Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (26 page)

Boutros Boutros-Ghali came to the UN with impeccable establishment credentials: he had accompanied Sadat to Jerusalem and was one of the architects of the Camp David Accords. His differences with the United States emerged soon after the Gulf War, which the United States saw as a model for future UN operations: “the UN proposes, on Washington’s initiative, and the US disposes.” Boutros-Ghali was of the view that the end of the Cold War would free the UN from the constraint of East-West rivalries. In a number of documents, he presented proposals for “preventive diplomacy,” including setting up “rapid deployment units which would allow the UN to nip potential conflicts in the bud, and even levy taxes to finance its operations.” As the cost of UN peacekeeping operations increased fourfold from 1992 to 1996 (from $600 million to $2.6 billion), and Washington withheld its dues (amounting to $2.9 billion), Boutros-Ghali denounced the “dishonesty” of those “who made the UN ineffective by depriving it of essential funds while refusing to pay the funds due to it on the pretext that it was ineffective.” It was when Boutros-Ghali began to assert his independence in practice that Washington’s patience ran out. He criticized Washington’s preoccupation with Bosnia—“a war of the rich”—and its neglect of Somalia, where “one third of the population was likely to die of hunger,” and Rwanda, where he accused the United States of “standing idly by” and “only getting
involved when the massacres had already decimated the population.” Many believe Washington’s anger peaked in April 1996 when Boutros-Ghali “insisted on publishing the findings of the UN inquiry implicating Israel in the killing of some hundred civilians who had taken refuge in a United Nations camp in Kanaa in south Lebanon.” In the end, Washington successfully replaced Boutros-Ghali with another African, Kofi Annan, the UN’s undersecretary-general for peacekeeping during the Rwanda genocide, who, not surprisingly, turned out to be much more attuned to Washington’s bidding. Kofi Annan’s rise came in the wake of two major crisis faced by the UN, the first in the former Yugoslavia, the second in Rwanda. Whereas Boutros-Ghali had been unwilling to follow the NATO command and approve American demands for aerial bombing of the Serbs on a scale more than symbolic, Kofi Annan readily obliged when he stood in for Boutros-Ghali. In Richard Holbrooke’s words, he then “became Secretary General in waiting.” But it was Rwanda that demonstrated that Annan’s willingness to serve the United States apparently knew no bounds: as Alexander Cockburn noted, “in deference to the American desire to keep Sarajevo in the limelight, he suppressed the warning of the Canadian General Romeo Dallaire that appalling massacres were about to start in Rwanda.”

Mary Robinson also incurred the wrath of the United States for her endorsement of the results of the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism—which debated Israel’s racist treatment of Palestinians and slavery as a “crime against humanity”—leading both the United States and Israel to walk out. Robert Watson infuriated the oil lobby when an independent scientific panel he chaired reached a consensus stating that human activity is a factor in climate change; he also led efforts to establish international norms on fossil fuel usage. The significance of oil interests in
shaping U.S. policy was exposed in a leaked memo from Exxon-Mobil that asked the White House: “Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the U.S.?” As director-general of the OPCW, Jose Mauricio Bustani increased the number of signatories to the international convention banning chemical weapons from 87 to 145 in his first five years in office.
The Guardian
credited Bustani with achieving “the fastest growth rate of any multilateral body in recent times” and lauded him for having “done more in the past five years to promote world peace than anyone else on earth.” Bustani even received a congratulatory note from U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell but soon ran into problems with the U.S. government. The reason was that he insisted on the independence of his office, resisting American demands that they decide the nationality of OPCW inspectors assigned to American facilities and opposing U.S. legislation that gave the president powers to block unannounced inspection of American facilities and banned OPCW inspectors from removing chemical samples from inspection sites. His biggest crime, though, was to try to persuade Iraq to sign on to the chemical-weapons convention, with the consequence that if OPCW inspectors were let into Iraqi facilities, Washington would be deprived of a quasi-legal justification for military action against Iraq. The United States first asked the Brazilian government to recall Bustani, but it refused on the grounds that he had been elected and not appointed; it then asked Bustani to resign, which he refused to do; it finally pressured the executive council of the OPCW to sack him, which it did. Bustani told the kangaroo court set up for the purpose:

By dismissing me, an international precedent will have been established whereby any duly elected head of any international organization would at any point during his or her tenure remain vulnerable to the whims of one or a few major contributors. They would be in a position to remove any Director-General, or Secretary-General, from office at any point in time.

