Friday, May 27, 2022

It's the Law! Whether Russia or the US!

 Ian Williams


WRMEA June July 2022

 WHETHER THE UNITED NATIONS can survive this “Special Military Operation” on a member state is a moot point. The invasion of Ukraine is a direct challenge to the whole 1945 world order enshrined in the U.N. Charter. And that is not good news for people like the Palestinians, whose advocates and diplomats have invoked the “unique legitimacy” of the U.N. and its refusal to authorize Israel’s acquisition of territory by force. The closest parallel is the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, where the U.N.’s response was entirely legal if perhaps ill-advised in subcontracting the details to the klutzes in Washington.

No friend of the Palestinians should wield “What about?” to justify Vladimir Putin’s illegal aggression on Ukraine, let alone the illegal and inhumane ways in which he has waged that war. But it is indeed legitimate to raise the questions in Washington, although the purpose should be to hitch Palestinian issues to the Ukrainian bandwagon, not to give Putin a “Get-out-of-The-Hague-Free” card in the Superpower monopoly game.

For half a century, the U.S. veto has vitiated the Palestinian cause at the U.N., so it was almost a coming of age for Moscow when the General Assembly vote on Russia’s veto against the Ukraine Security Council Resolution was as badly supported as previous U.S. vetoes on behalf of Israel.

However, U.S. diplomats—and media— were making no such odious comparisons as they crowed about Putin’s lack of support. Admittedly the reportage usually added (very) small print to the self-congratulations, that General Assembly resolutions are “not legally binding.” Archivists in the State Department could remind them that the reason for their alleged lack of effect is that for 30 years the U.S. has eroded their standing by declaring them as “not legally binding.”

That was, of course, because most such resolutions condemned U.S. vetoes protecting Israel. In the U.S. presentations, somehow the General Assembly resolution partitioning mandatory Palestine and setting up a Jewish state was indeed as binding and unalterable as the Laws of the Medes and Persians. But then, the Uniting for Peace resolutions were legally effective enough to fight the Korean War— until Palestine resurrected the procedure and Washington denigrated it.

Washington is not alone in suffocating in the stink of its own hypocrisy. Russia claims its veto from the U.N. Charter, whose core principle is a ban on “the acquisition of territory by force” accompanying the principle that all sovereign states are equal. Of course, the veto means that some states are more equal than others, but the U.N. Charter did not give Russia a permanent seat on the Security Council. That privilege belonged to the U.S.S.R., which was with Ukraine (and Belarus!), a founding member of the U.N. in 1945. The U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991, after which Moscow usurped the seat. There was no formal vote on it, but the diplomatic identity theft went unchallenged, but not un-noticed, at the time. U.N. diplomats did discuss it but, like abuse within the family, decided that discretion was the best path.

Even so, albeit 30 years on, it is a useful point to make against Putin’s specious legalism of a “special military operation” against a state he claims is not really a country. However, it is not practical to remove Moscow from the Security Council, although Russia’s removal from the Human Rights Council sets an interesting precedent for a challenge to its delegation’s credentials for the General Assembly. 

Secretariat inactivity apart, U.N. agencies of every description have responded to the war with material help and facilitated the rescue of civilians under siege by Russian forces, but U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has ducked the chance to “name and shame” and has instead been the soul of wriggly circumspection. That might have been acceptable if he were keeping his powder dry ready for a big diplomatic push. A U.N. Secretary-General has a role, indeed a duty, to provide a ladder for preposterous politicians like Putin to climb down from the tree in which they have trapped themselves.

Sadly, it took several months to get Guterres to attend to the war in person, without a ladder, and then only after hundreds of former and present U.N. luminaries signed a letter demanding action. When he went to the region, he raised eyebrows—and hackles—by calling on Putin first rather than the obvious victim. The Russians showed their appreciation by rocketing Kyiv within hours of Guterres landing there. Anyone who thinks that was an accident will maintain that the Black Sea flagship Moskva was hit by a stray iceberg. Belatedly Guterres gave the firm U.N. position that “in line with the resolutions passed by the General Assembly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a violation of its territorial integrity and against the Charter of the United Nations.” He added “There is one thing that is true and obvious, and that no arguments can change: We have not Ukrainian troops in the territory of the Russian Federation, but we have Russian

troops in the territory of [Ukraine].”

