hosts of supporters to back them up almost anytime they hit at the U.N.
Michael Scanlon, the former aide to Representative Tom DeLay (R-TX), provided the perfect description of the methodology used by groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA) to tap into this subculture. Scanlon, who misused Indian tribes’ money to further his political schemes, describes the process perfectly.
Our mission is to get specifically selected groups of individuals to the polls to speak out against something. To that end, your money is best spent finding them and communicating with them on using the modes that they are most likely to respond to. Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. The wackos get their information form [sic] the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet, and telephone trees.
If you want to see the process at work, look no further than than NRA leader Wayne LaPierre on the gun group’s StopUNGunBan.org website, which urges people to buy his book The Global War on Your Guns, and perhaps more pertinently, inveighs against the U.N. as the “new face of global socialism.”
No matter how many reassurances the world body had issued that it was no threat to the internal sale of weapons under any interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, the NRA went ahead and took a cheap shot at the U.N. This is the mind-set of many Americans: when things go wrong internationally it is always the U.N.’s fault.
Similarly, oil company lobbyists inveighing against the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, which seeks to control greenhouse gas emissions, can drill into the same rich wells of prejudice. While the companies offer the superficially more sophisticated argument that science has not yet demonstrably proven that the emissions cause global warming, the potent subtext is that the rejection of Kyoto and the refusal to control emissions are somehow a patriotic reaffirmation of sovereignty rather than a self-destructive demonstration of gluttony.
As senseless as the attacks can be, they can have their effects. The inflated and incendiary allegations over Oil for Food, fanned in exactly the same wacko wildfire mode, managed to divert the attention of Kofi Annan from management reforms, while driving popular American support for the U.N. to an all-time low.
It is illustrative that while for over a year columnists were flinging mud at the U.N. over allegations of corruption and abuse in the handling of Oil for Food revenues, they lost interest as soon as a report by Paul Volcker showed that it was governments and private companies that were the guilty parties. They showed no interest at all when a Bush-appointed auditor confessed that he could not track what had happened to the $10 billion in Oil for Food surpluses that the U.N. had handed over to the American occupation authorities for Iraqi redevelopment.
U.N. HATERS AT THE HELM There are immediate, short-term effects of the peculiar American hostility to the U.N. ranging from the petty, such as the grandstanding efforts of some New York State legislators to frustrate the rebuilding plans for the U.N. headquarters in Manhattan, to the profound, such as the time the U.S. threatened to veto sending reinforcements to the peacekeepers during the Rwanda genocide, because the Clinton administration did want to ask Congress for the money.
In the longer term, the anti-U.N. lobby has hobbled the signature of the U.S. on major international conventions, often despite the wishes of the State Department or the incumbent in the White House.
As a result, sometimes the U.S. fulfills the terms of treaties but refuses to ratify them, as happened with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Or it signs treaties, but then sends signals that it does not intend to carry out its obligations to fulfill the promised terms, as it did with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The U.S. now claims the right to cherry-pick which parts of international laws and conventions it intends to abide by. So, while hinting at war to stop Iran’s legal, if dangerous, moves toward uranium enrichment, the U.S. offers India a deal in total violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty that it is citing against Iran.
Then again, in 2004 the Pentagon and Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, pushed passage of the International Treaty on the Law of the Sea, but they were thwarted by the “backwoodsmen” in Congress, the isolationists who saw it as yet another pernicious attempt at global government. The U.S. Navy actually wanted it ratified because it would give them more freedom of passage, but such pragmatic considerations could not overcome the prejudices of the exceptionalists.
The Bush administration has taken disdain for the U.N. to previously unimaginable heights. Perhaps the most egregious gesture of official deference to the anti-U.N. lobby has been the appointment as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. of the belligerent John Bolton, who had spent decades denouncing the organization and calling for the U.S. to leave it.
His appointment by Bush while Congress was not in session gave an official blessing to the decades-long campaign against the U.N. by the conservative movement. In a similar vein, Christopher Burnham, currently in charge of the U.N.’s management and administration, and a former Bush administration official and fundraiser, actually thanked President Bush for his appointment last year, overlooking the fact that, nominally at least, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan had appointed him.
“I came here at the request of the White House. My primary loyalty is to the United States of America,” Burnham told the Washington Post, seemingly unaware of the oath that an international civil servant such as himself takes on appointment, giving up national loyalties. It is worth noting that for decades during which American media and politicians have berated the U.N. for “waste, mismanagement and corruption,” the U.N. official in charge of management has always been an American presidential appointee.
WORLD COURT WARS The campaign against the International Criminal Court, which was spearheaded by John Bolton, exemplifies how prejudices and irrational fears militate against real American diplomatic interests while exhibiting to the world the U.S.’s brand of overt nationalism. The U.S. “unsigned” the treaty establishing the Court, setting Washington at loggerheads with allies across the world, including all the members of the European Union. It refused to consider using the Court for the trial of Saddam Hussein, which would have saved both the American and the new Iraqi administrations no end of grief. Recently, it came close to vetoing U.N. resolutions on Darfur because the Court was asked to investigate the situation there.
At no point did the U.S. under Clinton or Bush object to application of the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction over the citizens of any other country in the world. Indeed, Clinton-era negotiators actually won a sympathetic hearing for the hypothesis that American military justice was so advanced that the ICC was almost irrelevant to U.S. forces. Other nations’ negotiators cut a lot of slack for Washington, and allowed many clauses that, without spelling out an overt American exception, made it in practical terms virtually impossible for an American to appear there.
Regardless of that, Bolton spent four years bullying small nations into making ritual, and in many cases dubiously legal, riders to the ICC treaty that committed them to refuse to hand over American suspects. There could rarely have been a more explicit statement of U.S. exceptionalism. The administration that has “rendered” suspects from all over the world to the U.S. (or worse, perhaps, not quite to the U.S. in the case of Guantánamo) says that it is unconscionable for any American citizen to be given due process in The Hague.
Apart from such gestures of contempt, the invasion of Iraq, the effective repudiation of the Geneva Conventions and the other instances of global anarchism perpetrated by this administration show that its attitudes to international law and the U.N.’s “constitution,” the Charter, are even more cavalier than its attitude to the U.S. Constitution. After all, while distorting or ignoring the Constitution, Bush’s representatives have never actually disavowed it completely, as Bolton and his ilk have with the U.N. Charter.
U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali once noted that neither the Roman Empire nor the U.S. had any patience for diplomacy, which is “perceived by an imperial power as a waste of time and prestige and a sign of weakness.” However, as the Goths, Huns and Vandals, among others, demonstrated, this was a dangerous misperception for the Romans, who also tended to forget what their leaders had done to the rest of the world when they had the upper hand.
BANNING THE BLUE FLAG So what can be done about it? Ironically, what for a brief time was wacko central out in Utah provides a positive sign. The heady witches’ brew of exceptionalism, paranoia, and survivalist sovereignty all came together in 2002 when the city fathers of the tiny town of La Verkin banned the U.N. flag and insignia from being displayed within the town limits. They also denied all access to United Nations forces, and required anyone working for the world organization to register their infamy at the Town Hall. It also ordered the erection of signs declaring the town to be a U.N.-free zone.
And what is good about that? Well, the good citizens of the town when they saw how their elected officials had made them a national, not to mention an international laughingstock, promptly called a town meeting and threw them out, while reversing all the eccentric ordinances. So the question really is, when are the sane people across the U.S. and in the halls of government in Washington going to emulate the Verkinites of Utah?
There are some hopeful signs that Washington may already be beginning a Verkin-emulation campaign. After all, the Senate did refuse to approve John Bolton’s nomination, even if thwarted by Bush’s recess appointment, and Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) emulated the little boy in the Hans Christian Anderson tale of the Emperor’s new clothes by cutting down to size the wild allegations about the U.N. Oil for Food program.
There should be much more of that, and the rational wing of electors and elected should be making it plain that letting John Bolton and his crowd choose the next Secretary General makes as much sense as allowing the National Evangelical Association to choose the president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.
Above all, as in Maurice Sendak’s children’s poem “Pierre,” the moral is, “Care!” The U.N. may be boring, and sometimes bureaucratic and slow, but so is air traffic control. If someone tried to abolish that, legislators would be up in arms. When you see people trying to destabilize the world by abolishing one of the few effective tools we have for international peace and order, some determined action is called for.

