Sinning, Preaching, Hypocrisy and the Saddam Verdict

Let Him Who is Without Sin Tie the First Noose.

As Bush welcomed the news of Saddam's impending hanging, one could almost suspect that his fervour against the Iraqi leader is motivated by the same fears that led Ted Haggard to preach Hellfire so strongly against homosexuality-to expunge the guilt of his White House cabal.

Civilized countries no longer execute criminals-not even someone like Saddam Hussein who is indeed guilty of the most heinous crimes, Ramsey Clark and similar apologists notwithstanding. Even less do they engineer the timing of a death sentence in order to win a Mid-Term election.

If the Iraqi prosecutors had tried and found Saddam guilty of the much bigger massacres using poison gas at Halabja rather than the token case of the mass murder in Dujail in 1982, it would have raised some very interesting questions. Instead, Iraqi prosecutors, backed by American legal brains, showed singular restraint. Of all his crimes, and all his hundreds of thousands of victims, they chose this one incident with 148 dead. That is rather fewer than Palestinians accuse Ariel Sharon of killing in the Sabra and Shatila two months later.

It is of course horrendous, but in scale far less than Saddam achieved in later years, and indeed far less than George W. Bush alleged against the Iraqi leader when he was trying to spur the UN General Assembly into supporting invasion in 2002.

Even so this verdict does firmly establish that the hand that Donald Rumsfeld shook in 1983 was already blood-soaked. But subsequent events show the active complicity of the White House cabal. Following that massacre, and while Saddam was waging a war of aggression against Iran, the US extended billions in agricultural credits, which amounted to a "War for Food" program, to Baghdad. Indeed, in 1984 Washington sold Iraq the Bell helicopters used later in 1988 to spread the poison gas.

The Republican administration and its chums in London sold the fixings for weapons of mass destruction to rain on the Kurds and Iranians, in the war that the UN later (albeit somewhat shamefacedly in the teeth of Washington's displeasure) declared that Saddam Hussein had started.

In the context of the prosecutors' decision to hang the whole case on Dujail, the refusal to refer the case to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, or to a special international tribunal, or even to allow a hybrid international tribunal as in Sierra Leone, acquires a new significance.

When the trial began, John Bolton's pathological opposition to the UN in general and to the International Criminal Court in particular looked like sufficient motive not to internationalize the trial. Rationally of course, the Iraqi legal system was hardly experienced in conducting fair trials on such matters, and the social implications of Sunni perceptions of Shi'a vengeance should have raised alarms. However, the Bush administration ran the Occupation, as their British allies at the time complained, and almost everyone now agrees, with FEMA-like incompetence and ignorance.

In legal matters we know the Bush administration has the A-team. (Just check with the Supreme Court in re Bush vs. Florida in 2000!). They would have realized that if the case had gone to an international tribunal, with an independent prosecutor, then the case would almost certainly have been much more voluminous and extensive, and would have covered crimes committed during the honeymoon initiated by Rumsfeld's visit.

How could the Bush administration applaud the hanging of a man whom they supported when he was carrying out his crimes? He did not become a murderer when he invaded a Kuwait: he was already a recidivist aggressor, murderer and torturer when US diplomats effectively stopped the UN reviewing both his invasion of Iran and his use of poison gas.

In any real justice system, the severity of the former Iraqi leader's crimes after 1982 is in no way diminished by the support that the British, American and even Russian governments offered him while he was carrying out some of the worst of them.

There is a very good case for the ending of impunity for sovereign leaders that international jurisdiction now offers, and to that extent, it is satisfying to see Saddam Hussein brought to justice. But that cause is diminished when the illegal invaders and occupiers of a country set up a court and manipulate a trial and execution for political advantage at home.

That picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein should be on every Democratic candidate's web site and election material to remind voters of who not only started the disastrous current war in Iraq, but gave such a hands-up to the murderous career of the current fall-guy.

Memo to Kerry: Criticize, Don't Apologize

Launch the Swift Boats!
IAN WILLIAMS
Senator John Kerry's recent comments to a group of college students that they could work hard in school or risk getting "stuck in Iraq," put the draft-dodgers in the Bush Administration Republican in paroxysms of predictable rage. Kerry, who first responded with anger at the GOP's criticism and later apologized, should stop being nice about the Deserter-in-Chief. He should be reminding voters that the President who has sent almost 3,000 allies and untold thousands of Iraqis to their deaths deserted his post during the Vietnam War.
Kerry should be reminding voters that while he himself served honorably in Vietnam, a war he disagreed with, almost the entire Bush team dodged the war that they supported. Similarly few if any of the legislators now calling for " staying the course" have any family members out there in Iraq.
He'd also do well to bring to voters' attention the continuing arrogance of the President, as revealed to Bob Woodward in Bush at War: "I'm the commander--see, I don't need to explain--I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
Finally, he should consider drawing public attention to Bush's own conduct during the Vietnam era, drawn from my 2004 book, Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Own Past.