During the war, Russian troops have breached numerous international conventions with attacks on civilians, in voluntary transfers of population, looted cultural property and so on ad infinitum. Whatever you think of Russian military prowess, it is not a People’s War as Mao or Ho Chi Minh preached, and, as far as winning hearts and minds go, the Russophone Ukrainians in the East, who have borne the brunt of the Special Military Operation, have been vociferously inveighing against their aspirant liberators—in Russian.

One small bright spot was the successful move by Liechtenstein, ironically endorsed by the U.S., to trigger a General Assembly vote whenever a permanent member casts a veto. Almost ironically as he looked around at the ruins Russia had wrought of the U.N. Charter and the post-World War II settlement, Moscow’s representative claimed that “the division of powers between the Assembly and the Council has allowed the United Nations to function effectively for more than 75 years.” This “effectiveness” is indeed news to millions of people from Indochina to the Congo, the Balkans and the Middle East, whose lives have been afflicted by the “scourge of war,” unhindered by the U.N. Charter and the organization it set up to end it forever.

Consistently, as a frequent victim of the veto, the Palestine delegation was a cosponsor of the measure, leading to an Israeli delegate to protest that it was against the rules. But then the Israeli delegate compounded her obtusity, trying to reconcile the good vetoes that Washington used with the bad ones that Russia had wielded. “In some cases, the problem has been the text of the resolution before the Security Council, not the veto itself.”

Indeed, as she implies, the text of a resolution might well call Israeli actions into question and “in the case of a particular resolution in the Security Council that does not promote peace and security, the veto should be cast.”

From now on, supporters of Palestine can and should use every occasion of a General Assembly debate on a U.S. veto to relate American statements about Russian frightfulness in Ukraine with Israeli behavior in Gaza. Bombings of civilians, deaths of children, violation of boundaries, defiance of Geneva conventions, annexation of territories acquired by force: you would almost think that Putin had studied the Israeli blueprint, and as Adolph Hitler famously concluded over the Ottomans’ Armenian massacres, “they got away with it.”

It is a reciprocal learning process as the barbaric Israeli assassination of Al Jazeera’s Shireen Abu Akleh demonstrates. Who knows though, maybe the White House foreign policy team might also learn from the self-serving expediency and manifest ambivalence of Israel and the Gulf states to U.S. resolutions on Russia and let them know they cannot expect automatic diplomatic and military support.

And maybe the U.S. can once again realize that international law is not something you can turn on and off when Israel is involved: that you cannot preach effectively against annexations in Ukraine, while condoning land grabs in the Golan, West Bank and Western Sahara. ■

Monday, April 04, 2022

Sanctions! not BDS.

  https://www.palestinechronicle.com/ian-williams-deterioration-of-intl-human-rights-mechanisms-blamed-on-us-defense-of-israel-video/


Ratcheting up the clicks at the moment. Well done Omar and PDD!

Friday, March 25, 2022

Albright's State Deportment

 Accessed 18 April 1999

Albright's State Deportment/ IAN WILLIAMS

[A Review of] SEASONS OF HER LIFE:

A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright.

By Ann Blackman.

Scribner's. 398 pp. $27.

Flirtatious and ferocious at the same time, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stamps the world stage over Kosovo, threatening fire from heaven if Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic does not agree to peace terms. Just as over Bosnia, she may even believe what she says. Unfortunately, the Serb leader is much better informed. He knows that whatever the public differences, Belgrade and Washington are united in wanting to avoid NATO airstrikes (even if they come to pass). Albright's grandstanding is a necessary part of the charade in which the United States acts scary and the Serbs act scared.

 With her ability to be stridently parochial, and insular as well, in six different languages, Madeleine Albright has been the perfect Secretary of State for this Administration. Never one to let substance interfere with a good soundbite, she has reinvented herself whenever it has been advantageous to her ambitions.

 But does she really merit a biography on the scale of Seasons of Her Life? As Ann Blackman frames the problem, "What makes her, among all the other brilliant men and women in America, stand out?" Almost inadvertently, emerging from Blackman's hard work is a portrait of Albright that shows she would be outstanding mainly by dint of her mediocrity in any such gathering (thus well meriting the nickname Madeleine Halfbright, which State Department staff members gave her after her appointment as US ambassador to the UN).