Jan / Feb 2005

The UN / THE US & REFORM Would the UN be better off without a rogue superpower in its midst? Ian Williams thinks not. The UN is like the speck of sand in the oyster, the irritant seed of a growing pearl. One of the reasons it irritates the American Right so much is that simply by existing it acts as a catalyst. The threat is not what it does, but what it stands for. Apart from the isolationists, the general American attitude to the UN is ambivalent – wanting to be loved by the rest of the world but still reserving the right to take unilateral action when deemed necessary. So, during the presidential election debates, Bush claimed that the invasion of Iraq was in support of the UN, even as he was dismissive of it. Kerry sent equally ambivalent messages. Inside the UN, during protracted negotiations over issues such as the Law of the Sea, the Kyoto Protocol or the International Criminal Court, the rest of the world made every effort to meet any rational American objection – and to cope with many irrational ones. US negotiators often ended up playing a good-cop/bad-cop routine, exacting concessions ostensibly intended to stem objections from the less rational people back in Washington. In far too many cases, after they had done their best to eviscerate a proposal, the US then backed off or ‘unsigned’ treaties. US Secretary of State Colin Powell followed a similar pattern in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, persuading everyone to work with him so he had something with which to counter the know-nothings in the Pentagon and the White House. The rest of the world went as far as it could – and arguably farther than it should – to accommodate him. It did not work. No takers From one point of view, the failure to stop the invasion of Iraq was a major defeat for the UN. In the face of ferocious American diplomatic pressure, not one state – not even those who blustered at length in an open meeting of the Security Council – had the temerity to move a resolution condemning the invasion. Kofi Annan at least went on the record – one year after the fact – saying that it was ‘not in conformity with the UN Charter’ and ‘illegal’. But when the President of the General Assembly, Jan Kavan, went to the Non Aligned countries and told them he would convene an emergency meeting if they asked for it, he found no takers. A more realistic view is that the refusal by a majority of members of the Security Council to support the attack was in its own way an important victory. Most UN member states sat down and refused to do what the bullying hyperpower told them to do. Indeed, while people may grumble that the US got away unpunished, the Grimm fairy tales remind us that getting what you wish is often punishment enough. Over 1,200 dead Americans, $200 billion spent and no end in sight for a bloody entanglement; all this vindicates the warnings from home and abroad that the US Administration ignored. Reality also bit back at the millennarians in and around the Administration in other ways. Just after the invasion, Richard Perle crowed: ‘The UN is dead. Thank God!’ Within weeks the White House discovered no-one would buy Iraqi oil that did not have a clear ownership title from the Security Council. Even before then, the Bush Administration found that countries would not come forward to help in Iraq because of the absence of a UN resolution. Has the US learned its lesson – or is it a recidivist scofflaw? In the stage version of Peter Pan children are exhorted to declare their belief in fairies in order to revive the dying Tinkerbell. We could almost say that the rest of the world’s collective belief in international law revived the moribund willingness of the evil Captain Hook to abide by it. Without admitting that it had broken the rules, the US at least signalled its acceptance that the rules exist. This may not be a just response. But reality is constraining the US, too – it will not rush to repeat the error. A year ago there was a real chance that the ‘neo-conservatives’ in the Pentagon would bring about an invasion of Syria at least, and possibly of Iran, with North Korea another target. In June 2004 the Administration that had marched into Iraq waving the Stars and Stripes was essentially trying to negotiate a withdrawal under the shade of the UN’s blue flag. Feather in the cap Many at the UN would now prefer to forget about Iraq and carry on as if it had not happened. But the experience has intensified debate about reform. Superficially, there is an attraction in trying to cobble together an alliance of Russia, China, Europe and Japan to oppose the grosser manifestations of American arrogance. While it may be true that the US is the biggest rogue state, it is far from being the only one. Moscow and Beijing opposed intervention in Iraq – but they are also opposing intervention in Sudan, just as they did in the Balkans, and would have done in Rwanda if anyone had bothered to intervene there in the first place. Such an alliance would vindicate the American Right that always said the UN was an anti-American plot anyway. In the long run, wider representation would indeed enhance the moral standing of the Council. Yet if the US veto is a major problem, adding five more vetoes is hardly an answer. Similarly, it has to be doubted that increasing its size by ten members – five permanent, five temporary – would enhance its effectiveness. The Economic and Social Council has trebled in size since it was set up – its impact has been in inverse proportion to its increasing size. There are no quick fixes. Insofar as the UN is a reflection of the realities of world power, the key to reform is to change those realities. This demands much more than mechanistic redrafting of the Charter or bean-counting on the Security Council. The road to UN reform actually begins in the