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