https://www.wrmea.org/north-america/saving-the-united-nations-from-the-u.s.html

Saving the United Nations from the U.S. 

IAN WILLIAMS

NORTH AMERICA

POSTED ON DECEMBER 21, 2024

(L-r) Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) call on the Senate to take up the Israel Security Assistance Support Act during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on May 16, 2024, in Washington, DC. In response to President Joe Biden's pause in shipment of some weapons to deter Israel from launching a full-scale ground operation in the Gaza city of Rafah, the legislation would freeze the budgets for the U.S. Defense Secretary, Secretary of State and National Security Council if the weapons are not delivered. (CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES)

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2025, pp. 36, 54

United Nations Report

By Ian Williams

MEDIEVAL MAPS always showed Jerusalem as the center of the world. Theology apart, they were in a sense, anticipating Palestine’s position at the center of gravity in the United Nations universe. Without prejudice to Kashmir, Myanmar, Western Sahara and the Congo, for example, no other issue poses such knotty problems to the world community and rule of law, since it encapsulates a core issue: Does international law have meaning or relevance?

U.S. officials have threatened the International Criminal Court (ICC) with sanctions, countenanced action against its officials and  looked on with a mild moue of distress as the Israeli Occupation Forces shoot U.N. officials and U.S. citizens engaged in relief work while the White House draws innumerable lines in the sand for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that he promptly erases with tanks, bulldozers and gunships. “Self-defense” just does not cut the mustard any more for apologists, not least with the latest master stroke of the ICC announcing Myanmar indictments. Can U.S. pontificators masticate a sandwich that has Vladimir Putin on one side and Gen. Min Aung Hlaing on the other—with Netanyahu as the filling? 

During the Balkan Wars, many young State Department professionals struck the board and cried “no more!” at the shameless double standards. The Clintonian response was simply to avoid all use of the word genocide to avoid any legal obligations by the U.S. 

The current generation appears either to be opportunistically complaisant in the face of Netanyahu’s genocide, or worse, true believers in Israel and its claimed right to self-defense. In his last days as president, Barack Obama let through a conscience-easing resolution against Israel: there is little or no chance of any such significant gesture from the Biden administration in its dying days. 

In contrast, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have just forfeited their chances of power with their shameless abasement to indicted war criminal Netanyahu—who had spent his term as Israeli prime minister campaigning against their re-election. 

Observers often wonder whether the U.N. could survive without the United States. We have been here before. Time to reverse the query—how can the U.N. survive in any meaningful way with the U.S. as a malignant metastasizing tumor at its core? 

In the end the Devil is in the details. In the past, despite repeated purges of U.S. foreign policy personnel, the State Department retained a residual legalism as officials have tried to reconcile the passing politically motivated whims of officials to stay within the law. John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. cut the Gordian knot—he simply asserted that international law did not apply unless the U.S. said so, thus avoiding confusion. In his crusade against the ICC, Bolton’s initiative to punish member states that failed to explicitly offer preemptive amnesty to American troops brought the U.S. into more disrepute than the U.N. and not just its “moral” standing. It was simply shrugged off and forgotten by most members. This time, the organization’s members would get their retaliation in first. It is pointless to try creative engagement with bigots. 

While appreciating his need for caution, many people were despairing of Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor. After all, other judges on the ICC have been threatened, bullied and blackmailed by Israeli agents. But he pulled a geopolitical rabbit out of his British barrister’s wig with the Myanmar charges. To the rest of the world, how does the U.S. greet an indictment of Putin and threaten sanctions against the U.S. and its international signatories, like Britain and France, for taking the same actions against Netanyahu? And now, the vultures are fluttering home to roost as in an adroit master stroke, Khan has announced his action against the head of the Myanmar junta. 

In any rational politics, this would pose U.S. officials an insoluble dilemma: How can they welcome General Min Aung Hlaing’s arrest while attacking Netanyahu’s? To Khan’s delight, Myanmar, like Israel, is not a signatory, but like Israel it committed crimes on the territory of a state that was—Bangladesh. 

President-elect Donald Trump’s U.N. ambassador pick, U.S. representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), has joined Israel’s call to defund the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). When she  launches off at the U.N., delegates should program their ChatGBT with the translation “yada yada yada” for her keynote message and media should deride, rebut or mock her. 

There is no upside to pandering to her nor even trying to reason with her since her delusional world actually has a solid grounding in reality. Stefanik’s future career plans are founded on massive American Israel Public Affairs Committee-related donations. Like Nikki Haley before her, her limited vision sees the world stage as merely the green room in which she prepares herself for the Oval Office. The interests of the U.S., the world, even humanity at large are entirely peripheral. It is true that the U.S. as U.N. founder convened the early meetings of the U.N. in Long Island. But what a long, twisted road for U.N. diplomacy to bring it down to Long Island politics for an obsessive career-oriented and parochial politician.