political institutions of the US. An apocryphal dictionary definition of ‘War’ is ‘God’s way of teaching Americans geography’. The Iraqi débâcle has certainly put foreign policy on the agenda in the US – and, more particularly, the failures of unilateralism. However, while we are waiting, there are some interim responses available. Many of them begin in the General Assembly, which has let itself be overshadowed by the Security Council. In recent years Council members elected from the Assembly – such as Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Jamaica and Ireland – have played a principled and effective role in ensuring that the Permanent Five do not always get their own way. Electing more members like that would go a long way towards reforming the Council. At present the members are chosen on complicated rotations that, for example, put Rwanda on the Council during the genocide, Morocco while occupying Western Sahara, Indonesia after its annexation of East Timor. Solution The General Assembly could insist that prospective members of the Security Council must prove that they deserve their seats. No candidacy for the Council – whether for permanent seats in the future, or for elected seats currently – should be considered unless the country has a genuine, stable democracy that guarantees civil and political liberties for its citizens and has a record of adherence to UN decisions and international law. It is true that while Council members can block initiatives by permanent members, they cannot overrule the veto. But even here there is a solution in the General Assembly. As soon as the Palestinian Authority rediscovered the US invention of referring issues vetoed in the Security Council to a Special Session of the General Assembly, the US expediently declared the procedure no longer valid. That view should be loudly and publicly challenged by other members. It behoves them to remember that – whether in Darfur, Rwanda, Kosovo or Bosnia – this procedure offers a way to break the deadlock in the Security Council that otherwise allows genocide to continue untrammelled. Americans often claim that the US was the first country based not on territory, ethnicity or language, but on an idea. The UN is actually most useful as an embodiment of the idea that global co-operation is essential for solving our common problems. More than fixing committees we have to fix that big idea so that it becomes self-evident and, where it is not self-evident, reluctant rogue states – of whatever size – are persuaded of its force. Ian Williams writes about the UN for The Nation and is the author of The UN For Beginners, Writers and Readers, New York, 1995. Usha John - teacher, Faridabad, IndiaUsha is optimistic about the UN. But that is mostly because of the humanitarian work done by agencies like UNICEF and UNESCO – in a country with masses of impoverished, illiterate people.Usha feels that India made an historic blunder by not getting itself a seat on the Security Council when it was possible. ‘Look at them [Indian leaders] talking so excitedly now about an expanded Security Council when we all know it is not going to come about so easily…‘As a teacher I know that but for UNICEF initiatives in building awareness and interventions on such burning issues as widespread childhood malnutrition, discriminatory practices against the girl child and vaccinations, nothing would ever have been done… ‘I was particularly moved by the UNICEF reports on the plight of infants and children in Iraq between the two Gulf wars, at a time when that country was placed under crippling UN sanctions… We now have problems teaching children in our schools about what the UN is all about – and surely the UN has strayed a long way away from what is written in the civics textbooks.’ Interview and photo by Ranjit Devraj

© Copyright 2005 New Internationalist Publications Ltd. All rights reserved.

Let Him Who is without Sin, Get His Hand out the Till

For those who complain that my blog is not short enough, here is seriously bad news. My article in the current edition of the WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • WINTER 2006/07, to which you should subscribe runs to many thousands of words. All of them golden of course. Check their site, and check the story, yet another homage to Little W’s Big Adventure in Mesopotamia.

The True UN Scandal: Who Pocketed the $10 Billion for Iraq?

Ian Williams

In December 2006, Kofi Annan finished his two-term tenure as secretary general of the United Nations. Among his greatest achievements was undoubtedly shepherding the principle of “The Responsibility to Protect” through to adoption by the Heads of State Summit in the General Assembly in September 2005. By beginning to put some teeth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and overturning the traditional concept of absolute national sovereignty, this prefigured a huge change in international law, even if, as the ongoing conflict in Darfur demonstrates, its implementation leaves much to be desired.

Sadly, however, in the United States at least, many commentators tied Annan’s name to the alleged “Oil for Food” (OFF) scandal. It is perhaps timely to take a retrospective look at this, not least since the miasma it raised at the time still lingers around both him and the organization. Perhaps no molehill has ever been made into such a mighty mountain.

Following attacks by the conservative UN-hating media in the United States, and to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom, Secretary General Kofi Annan convened an Independent Inquiry Committee into the OFF program to be headed by the former Federal Reserve chair, Paul Volcker. His committee had unprecedented access to documents, emails, and phone and financial records across the world. Annan’s act was not that of a man who had anything to hide.

