Its those people again! the US and the UN!

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2017, pp. 32-33

United Nations Report

Just Like the President-Elect, Trump Cabinet Appointments Send Mixed Messages

By Ian Williams

Ambassador Peter Thomson of Fiji, president of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly, addresses a special meeting of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, held in observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Nov. 29, 2016. (U.N. PHOTO/MANUEL ELIAS)

CRYSTAL BALLS DO NOT work well in the United Nations at the best of times. If you want a recipe for chaotic outcomes, then take 193 direct players, 5 of whom have an ace up their sleeve in the form of a veto, dictating to an organization with dozens of relatively autonomous agencies whose heads often apportion their allegiances to the nations who proposed them and those who finance them. And into this, Donald Trump has thrown the Tea Party-backed governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, born Sikh, converted to Methodism, one of whose few foreign policy stands mandates state opposition to BDS efforts.

On the bright side, the new U.N. representative did have the courage to oppose Trump earlier, and to oppose deportation of Muslims, and we can assume that her subcontinental origins will to some extent inoculate her against xenophobia, and perhaps even American exceptionalism. However, quite how this works for future American foreign policy in general, let alone toward the United Nations, is even more of a mystery than before.

The previous pattern was that Democratic presidents included the U.N. ambassador in their cabinet, while Republicans do not. But Donald Trump has promoted Haley to the cabinet. Was this because he was not aware of previous practice, or because he wanted a minority woman in his cabinet? Or was it a bribe to get her to give up her independent position in South Carolina?

Previous U.N. ambassadors have always had to cope with the ghost of Andrew Young, the U.N. envoy fired for meeting informally with the Palestinian representative at the U.N., so even those who privately disagreed with the Lobby’s manipulation of U.S. Middle East policy have gone along with the flow and dutifully—and shamefully—leveled the veto on the mildest criticism of Israel.

It would be difficult to piece together a coherent foreign policy from Trump’s erratic statements on the campaign trail and afterward. From one point of view, his phone conversation with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen was a welcome sign of refusal to be bullied by Beijing—but if it was not part of a considered policy, it was an indication that we have a president-elect who could puckishly start World War III with an ill-considered gesture. And to add to the confusion, it is not clear against whom he would start it!

So, on the one hand, he opined that the Israelis should pay for their U.S. weapons supplies—but on the other, he made the standard pledge of moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. But had anyone explained the intricacies of international law to him? Or, since almost every other candidate made the same pledge, did he, too, have his fingers crossed behind his back when he said it?

Trump’s nominee as defense secretary, Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, has wisely suggested that Israeli policies in the occupied territories are a clear and present danger to U.S. forces in the region—but then wants to step up pressure on Iran, just as Netanyahu and the Lobby ordered.

We are not even sure what Trump’s views on the United Nations are. From some quarters, hostility to the organization is engendered by the member states’ insistence that Israel does not have an automatic pass for breaches of U.N. decisions. Certainly the Democratic Party has been torn for years between supporting the great creation of Roosevelt and Truman and deploring its support for Palestinian rights. Since the Republican/Likud Axis has become so prominent, the GOP has merged its pro-Israel stance with its nativist dislike of foreigners—a blend manifest in Rudy Giuliani, the curmudgeonly ex-mayor of New York who in 1995 ordered PLO leader Yasser Arafat out of a U.N. anniversary banquet.

To some extent Trump has prejudices rather than policies—but he is enough of a businessman to realize that it is often profitable to overlook reflexive aversions. Trump the realtor obviously appreciates the U.N.’s effect on property values in New York City, building one of his most outstandingly tasteless edifices just across the road from U.N. headquarters. Whatever prejudices he and his father had against African-American tenants is clearly not carried over to the many African and Arab diplomats who rent and buy his properties.

So will the policy be neglect, or will he see what other administrations, not least Bill Clinton’s, have: that the U.N. saves a lot of effort compared with being the world’s self-appointed cop? It is really difficult to say, but then that is true of previous regimes. Clinton posed as a liberal internationalist and then issued his Policy Directive 25 that vetoed any expenditure on peacekeeping that did not directly serve self-defined U.S. interests. The victims of Rwanda and Srebrenica were not, we discovered, essential U.S. interests.

In contrast, President Barack Obama amended that directive last year, in a reasoned assessment that asserted, “Multilateral peace operations, particularly United Nations (U.N.) peace operations, will, therefore, continue to be among the primary international tools that we use to address conflict-related crises.”

The crucial question is whether a Trump administration will have anything like a coherent foreign policy—and to what extent it sees the United Nations as helping in fulfilling that.

Using the old Confucian cliché of crisis as opportunity, new U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has a better chance of independence than most—even if the major powers will nominate most of his senior officials. As previously noted (see Nov./Dec. 2016 Washington Report, p. 30), elected unanimously as a former prime minister of an important, if small, power; as head of one of the U.N.’s most called-upon agencies; and even as former president of the Socialist International, he has far more experience and better international connections than Trump—or any of his cabinet members.

Interestingly, Guterres had the support of China for his candidacy, and China has upped its dues payments, so that it is now the next biggest financier, after the U.S., for U.N. operations—and provides more peacekeepers than any other great power. The U.S. might still be the “indispensable power” Madeleine Albright claimed it to be, but it has never been more dispensable than now, as its primacy is increasingly challenged.

ANNEXING U.N. TERRITORY?

Meanwhile, back at the U.N., Israel’s Ambassador Danny Danon has shown his heritage in the settlement movement since he became chairman of the U.N. General Assembly’s Sixth Committee, which deals with legal affairs. He is clearly enjoying himself and has expanded the toehold to annex more and more organizational territory. His latest escapade was to convene a meeting of self-appointed legal experts that included Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America to consider legal action against advocates of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. It appears to be a tendentious extension of the claimed privileges of the chair, but has no legal effect.

However, politically, it surely is time for the Palestinian Mission to convene a U.N. conference on how to give international legal effect to the decisions of the International Criminal Court on the applicability of the Geneva Conventions on Occupied Territories to the Israeli-occupied territories.

On Nov. 29 the U.N. commemorated its Annual Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Ban Ki-moon has been an articulate defender of international legality, not to mention humanitarian solidarity, in the region, but his statements have rarely been reported, not even in indignation by pro-Israeli press—almost as if they realized that condemning such a mild-mannered and manifestly principled person would only validate his statements. So it is only fitting that as he leaves office we reproduce his remarks:

“Recent years have witnessed two unsuccessful attempts at negotiating a peaceful settlement, three armed conflicts, thousands of dead—the vast majority of them Palestinian civilians—rampant incitement, terror attacks, thousands of rockets and bombs fired at Israel from Gaza, and an expanding, illegal Israeli settlement enterprise that risks undermining Israel’s democratic values and the character of its society.  This year, the number of demolitions of Palestinian houses and other structures by Israeli forces has doubled, compared to 2015. Gaza remains a humanitarian emergency, with two million Palestinians struggling with crumbling infrastructure and a paralyzed economy, and tens of thousands still displaced, awaiting reconstruction of homes destroyed by conflict.”