 However, she would also stand out for her burning ambition--and for her intensive cultivation of social and political connections of the kind available to someone of substantial wealth. (Madame Secretary benefited from a generous divorce settlement after what she has described as a "Cinderella marriage" to a millionaire.) Blackman actually writes that "Albright's greatest appeal is that she is just like us, only wealthier"! This has perhaps unwitting overtones of Hemingway's putdown of F. Scott Fitzgerald's remark about the rich--"They are different from you and me": "Yes, they have more money." But it really sums up the secret of Albright's success more aptly than any neofeminist reading of progress from the log cabin of Kinder, Küche, Kirche to political glory.

 In becoming the first woman to head the State Department, Albright achieved cult status in some superficially minded quarters. People Blackman terms the golden girls--Democrats like Barbara Mikulski, Barbara Kennelly and Anne Wexler--spoke out prominently in her favor, for example. But many of us who followed the careers of Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi need convincing that the absence of cojones in itself guarantees wisdom, virtue or empathetic statesmanship. Even so, those redoubtable women, political warts and all, were elected despite their sex. Blackman's account makes it clear that Albright was appointed to public office by a symbol-sensitive White House because she was a woman. "Frankly, [President Clinton] wanted another woman in the cabinet," Blackman quotes a wisely anonymous but assumedly knowledgeable source as saying. In fact, cojones did help Albright directly, since her use of the word at the United Nations over Castro's downing of a flight of Cuban exiles helped lock her in the media eye as a staunch anticommunist--and an electoral asset for the President in Florida.

 Blackman's bibliography cites Albright's PhD dissertation, her MA submission for Columbia, one from Wellesley and a mere quartet of memorable public speeches, significant for their carefully crafted soundbites rather than their insights. Certainly no male so thinly qualified would have even been on the short list to head State--nor would a better-qualified woman lacking Albright's social connections. Among her predecessors, Warren Christopher may not have played to the gallery, but he had a long record of public service and had been Deputy Secretary of State prior to his Cabinet appointment. Cyrus Vance had been Deputy Secretary of State as well (and LBJ's emissary to North Vietnam) before he was elevated.

 Blackman's journalistic integrity rescues this book from the hagiographic gushing that it occasionally approaches. However, that creates a constant dissonance between biographical intent and delivery of the content. For example, she asserts that Albright has made sure that "women's rights are a central priority of US foreign policy" but then goes on to report that there has been no great leap forward in the number of female ambassadors on her watch. She quotes a close friend of Albright as saying, "Gender didn't hit her in any real way until she got to the United Nations. Feminism wasn't an important cause for her until recently."

 Even at that, it appears mainly to be a stepping stone. For example, Blackman reports that while Albright was nominally in charge of the US delegation to the International Women's Conference in Beijing, she disdained actual attendance, except insofar as she could share Hillary Clinton's plane for the one-day fly-in visit. Significantly, the book is as silent as Albright was herself about the sexually adventurous Clinton's sacking of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders (another, more neglected female first) for her statement at the UN that masturbation did not carry a risk of AIDS. In a more political vein, Albright's first move on arrival at the UN was to push out April Glaspie, the former chargé d'affaires in Iraq who carried the can for the Bush Administration in its confused signals to Baghdad before the start of the Gulf War. Glaspie had been serving her penance at the US Mission to the UN. In short, sisterhood may have been a force in getting

Albright appointed, but it is not a concept she has put into practice much herself.

 Blackman also records that her globetrotting protagonist was not going to attend the Copenhagen UN Social Summit at all, considering the war against global poverty too soft a subject for her consideration. Until, that is, Al Gore announced he was going, whereupon Albright, then UN ambassador, decided to hitch a lift with him. As Blackman says, she "understood that if she were to have any chance at higher office, she would need to spend time with people who could influence the decision." Brown-nosing becomes an art form in these pages, which occasionally read like Diary of a Nobody in the third person, as they record Albright's delight at getting this or that invitation, or mortification at being left off this or that power list.

 Despite the log-cabin-to-State-Department nonsense that she and her spinmeisters have woven, it is clear that Albright came from a relatively affluent and privileged background. No amount of spin can transform a privileged, upper-middle-class upbringing, with governesses and Swiss private schools, into a life of deprivation.