More than the Cold War, it is the period after it that has led to a breakdown in international rules governing the use of force. Recall that the Security Council never authorized the use of force against Yugoslavia in the case of Kosovo. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force except for self-defense, unless approved by the Security Council. The Kosovo War was led by NATO, which never really claimed defense as its rationale. When Robin Cook, the British foreign secretary, told Madeleine Albright that he had “problems with our lawyers” over using force against Yugoslavia without Security Council approval, Albright responded, “Get new lawyers!”

Asked whether the United States was explicitly seeking Security Council approval to attack Iraq in 2003, Secretary Powell cited Kosovo as precedent for acting without such authority. But when discussing the consequences for Iraq of a possible breach of resolution 1441, Powell had no hesitation in claiming that the Security Council “can decide whether or not action is required,” but the United States will “reserve our option of acting” and will “not necessarily be bound by what the Council might decide at that point.” In other words, Powell was arguing that the council’s decisions are binding on Iraq but not on the United States.

Its cavalier attitude to a rule of law in the international arena is evident in the ease with which the United States has felt free to withdraw from treaties, considered far more binding than resolutions. Ramsey Clark is perhaps the harshest critic of American resistance to an international rule of law. In a letter he sent to all
members of the UN Security Council on September 20, 2002, Clark listed the treaties renounced by American administrations since the end of the Cold War:

The U.S. has renounced treaties controlling nuclear weapons and their proliferation, voted against the protocol enabling enforcement of the Biological Weapons Convention, rejected the treaty banning land mines, endeavored to prevent its creation and since to cripple the International Criminal Court, and frustrated the Convention on the Child and the prohibition against using children in war. The U.S. has opposed virtually every other international effort to control and limit war, protect the environment, reduce poverty and protect health.

The sad fact is that the emergence of the United States as the world’s only superpower has gone hand in hand with its demand to be exempt from any international rule of law. At the same time, the United States has not hesitated to call for a selective application of the rule of law, seeking to use the law as an instrument to hold
others
accountable. This much is clear if we contrast the U.S. opposition to the International Criminal Court to its attitude toward the establishment of international tribunals in select cases.

The International Criminal Court was set up to try individuals for the world’s most heinous atrocities: genocide, war crimes, and systematic human-rights abuses. American concerns that those with vindictive intentions might turn this into an opportunity to take American soldiers or civilians to court were registered and incorporated into the treaty when it was written. The ICC is thus to be a court of the last instance. It can step in only when countries are “unable or unwilling” to prosecute mass murderers or perpetrators
of other systematic abuses. Nonetheless, Washington asked the Security Council to approve a complete and indefinite exemption for U.S. nationals from the court’s jurisdiction and even threatened to veto the renewal of UN peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and elsewhere if it did not get its way. After two weeks of bitter negotiations and opposition by the European Union and others, a compromise was reached: the council agreed to grant an exemption to all individuals from countries that had not ratified the treaty—but for one year only.

Outraged by the move, Canada, one of the prime movers behind the court, denounced this arm-twisting as itself illegal. Unable to keep the ICC from becoming reality, the Bush administration devised a new strategy: to sign bilateral agreements whereby both signatories pledge not to hand over to the ICC nationals accused of crimes against humanity. On May 6, 2003, the Sierra Leone parliament became the first to ratify such an agreement. An Amnesty International statement condemning this “impunity deal” stated: “This is a completely unacceptable decision especially at a time when [Sierra Leone] is starting the process of dealing with mass human rights abuses that have taken place in the recent past.” But by mid-June 2003, thirty-seven countries had signed such agreements. Except for India, Israel, Egypt, and the Philippines, the rest are small, poor countries, most heavily dependent on U.S. aid.

