Fiona Brewer
Laura Mackey
Simon McGarr
Fergal Crehan
Gary Malone
Mattie Lennon
Sarah Byam
Anita Kiely
Fred Roe
Keisha Poiro
Emma Pearson
Fluffy Dutton
Donal O'Driscoll

The above is the concluding passage of an article, quite caustic in tone, written in response to what was then Kofi Annan's recent success at averting an air strike on Iraq ­ the bombers were recalled in mid-flight - by forging an agreement with Saddam Hussein to comply with UN regulations on weapons inspections. The article describes the UN as 'a toothless bureaucracy that commands no army, wields no power and begs for revenue' and charges that 'the United Nations Secretary-General insinuated himself into the showdown' between Iraq and the US.

Sanctions against Saddam's regime have been responsible for the death of approximately 500,000 children within Iraq since they began ten years ago. When Madeline Albright was quizzed about this in 1998, she responded:

Leaving aside the fact that Krauthammer's tunnel-visioned bellicosity now looks very dated in a world that has largely wised up to the criminal nature of the sanctions against Iraq, it is worth examining the article to gain some insight into  its sheer contempt for international law.

Article 39 of the UN Charter, to which the US is a signatory, states that 'The sole exception to this is where a nation may act unilaterally in self-defense (article 51). Article 40 states that '[i]n order to prevent an aggravation of the situation, the Security Council may, before making the recommendations or deciding upon the measures provided for in Article 39, call upon the parties concerned to comply with such provisional measures as it deems necessary or desirable.'

It could scarcely be clearer, then: if one nation perceives itself to be under threat from another, it may approach the Security Council who will then assess the existence or nature of the threat and sanction appropriate measures. No nation, unless attacked, may act unilaterally with military force. This is an important part of international law for an obvious and simple reason: it forbids states from attacking each other when they feel like it. Kofi Annan's diplomatic mission to Iraq was thus an attempt to make both sides in the dispute comply with international law. With this in mind, Krauthammer's view that Annan was some kind of meddler who 'insinuated' himself (as though it were none of his business) into the stand-off makes no sense. As Secretary-General of the UN it is explicitly Annan's business to uphold international law: in this case, by ensuring that (i) Iraq complied with UN regulations and (ii) that the US did not violate international law by bombing Iraq before the options outlined in articles 39 and 40 have been exhausted. (As though the US were under military threat from Saddam Hussein to begin with.)

Krauthammer asks:

Why must American foreign policy be contracted out? Why should the world's sole superpower, the one that bears all the risks and costs, bend a knee to parties that bear none of the costs, none of the risks, and have contrary interests?

 The answer, obvious after about three seconds' reflection on the matter, is this: because the alternative to a world in which nations have not agreed upon moral principles of conduct between each other is a Hobbesian one where states are permitted to brutalise each other when they feel like it, and the rule of force, not law, governs. The party with the greatest force at its disposal, therefore, may call the shots. It would be a world in which moral considerations would be, as Nietzsche put it, a conspiracy of the sheep to convince the wolf that it is wicked to be strong. Needless to say, the need for the rule of international law applies a fortiori to 'the world's sole superpower'. But this does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Krauthammer.

I use Krauthammer's article as an example of a very worrying and aggressive hubris exhibited by supporters of, and key agents in, the world's sole remaining superpower. Echoing Henry Kissinger's averration that Æ[p]olitics in our age is not a question of emotions, it is the facts of power'[1], Secretary of State George Schultz stated in the year of the Nicaraguan invasion that '[n]egotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table', and he dismissed as 'utopian' such conflict-resolution procedures as 'outside mediation, the United Nations, and the World Court'[2]. George Bush has already stated that 'I will never apologise for the United States of America ­ I don't care what the facts are'[3]. And George W. Bush has stated that he 'will never place US troops under UN command'[4]. The hypocrisy was recently summarised in The Economist:

America lauds the principles behind the proposed world criminal court, but witholds its support unless it can be sure that none of its citizens will ever appear before it. It upholds the Chemical Weapons Convention ­ so long as the President, says Congress, can stop an inspection on American soil, or prevent an American sample being analysed in another country. One of the reasons that the United States would not ratify the Comprehensive Test-Ban treaty last year was some senators' horror at the prospect of foreign inspectors poking around in America's nuclear arsenal.[5]

In short, the US endorses principles to which it then insists upon becoming an exception.