 Few people would regard being the daughter of a college professor and having to take a scholarship to Wellesley as swimming against the social stream. After marrying into money, Albright used her wealth to consolidate her position as a Georgetown hostess whose rabidly hawkish cold war sentiments, seemingly picked up through hero worship of her Czech émigré father, could always find a popular echo among Democratic movers and shakers. (Albright was an outsider of her own creation, since she had set herself on being rich, WASP and Wellesleyan and remade herself in this image, renouncing Catholicism for a comfortable Episcopalianism.)

 At least we are spared any hint of a radical past. Albright, it seems, was a proto-neocon from the beginning. During the sixties, when, Blackman stereotypically tells us, "antiwar radicals who grew their hair long and smoked pot" and "black-power advocates sporting 'Afros'" besieged college presidents, Albright found the demonstrations at Columbia "a pain in the neck." Albright, we deduce, neither wore an Afro nor smoked the demon weed; instead, she struggled with her postgraduate work and wrestled with the dilemma of whether to leave the children at home with the housekeeper.

 Interestingly, and once again reflecting the dissonance between the biographer's task and this volume's contents, the body of Blackman's text takes seriously Albright's amazing amnesia about her Jewish ancestry and the price her grandparents paid for their ethnicity. Blackman does record in her introduction that she found "very few people who believe [Albright] was truly ignorant of her family heritage." As Blackman herself says, it "stretched the imagination." Within months of her appointment as Secretary of State, in other words, Albright was revealed to be someone who was either suffering premature Alzheimer's or who was pathologically covering up knowledge of her family history. On the face of it, neither is an optimal characteristic for running the foreign policy of the world's only superpower. Blackman fails to consider what the effect of these revelations would have been if they had surfaced before her appointment: Discussions made public at the time reveal that Albright might have found herself scoring more negative points for her Jewishness than positive points for her womanhood at a bean-counting White House.

 There is much in this book with the ring of truth--but what rings out loudest is the sound of silence when it comes to examining the record of Albright's public life as opposed to her personal history. Blackman disclaims any attempt to analyze her subject's approach to US foreign policy in favor of following "the path Albright walked to shatter the glass ceiling." Would it be conceivable for a biographer of Henry Kissinger to write about his struggle with his Austrian-Jewish origins in an administration that was frequently tinged with anti-Semitism--and not mention Vietnam or Cambodia?

 Yet in Seasons of Her Life, Blackman gives almost as much prominence to Albright's presidency of the trustees of the Beauvoir Elementary School in Washington, DC--an affluent private establishment not much patronized by the majority population of the District--as she does to her career at the UN. In one way this is reasonable, since it was the nearest thing to public office Albright held before becoming ambassador to the UN in 1993.

 There is much talk of facials, hairdos, dating and dresses, but not one single mention of Rwanda. In fact, in 1994 Albright fought single-handedly in the Security Council to stop any UN reinforcements whatsoever from going to Kigali while somewhere between half a million and a million Tutsis were being massacred. All agree that loyalty to Clinton has been one of her virtues. She was never more loyal than in this championing of Presidential Decision Directive 25, which ruled that the United States would veto any UN peacekeeping operation that did not directly benefit US interests. Her pride in her Czech origins is continually stated, but in this case it was ironically justified. "The crocodiles in the Kagera River and the vultures over Rwanda have never had it so good," Karel Kovanda, the Czech ambassador to the UN, reprimanded his colleagues on the Security Council (and by implication one in particular) in an attempt to get reinforcements for the tiny UN contingent in Kigali.

 In another example of diplomacy by soundbite and photo-op, Blackman reports that Albright went to Somalia to wear a flak-jacket with US troops for the cameras and that she decided Boutros Boutros-Ghali should be fired as Secretary General of the UN because of that organization's failure there. However, Blackman does not mention her heroine's role in pushing the UN to fight a vendetta with Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, which could be regarded as the cause of the debacle in which eighteen US Rangers were killed. Nor does she mention that the key incident in which the soldiers were killed was an American operation initiated and carried out without even informing, let alone consulting, UN forces on the ground.

 Blackman gives the dubious credit for sacking Boutros-Ghali to Albright without really explaining why she did it. Perhaps closer examination would have led Blackman to examine the most likely hypothesis: that, Salome-like, Albright danced in front of Jesse Helms with Boutros-Ghali's head, in return for promises of easy confirmation as Secretary of State from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman.