While it contains the obligatory “balance” so often demanded by U.S. and Israeli representatives, the inescapable truth of who is most to blame emerges clearly from its enumeration of the details. In the General Assembly debate on the resolutions, U.S. representative Richard Erdman came out with the usual worries about “the disproportionate number of one-sided resolutions that had been designed to condemn Israel.” Interestingly, he added, “While the United States consistently opposed every effort to delegitimize Israel at the United Nations, his delegation would also continue to view Israeli settlement activity as illegitimate, corrosive and a threat to a two-state solution.”

Erdman failed, however, to identify how much of Israel Palestine occupied and how many settlements it had built there. Nor did he identify what steps Washington had taken to persuade Israel to give up its corrosive ways, short of stuffing its arsenal with offensive weapons and its treasury with cash.

In fact, he missed a golden opportunity to suggest ways to take the wind out of the sails of the international BDS movement. If the U.S. and U.N. took the action they had against South Africa, then consumers’ boycotting bath salts from the occupied Dead Sea would be totally unnecessary. ◙

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U.N. correspondent Ian Williams’ book UNtold: the Real Story of the United Nations will be published by Just World Books in Spring 2017.

The Sort of Triumph of the Sort of Will!

Letter from America – Ian Williams

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: December 19, 2015 Last modified: December 15, 2015

There are shades of euphoria from supporters of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change announced so triumphantly at the beginning of this month. “Universal” and “legally binding” are epithets brandished in its favour. Well, up to a point.

The mere fact that there is an agreement, of any kind, understandably warms the hearts of the many committed people who have for years tried to effect a change. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary General, has made it a major issue since he took office – and he and Gordon Brown played a major part in turning the previous Copenhagen talks into a holding operation rather than a complete disaster. So trying to count the ways in which Paris is a more limited success than the headlines suggest, let us accentuate the positive.

The mere existence of a global agreement accepting the reality of man-made climate change is a big step forward. It rebuts untold millions of dollars poured into public relations by oil and coal producers with direct mercenary interests, not to mention conservative kooks who have decided that the whole idea of global warming is a communist plot to subvert entrepreneurial activities.

If the Shadow Chancellor can quote Mao, so can I. One of the lines in the Chairman’s Little Red Book was that ideas can become a material force, and without endorsing the rest of the Maoist oeuvre, that is very true. In that sense, the Paris Agreement is a turning point in international sentiment for combating the unfolding ecological disaster, ideological leverage in the coming struggle.

The right have become experts at having their will triumph, both positively and negatively over the years, which is why they have fought this outcome so hard and so long. Even relatively rational politicians in America and elsewhere, faced with the wrath of the carbon fuel lobby have temporised about the reality of global warming. Saudi Arabia, continuing the constructive role that it plays in so many spheres, has spent enough hiring the mercenary PR companies to fight its oil-soaked corner globally for it to have resettled several threatened low lying atolls by now.

That is why the Paris agreement at the beginning of December was such a landmark event, despite all the compromises and weaselling that went into it. The simple fact of acceptance of reality, no matter how belated, is a great leap forward in the face of the industry lobbyists.

Gaining recognition of that premise made other forms of progress possible – like the Pacific mini-state of the Marshall Islands who campaigned to ensure that there would a review of the targets within five years instead of 15. However, the review is desperately needed. The targets are hopelessly inadequate and it is a small consolation that the signatory countries recognise when the agreement effectively postpones the reaction needed now until the second half of the century. It is as if we stood in a burning city and congratulated ourselves for noticing the flames and temperature, but decided not to set the fire brigades on the case for a while longer.

In that sense, the Paris agreement is an egregious example of the fun and frivolity that the city was once so famous for. Having evaded the targets set in Kyoto, Bali and other resorts, the nations of the world have now set a non-binding set of targets that they will probably ignore and evade again.

While considering the triumph of the will, one can see in this agreement how the faith-based solutions of the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan era still haunt us. A carbon tax, on the fuel used could be one of the most effective inducements to encourage investment in more efficient energy use and generation, and thus emissions. However, reflexive right wing (and now “centre”) recoil from the very idea of taxation – which would put cash in the hands of governments for the public good –- has been subsumed by the idea of alleged market mechanisms and trading emissions.

The agreement is deeply flawed, weak and ineffectual. But it lays down what should be done – at a minimum. It is up to the rest of us to risk a few virtual carbon-emissions by holding the feet of governments to the burning coals, making sure they keep their promises.

Two Cheers for Obama!

Tribune

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: August 7, 2015 Last modified: August 8, 2015

Attacked almost as fervently by the left as by the right, Barack Obama is now doing what second-term presidents often do – looking to his legacy. He has been remarkably successful, not least in the face of a rabidly hostile right wing in Congress and with a frequently lukewarm Democratic Party in support. Many Democrat legislators would make New Labour’s worst sound like Bolsheviks in comparison.

For Americans, Obamacare is his signature legacy. Although deeply flawed in comparison with a single payer system, compared with what passed for healthcare before, it is a huge step forward. Like most American legislation, it is a complex product of messy compromises with the pharmaceutical and insurance lobbies which had to be persuaded not to kill the reforms completely It is sad but true that while donors have considerable influence in the Tory Party, and were gaining it rapidly in New Labour, in the United States, quite often they literally write the law. That is one of the reasons why donor-driven policy making has failed to reform the American financial system since the sector is a major donor to the Democrats.

Even so, Obamacare has offered millions of Americans health insurance coverage who could not afford it before and has even managed to constrain the cost inflation that has already made American healthcare the most expensive in world. Diehard Republicans have tried more than 50 times to repeal it. The Republican leadership is glad at the failure. Depriving millions of voters of healthcare in the run up to an election would have brought reality crashing down on the empty rhetoric of the Republican right.

Foreign policy is a traditional recourse of second-term presidents trying to make the history books and here Obama has faced down strong lobbies such as the Israel and Cuba to make a mark. It is only a couple of decades since Bill Clinton bowed down to the Cuban American Foundation and ratcheted up sanctions against Havana in return for campaign donation. Obama has now finally normalised relations with Cuba and is surviving unscathed. Third-generation Cuban Americans now either don’t care or even actually welcome more access to their ancestral homeland. The business community is more concerned with getting its toe in the door than closing the gate on Cuba business. It has long been clear even to the more rational American conservatives that Cuba is no threat to the US nor to the hemisphere and that the policy has been counterproductive. The domestic lobby was moribund, and internationally there was nothing but praise for the move.

Over Iran, he has had to work much harder to overcome the prejudices and passions against Teheran where there are unlikely allies from the Saudis to the Israelis uniting to sabotage the deal. Obama has had to take on the mother of lobbies, AIPAC and its allies, exhorted on by Benjamin Netanyahu and a host of derangedly conservative Likudnik billionaires. Again, he saw his chance. Polling showed that Netanyahu’s support among the American Jews was minimal. Fewer and fewer American Jews see their identity as particularly tied to Israel and, like the general American public after Iraq and Afghanistan, even fewer relished the idea of another all-out war in the Middle East – let alone the one that the Israeli leadership is so ostentatiously trying to provoke. John Kerry and Obama have kept the line to get the agreement which is now enshrined in United Nations Security Council resolution 2231. Netanyahu’s attempts to interfere directly in Washington’s foreign policy decisions have been so outrageous that he might well have alienated the Democrats away from the hitherto unbreakable bipartisan support for the Israel lobby.