Deserter

When the government was drafting his contemporaries and sending them to Vietnam, George W Bush joined the Air National Guard in Texas, and ticked the box saying "no" to overseas service: a choice denied most of his contemporaries then, who did not have the Ivy League connections to enter such units. More importantly, such choices are denied now to the National Guardsmen who were not only called up for service in Iraq, but have found their terms extended while they were out in the desert.
All over the world, men and women are now dying and being maimed because George W. Bush had lived through "the war of his generation," without hearing a shot fired in anger, And perhaps because "Little Googen" as his indulgent parents called him has been trying to emulate his genuinely heroic father, without actually risking his life. His father had left school at 18 and used his family connections to become the youngest pilot in the Navy.


Soldier of Fortune

Since he has persuaded the vast majority of Americans, if not the citizens of any other country in the world, that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center, perhaps we should not be surprised at George W. Bush's success in passing himself off as a veteran with so many Americans, including many who are actually combat-seasoned veterans themselves.

As the Tet Offensive was winding down, family, friends and his own faith in his entitlement slid him into 111th Tactical Recon Texas Air National Guard. Having plotted the course, young George had taken the aptitude test for air force officers on 19 January 68 in New Haven. The test showed him with a grade of 25% for pilot aptitude, 50% for navigation, and 95% for "officer quality." There were 500 applicants. Bush was accepted immediately.

One suspects that you get 75% for "officer quality" by simply answering yes to questions like, "Is your family rich, politically connected, and did you go to Yale or Harvard. Indeed, the tests could not be too hard because he scored an impressive 85% on verbal aptitude. It must have been a multiple choice test, since one cannot really see him getting that if he had had to write a sentence.

Texas circles knew this unit specifically as "Air Canada," since joining it had all the advantages of fleeing North of the Border as far as service in Vietnam was concerned and none of the political or meteorological downside. It was a "champagne unit" since its personnel was so rich and well-connected. Another comrade out of arms was the son of Lloyd Bentsen, which is one reason why the Texas Dems have now pushed this issue over the years.

In the unlikely event of the ghosts of Santana and Zapata ever rising on the Texas border to reclaim the Lone Star State for the United States of Mexico, then the Texas National Guard may have seen some tough fighting. But there was no way they were going to Vietnam, hence its popularity.
As Colin Powell said in his memoirs before joining Bush's cabinet, "I can never forgive a leadership that said, in effect: These young men, poor, less educated, less privileged, are expendable (someone described them as 'economic cannon fodder'), but the rest are too good to risk."

Powell added, presciently and inconveniently, "I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well placed... managed to wrangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units. Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country."

Bush's first solo flight was hymned by the PR office of the unit, "George Walker Bush is one member of the younger generation who doesn't get his kicks from pot, or hashish or speed...As far as kicks are concerned, Lt Bush gets his from the roaring afterburner of the F-102." One cannot help wondering about the significance of the omissions in that press release. Did the PR drafter know something, since booze and cocaine are conspicuously absent from the pilot's alternative kick list?
Certainly, Helen Thomas, the veteran correspondent reduced the White House spokesman Scott McClellan to incoherent evasion in February 2004 when she asked him if the President had been ordered to do community service. McClellan wriggled, squirmed, tried counter-attacking, and was being so obviously evasive that the rest of the press corps joined in trying to get him to either say yes, or no or that he would approach the President to answer the question. The failure to respond should perhaps be set next to the refusal to deny categorically the use of illegal drugs before 1974, and perhaps also his sudden conversion to charitable work in inner cities at a time when he was supposed to be flying with the Guard.
One does not have to be too partisan to smell a fish here. We do not know its size, or its species, or even where it is lurking, but you do not need the nose of a conspiracy theorist to smell it.

Was George W. Bush a deserter? Almost certainly in the legal sense, but certainly in the moral sense. He took active and multiple steps to avoid physical risk in "The War of his Generation," to which he lent political support.