In October 2005, and with the investigation costing almost $50 million dollars, the report (1) came out, and in summer 2006 it was followed with a précis “Good Intentions Corrupted: The Oil for Food Scandal and the threat to the UN.”(2) Paul Volcker wrote the introduction but two of the investigators, Jeffrey A. Meyer and Mark G. Califano, authored the content. In contrast to the enthusiastic coverage from the conservative media about the so-called scandal, the report did not garner much media attention, perhaps because, in general, it exonerated the United Nations from the hyperbolic accusations made against it. Its conclusions are relatively sober, unexceptional, and essentially repeat those of many previous reports on the failings of UN management.

The book recounts examples of the five ambassadors holding permanent seats on the Security Council bypassing UN procurement procedures, and of U.S. naval cover occasionally being provided for oil smuggling operations, which, in total, amounted to $8.4 billion of revenue for Iraq in defiance of sanctions. It notes the general apathy of Security Council members to reports of smuggling, kickbacks, and surcharges, which netted the regime another $1.8 billion. It also points out that the Security Council gave the UN Secretariat and the Oil for Food program the mandate and framework that made it possible for Iraq— and many companies and governments—to manipulate the program.

In the précis to the report, Volcker writes, “I did not, and do not today, believe that the evidence developed by the committee justifies a sweeping allegation that financial corruption is or was characteristic of the institution as a whole. Rather…there is a ‘culture of inaction,’ of a strong tendency to evade administrative responsibility. That culture is rooted both in the character of the UN organization and in broadly political considerations.”

It is, however, that political context that is mostly missing from “Good Intentions Corrupted,” just as it was from the Volcker report. There were good reasons why the Iraq program was not robust in its enforcement of sanctions, no matter how much shock the report expresses about inattention to such details. It is unlikely that the Security Council, cognizant of the hardship that Iraqi sanctions caused,will ever again agree to impose such comprehensive and draconian economic sanctions. Indeed, another lesson from the affair may be that, in a globalized world, any attempt to micromanage the foreign trade of an entire country’s economy is not only futile, but risks disastrous socio-economic consequences. Since, the Security Council has limited subsequent sanctions to rogue regimes or against strictly military trade.

The Background to OFF

In a vindictive mood at the end of the original Gulf War in 1991, the Americans, with British and (at the time) French support, instituted a crushing package of economic sanctions, reparations, and monitoring against Iraq. Not since Versailles had victors imposed such measures on the defeated. The sanctions did not have a “sunset clause.” A positive vote of the Security Council was necessary to lift them. It was only possible because, at that immediate juncture, the Soviet Union, and then Russia, cooperated. Later, other members asked for “light at the end of the tunnel”—a demonstration that Iraqi compliance with Security Council resolutions would lead to lifting the sanctions—but the United States made it plain that it would veto any such attempt while Saddam Hussein remained in power.

The original sin was the rush of enthusiasm in the aftermath of the Gulf War and the Cold War, when the UN looked likely to become the executor of Washington’s foreign policy. A more independent secretariat might have warned of the pitfalls of the policy the Security Council adopted, although, to be fair, at the time few foresaw that sanctions would still be in effect a decade later.

As the economy imploded and public services collapsed, it soon became apparent that the sanctions’ primary victims were ordinary Iraqis. Indeed, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ruminated on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 1996: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima…. Is the price worth it?… I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” She has since regretted the statement, but at least it had the benefit of candor. Clearly, Washington did think that the political and strategic benefits outweighed the costs paid by Iraqi civilians, otherwise it could have relaxed the sanctions.

Sadly, it was the United Nations that tallied those casualty figures, though staff members saw their job as developing economies, not destroying them; saving children, not starving them. They tended to see the sanctions as an American-enforced aberration from the true mission of the UN system. High-profile officials—such as Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, in September 1998, and Hans Von Sponeck, in March 2000—resigned in protest against complicity in what Halliday called genocide. It did not help that the resolutions earmarked 30 percent of the proceeds of oil sales to war reparations, which went mostly to Kuwait and major oil companies and which provided an additional pretext for Baghdad’s defiance.

Without firm opposition within the United Nations, for a few years during and after the Gulf War, Washington and its junior partner in London promulgated instructions inside the UN as if it were an extension of their own foreign policy apparatus. It was a brave staff member who resisted their wishes—as indeed Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali himself discovered when his term as secretary general was not renewed, in part because he was insufficiently cooperative with Madeleine Albright.

In the Arab and Muslim world, and even in Western Europe, the palpable suffering of Iraqi citizens eroded support for sanctions and diminished the moral standing of the world organization. The stark contrast between the relentless application of pressure on Iraq, and the free diplomatic pass given to Israel in enforcing compliance with Security Council resolutions, also exacerbated disaffection. While legally significant, the contrast between resolutions censuring Iraq, which contained their own means of enforcement, and those against Israel, which did not, merely reinforced the perceived disparity. Even Saddam Hussein’s cavalier disregard for, and defiance of, UN disarmament resolutions found defenders in the face of Washington’s relentless antipathy. As the sanctions wore on and American officials began to call for regime change, UN members chafed at what seemed a blatant attempt to flout the bedrock principle of national sovereignty. (No UN resolutions ever mentioned overthrowing Saddam— indeed George H. W. Bush had deliberately avoided that option at the end of Operation Desert Storm in order to preserve the international coalition.) Clearly, if the sanctions had needed a reauthorization vote—as peacekeeping operations do—it is unlikely there would have been a Security Council majority to re-impose them, apart from the potential veto that the Russians, Chinese, and later the French might have wielded.