But Obama’s administration is so overcome with its own temerity that it shows signs of the “fight or flight” syndrome. The release of the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard is clearly an attempt to compensate Netanyahu, as is the public talk of increasing military and economic aid. So, can he force a durable Middle East peace settlement on Netanyahu and Israel? It was one of his first avowed ambitions on taking office, and after all the humiliations he has endured at the hands of Israel’s Prime Minster, it would be of deep personal and historical significance to pull it off now with political pressure instead of the traditional pandering.

About Ian Williams

Ian Williams is Tribune's UN correspondent

Half Cheer for Hillary

Ian Williams

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: April 18, 2015 Last modified: April 15, 2015

When many on the left were gushing adulatory about the election of America’s first black president, I tried to sound a cautionary note. Barack Obama was not really the second coming, but neither was he the Antichrist. And he was lot more promising than Hillary Clinton. Predictably, the vociferous sections of the left who revile anyone who is in power, started to fulminate as soon as he did not deliver the millennium. But then, he had never promised it. Sceptical to begin with, now the election circus hits town, I have to admit that Obama is actually doing better than I expected.

For all its manifest faults, Obamacare has delivered health insurance to around 16 millions of Americans who did not have it before. That is a huge achievement, not least in the American context, since those people were almost by definition not wealthy and therefore not in a position to bribe the legislators to pass the healthcare act. On the economy, Obama trod very carefully. Perhaps too much so, but he did complete the job of stopping the crash and turning the American economy round. He actually delivered a stimulus package without mentioning it. Perhaps he could and should have advertised government’s role in turning things around – but he had a mostly hostile Congress around, ranging from deranged Tea Party types to the right of the Democratic Party who overlapped what is left of the sane wing of the Republicans. Best to do good by stealth than shout and be thwarted.

He also extricated the United States from the tail end of the debacles in the Middle East initiated by George W Bush and Tony Blair, although their legacy has come back to haunt him. Reality there is messy, but it is surely no mean achievement to resist the pressures from so many powerful lobbies to start yet more wars in Iran and Syria. Resisting Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel lobby in order to reach a deal with Iran represents a major step forward. One does not have to admire the domestic policies of the Iranian ayatollahs to recognise just how unjust and counterproductive American policy has been. India and Pakistan that have fought numerous wars, and both have nuclear arsenals, the latter just a coup away from control by Taliban sympathisers. In a breath-taking display of hypocrisy, India, which has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, voted at the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council because there was a faint suspicion that Iran could develop the same nuclear fuel refining capacity to which it was entitled under the NPT!

One definition of chutzpah has to be the calls for war against Iran by Israel, a non-signatory of the NPT, the possessor of nuclear weapons, and wager of multiple wars and acts of aggression against almost every other country in the neighbourhood. Obama’s forestalling Netanyahu is an outstanding display of vertebracy among recent White House incumbents, as well as bringing comfort to all­ who wondered when the odious Likudnik would get his comeuppance. And what is more, it was good politics.

Obama has also defied the Cuban exile lobby. Much of Cuba’s economic travails derive as much from pseudo-Marxist mismanagement by the government, but normalisation will at the very least deprive the Castro regime of its excuses and hasten reform.

So what about Hillary Clinton? She would be Blair in a trouser suit. They share a conviction that the business of politics is get wonderful people like themselves elected, and if that means taking money from people and doing their bidding, what’s the beef if they get elected. Hillary is as free with her political favours to corporate donors as her husband was to doting interns. But unlike him, she keeps her promises to them.

At the moment, she is faraway the front Democratic candidate, which impales any sensible person on the horns of a dilemma. But wriggling apart, in the end, is it better to have an utterly cynical and selfish president who is in the same dimension as the rest of us, or a Republican ensconced in the Twilight Zone? Remembering what happened when people deserted James Callaghan and got Margaret Thatcher, there will be many who will reluctantly but inevitably make their mark next to Hillary Clinton, who might or might not reintroduce Rodham back as her middle name depending on what the polls tell her.

About Ian Williams

Ian Williams is Tribune's UN correspondent

Pots, Kettles, and Situation in Syria black!

WRMEA, May 2014, Pages 14-15

United Nations Report

It Helps to Have Moral Authority When Criticizing Perpetrators, Passive Onlookers

By Ian Williams

Syria poses a classic dilemma for the United Nations. It cannot do anything opposed by a permanent member of the Security Council, in this case Russia. But there is another dimension, as former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali eloquently complained: the U.N. has no army, no police force of its own. It cannot act unless member states provide the wherewithal for it to do so.

The countries who are prepared, or able, to commit substantial forces are not necessarily those best politically or ethically suited to operations. While Moscow, with help from Iran, has actively provided support for Syria’s military and Bashar al-Assad’s morale, we have to ask about the failings of the rest of the world, and in particular the West.

Diplomacy is interconnected. Washington’s tacit continuation of the Cold War after Glasnost exacts a price, fueling Rus­sian revanchism, and a desire to tweak the Eagle’s feathers. Hardly an occasion has been missed to humiliate Moscow. It is true that Russian rulers have often behaved stupidly and reflexively, playing to populist resentment at home, but they have surely been provoked—and the rewards for being sensible have not been so great.

It began with Russian support for Desert Storm, which was a huge breakthrough. (Indeed it is worth remembering that Syrian troops also played a role in that first Iraq war.) Sergei Lavrov was Russia’s permanent representative to the U.N. at that time, and he smarted under the combined humiliations of the West’s insistence on taking Iraq resolutions farther than their clear intent, and the maintenance of brutal sanctions when they had lost international support.

Russia’s invention of an Orthodox International to be the ghost of the Comintern has certainly trapped it into a geopolitical tangle from which it sometimes has difficulty extricating itself. It went along with sanctions against Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic because it was clear to all but a coterie of leftists and nationalists that Belgrade’s actions were beyond the pale of international law. But then it ended up supporting him in ways that persuaded him, like Assad, to continue in his course of action.

The West’s reaction was equally shortsighted and presaged Syria. Secretary of State James Baker thought the U.S. did not have a dog in the fight. Britain and France assumed that the Bosnians would lie down and die, expeditiously, so if it were done, it were best done quickly. They feinted, providing U.N. peacekeepers who did not keep the peace but collaborated in the Serb siege of Sarajevo, while monitoring and counting how many shells were rained down on civilians.

Hardly an occasion has been missed to humiliate Moscow.

While we deservedly point the finger at Russia, in Rwanda the only dog in the fight barked in French. Paris supported the murderous regime and nobody else cared enough to intervene. Countries withdrew their forces and left the few behind isolated and at risk, doing their best to protect the victims.