Absent without leave? Certainly. He went missing in Alabama when he asked to be posted there so he could campaign for a family friend. He failed to report for duty and defied a direct order to attend a medical examination. In doing so he made himself unfit for his duty, flying, every bit as surely as if he had "let off a shotgun next to his ear," as he complained other people did to avoid conscription. The only credible person who saw him on a base for a year was a dentist who examined his teeth. Once. Contemporary National Guardsmen are now in custody for refusing to return to Iraq. Sergeant Camilo Meija served a year in military prison for refusing to return to war. Bush never went.

James Madison in Political Reflections, in 1799 described two "momentous truths" in politics: "First: That the fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad. Secondly: That there never was a people whose liberties long survived a standing army." One cannot help wondering whether Karl Rove and Bush the Younger may not have read this and taken it as more in the nature of sound political advice than a principled warning!

While the founders envisaged unscrupulous monarchs, chief executives or generals using the army to seize power, it is not so much the actual army, but its prestige that the modern day putschists abuse. They themselves are what Christopher Hitchens calls the "braver sort of Pentagon intellectuals," who are too cerebral to wave flags but quite happy to encourage the habit in others, and their comrades in the White House, such as Dick Cheney and his entourage, not to mention the Civilian-in-Chief himself, George W. Bush.

Between them, in the name of those hyped-up external dangers they have made it almost blasphemous to question the finance, purpose or conduct of the armed forces or of the President who has done so much to destroy the lives and living standards of serving military and veterans alike.

There should be hoots of derision every time he and his Chickenhawk entourage play soldiers. As Peter Ustinov said, most kids play soldiers when young, but most grow up. Thanks to Bush, lots of children across the world are growing up without a parent. And some will never grow up at all.

More Beating about the Bush on elections

Foreign Misadventures Hit home
By Ian Williams
Asia Times, 2 November 2006

For once, foreign policy is a major issue in a US election, and not just the Iraq fiasco. Indeed, it is possible that North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong-il may have inadvertently won the US mid-term elections for the Democrats with his nuclear explosion. Until then, there were definite signs that the beleaguered White House was considering military operations against Iran - a new October surprise to concentrate the voters' minds on the "war on terror."

Even this White House crew would have difficulty justifying military action against the ayatollahs - who deny they even want a bomb - while leaving a triumphant Kim boasting and demonstrating that he actually has one.

As a result, the elections could break the long Republican monopoly on federal power, if, as seems possible, President George W Bush's party loses either the Senate or the House of Representatives - or even both.

Of course, the White House has made the major contribution to its own defeat.

North Korean nukes notwithstanding, any White House plan to attack Iran was unlikely to work. Two years ago, the Republicans may have been able to persuade voters that when you are stuck deep in a muddy hole you dig downward to find the exit. Now, despite the best cover that the media moguls can give it, the administration has lost the confidence of the public.

In addition to that domestic distrust, no amount of gloss or conservative talk-show hosts can cover the disaster of the Iraq war, and as the American casualties mount they are becoming less and less easy to hide. Apart from a few neo-conservative ideologues, there is no constituency at all for sending US troops to die in a new Korean war, let alone in Iran. Indeed, the majority of voters think the US should be talking directly to Pyongyang and Tehran on the nuclear issue, which, hidebound by ideology, the White House refuses to do.

The turning point was the fiasco of Hurricane Katrina, when the depths of incompetence, patronage and corruption were revealed to a shocked United States. It has continued with scandal after scandal, as bribery, gay pedophilia and similar issues have chewed away at the Republican pretensions to being the party of "moral values" of the kind espoused by southern and midwestern Americans.

It is not that the Democratic Party is particularly moral or resistant to corruption, but a decade in opposition has not really given it the same opportunities to dip into the till in Washington as its Republican colleagues.

Unprecedentedly, polls now show that the public thinks the Democrats would do better on security issues, and they have always tended to trust them more on domestic issues. Nonetheless, incumbency is a powerful thing in the United States.
The founding fathers, a disparate group of local elites, carefully designed the constitution to avoid any one group or party getting overweening power. For years now, the Republicans have bucked the spirit of those checks and balances.

With an almost Bolshevik discipline, ideology and drive to power, they have used their power to pack the judicial benches, federally and locally, redrawing congressional districts and rewriting the electoral rules in the states that they control. The fruits of that were a Republican majority on the Supreme Court, all nominally pledged to support states' rights, overturning the Florida courts on the 2000 presidential election in one of its most shamelessly partisan judgments since it enforced the return of escaped slaves from the north to the plantations.

They have looted the Treasury to hand over untold billions to their wealthy supporters, who, in return, have poured cash into the fight against most Democratic challengers, either directly or through a shadowy range of foundations, media operations and allegedly independent committees.