Besides the moral considerations, Iraq represented potential oil concessions and trade with Russia, China, and France. By 1997, sanctions were losing support and were about to crumble completely. For the majority of the council, and for much of the secretariat, since the U.S. veto was an insuperable obstacle to lifting sanctions, the Oil for Food program was seen primarily as a way to mitigate the effect of the sanctions on ordinary Iraqis by providing food supplies. In contrast, for Washington, whose basic assumptions the Volcker report reflects, the purpose of the Oil for Food program (to which it reluctantly agreed) was to maintain sanctions in the face of growing worldwide reluctance to cooperate.

Smuggling Condoned

Though a hostile conservative press has accused the Oil for Food program of providing billions of dollars to the Iraqi regime, most of the smuggling was already under way before the program was established. This was known to Western intelligence services and the media—or indeed anyone who wanted to know. The Americans and the British kept sending mixed messages—not officially condoning, but never overtly condemning Iraq’s oil trade with Western allies. Under Article 50 of the charter, Iraq’s neighbors, like Turkey and Jordan, were entitled to compensation for costs they incurred in maintaining sanctions. However, no one really wanted to pay up, least of all a U.S. administration that had for years found it difficult to obtain congressional approval of UN dues. So from the outset there was massive oil-trading, referred to as “smuggling” in the press and committee reports, across the borders to Jordan and Turkey, which the Volcker report confirms was well established by the time Oil for Food had begun.

The American-allied Kurds in the north siphoned a significant percentage from oil sales to Turkey that passed through their territory, and the Jordanian economy would have collapsed without the oil trade across the border—for which Amman did ask permission of the Sanctions Committee, which “noted” the request without delivering an opinion. It was the diplomatic equivalent of a wink and a nudge. The Western powers only began to be irritated about the “smuggling” in 1997, when Damascus negotiated a rapprochement with Iraq and later re-opened the Syrian pipeline. The flurry of indignation from the British and others was hard to sustain, as they could not explain why this was in any way more censorious than the leakage to Turkey and Jordan.

The Matter of Sovereignty

Anomalously, Iraq was formally a sovereign member state of the UN even as it was being treated as a defeated nation. For example, to respect the letter of international law, the UN applied for Iraqi visas for its personnel in the Kurdish areas where Baghdad had no practical authority whatsoever, and allowed the regime to veto personnel.

The United Nations Special Commission, the nominally UN weapons inspectors team, had proven to be an extension of U.S. intelligence, which played directly to Iraqi Ba’athists’ paranoia. The Iraqis did not want a fresh team of weapons inspectors using the cover of the Oil for Food program serving on behalf of a state threatening military action against them. When the Security Council agreed to the Oil for Food program after initial American resistance, Saddam’s regime showed that it could be equally opportunistic in its feigned principles, and initially cited national honor in resisting inspections.

To get the food to the population, UN officials—who cared more about the Iraqi citizenry than either Baghdad or Washington—in effect had to compromise with the Ba’athists’ pretenses about “national honor” to get the program running. As a result, while the United Nations managed the escrow fund into which all oil sale revenue went, and which paid for the food, the program had no say about which companies or countries Baghdad chose to sell oil to, or to buy food and supplies from.

Unsurprisingly, given hostility in Washington and London, Baghdad did not award many contracts to American or British companies, and used commerce to reward and influence countries like France, Russia, and China, whose votes they coveted in the Security Council. It would be naïve to assume that those contracts had no influence in determining their votes. Certainly France’s position changed considerably over this period. At least Baghdad’s ill will towards Washington had the effect of sparing most American companies from the temptation to join in the kickback scheme.

Taking all this into account, while the Volcker report spreads the blame among the member states, the Security Council, and the secretariat for the program’s failure to enforce sanctions on Iraq, it misses the point in reprimanding the UN staff. To many, and very possibly a majority, while the Iraqi sanctions may have been legal under the UN Charter—they were illegitimate, and arguably immoral. Hence the contrast in outlook between the United States, as reflected in the Volcker committee’s report, and much of the world. For most of the UN staff, the OFF program was about feeding Iraqis. For Washington it was about starving the regime of funds for rearmament. It needs reiteration that in both contexts it was hugely successful. By the end, the program was providing essential food and medical supplies for over 80 percent of the Iraqi population, and, as was subsequently proved by both Hans Blix’s UN Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission inspectors and their American successors, it was also successful in stopping Iraqi rearmament.

Indeed, it was so successful that the U.S. occupation authorities asked the UN to continue the program after the 2003 invasion and then praised its performance after it ended. A surplus of more than $10 billion dollars was handed over to the Occupation’s “Iraq Development Fund” to be disbursed under the scrutiny of an international monitoring board. Such was the context when Kofi Annan asked Paul Volcker to establish and head the Independent Inquiry Committee. Yet surprisingly, the committee did not take into account the very political circumstances of its own creation.

How Success Turned to Scandal

Within a year of the Iraq invasion, the anti-UN media in the United States began to trumpet the “UN Oil for Food Scandal,” which was, according to the neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, “the biggest financial scandal in the history of the world.” Some of the wilder pundits claimed it involved the mismanagement of “hundreds of billions of dollars.” The real target of the attacks was the United Nations itself, and, especially, the reputation of the secretary general. When, in December 2004, Republican senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota called for Kofi Annan’s resignation, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune provided a succinct explanation of what lay behind the attacks. Describing Coleman’s call as a “sordid move,” a December 4, 2004, editorial explained, “For months before the election, the right-wing constellation of blogs and talk radio was alive with incendiary rhetoric about Annan and the oil-for-food scandal…. This is really all about Annan’s refusal to toe the Bush line on Iraq and the administration’s generally unilateral approach to foreign affairs. The right-wingers hate Annan and saw in the food-for-oil program a possible chink in his armor. They went after it with a venomous fury.”