It is in fact difficult to see a way out of the Syrian crisis in the absence of any credible actors with any moral authority. There are so many double standards that observers could easily grow cross-eyed. The U.S. is hopelessly compromised by the military, financial and diplomatic support it provides for lawless behavior by Israel, whose intervention in turn would possibly have only one positive outcome—uniting Syrians against it. The U.S., if not hampered by the Israel lobby, could make up to Iran and break the spurious unity of Alawite and Shi’i, but under the influence of the same lobby the U.S. was putting distance between itself and Turkey, which could have taken action—except, perhaps, for its less-than-exemplary behavior toward the Kurds, who straddle the regional boundaries.

In the end, where there has been action, it is because world public opinion turned against both the perpetrators and the passivity of the onlookers. That did not work too well in the case of Darfur, of course. However, it seems to be at least one of the principles behind Ban Ki-moon’s increasingly strong statements.

When he was running for the office, U.N. Secretary-General Ban pledged full support for the International Criminal Court (ICC) and for the concept of “Responsibility to Protect,” steered through the U.N. by his predecessor, Kofi Annan. Ban was sincere to the point of career suicide, since the temporary U.S. “permanent representative” at the time was none other than John Bolton, the paleocon who had made it his life work to destroy the ICC—and, for that matter, the United Nations.

Ban’s restrained delivery, sadly, means that his statements are not always taken as strongly as intended. In some ways this is a diplomatic plus. He can tell the truth without being mortally insulting to those he tells the truth about, which is indispensable in offering the U.N.’s intermediary services.

His statement in March went far beyond what most previous U.N. officials would have dared to say about a sovereign state. “Three years ago, the Syrian people stood up in peaceful protest to demand their universal rights and freedoms. In response came brutal force, escalating bloodshed and the devastation of civil war,” he declared, putting the blame clearly on the Assad regime.

“Syria is now the biggest humanitarian and peace and security crisis facing the world,” he went on, “with violence reaching unthinkable levels. Syria’s neighbors are bearing the increasingly unbearable humanitarian, security, political and socioeconomic effects of this conflict.”

Ban said he “deeply regrets the inability of the international community, the region and the Syrians themselves to put a stop to this appalling conflict,” and appealed “to the region and the international community, and in particular to the Russian Federation and the United States as the initiating states of the Geneva Conference on Syria, to take clear steps to re-energize the Geneva process.”

So the secretary-general was not just pointing the finger at the parties in the conflict, but also at the other United Nations members who have failed the Syrian people. Valerie Amos, the U.N. under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, was even more forthright, adding, “Our collective voice should be raised in protest at the flagrant violations of international humanitarian and human rights law…The international community needs to show the courage and determination to do all that is necessary to reach a political solution. Without that, we will see years more of destruction and continued brutality meted out to the people of Syria.”

It would, of course, be easy to dismiss this as empty rhetoric. But it is in fact more substantial rhetoric than the U.N. exhibited in the past, when under the shield of sovereignty and cowardice it kept its peace about the Balkans and Rwanda.

Ban has been equally forthright on the Palestinian question, calling out Israeli breaches of resolutions, the embargo on Gaza, etc.—at a time, one might add, when Egypt, a member of the Arab League, has been colluding in keeping the Strip isolated.

Some naming and shaming is certainly called for. In this benighted age, there are few independent moral figures. One could not even be sure that the late Nelson Mandela, whose gratitude for support against apartheid sometimes over-rode his ethical sense, as in his support for Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, would get this right.

That makes it even more important for a figure like Ban Ki-moon, backed perhaps by the “The Elders,” the group of statespeople set up by Mandela and Kofi Annan, to call on the various capitals—beginning with Moscow and Tehran— to act, to tell Assad that his time is up.

But that will only be the beginning. If there is a post-regime period, it will need international support. That would be a good time to call Moscow’s bluff—and invite the Russian army to send contingents of peacekeepers to the force that will be needed to maintain security in Syria.

Of course, Crimea does not assist. Moscow denies the right of Kosovars, after ethnic cleansing and massacres, to secede from the state that tried to drive them out. Washington tacitly supports the right of Israel to annex Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights and displace the indigenous inhabitants.

American negotiators back Israel in its attempt to redraw the internationally accepted 1967 line, but Washington condemns Moscow’s (rather clumsy) attempt to redress arbitrary borders drawn up by a Communist-ruled Kremlin. There are even echoes of Palestine in the Crimea: who should vote in a referendum? The Crimeans, who were driven out en masse by Stalin, or the settlers who came in afterward?

And that brings us to the birth of the United Nations. Following World War II, the key principle—evoked in the Middle East resolutions, surviving in East Timor and Western Sahara and invoked in Kuwait—is the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force. By moving in troops in large quantities and staging a dubious referendum in Crimea, Putin is breaking a cardinal principle on which the shaky post-war peace has depended. Boundaries are not sacred: they can be renegotiated, they can be arbitrated and litigated—and, in truth, the Crimean boundary is far less sacred than many others.

But the prospect of changing them by force, or with the threat of force, is what united the Security Council against Russia, which was forced to use its veto on March 14.

Putin united the world against Moscow. Yes, the U.S. invaded Panama, Grenada, Vietnam and more, but it pulled out afterward. If Saddam Hussain had just installed a friendly regime in Kuwait and pulled out, he would not have united the world against him.

Russia might not suffer military consequences from its actions, but it has orchestrated diplomatic disaster for itself and others. Watch out for a referendum in the settlement zone, citing the Putin precedent. But it will make no difference. Like Morocco and Israel, Russia might have possession, but the overwhelming majority of U.N. members will not recognize it. Ban should wait to talk to an elected Ukrainian government that one hopes will blunt the influence of the nationalists whose rhetoric and actions have done so much to foment separatism in Crimea.

Ban Right on Iran

WRMEA, March/April 2014, Pages 28-29

United Nations Report

Despite Outcome, Ban Was Right to Invite Iran to Syria Talks

By Ian Williams

U.N. and Arab League envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi (l) and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the Jan. 22 press conference closing the Geneva II peace talks on Syria. (Philippe Desmazes/AFP/Getty Images)

George Orwell invented “non-persons” in his novel 1984—people so politically incorrect they were treated as if they did not exist. He also invented the “Two Minutes Hate,” in which crowds were worked into paroxysms of rage at the mention of Big Brother’s political opponent.

Today it is not Big Brother but the Dog’s Tail which decides which is a non-country or a non-person, and identifies which countries are so unfit that they can only be ritually vilified. In Washington, the powers that be seem to blithely forget the years in which the old China lobby persuaded them to ignore Beijing, and the sore loser faction bade them to boycott Hanoi—or how, until recently, no one could talk to the Palestinians. Even now, we can only talk to some Palestinians.

In a recent example of this selective and consciously directed amnesia, Norway’s permanent representative to the U.N. told the Security Council that his country was “deeply concerned about the deteriorating economic and humanitarian situation in Gaza. We call for the lifting of the restrictions in compliance with Security Council Resolution 1860 in all its elements, including the need for security for all the civilian populations.”

