Beyond Munich: The UN Security Council Helps Disarm a Prospective Further Victim of U.S. Aggression

magine that when Hitler was threatening to invade Poland, after having swallowed Czechoslovakia-with the help of the Western European powers' appeasement of Hitler at Munich in September 1938-the League of Nations imposed an arms embargo on Poland, making it more difficult for the imminent victim to defend itself, and at the same time suggested that Poland was the villainous party. That didn't happen back in 1939, but in a regression from that notorious era of appeasement something quite analogous is happening now.

Here is the United States, still fighting a brutal war of conquest in Iraq, which it is now doing with UN Security Council approval, with open plans and threats to attack Iran and engage in "regime change," gathering aircraft carriers off the coast of Iran, already engaging in subversive and probing attacks on the prospective target, and the UN Security Council, instead of warning and threatening the aggressor warns, threatens and imposes sanctions on the prospective victim!

The way it works is that the United States stirs up a big fuss, proclaiming a serious threat to its own national security, and expressing its deep concern over another state's flouting of Security Council resolutions or dragging its feet on some point of order such as weapons inspections-we know how devoted the United States and its Israeli client are to the rule of law!

In the Iraq case, this noise was echoed and amplified in the media, often splashed across headlines and drummed up in editorial commentary. In turn, elite opinion in the United States and Britain coalesced around the beliefs (a) that a WMD-related crisis really existed in Baghdad and (b) that it required the Security Council's special attention. Straight through March 19-20 2003, Iraq, the prospective target of a full-scale attack, decried the absurdity of this U.S.-U.K. noise, and filed regular communiqués with the Security Council and Secretary-General documenting the U.S.-U.K. aerial strikes on its territory,[1] including the "spikes of activity" period from September 2002 onward.[2] The vast majority of the world's states and peoples also rejected the war propaganda-including the largely voiceless U.S. public, where in the weeks before the war, two-thirds of non-elite opinion stood firmly behind multilateral approaches to defuse the crisis, foremost of which was permitting the UN weapons inspections to take their course.[3] But then, as now, pretty much the entire world recognized the U.S.-U.K. hijacking of the Security Council, and its strategic misdirection away from a defense of the actual target of the threats (Iraq) onto the execution of the policy of the states making those threats while playing the role of Iraq's potential victims (the U.S. and U.K.).

So the aggression planning proceeded then and does now with the cooperation of the UN and international community. In the Iraq case, the Security Council allowed itself to be bamboozled into restarting the weapons-inspection process, accepting this as the urgent matter, rather than the war-mobilization and threat of aggression by the United States and its British ally. Although the Security Council did not vote approval of the U.S.-British attack, it helped set it up by inflating the Iraq threat and failing to confront the real threat posed by the United States and Britain. Then, within two months after "shock and awe," the Security Council voted to give the aggressor the right to stay in Iraq and manage its affairs, thereby approving a gross violation of the UN Charter after the fact.

Now, four years later, the Security Council has outdone itself. Not only has it failed to condemn the U.S. and Israeli threat to attack Iran-the threat itself a violation of the UN Charter,[4] and one made ever-more real by the U.S. invasions of neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq during this decade alone, now followed by a huge U.S. naval buildup near Iran's coast to levels not seen since the U.S. launched its war on Iraq four years ago in what the New York Times just called a "calculated show of force."[5] But even worse, the Council has aided and abetted these potential aggressors by adopting three resolutions in the past eight months under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, each of which affirms that Iran's nuclear program is a threat to international peace and security, and reserves for the Council the right to take "further appropriate measures" should Iran fail to comply-that is, should Iran not cave-in to U.S. demands on exactly the terms demanded.[6]

Since July 31, the Council has demanded that Iran "suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development"[7]-despite the fact that Iran's right to engage in these activities is guaranteed under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.[8] Since December 23, it has identified the existence of Iran's nuclear program with so-called "proliferation sensitive nuclear activities"[9]-despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency has never shown Iran's program to be engaged in any kind of activities other than peaceful ones. Indeed, in the December 23 resolution, the Council used the phrase "proliferation sensitive nuclear activities" no fewer than eight different times to describe Iran's nuclear program, the clear-and perfectly false-allegation being that for Iran to do research on and develop its indigenous nuclear fuel capabilities places Iran in violation of its NPT commitments.

But perhaps most egregious of all, the March 24 resolution prohibits Iran from selling "any arms or related material" to other states or individuals (par. 5), and calls upon all states "to exercise vigilance and restraint" in the sale or transfer of a whole list of weapons systems to Iran, "in order to prevent a destabilizing accumulation of arms…" (par. 6).[10] As the editorial voice of The Hindu immediately recognized, the first term is critical "not so much because the Islamic Republic is a major vendor of weapons even to Hamas or Hizbollah but because it gives the U.S. an excuse to intimidate or interdict all Iranian merchant shipping under the guise of 'enforcement'."[11] Likewise with the second term, which, if history is any guide, Washington will interpret as a strict prohibition on weapons sales to Iran, thus depriving the potential victim, faced with attack by one or more nuclear powers, of the right to obtain even non-nuclear means of self defense. This of course has been a standard U.S. tactic over many years, even against puny victims-Guatemala in 1954 and Nicaragua in the 1980s, among other cases. But now the United States has succeeded in getting the Security Council to help it impede the self-defense of yet another target of aggression. In this truly Kafkaesque case, the state targeted for attack (Iran) has been declared a threat to the peace by the Security Council, at the behest of a serial aggressor openly mobilizing its forces to attack the "threat."[12]