The story of how Oil for Food mushroomed into a UN scandal begins with Claudia Rosett, a former Wall Street Journal writer who is now journalist-in-residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. In a 2002 New York Times op-ed, just after Bush went to the UN to seek authorization for an invasion of Iraq, she called the Oil for Food program “an invitation to kickbacks, political back-scratching and smuggling done under cover of relief operations…. If the oil-for-food operation is extended, however, it will have a tremendous influence on shaping the new Iraq. Before

that is allowed to happen, let’s see the books.”

The idea that the UN had failed by not backing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and that Saddam Hussein’s continued malfeasance could be blamed on the UN, was very much part of the house philosophy of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Its board included such GOP eminences as Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Frank Lautenberg, Newt Gingrich, and James Woolsey, as well as Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer. Its own website advertised its connections with the Iraqi National Council and Ahmed Chalabi, its leader-in-exile. Chalabi’s position was crucial. He disliked, in particular, Annan’s special representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, who was assembling an interim government in Baghdad and had correctly assessed the lack of indigenous support for Chalabi in Iraq. At one point, Chalabi had called the secretary general’s office in New York to pressure Annan to appoint him to a position commensurate with his self-perceived importance. When Annan’s office resisted, Chalabi and his team carried out their threat to propagate the claim that Benon Sevan, the retiring Oil for Food chief, was on a list of 267 people for whom Saddam Hussein had authorized commissions on oil trades. This claim provoked a rash of stories focusing on the alleged UN connection.

With so much smoke, the media seemed to assume that there had to be a fire. Interestingly, these stories were mostly in the op-ed pages. The Wall Street Journal news section undertook some sterling investigative work that did not point at corruption in the UN, but rather at collaboration between private companies and member states in providing revenue for Baghdad.

In March 2004, Annan, backed by the Security Council, appointed former Federal Reserve bank chair Paul Volcker to head an inquiry. Soon, however, the same people who had demanded the inquiry began to accuse Annan of under-funding it. When he then obtained $30 million from residual OFF funds set aside for administration, he was immediately accused of taking bread from Iraqi children’s mouths.

The New York Post denounced the inquiry as a cover-up, and New York Times columnist William Safire referred to Annan’s “manipulative abuse of Paul Volcker,” whose reputation for integrity was “being shredded by a web of sticky-fingered officials and see-no-evil bureaucrats desperate to protect the man on top who hired him to substitute for—and thereby to abort—prompt and truly independent investigation.”

The chorus grew louder following the leak of a letter in which Annan cautioned the U.S.-led coalition against a frontal assault on Fallujah. Fox television’s Bill O’Reilly declared that “it’s becoming increasingly clear that UN chief Kofi Annan is hurting the USA.” On November 24, 2004, the National Review declared “Annan should either resign, if he is honorable, or be removed, if he is not.” And, on December 1, 2004, writing in the Wall Street Journal, Senator Norm Coleman called for An-nan’s resignation. When asked, President Bush did not repudiate Coleman’s call with any expression of confidence in Annan, but called simply for the investigation to take its course. A week later, Prime Minister Tony Blair joined much of the world in expressing support for Annan, to whom delegates in the General Assembly gave a standing ovation.

By this time, the Volcker committee had won over the conservative press, albeit inadvertently. The interim reports publicized many allegations from the UN’s own, widely derided Office of Internal Oversight Services, without publishing rebuttals from UN staff. The hostile press also welcomed the Volcker inquiry’s censure of Annan over his son’s involvement with Cotecna, a company contracted to inspect food deliveries. Kojo Annan had lied to his father in declaring that he had severed his relationship with the company, and it was discovered that he had concealed continuing payments from Cotecna.

Volcker’s team found no evidence that the Secretary General had in anyway been involved in the procurement scandal but held that he had not treated these allegations seriously enough. Annan had asked for the advice of his (U.S.-appointed) undersecretary general for management, and of his undersecretary general for legal affairs, who told him that since he had no contact with the procurement process, he did not need to take further action. And, though Volcker countered that he should not have believed his son and authorized a major inquiry, the published report effectively cleared Annan and the UN of the vast majority of the corruption charges leveled by the conservative media. Apart from Annan’s involvement, this was a lesser matter than the ever-growing billions that the critics alleged the UN had squandered.

About Benon Sevan

In the face of allegations of tens of billions floating from the gulf, the sole finding of direct UN corruption was leveled at Benon Sevan, the Cypriot head of the $100 billion program, who declared $147,000 in gifts over four years from an aunt, which the committee decided had come as commission on otherwise legitimate oil trades from a company run by his friends. If true—and the evidence the committee adduced was circumstantial—this was clearly unethical, but not necessarily illegal. They also took Sevan to task for his style of management. Sevan did run the program at arms’ length from the secretariat, but his colleagues, while admitting that he could be stubborn and idiosyncratic, also pointed out that secretariat interference in OFF would have slowed down its work. By insulating it from bureaucratic interference, many believe the Cypriot abetted the program.