Compared with what comes out of mealy-mouthed Washington, this sounds like a strong statement. But readers accustomed to the sound of silence will note the absence of names in this otherwise resounding declaration by Norway in the first Security Council meeting of 2014 on the Middle East situation. In what perilously approached Orwell’s Doublethink, Norway could not bring itself to name Israel as the country maintaining the restrictions its diplomat was deploring in defiance of previous resolutions.

In contrast, Iran did not disguise its favorite target the way it used to, since the former “Zionist Entity” has now graduated to become “The Israeli Regime”—which, the Iranian envoy pointed out, “is the only one in the region that possesses all types of Weapons of Mass Destruction but is not a party to any of the treaties banning them.”

He added that it “should also be compelled to join such treaties, in particular to accede to the NPT, without any further delay and precondition, and place all its nuclear activities under the IAEA comprehensive safeguards, in order to remove the only obstacle for the establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East proposed by Iran in 1974.”

One might not totally appreciate the messenger, but the message is spot on!

Despite, or perhaps even because of, such eminently good common sense, Washington banned Tehran from the peace talks in Geneva, to which U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon very sensibly had invited it.

As Ban recognized, you do not make peace by refusing to talk to opponents, and vetoing Iran’s involvement makes it more difficult to achieve peace. The whole debacle suggests that the Obama administration is acting from the Clinton-era script when its dealings with the U.N. are concerned. It is not surprising that Secretary- General Ban has quipped that SG stood for “Scape Goat,” but this debacle, unfairly, had him dubbed as Washington’s poodle—for taking a step with the full knowledge of the State Department and U.S. administration, but which the U.S. then expediently repudiated.

Despite being the victim of poison gas attacks itself, it is true that Iran has not exactly covered itself with ethical or humanitarian glory during the Syrian tragedy. But then, neither has Russia, which has supplied the bulk of the weaponry for the regime. And yet no one has suggested banning Moscow from the talks, or even the Assad regime itself. Additionally, after that regime, among the major obstacles to a rational and democratic solution are the fundamentalist fighters bankrolled by major Arab oil states—with whom the U.S. maintains the closest and most amicable relations.

The problem is that in some quarters—including these armers and bankers of war criminals—Iran is a non-country, which leads to palpably nonsensical acrobatics by Washington and others. The U.S. can have bases in countries bankrolling “terrorist” groups, but because those profoundly undemocratic regimes do not like Iran, the U.S. must be careful about talking to Tehran.

So Israel could sell the ayatollahs weapons in the course of Iran-Contra, during which the U.S. itself was using Tehran to arm right-wing terrorists in Nicaragua. The U.S. and Iran can both support the Iraqi government in defeating Sunni insurgents and terrorists in Iraq, and indeed colluded to combat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But because President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were, quite correctly, talking to Iran on the nuclear issue, they were on a short leash from AIPAC on Iranian entanglements. This time the dog had more than one tail: There was external pressure from Arabs and Israel, and of course the internal pressure from Congress being whipped up by AIPAC.

Clearly in the real world, it is to everyone’s advantage to have at the table a major player in the conflict—if you want it to end. But diplomacy is often best orchestrated to the sound of silence. Not mentioning issues is often crucial to getting parties to agree to talks, and so Iran’s invitation to the peace talks involved eliding the issue of whether Iran explicitly accepted the Geneva Communiqué on which the talks were based. It had not, but showed signs that it could be nudged that way.

So Ban, with the full knowledge of the U.S., invited Iran to the talks, despite the fudge on whether or not Tehran had signed off on the communiqué. He was taking a bold risk. He rightly believed that Iran should be there, but the talks were the property of the participants, each of which had an implicit veto.

It was a delicate operation, depending on complicity and discretion from all parties. Someone somewhere blew enough to bring the house of cards down. The U.S. side seems to have demanded explicit guarantees of Iranian acceptance of the communiqué, which precipitated an explicit repudiation of them by Tehran. That led to Washington demanding that Ban withdraw the invitation to Iran. American briefers immediately began to castigate Ban’s incompetence, even though it was U.S. diplomatic ineptitude that seems to have precipitated the collapse.

Was it the usual Iran haters who blew the structure down, or did someone in the administration do it so that they could appease AIPAC for defeating it on the sanctions issue? There were so many places such a complex operation could be toppled, it would be difficult to tell. It could be that one part of the administration knew what was happening, and another didn’t.

Clearly, Ban also, justifiably, feels let down by the Iranians for rising to the American bait so quickly. They should have just shut up and turned up.

But the name-calling cannot disguise the inalienable truth that if the talks are to be successful then Iran should be involved in them, that Ban was right to invite them and the U.S. foolish to disinvite them.

As a corollary, if the U.S. had a coherent foreign policy it would build on its common ground with Iran—in Iraq, in Afghanistan and, increasingly, on the nuclear issue, to persuade Tehran that there were advantages in working with Washington to force Assad to the negotiating table. Indeed, the U.S., as its own hydrocarbons bubble up out of the ground, could persuade the Arab Iran-haters to cease their pernicious activities in backing terrorist bands that tend to make Assad look good, even as they open a fifth column in the opposition’s ranks.

Washington could have expressed its regrets at the Iranian invitation, and let it stand. It is not in the longterm interests of the U.S., or any other responsive great power, to diminish the appearance of independence by the United Nations. In the end, the Geneva Talks epitomize the U.N.’s dilemma. The organization is needed to provide a neutral space, an arena for the negotiations. But it also needs the active collaboration of its most powerful and involved members to produce results.

A secretary-general can only play the hand he is dealt, and in this case Ban’s two aces turned to jokers. He should not let it dissuade him from trying to do the right thing in the future.

Iran, reality impinges in DC

http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2013/10/ian-williams-21/