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U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of U.N.told: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Middle East Books and More).

 

 Way To Go Comrade!

My old friend Mike died last month….I admire and will I hope emulate his equanimity towards his end. Thanks to Sandra for the link to a moving deity-free memorial.

 

Mike McCrink 1948 2024

Mike McCrink did not invoke any deities when he called me in New York with his oncologist’s gloomy prognosis. While concerned to tie up loose ends for his survivors, he was almost as disturbed about the aftermath of the British and American elections as he was about his personal medical news. I was not surprised that his ironic laid back world-view coped well with dire scenarios, personal and political. 

Between tumors and Trump & Starmer, we did seem to be overdrawing on the Apocalypse account. For half a century we had helped each other navigate through some stormy political and marital and medical shoals and assisted each other in doting dad-hood, which he took very seriously. In one of his pithy pub aphorisms, he remarked that while people like us were rhetorically uncommitted to marriage, it said a lot for the institution that we tried it so often in the face of all the evidence against!

Both of us were beneficiaries of the recently born British welfare state and both naked out our existence to what increasingly seems like its faltering finish. Without illusions, both of us knew it was better than that went before and that it was deteriorating in front of us. We had shared over fifty years of politics together, from the time he turned up from London following the twin idols of Chairman Mao Tse Tung and Reg Birch to join us in the Liverpool branch of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist Leninist),  which wobbled between the latter’s autodidact Cockney philosophy and esoteric Chinese sloganeering.

Luckily we shared an irreverent sense of humour and relished indulging in Maoist concepts like “bombarding the headquarters,” and ”it is right to rebel,” while we often acted out like the Peoples’ Front of Judea (Splittist). The party actually did have some sound perceptions, but its Leninist founders increasingly frowned upon any disrespect for the headquarters, let alone bombardment or any actual rebellion. I remember Mike musing over a pint that the putative revolutionary party of the working class probably had fewer members and less influence than the Flat Earth Society! 

We were even more underwhelmed when Chairman Reg decided that Albania’s Enver Hoxha had the answers.  We never found what  the Albanian for “42” was, whether in Gheg or Tosk, but recognized Taurine excreta when we smelt it. We did truly and sincerely believe in emancipation of the working class, right up to now, but since we both came from the toiling masses ourselves, we had no great illusions about the outcome. We demonstrated and picketed about Apartheid, Vietnam, West German persecution of Leftists, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the so called Prevention of Terrorism laws, but we realized we were bearing witness, rather than shaking the world.

We had a PR strategy which leveraged our small numbers - to picket unpopular reactionary targets and get the local media to cover our protest. So we picketed the German and South African consulates. We discovered that both had recently closed because of the slump in shipping in the port of Liverpool. We discovered about the closure when the caretaker poked his nose through the door to find out what was happening. He broke this news just as we launched into our set-piece orations for Radio Merseyside - so we told him to shut up and get shut the door while we carried on!

We might occasionally have our head in the clouds, but Mike always had his feet firmly on the ground. Maybe his time as an altar boy inoculated him against dogma, Leninist or Christian, and our exposure to “Marxism -Leninism,” inoculated us against Leninism for when Trotskyist Militant Hattonistas escaped from the Life of Brian to try to impose Bolshevik discipline on Liverpool Labour Party. In the end, we discovered that the secret to avoiding disillusion is to avoid illusion. 

Perhaps one of his more idiosyncratic contributions was treating heroin users with acupuncture, which he had gone to China to study. I later suggested find out if he consider a potential retirement income from his (genuine) Chinese acupuncture qualifications but assumed that  since it was outside the NHS, it was not a secure income stream. I half-jokingly suggested veterinary acupuncture but he was not sure the customer base would see the point.

So he fell back into Further Education. We shared a predilection for history with an economic and social angle and I did urge him to try writing, but perhaps he predicted, accurately from my own experience, that the profession did not offer much in the way of fortune nor fame.

Always concerned about the excluded, he carried on teaching problem kids in Edinburgh after many contemporaries had cashed in their pensions. He was in harness right to the end - because he enjoyed it - and it was the right thing to do! 

It is 35 years since I moved to New York and Mike’s TransAtlantic companionship has been a constant support not least during my tediously frequent NDEs in the ICU at Columbia which in the end enable us to quip together about his approaching demise. It was heartbreaking but gratifying when he called a few days before the end, and told me it was his last call -to thank me for being a good friend.  I hope I face my exit with equal grace and equanimity.