Sevan returned to Cyprus in 2005 and has not been in New York since, which does not necessarily imply an admission of guilt. In New York, he faced a politically motivated prosecution in an atmosphere poisoned by media allegations. In January 2007, a U.S. district attorney filed charges against him. He denies guilt and cannot be extradited. Indeed, one suspects that the Volcker team’s report devotes a chapter to him because, in the end, this was the only substantial accusation of serious impropriety against any UN official directly related to the program. For all the time, money, and effort put into the Volcker report, there are several significant omissions that obscure an accurate overall judgment of the Oil for Food program. For example, the inquiry does not look into what happened to the $10 billion in OFF surpluses that were handed to the American occupation authorities for the Development Fund for Iraq, for which no accounting has been provided either to Congress or to the International Advisory and Monitoring Board. It was not in his committee’s mandate, said Volcker, to determine how much money was handed out, much of it in no-bid contracts, to companies close to the White House. Stuart W. Bowen, the

U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction since October 2004, has also been unsuccessfully trying to find out what happened to the $10 billion, which had been augmented by a matching amount from frozen Iraq reserves. Notably, the press that had fulminated against the United Nations has been silent on this matter. Similarly, little attention has been paid to the fact that the Oil for Food program funneled $20 billion of Iraqi oil revenues to the largest reparations scheme since Versailles. Even at current reduced rates, 5 percent of Iraqi oil money will be diverted indefinitely to pay the balance of $30 billion in accepted claims. Kuwait has refused to discuss dropping these reparation demands. These figures clearly overshadow Sevan’s alleged $147,000 in payoffs—both in quantity and their effect—but have not had one-hundredth of the media coverage. The Security Council voted for both handovers of cash, which perhaps makes a much stronger case for political reform of the organization than the Volcker report makes for the long accepted need for managerial reforms.

Neither the United Nations nor any other organization should be allowed to excuse incompetence or corruption by pointing the finger at other organizations and countries. There were serious faults in the OFF program, inherent in the mixture of political controls and motives behind it, and, as Annan himself said, it was far too ambitious a program for the UN to undertake.

But, it is legitimate to contrast the froth and indignation over OFF with the relative silence from the same critics over the missing funds provided to Iraq. What was immediately apparent was that the UN reconstruction effort proved incapable of defending itself against a politically motivated assault on its integrity. Though there is a big constituency for the United Nations within the United States, it is essentially passive: with a few honorable exceptions, no leading figures stood up to defend the organization. Even as Kofi Annan retired, the stains lingered on both him and the organization.

Among the obvious lessons are that the international community should never impose such draconian economic sanctions on a nation, and that such resolutions should, in any case, contain a sunset clause to prevent veto holders maintaining penalties in pursuit of selfish national interests. The biggest lesson, however, is the need for an independent and strong international civil service in the secretariat. This has not been helped by the failure of successive U.S. administrations to pay UN assessments on time and their tacit connivance in slander campaigns. In an interview with Kofi Annan just before he resigned, he put it with typical understatement: “There have been times when it has been tough, particularly when some people on the Hill or the right wing begin attacking the UN and the secretary general, and no one pulls them back even though that’s the same organization that you are going to turn to tomorrow. If you undermine the organization to that extent, your own population may ask you ‘Why are you going to this organization that you’ve discredited so much?’” Why, indeed?

Notes

1. The Volcker reports are available online at www.iic-offp.org.
2. Jeffrey A. Meyer and Mark G. Califrano, Good Intentions Corrupted: The Oil-for-Food Scandal and the Threat to the U.N., introduction by Paul A. Volcker (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006). WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • WINTER 2006/07

The UN and Iraq

As we approach the fourth Anniversary of Little W’s Big Adventure, here is the chapter I wrote on the UN and the Iraq War for
the collection The Iraq War: Causes And Consequences edited by Rick Fawn and Ray Hinnebusch.
Well worth buying, as Fred Halliday of the LSE said:
“This is a treasure-trove of a book. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the policies of the major international and regional states leading up to the war, as well as the immediate consequences, and at the same time relates this analysis to broader issues in international law, foreign policy, and international relations theory. It sets a standard to which all subsequent discussion, in public policy debates and in academic analysis, will have to refer.”-

The UN and the Iraq War

Ian Williams

Depending on the point of the view of the observer, the United Nations is a total failure either because it failed to support the US invasion of Iraq – or because it failed to prevent it. Certainly, ideologically motivated commentators in the United States cited the failure of the U.N. to endorse the attack on Iraq as evidence of the organization’s uselessness, and in the aftermath of the invasion neo-con Richard Perle exulted that “the U.N. was dead – Thank God!” However, a more nuanced view of the organization, would be that its failure to support the invasion maintained at least the principles of international law, and that the US return to the organization to assist in the aftermath was recognition, albeit grudging, of what Kofi Annan has called the “unique legitimacy” that only the organization can provide.