It may only be a small step, but it may be a step forward

by Ian Williams

Sunday, October 6th, 2013

As Winston Churchill said: “America always does the right thing, but only after it has tried everything else first.” Finally responding to Iranian overtures has taken so long that his dictum has been tested close to destruction. And everything is connected. Apart from the symbolic handshake, American officials and politicians have been dealing with Iran all along.
One cannot help wondering if there were not some subtext on Syria behind the current rapprochement. Iran is one of the few nations in modern times to suffer chemical warfare, and, in their own odd way ,the ayatollahs can be quite principled – as we were reminded at the United Nations, about the fatwa against nuclear weapons. Is it possible that the sarin in Syria might test the Damascus-Teheran axis?
Even so, Barack Obama’s uncritical proclamation of American exceptionalism in his UN speech counterpoints his willingness to talk to Teheran. The latter shows some pragmatic acceptance that other countries than the United States and Israel have domestic policies with which their leaders have to cope with. The occasion recalls one of the better US ambassadors to the UN, Bill Richardson, who looked puzzled when questioned why other countries should accept a US offer to pay some of its arrears to the UN, but leave hundreds of millions owing. “But Congress has passed this.” Even such liberal and well-meaning statesman had difficulty accepting that there was anything between Capitol Hill and heaven, which puts into context Obama’s original thought that if Congress approved air raids on Syria, why would the UN be involved?
Mark Twain averred: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Successive generations of representatives have reinforced his point with their votes. But the contemporary breed has a particularly obtuse outlook in which the criminality is permeated with an ideological rigour that is disturbing because the stench of corruption is (only partially) masked with the whiff of sanctimony.
If Obama had gone to Congress for support to bomb Syria without a UN resolution, then some legislators would have opposed it because of its illegality. But diehard conservatives would have opposed it because they have written the Good Samaritan out of their texts. They do not see that is any of America’s business what is being done in a far away country of which they genuinely know little and care less. Indeed, their phobia about “Obamacare” shows that they do not care much about suffering at home.
However, American conservatism is not monolithic. The neo-conservatives, as their name implies, are new. Unusually, their focus is on foreign policy, as befits their Trotskyist antecedents, and they now substitute a pro-Israel and anti-Islamist sensibility for their former rabid anti-communism. The older conservatives draw on the isolationist trends that kept the US out of the League of Nations and the Second World War for so long.
The spectrum is varied. Principles are fine, but a lot of them depend on domestic lobbies to be re-elected. So neo-cons and older conservatives alike will go along with powerful campaign funders such as the defence industry lobby. Some of the libertarian right are so firmly isolationist that they defy their conservative colleagues and oppose intervention even when Israel wants it.
Which, sort of, brings us back to Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu is on his way to Washington, and is unhappy with the idea of any kind of a deal with Iran. It is remotely possible that Obama will finally tell the arrogant Likudnik that the tail does not always wag the dog. It will be difficult, and diplomatically stupid, for the administration to withdraw from a deal brokered with the Russians and Europeans. But will the Palestinians end up paying the price, with yet more concessions ton settlements and arms aid? John Kerry’s willingness to chastise the European Union over embargoes on settlements is a reminder of the lobby-trimmed limits to ethics in US foreign policy.
So the shifts in foreign policy might not be as tectonic as one would hope, but any concession to global reality in the face of domestic lobbying has to be a step forward.

US's Diplomatic Disarmament

United Nations Report

Decades of Knee-Jerk Vetos for Israel Limit U.S. Options on Syria at the U.N.

By Ian Williams

Members of the United Nations Commission on Inquiry on Syria (l-r) Carla del Ponte of Switzerland, American Karen Konig Abuzayd, chairman Paulo Sergio Pinheiro of Brazil, and Thailand’s Vitit Muntarbhorn arrive at a Sept. 16, 2013 press conference following the presentation of the commission’s report to Human Rights Council members in Geneva. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)
Syrians are the victims of a smorgasbord of global double dealing and hypocrisy that exceeds the sad standards we have become used to in this century. The arguments have seen some unlikely alliances in the West. In support of intervention are people who are genuinely concerned at the plight of Syria’s suffering people, along with those who are happy to cheer Israeli bombings of Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese people. The presence of these latter ghouls in the pro-intervention camp should give anyone pause, along with their like-minded neocon friends who want the Pentagon to use all that smart and lethal military technology.
On the other hand, we have conservative isolationists who really do not see it is as our business if foreigners are killing each other in faraway places of which they know little, and they are arm in arm with radical leftists. Once upon a time, the left preached proletarian internationalism, workers in unity across national boundaries, sending volunteers to Spain, calling for the opening of a Second Front in Europe and applauding foreign aid to the Viet Cong. In this new era of what we should puckishly call socialist nationalism, a country’s sovereignty is sacred and unimpeachable—at least if threatened by any Western power. So they come to the same conclusion as the right: let them rot.
The United Nations is used as a tool by both sides. It has been honorable but ineffective. Ban Ki-moon has actually repeatedly emphasized the horror of what has happened while eschewing Washington’s unilateralism.
Indeed, some of those who oppose intervention will piously point to the need for Security Council authorization before any action is taken against Syria, or Serbia, or Sudan. But if the U.N. does authorize action, those people will oppose it just as fervently! For the dying Syrians, the U.N. must seem thoroughly irrelevant, but it is the cockpit in which their case is being fought. Russia, a weaker power with a Security Council veto, cites the organization continuously as the necessary legitimation for action against Syria, clinging to the literal legality of U.N. obligations while being insouciant of the spirit.
President Barack Obama has been puzzlingly imprecise about U.S. attitudes to the world body, perhaps reflecting a battle inside his team with the neocons who see the U.N. as an instrument to be used when it suits them but cast aside when inconvenient. Obama’s reputation will take considerable time to recover from his initial gaffe of suggesting that the U.S. would not wait for the U.N. inspectors’ report on chemical weapons use in Damascus. After the brief post-Bush honeymoon, it is obvious that Washington’s lucid moment about the U.N. and international law has come to an end.
One would like to think that the British House of Commons vote against intervention—from the parliament that declared war on Hitler because he had invaded Poland—was not simply an expression of isolationism, but also a comment on legality. Both Cameron and Obama had signaled their willingness to attack without the U.N. report, let alone a U.N. mandate.
The members of parliament also voted in a context in which it is universally admitted that Tony Blair and Bush lied to secure support for their disastrous attack on Iraq, and in which maladroit and insincere leadership turned a bad dream into a nightmare, and turned the intervention in Afghanistan—which was legal—into a total disaster.
The framers of the concept of Responsibility to Protect—R2P, as it became known in diplomatic shorthand in the age of text and Twitter—were well aware of the pitfalls, and their document anticipated most of the perils that face its honest application. Few countries are unalloyed emulators of the Good Samaritan: they do not like risking their own citizens’ lives and taxpayers’ finances in a good cause. One might remember that the U.S. sent the bill for Desert Storm to the Gulf states, who sent on their claims to be paid with Iraqi reparations.
But the palpable disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan raise the question of who can be entrusted to run such operations? Under R2P, the time to intervene in Syria was two years ago, when the Assad regime began to massacre demonstrators. The U.S. dithered, militarily and diplomatically, emulating former Secretary of State James Baker when he said of the Balkans that the U.S. “has no dog in this fight.” Some decision makers were weighing on varying scales whether it was good for Israel or bad for Iran, and the really cynical concluded that an endless civil war eviscerating an Arab neighbor to Israel just had to be good thing.
In the end, of course, the precipitating event was the chemical weapons attack which crossed the red line that Obama probably now wishes he had not drawn in the sand. This horrific attack diverted attention from R2P to the chemical weapons issue, and allowed unusually adroit Russian diplomacy to switch the issue from the regime’s killing with mere physical impact weaponry to the chemical weapons. Before, the issue was whether to use military force under R2P to protect civilians, with or without a U.N. mandate. Now it has become simply chemical disarmament.
To the dead, it might count as irrelevant whether they were charred with napalm, burnt alive with white phosphorus, shelled in a marketplace or disintegrated by drones dropping bombs from on high.
Syria had not hitherto signed the conventions banning chemical and biological weapons, one reason being that it had neighbors—notably Iraq and Israel—who also had not. Interestingly, the Israeli government is happy that Syria might be disarmed, but less ecstatic about Damascus ratifying the convention, since that raises the question of why poor little Israel has not—not to mention the nuclear issue! Indeed, the U.S. itself was a relatively late signatory to the convention.
Even then, there was something very Israeli in tone about the idea of massive air-strikes to “punish” the regime. Its sole purpose was to insulate Obama from the charges that he was doing nothing. Bombing the chemical and biological weapons stocks carries fairly obvious risks. The chances of massive casualties for the civilians who are being “protected” are very high, while the denial of any intention of regime change misses the point. How else does one stop the regime massacring its citizenry without changing it? Apart from warming the cold hearts of those who always applaud bombings of Arabs and Muslims, it is difficult to see any point in the threatened exercise.
In an ideal world, a surgical military strike to take out the regime might have stopped the killing, but that is far too late, and the only country with the wherewithal to do it, the U.S., is manifestly unsuited for the role after recent experiences, even in the unlikely event that it could persuade its fellow U.N. members to entrust it with a mandate.