We have to remember next Tuesday's election is not just a referendum on Iraq. US elections are overwhelming about local officials and issues. We can guarantee that the Republicans and their surrogates will pull some of the sleaziest stunts imaginable in the next week to take people's minds off the unholy mess in the Middle East. Any party that slimes a paraplegic war veteran for lack of patriotism will clearly stop at nothing, but that is precisely what they did last time to defeat triple-amputee senator Max Cleland of Georgia.

On the positive side, millions of voters who earlier did not want to roll in the mud of a US election have been exasperated and scared into action. If there is a victory, apart from the ineptitude of Bush, a major factor will be the upsurge of grassroots movements such as MoveOn.org, marshaling election workers, cash and enthusiasm to key fights.

Many people watched the last two elections with horror at the oddities of electronic voting machines, changing rules and the exclusion of voters, and lawyers and volunteers across the country are watching carefully.

That raises the perennial question of the Democratic Party, of which it could be said, as Dorothy Parker said of Los Angeles, there's no there there. Control of what passes for a Democratic Party nationally is still firmly in the hands of the more conservative wing. While there is no doubt that a Democratic seizure of either house of Congress would be good news, there is a long way to go for euphoria. Some of the Democratic contenders have triangulated themselves so far to the right that even if they do not follow White House aide Karl Rove's orders, they will vote for reactionary measures of their own accord.

In the long term the dilemma is how those motivated millions can exercise their continuing influence on the Democratic Party machinery in a way to keep it on course, and electable - which is not necessarily the same as pandering to the modern version of the old southern Democrats around the Clintons in the Democratic Leadership Council. In general, American electors are more sensible than the people who buy their way into office with money from vested interests, but even without wobbly voting machines, they have difficulty in controlling their alleged representatives.

Ian Williams is author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.

The Devil and Bolton

On Wednesday, the General Assembly rested to allow the Latin America group to decide what to do in the face of the deadlock between Guatemala and Venezuela over the region's temporary Security Council.


A Devil's Bargain

IAN WILLIAMS

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061030/iwilliams2


Ian Williams writes that the United States may well have its way and exclude Venezuela from the UN Security Council, in retribution for Hugo Chávez's diabolical roast of George W. Bush. But doesn't the world have larger issues to worry about?


At midday Tuesday, the sixteenth ballot in the proxy sumo wrestling match between Venezuela and Guatemala for the Latin American seat on the UN Security Council made the 2000 Florida recount seem like a consensual vote of acclamation.

Although the seat represents the Latin American and Caribbean region in the UN, and Venezuela had a clear majority there, the whole General Assembly votes for contested seats. It takes a two-thirds majority to win the election; although Guatemala, the United States' favored candidate, was a clear leader in the first four ballots, the repeated attritional voting only shifted a handful of votes to and fro.

But as the delegates got exhausted and frustrated, the swings became wider; at one point Venezuela and Guatemala reached neck and neck at ninety-three votes each. After three inconclusive ballots, Mexico and, mysteriously, Cuba put their respective hats in the ring, each getting one vote. By Tuesday morning the swings had reduced again. The rules allow alternating triplets of ballots in which any country can declare candidacy in an attempt to break the deadlock.

But this is a grudge vote of attrition between the United States and its opponents. The repeated voting has been unmatched since the three-month marathon in 1979 between Cuba and Colombia. But to maintain that took the discipline of the cold war. The whisper has it that the Dominican Republic is waiting to climb over the bodies of the contending parties when the delegates get too tired to carry on. The United States will support that; in fact, it will support almost anyone but Hugo Chavez but will do so discreetly to avoid the reaction that overt Washington sponsorship brings.

The vote, whether delegates like it or not, and many do not, has developed elements of a popularity contest between the United States and Chavez. Many delegates would like to look at larger issues, and certainly among the nonaligned nations are some who may not totally appreciate Chavez but who think that Guatemala suffers from being Washington's standard-bearer.

There is indeed a tradition in the UN for delegates to use the secret ballot to show what they think of overweening American diplomacy--for example, the United States lost a seat on the Human Rights Commission in 2001. Many observers at the UN--including myself, frankly--thought that Venezuela would be a shoo-in for a two-year term on the UN Security Council. But delegates clearly are refusing to have parameters dictated to them.