Throughout the Cold War, the US compiled an impressive track record of support for, and participation in, state terrorism. Examples which come to mind include the bombing of Cambodia 'back to the stone age'; military aid to Indonesia for the invasion of East Timor which had killed some 200,000 people (one third of the population) by 1978; the 1986 invasion of Nicaragua; decades of military and diplomatic support for Israel in its efforts to crush Palestinian nationalism and threaten its Arab neighbours; and so on. To crown these achievements, the US is the only nation to have attacked another country using nuclear weapons. Now that the US is no longer even counterbalanced by a rival superpower, it is not entirely irrational of smaller nations to fear it.

The week before Krauthammer's piece appeared, another Time article considered the options for dealing with the Saddam regime. The title was 'Should he just be Killed?'[6]. After advancing the case for the proposition by describing an arsenal of deadly weaponry at Iraq's disposal that would not distinguish it from many other US client states, the author good-naturedly withdraws from the thought of assassination, concluding that 'the biggest obstacles to killing Saddam aren't moral or legal but practical. It's not smart for the US, which has a huge stake in world order, to be seen as resorting to a little terror of its own.' No doubt the East Timorese and others can attest to America's bashfulness about participating in state terrorism.

An interesting thought experiment suggests itself. Applying the same rationale, one could just as easily write the same article about Israel's new prime minister. Ariel Sharon, like Saddam, was responsible for the invasion a smaller, weaker country (Lebanon in 1982). Like Saddam, he was responsible for brutal atrocities during that invasion (the Sabra-Shatilla massacres, according to Israeli journalists Zeev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari involved 'the wholesale slaughter of families', infants being trampled to death, live grenades being hung around victim's necks, and rape[7]). And like Saddam, he is a major threat to the stability of the region, only more so, given that Israel is the regional superpower (thanks to the US arms supply) while Iraq's military power has been reduced to approximately what it was during the British mandate there. Could one imagine a western news magazine mooting an assassination attempt on an Israeli prime minister and it passing without comment?

The hypocrisy of the situation deserves some attention. Israel, illegally and in defiance of annual UN demands that it withdraw, occupied south Lebanon for twenty-two years. The US did not muster any international or regional force to expel it. Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, by contrast, lasted barely seven months. Israel has illegally occupied the West Bank, Golan Heights and Gaza Strip for thirty-four years: again, there are no US calls for withdrawal. Israel, a state that has historically exhibited far greater bellicosity towards its neighbours than Iraq, also possesses an arsenal of nuclear and chemical and biological weapons. Speaking of an an installation outside Tel Aviv housing the latter type of weaponry, one Israeli biologist has claimed that 'there is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapon ' which is not manufactured at the institute'[8]. In short, a state that is not occupying any territory is made subject to sanctions and weapons inspections and destruction, whilst a nearby state that is illegally occupying territory is not made subject to sanctions, and its weapons of mass destruction go uninspected, even unmentioned. Is it any wonder that Saddam's televised exhortations to defy the Americans is so often paired with calls to resist the Zionists? This ploy works because the hypocrisy is so much more visible in the Arab world than in the west.

Robin Cook, among others, has explained the most recent attack on Baghdad as an attempt to preserve the integrity of the northern and southern no-fly zones, the former to protect the Kurds, the latter to protect the Shiite majority in these respective regions. Yet in February 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, the allies exhibited a rather different approach to protecting these two parties. Shortly after the Iraqi retreat from Kuwait, rebellions broke out in both regions. Iraqi rebels asked the US for access to captured Iraqi equipment: the US refused, and the resulting massacres were foreordained.

The attack has also been justified as necessary to protect the lives of Allied pilots from the threat of increasingly sophisticated Iraqi artillery and radar tracking systems. Yet how many westerners who listened to this justification could remember the May 1987 Iraqi missile strike against the USS Stark which killed thirty-seven of its crew? Probably very few, given that Iraq was fighting Iran at the time, and thus its actions had considerable US military support. If such an attack were to happen today, when Saddam has been the enemy du jour for years, there would be no forgetting the consequences.

I heard one US response to the most recent attack on Baghdad that was positively Orwellian. Quizzed by a Channel 4 reporter about the general regional attitude to the attack, former defense secretary under the Reagan administration Richard Perle explained that although there doesn't seem to be support among the Arab states, it may be there in the form of silence, or even criticism. Comment would be superfluous.

by Gary J. Malone
5/3/ 2001.