Past Humiliations

Moscow’s cooperation over the chemical issue might raise other possibilities. Rus­sian attitudes need to be put into historical and diplomatic context. Yes, there is the basic immorality of support for Assad (as for Qaddafi and Milosevic before). But Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was Russia’s man at the U.N. after the first Iraq war, in which Moscow cooperated in the spirit of the New World Order. It was regularly humiliated by seeing its views set aside and resolutions with which it had originally colluded being stretched to justify actions, bombings, embargos and the economic destruction of a nation and people, well beyond any reasonable reading of the resolutions. Lying Western leaders bypassed Russia for the second Iraq war, and again in Libya, when reluctantly conceding a principle on R2P Moscow once again was ignored in the operation’s execution. Western behavior has indeed been such as to justify some degree of paranoia! Bush and Blair’s precedents of taking such phrases beyond the limits certainly explains Moscow’s reluctance to see any mention of forcible intervention, even in a chemical disarmament resolution.
The fact remains, however, that Lavrov has effectively thwarted the U.S. push—which entailed, one suspects, some heavy pressure by Moscow on its ally in Damascus, including a threat of withdrawal of support. Sadly this shows what President Vladimir Putin could have achieved earlier but chose not to, so there are no haloes on offer.
And then we come to continuing hypocrisy. U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power in September was defending the possibility of intervening without the approval of the U.N. Security Council. However, Washington can try to get a resolution at an Emergency Special General Assembly, under the “Uniting for Peace” resolution designed precisely to bypass a vetoed Council. The two reasons for not doing so illustrate the lamentable cumulative effects of American undiplomacy over the decades. Ironically, to assemble the alleged “Coalition of the Willing” in Iraq, the isolationists of the Bush administration carefully courted, albeit via a somewhat rough wooing, many small nations, as did then-U.N. Ambassador John Bolton in his quasi-theological crusade to thwart the International Criminal Court.
Since the Obama administration is much less single-minded on Syria, it has not devoted similar resources. A Coalition of the Dithering somehow lacks focus. Most perniciously of all, however, the canker of reflexive support for Israel has led the U.S., under both Republican and Democrat administrations, to deny the legal validity of the very process it had pioneered to fight the Korean War despite the Soviet veto. The reason for that denial, of course, is that the Palestinians had rediscovered the technique to combat the automatic U.S. veto on behalf of Israel. Washington has therefore sacrificed a valuable legal and diplomatic lever—which, by contagion, tempts it to illegal action.
A General Assembly resolution calling for an arms embargo might not have “legal” effect, but it certainly would have a profound diplomatic and moral effect on Moscow. It could also signal exasperation with Washington’s Gulf allies and their support for the Salafist wing of the opposition, whose sanguinary and shameless efforts have given Damascus such a propaganda coup. But Washington shows no signs of sacrificing its other interests for a bunch of dying and dispossessed Syrians by threatening sanctions against Russia or the Gulf.
Sadly, however, while the U.N. can now offer hospice care to Syria and help it to survive, there is no miracle cure in sight. Through its agencies it can help the refugees and the internally displaced, and it can provide inspectors and mechanisms to implement a cease-fire if Kerry and Lavrov can pull one off. It will certainly be part of any solution—but there are no unmitigatedly happy endings in view.

Roads to Damascus

/http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2013/09/ian-williams-20/

Intervention intentions and a credible Syrian course

by Ian Williams

Tribyne Friday, September 6th, 2013

Defenders of dictators throughout the world have made non-intervention a point of alleged principle. It camouflages their record of callous disregard of the suffering of people at the hands of thugs who invoke “anti-imperialist” rhetoric to cover their murders. On the other hand, some proponents of intervention are clearly not motivated by the suffering of Syrian civilians. That should not detract from the overwhelming moral and legal justification for international action to stop the murderous activities of the Syrian regime. However, while is there plenty of scope for uneasy consciences as the world has stood by and watched the regime’s depredations, we must beware of would-be brain surgeons carrying sledgehammers, whose motives and methods are equally dubious.
Even the better-intentioned often seem to be in the “something must be done” school of politics, sending a message to domestic constituencies. Barack Obama has put himself in that camp, committing himself to “punish” Bashar al-Assad, with no clear outcome to the action except defiance of the United Nations and the rule of the international law invoked against Damascus, as well as risking the sort of devastation caused by the Iraq war and its aftermath.
Obama has implicitly joined the neo-conservative ideologues who want “action” and punitive bombing because they want to send a “signal” to Iran and a message of support to Israel.
There have been comparisons with Kosovo, but the key intervention there was not the bombing campaign, which was conducted from high altitude to allow Bill Clinton to show that he was “doing something” while not risking the domestic fallout of shot-down American pilots. It was the threat of ground forces moving in caused Slobodan Milosevic to run up the white flag.
There are, of course, international conventions against chemical weapons, but killing so many innocent people, whether with cluster munitions, as still issued to the United States military, phosphorus (as used in Gaza), or napalm, is equally reprehensible and such actions are surely covered by the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. And, as Tony Blair and George W Bush graphically demonstrated, the principle of humanitarian intervention is susceptible to partisan interpretation, which is why it has to be applied so cautiously.
The Syrian people are victims, not only of Assad’s ruthless reluctance to cede power, but also of disastrous diplomatic decisions by the West. Russia’s stance is not excusable but understandable in the context of constant American snubs. But Russian support for Assad is as indefensible as unqualified American support for Israel, which poisons every diplomatic initiative in the region. The US now disdains the UN’s Uniting For Peace procedure under which the Korean War was fought, because the Palestinians have used it to bypass the automatic American veto in support of Israel.
The Israel connection also stops Washington dealing rationally with Teheran. As victims of (Western-backed) chemical attacks, even the Iranians might be open to discussion. The Israeli connection should give pause to any American involvement in military intervention. The US might have the military resources, but its record shows that it is not ideologically or politically equipped to meddle directly in Arab and Muslim affairs.
It is not enough to shout “No to intervention”. Nor is it enough to bleat about diplomacy – only a credible military threat might bring Assad to reasonable negotiations. A regime implicated in chemical warfare might amount to a diplomatic weapon for use by any UN members genuinely concerned. Members of the Security Council should and tell both Moscow and Washington that, Israeli concerns notwithstanding, they will take the issue to the General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace procedure if Russia uses its veto.
Since Vladimir Putin’s stance is as much about face as love for Assad, the prospect of defeat in the court of world opinion might make him more amenable to joint action.
The British Parliament’s declaration of independence, backed by other countries, could give Obama the cover he needs to face off the neo-cons and the Israel lobby over ill-considered intervention and yet win some agreement from traditionally isolationist Americans that some considered investment in Syria is necessary.