The Pre-war Struggle in the Security Council

During 2002 it became increasingly clear that the US was bent on war against Iraq, the only question being whether it would act unilaterally or take a multilateral route through the United Nations. The advice of Bush senior, Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were the compelling factors behind the President’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly in 2002. Set in the context of decades of perennial American conservative abuse of the UN institution, the President’s speech was a relatively skillful attempt to woo the United Nations and its member states to join in his attempt to deal with Saddam Hussein. Invoking the ineffectuality of the League of Nations and its consequent fate, he pointed out that the UN was supposed to be different. Praising the organization for its part in liberating Kuwait, he catalogued Iraqi defiance of the U.N., which was at the time undeniable: he referred to Iraqi breaches of resolutions on weapons inspectors, refusal to hand over prisoners, and Saddam’s continuing repression of his own people.
Giving notice of the administration’s impending demands on the U.N. Bush declared, “Our partnership of nations can meet the test before us by making clear what we now expect of the Iraqi regime.” He demanded that Iraq abide by all outstanding resolutions. However, without being irremediably offensive, the speech gave warning that Washington would only stay on the UN highway as long it went swiftly and smoothly in the direction the President wanted. “If Iraq’s regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively, to hold Iraq to account. We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions, but the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced, the just demands of peace and security will be met, or action will be unavoidable, and a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.”
Iraqi intransigence over admitting inspectors had also left the regime with few friends in the UN, while making the strictly legal case against it incontrovertible.
However, when the American draft resolution on Iraq finally arrived at the Security Council, it included provisions that had no chance of being accepted by other Council members, but which were there to please the hawks in the Pentagon and around Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. The draft, which was originally only shared with the five permanent members of the Security Council, recalled the original resolutions authorizing the use of force by members, and found Iraq “in material breach” of the ceasefire resolutions. It demanded entry for UN weapons inspectors and mandated armed U.N. security forces to be deployed to protect them; it also would allow the five permanent members of the Security Council the right to recommend sites to be inspected, individuals to be questioned, and request permission to have their representatives join the inspections. Of course, only two of the five were likely to exercise such rights, or provide forces.
The inspectors would have the right to declare no-fly/no-drive zones, exclusion zones, and/or ground and air transit corridors. Iraq would have to provide the Security Council, before inspections, but within 30 days from the date of the resolution, “a complete list of its programs to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles as well as all other chemical, biological and nuclear weapons production or material.”
Iraq would have to provide a list of personnel involved in the programmes, whom the Inspectors would have the right to interview in or outside Iraq. Any false statements or omissions in the list of programmes or personnel submitted by Iraq and or its failure “at any time to comply and cooperate fully in accordance with the provisions laid out in this resolution, shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq’s obligations, and that such breach authorizes member states to use all necessary means to restore international peace and security in the area.”
Seeing the writing on the wall, the Iraqis agreed to talk to Hans Blix of UNMOVIC and Mohamed El-Baradei of the IAEA and following their discussions seemingly announced that the inspections could resume, but the letters they sent giving their version of what had been agreed was so hedged around with qualifications that it bolstered the American case for war.
Even when it was cleared up, Blix and ElBaradei then refused to send in inspectors until the American draft resolution was dealt with, since they did not want to send staff into a war zone. The draft was frozen, not least because the only version ten elected members of the Council had seen was in the newspapers, which did not dispose them favorably to the process. In any case, neither they, nor the inspectors liked what they had read of it.
A principal issue in negotiation over the draft was whether member states, i.e. the US and Britain, could act on their own authority against Iraq if they deemed it in non-compliance. US secretary of state Powell pledged an additional meeting of the Council before the US acted on the trigger clauses in the draft resolution, but that was not enough for most members, since it would still give Washington a free hand to determine when to mete out the threatened “severe consequences” and what form they would take.
The steady stream of belligerent leaks from the Pentagon civilians did not help since they brought the hidden agenda–war at any cost–out in the open. Ambassador Sergei Lavrov for Russia articulated the suspicions during the debate. “If we’re talking, not about the deployment of inspectors, but about an attempt to use the Security Council to create a legal basis for the use of force, or even for a regime change of a U.N. member state, and this goal has been constantly alluded to by several officials publicly, then we see no way how the Security Council could give its consent to that.”
Even, Powell, the most urbane member of the administration, did not reassure others when he said that “any resolution that emerges from this will be a resolution that preserves the authority and the right of the president of the United States to act in self-defense … in concert with the international community or with like-minded nations rather than through the U.N. should it not wish to act.”
When the resolution was finally brought back to the permanent five on Monday 21st October, there were still not enough concessions to win over the doubters. It still included the key language that members feared would give the White House the excuses it wanted: seven days for the Iraqis to comply, a declaration that Baghdad was already in “material breach” of UN resolutions and a warning of consequences.
While the hawks dictated the initial American positions, the White House in the end opted to go with the more diplomatically feasible route of UNMOVIC and IAEA inspections backed by a strong resolution. Bush and Cheney’s meetings with Blix and El-Baradei were in part a reassuring signal to the waverers on the Security Council that after the President’s initial diplomatically disastrous fit of pique when Iraq had first accepted inspections, the White House was now backing them.
Based on previous experience of Iraqi intransigence, the other members of the Security Council almost all conceded that when the inspectors went into Iraq they should be backed by the threat of force and the implication was that if Baghdad resisted, then the Council would back military action. In private the Russians, Chinese and French all admitted that this was Iraq’s last chance, not so much because they wanted it that way, but because they saw no percentage in resisting Washington to cover for Iraqi irrationality.
In the end most members were also prepared to accommodate US whims, even fairly lethal ones, to preserve the appearance of legality, since they tacitly bought into the administration argument of the irrelevance of the UN if it failed to enforce its resolutions. If the alternative was the world’s most important nation ripping up the UN Charter, it was best to go along with it and try to keep what Blair called a hand on the steering wheel. As it was to turn out, it was a runaway train, with no steering wheel, and little in the way of the brakes.
With the final unanimous acceptance of UN SCR 1441 on 8 November, just after the US elections, the US had certainly triumphed in its major point. Despite the dubiety of every other nation except Israel, Iraq was now elevated to the top of the global security agenda. From the positive side, the US had now made its plans for an invasion of Iraq legally and diplomatically contingent on the regime’s non-cooperation with the inspectors, or at least on their discovery of undeclared weapons of mass destruction. The much amended resolution seemed to offer Iraq a genuine opportunity to avoid war by cooperation with UNMOVIC and the IAEA.
It also avoided giving the US the automatic right to attack that the hawks had originally insisted on, and Blix had successfully secured the removal of the provisions allowing the Permanent Five members to foist staff onto the inspection teams. However, he had been less successful with his argument that the 30 days for “full and frank” disclosure by the Iraqis was not enough.
The US had made assumptions in depth that their casus belli was on its way. They assumed that Iraq would not cooperate, then that it either would not deliver the disclosure in time, or if it did that it would provably lie in it. Fanned to fever heat by Washington leaks, the next few months were to see a succession of alleged make or break dates. Firstly would Iraq accept the resolution, and secondly would Baghdad deliver the “Full and Frank Disclosure” demanded?
In the end the Iraq regime belatedly offered unprecedented cooperation to the UN inspectors who began their rounds in Baghdad. Frustrated, the Washington hawks tried to talk up Iraqi potshots at US planes patrolling the no-fly zone into a material breach of the resolution meriting the “serious consequences,” that they so seriously want to mete out. However, the rest of the world, from K