Its dogged opposition to the ICC not withstanding, the United States has been eager to establish international tribunals in limited contexts, such as Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia. The Cambodian case illuminates particularly well the United States’ self-interested policy. When the war in Indochina ended, America did not have a single and consistent approach to dealing with war crimes in the region. Whereas no international tribunal was mandated
to try U.S. war crimes in Vietnam or Laos, the United States supported the call for an international tribunal to try Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes. When it came to drafting the terms of the tribunal, Washington demanded that the mandate of the court be restricted to the period from 1975 to 1979. Had the years before or after been included, the United States would have run the risk of itself being charged with war crimes. Any scrutiny of the pre-1975 period would have directed the court’s attention to the years of U.S. carpet bombing in Indochina, just as an investigation of the post-1979 period would have brought to light the political cover the United States provided the Khmer Rouge, both at the UN and internationally, against the Vietnamese, who invaded Cambodia in 1978.

Its reluctance to be held accountable internationally does not distinguish the Bush administration from other great powers, historically. What does distinguish it is the reckless determination to dispense with any project that would integrate others—whether rivals, dissidents, junior partners, or dependents—in a rule-based international order. Anatol Lieven, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, reminds us that the plan for “unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority” has been “consistently advocated and worked on by the group of intellectuals close to Dick Cheney and Richard Perle since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.” Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, considered the in-house dove in the Bush administration, shares this basic goal with the rest of the security establishment. As early as 1992, when he was chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell declared that the United States requires sufficient power “to deter any challenger of ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage.” The famous strategy document drawn up by Paul Wolfowitz in the last year of the senior Bush administration incorporated this very goal. His
son proclaimed it as official policy in his West Point speech of June 2002: the guiding purpose of U.S. post-Cold War strategy should be to prevent the emergence of any “peer competitor” anywhere in the world. What distinguishes Powell from the hawks in the administration is not this basic goal but their commitment to preemptive war, now official American doctrine. Americans need to be aware of the logic of preemptive war. It is not accidental that most genocides have been carried out in times of war. The population is told: if you do not kill, you will be killed. You kill because you fear they may do to you what you are about to do to them. Preemptive war is the logic for genocide.

The current Bush administration is the ideological descendant of the Reagan administration. Prominent “bleeders” in the Reagan administration who shaped the ideological character of the Afghan War, like Richard Perle, are powerful influences in the shaping of defense policy in the current administration. The rhetoric about democratizing the Arab world, including the conviction that democracy must spread through American power, echoes Reagan, who heralded the contras and the mujahideen as “founding fathers” of democracy in Nicaragua and Afghanistan and the counterrevolution as a “democratic revolution.” Just as “democracy” has become an imperial banner waved in the face of Third World nationalist regimes, as in the Reagan years, so has national security become an imperial project simultaneously eroding democracy at home and undercutting nationalist attempts to build a meaningful sovereignty in the era of globalization.

Israeli Power and Local Impunity

No one should be surprised that the United States is indeed considering a “solution” for the Palestinian National Authority in the Occupied Territories similar to that for Iraq: a regime change followed
by a form of trusteeship. The resemblance between U.S. policy in Iraq and Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories has increased markedly since 9/11. As the United States was able to maintain in Iraq the combination of an intermittent air war with sanctions that have been shown to result in mass murder, Israel has effectively choked economic life in the Occupied Territories and reduced its inhabitants to bare-bones levels of poverty through a combination of regular punishment with extended curfews and restricted movement. On February 2, 2002, the
New York Times
reported the publication of a statement in Jerusalem, signed by more than one hundred Israeli reservists, saying they would refuse to continue serving in the West Bank and on the Gaza Strip because Israel’s policies there involved “dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people.” Like the United States in Iraq, Israel publicly refused to make a distinction between civilian and military targets in the Occupied Territories—justifying “our terror” either as a preemptive strike or as a response to “their terror.” In the process, the Iraqi and the Palestinian people have suffered collective punishment, meted out with impunity.