East and West, meeting in twain?

Can Obama, Xi find common ground?
Special to The BRICS Post
June 7, 2013, 3:34 am

In 1907, US President Teddy Roosevelt signaled the arrival of the US as as world power by sending the “Great White Fleet” in  a grand gesture to the globe it circumnavigated. It was a little premature: the ships were obsolescent and relied on the kindness of strangers to refuel but it did mark Washington’s aspirations to put truth in the rumours about the Monroe Doctrine.
Similarly, Xi Jinping’s grand tour, which begins in California and a meeting with US President Barack Obama on June 7, is a debut rather than a consolidation.
It is, perhaps wisely, more economic in its theme, brandishing investments rather than waving big sticks.
While modern financial and trading networks need not follow the consolidated marine and land boundaries of previous rising empires, Xi’s triumphal progress through America’s backyard – the Caribbean and Mexico – demonstrates how much more effectively powerful China’s economic success is than the Soviet weaponry had been. “The China Dream,” is Xi’s rallying cry of a China with a seat at the top table.
It will be interesting to note the progress, with small indicators like the almost certain relaxation of Chinese regulations that restrict imports of Mexico’s Tequila because of methanol levels. A few extra Chinese hangovers is a small price to pay for an economic beachhead right on the Rio Grande.
It is fascinating to watch the interplay between the aspirant and receding superpowers and it is reassuring that both sides are obviously thinking seriously, and not necessarily reflexively about it.
When Richard Nixon went to China, apart from recognition of the previous pariah state’s future potential, at least part of  the White House motive was counterbalancing the Soviet Union. President Xi’s tour of the America epitomizes a renewed appreciation on both sides, but above all of China as a potential counterweight to the US itself. A less confident US is relinquishing the xenophobia, or more specifically Sinophobia, that previously greeted Chinese investment interests.
Across the US, job-hungry local governments yearn for the Yuan to come in and do what their own bankers are refusing to do – invest locally.
The times, they’re a-changing
Previous ups and downs of the great powers have been marked by major conflagrations, and we can be grateful that the demotion of the Soviet Union was relatively peaceful. Two decades ago, it would have been difficult to believe that the US of Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars and the New American Century fame would have been quite so polite to its most likely supplanter.
Two decades ago, even Japan was viewed with a jaundiced eye as it surged close to overtaking the US economically, even though militarily it was no threat, and indeed, was almost a US protectorate. The costs of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have taxed US power even as it outspends the rest of the world militarily.
But the relationship between China and the US is unique. While there is very real rivalry as they both compete for the same space at the top of the table, it is like a Puerto Rican knife fight with the combatants tied by the wrists to each other. The US needs China, which, after all, has financed Washington’s wars with its purchase of US dollars. Conversely, China needs the US. Beijing can neither forgo those reserves deposited in its rivals’ Treasury vaults and needs its markets to fuel the growth of its economy.
Xi knows that the secret of continuing Communist Party of China (CPC) power in the face of potential domestic dissatisfaction is the growing prosperity that keeping US consumers happy brings.
However, China is developing military potential along with its economic success and the friction over disputed islands around the China Sea is worrying. The scenario of a rising uppity power confronting one that is relatively getting weaker, is all the more worrying when we consider that network of alliances and defence commitments that the US has across the region. China has interests and claims in an area where the US is far from home but has ties made in former days of glory.
Pulling treaty triggers

There has been rising tension over disputed islands in the China Sea [Xinhua]

In 1914, we saw what happened as a result of those treaty triggers being pulled, and in the South China Sea, US commitments to Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines could drag the US into a local conflict with China where the latter has its forces concentrated. The US, of course, is still in imperial overstretch mode, with bases and commitments worldwide. At home, the American public has strictly limited enthusiasm for wars for far-away countries of which, after all, it knows amazingly little.
Conservatives have set up a shopping lists of what Obama should demand of Xi, on economic reforms, currency policy, government etc. Obama is more sophisticated than many of his predecessors – and of course economic circumstances have weakened his hand. He is, one hopes, not going to be crass in his demands of China.
One assumes that Obama would realize just how counterproductive it would be for the US, whose economic model has never looked so dodgy, to lecture China, for whom a growth rate four or five times the US’s, seems to be overstretched in its own right. He will also understand that Xi has his own domestic politics to worry about.
The Communist Party has pretty much abandoned the dialectic of the class struggle, and the glue that holds it together is the nationalism of an oft-humiliated civilization.
So the talks are an opportunity for quiet dialogue and a development of rapport between the two leaders. Beijing might offer magnanimous compromises or exit routes on many of the maritime border issues, for example, but would certainly bridle at any ultimata. But the US is hardly in a position to brandish ultimata.
Room for compromise
In the case of Taiwan, for example, the administration’s efforts are more about stopping Taipei tickling the dragon than building up a prickly defence. The long obfuscation of Congressional efforts to sell F-16s to Taipei shows successive presidents’ deference to Beijing’s sensibilities, which on the face of it is illogical appeasement. The planes are only of use if China attacks – no one seriously expects Taiwan to attack the mainland, after all. But Washington has to take account of the importance of the island in China’s inner party rivalries.
There is room for compromise. If we consider, for example, North Korea as China’s Israel, an embarrassing but ineradicable ally, it would frame the limits of what Washington could reasonably expect China to do in a low key way. Xi can no more disown Kim Jong-un publicly than Obama can repudiate Netanyahu, but there are important gestures available.
Obama could pledge, for example, that US forces would withdraw from the Korean Peninsula in the wake of any re-unification, thus avoiding the triumphalistic mistakes in Europe that still fuel Russian resentment.
In fact, there is another model the two might adopt. Britain and the US were similar rivals and partners, tied as much by financial chains as any alleged common bonds of culture and language.
The US facilitated the decline of its erstwhile rival, moving from debtor to creditor – and, it might be added, doing its best to stab its ally in the back financially even as they fought together. But it has not approached military tensions since the British burnt the White House in 1814.
Of course, unless the Tea Party triumphs and splits the US into autonomous fragments, the US is never going to decline as precipitately as Britain shorn of empire, but it is possible for a rising China to be partners with a still powerful, although relatively declining America.
It would appear that Xi and the Chinese are prepared for this.
In terms of domestic politics, Japan is the foreign scapegoat up front while the US is relatively benign in China’s image.
Similarly, China benefits in the US from not being the Soviet Union and also the  main trading partner, an object of admiration and emulation.
Xi and Obama might be the two right people in the right place to make the mutually respectful links needed – and these talks will demonstrate that, one way or another.