 Blackman fails to explore what is, on the face of it, a highly unlikely yet continuing alliance between Albright and Helms. In fact, they share an intensely parochial and reactionary view of the world. Perhaps the most germane comment is the cable home from former British Ambassador Sir John Weston, who, in best "Yes, Minister" style, alerted the Foreign Office to the failings of the new Secretary of State. "She is not always good at accepting the need to apply to the United States the same standards and expectations she requires of others.... There is a mildly irritating tendency to create a fixed position and then to look around for others to save her from the detailed consequences of it.... Her reaction to being exposed or brought under pressure from sudden turns of events are sometimes tetchy, verging on the panicky."

 It is perhaps significant that Weston has retired from the Foreign Service. Most of the other diplomats who were privately so dismissive of her joined the fawning chorus of congratulations once she became Secretary of State. The same process has been obvious in the media, where her career has been written up as if she were some combination of Metternich and Mother Teresa.

 In fact, most of the press who covered Albright at the UN had as little time for her as she had for them. Her spinman would go straight to Washington to get the pliable coverage he wanted, bypassing the New York staff. From the time of her arrival at the UN, it was obvious where her ambitions lay, and her media effort was directed solely at the State Department. However, she had apparently been cautioned that it would not do to look too eager, so everyone was supposed to conspire in pretending that it was not so.

 I must confess an interest here. Not long after Albright took over, her spokesman, Jamie Rubin, bell, book and candled me from the US Mission in 1994 for writing a profile of Albright in the New York Observer that referred to her "barely concealed ambitions...to become Secretary of State." Rubin complained that I had not recorded his denial of any such ambition; she and her staff have a strong view of the proper role of journalists: as stenographers whose task is to write down every word.

 When the Washington Post's Michael Dobbs revealed his findings about Albright's family being massacred during World War II, Blackman records that Albright's response was to call Post publisher Katharine Graham, who wisely realized that it was too late to do anything about the story. Rubin's response was to spoil Dobbs's scoop by leaking his results to other outlets who could assure a more sympathetic, if not sycophantic, stance. Later, one press occasion in Belgrade was canceled simply because Dobbs was the pool reporter.

 Blackman says she asked Albright about the prevailing State Department doctrine that if someone writes something 99 percent positive and 1 percent negative about her, she will focus on the 1 percent. The champion of free speech and the American way of life told her chillingly, "So eliminate the 1 percent." It is to Blackman's credit that she has significantly exceeded the single percent. While most of her editorializations are in the traditional inside-the-Beltway mode of never attacking a possible source and the impressive negative percentage is always ascribed to others, I'd be surprised if Blackman ever got another exclusive interview. In Washington, access is given to stenographers, not investigators.

 Blackman's integrity and resourcefulness show through the pink cotton wool padding. I only wish she had adopted the persona of the little girl revealing the insubstantiality of Empress Albright's new clothes and dug a little deeper. She could have explained just why Albright is the perfect embodiment of this Administration's content-free foreign policy, in which one deranged Senator from North Carolina or a campaign donation from a banana magnate has more weight than all of America's allies put together, let alone the rest of the world.

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Ian Williams, The Nation's UN correspondent, has reported extensively on Madeleine Albright.

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Thursday, March 17, 2022

If Caracas why not Teheran?


If Caracas, why not Teheran?

Briefing with Trita Parsi

Friday, March 18th, 2 p.m. EDT on Zoom
Faced with war in Ukraine, oil shortages, Gulf, Saudi and Israeli reticence to support the US diplomatically and economically, Western policy towards Teheran is shifting, even as Moscow tries to use the JCPOA for leverage. 

Trita Parsi EVP of the Quincy Institute tries to parse the shifts in policy and see where it fits in the wider conflicts.

 
REGISTER
Trita Parsi is an award-winning author and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World OrderHe is the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign policy, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. In 2021, he was named by the Washingtonian Magazine as one of the 50 most influential voices on foreign policy in Washington DC, and preeminent public intellectual Noam Chomsky calls Parsi "one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran."

Thursday, March 03, 2022

The UNsteps back from the plate.

 https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/03/03/what-russias-defeat-at-the-un-really-means/

Monday, February 28, 2022

Stalin's Ghosts

 https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TtdORXrzToeHS8pAbbZYzQ

My interview with Terry Melia

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNpWUt0pBow

Foreign Press Briefings

 I've been remiss in keeping up to date. I promise to do better. In the meantime, here is a compendium of recent FPA briefings


https://www.youtube.com/c/foreignpressassociationusa