It should be recognized that the treatment of Iran's nuclear program, and the Security Council's cooperation in this treatment, is the ultimate application of a global double standard, enforced by an aggressive superpower now able to get away with both hypocrisy and murder. Only the United States and its allies may possess nuclear weapons. They alone may threaten to use nukes. They alone may improve their nukes and delivery systems. Only client states such as Israel may remain outside the NPT indefinitely and without penalty. The United States may ignore its NPT obligation to work toward nuclear disarmament. It may even renege on its promise never to use nukes against nuke-free states that joined the NPT. But no matter. By sheer fiat-power, no other state may acquire nukes without U.S. consent. Nor as the case of Iran shows may a state engage in its "inalienable right" to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes unless and until the United States approves.

We are in the midst of a crisis within the post-war international system, as a serial aggressor is now able to mobilize the Security Council, tasked with the maintenance of international peace and security, to declare the state that it threatens with war a menace to the peace and to help the aggressor disarm its target. This carries us beyond Munich.

Who Is The Greatest Rogue Of All

Most people believe that their own country is virtuous and that only others misbehave enough to qualify as international outlaws. But the United States has elevated this popular sentiment to the level of national policy, by designating certain countries, of its own choosing, as "rogue states."

The dictionary defines "rogue" as "a fierce and dangerous animal, like an elephant, that separates itself from its herd." By this standard, the United States, not the piddling tyrannies named by the State Department, is the world's number one rogue.

Since it obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945-cities, not military targets-the United States has bombed eighteen countries, and invaded still others, with no declaration of war nor any possibility of retaliation, at least until September 11, 2001.

And in the case of Afghanistan, the United States launched a unilateral war of revenge against a brutal regime of its own creation, although none of the 19 hijackers were Afghan and none of the thousands of "detainees" held in the United States and abroad have been charged with any participation in the crime. Furthermore, the alleged "mastermind," still at large, might well have been turned over to the United States through negotiations-which President Bush rejected outright from the start. PS: in case you haven't noticed, we don't negotiatee-except on our terms.

Of course all this is defended on the ground that we are "so good" (as the President has said) and always act in the world's interest. Can we explain the universally opposed embargo against Cuba as a global service? Did we support the murderous regime of Suharto in Indonesia for 32 years out of altruism-or because U.S. mining, oil and timber interests loved the "favorable climate of investment" the dictator provided for them?

In other cases too U.S. actions reflect the power of corporate interests. For example, the United States refused to participate in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development-sponsored talks in Paris in May 2001, on ways to crack down on off-shore and other tax and money laundering havens. For any other nation, this would now be highly embarrassing in the age of Enron, but such a thought would never even occur to U.S. policymakers.

Or consider President Bush's declaration in March 2001 that the Kyoto Protocol for controlling global warming was "dead," and his refusal to participate in negotiations in Marrakech (Morocco) to revise it-all because it might harm the U.S. economy. So if the world thinks controlling global warming is more important than short-term negative economic effects, Bush separates himself from the global consensus based on his reading of U.S. interests alone-and his stance coincides with that of the oil and automobile industries, not with the real interests of the American people.

Several U.S. unilateral positions have been geared to the demands of the military-industrial complex, and other parties advocating an aggressive foreign policy. Last December the United States withdrew from the 1972 Anti ballistic Missile Treaty, gutting this landmark arms control accord to the dismay of virtually every country in the world.

The United States has not ratified the Comprehensive (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty signed by 164 nations, and under Bush opposes it. This country rejects the Land Mine Treaty, concluded in Ottawa in December 1997 and signed by 122 countries; the Pentagon finds land mines useful, outweighing the "collateral damage" they entail for thousands of civilians every year.

In February 2001 we refused to join 123 nations to ban the use and production of anti-personnel bombs and mines; flexible killing power for the Pentagon must be preserved, regardless of human cost. This country was also the only nation to oppose the UN Agreement to Curb the International Flow of Illicit Small Arms in July 2001.

The United States rejects an International Criminal Court because our personnel might become subject to its jurisdiction. In 1986, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that the United States was in violation of international law by sponsoring and supporting a Contra army to attack Nicaragua. The United States simply refused to accept the Court's jurisdiction, although it hastens to do so when the Court decides in its favor.

The United Nations is treated the same way: when the United States can get the Security Council to do what it wants, like bomb Iraq in 1991, it goes that route; when it sees it can't get UN backing, as in its invasion of Panama in 1989, it simply disregards the UN or uses its veto. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated in 1998, "the United States acts multilaterally when it can, unilaterally when it must."

In the case of Afghanistan in 2001, the Bush administration couldn't be bothered with the UN or any other international body to deal with what it declared to be a "crime against humanity": it simply bombed. As for the treatment of prisoners shipped to Guantanamo chained, blindfolded, and classified as "unlawful combatants," South African jurist Richard Goldstone points out that this is "not a term recognized by international law." If they are prisoners, they are entitled to POW treatment; if simply criminals, "under the US Constitution. they've got even better protection."

But for U.S. leaders, international law is for others, not ourselves. Whether an action involves waging war, with the devastation and death that "precision bombing" brings to a chosen country, or expanding environmental controls and reducing global warming, the United States is proclaiming, more loudly than ever, that it will "act unilaterally" whatever the cost to others-and sooner or later to its own people.

Aswin Kumar