If, as seems likely when the delegates get tired and a consensus candidate emerges, and Hugo Chavez loses, he will doubtless interpret it as vindication of his denunciations of the United Nations as an American-dominated anachronism. He will miss the point. A body of 192 countries, a majority of whom have have often publicly voted to deny and rebut idiosyncratic American interpretations of international law, chose not to vote for Venezuela in a secret ballot.

That goes beyond Chavez's diabolical roast of George W. Bush during the September 21 general session. Chávez supporters could indeed point to almost equally ludicrous statements from the Bush Administration, but one hopes for higher standards. The first impulse at the UN is to try for consensus, which is difficult enough with John Bolton representing the United States but would not be helped with a perpetual dogfight between him and Chávez.

Additionally, even if Chavez's domestic human rights record is by no means as bad as Washington depicts it, his diplomatic record on human rights at the UN is associated with the world's worst. Venezuela abstained along with Iran and Belarus on the formation of the new Human Rights Council--but then, to put it in perspective, Israel and the United States voted against it!

Ironically similar to the Bush doctrine, recent Venezuelan diplomacy has argued that absolute state sovereignty protects Chavez and any of his friends from international scrutiny but assumes the right to interfere anywhere else. While the US media played up Chavez's buffoonish shtick against Bush, they overlooked his equally intemperate attacks on the "Responsibility to Protect" adopted unanimously at the previous year's UN summit, which under current circumstances is tantamount to providing diplomatic cover for the Sudanese mass murders in Darfur.

Delegates may indeed question the US doctrine of presidential infallibility, particularly in relation to Bush, but watching murderous impunity in Sudan, and seeing a nuclear North Korea rising, will not attract them to Chavez's reflexive opposition to everything Washington stands for.

UN members do not want to expel the United States from the United Nations, nor to mount a crusade (let alone a jihad) against the world's only superpower. They want to engage the United States in a constructive way, even if this often appears as unrequited love. They assume, probably correctly, that comfortably elected South Africa, Italy, Belgium and Indonesia will be more constructive and selective in their opposition.

So while the United States may have its way in excluding Venezuela from the Security Council, it is unlikely to have the entirely pliable Council it would like. Domestically, however, the Administration would certainly declare a Venezuelan defeat to be another notch on John Bolton's belt, and use it to reopen the issue of his confirmation, or to justify an end run around an overly strict interpretation of the law on recess appointments. For most people, the millenarian visions of both Chavez and Bolton would be a distraction from the pressing issues that face the UN and the world.

Ban and the Bomb

Talk to Pyongyang, not at it
By Ian Williams
Asia Times
Knowing North Korea's penchant for symbolism, one cannot help wondering whether the timing of its apparent nuclear test was meant to rain on Ban Ki-moon's party as the United Nations secretary general-designate. As it was, the business of selecting a South Korean as the world's secular pope was rushed through with almost unseemly brusqueness by the UN Security Council so it could discuss Kim Jong-il's diversion.

The General Assembly will probably confirm Ban's appointment, predictably with no dissent, on Friday. It is probably too late now for his Sunshine Policy of engagement with North Korea to be held against him.

But it has been noticed that John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, expressed complete and almost proprietary satisfaction with Ban's appointment. It is almost reassuring to note that the US envoy's soulmates in the conservative Heritage Foundation had expressed doubts about Ban's suitability, citing Seoul's reluctance "to confront North Korea on human rights or its belligerence and nuclear ambitions" and alleging that "Ban has said little about UN reform, and there are questions about his commitment to it. The current government in South Korea campaigned in 2004 with strong anti-United States rhetoric." [1]

Even so, the Security Council agreed a unanimous statement condemning North Korea's action, and even more predictably showed signs of deadlock as the various parties put forward their widely differing tactics for resolving the issue.

Last week, Bolton had said the UN was not the "alpha and omega" of such disputes. As one of the cartographers of the "axis of evil" that lumped Iraq, Iran and North Korea together, he should know. It is indeed axiomatic that virtually no one is happy about Pyongyang's test, but it is entirely legal, and one of the reasons for that is the United States' and Bolton's diehard fight against improving the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime.

North Korea finally opted out of the NPT in 2002, which it was perfectly entitled to do, but would not have been if the treaty had been strengthened, as most delegates wanted. Bolton, who does not believe in international treaties that bind the US, or for that matter Israel, frustrated any attempts to strengthen the NPT regime. The administration of US President George W Bush has been trying for years to inch toward renewed nuclear testing, regardless of the NPT agreement to reduce and run down existing nuclear-weapons stocks.

Nonetheless, for once - perhaps it is the stopped-clock syndrome - Bush is entirely correct. Although there are more than a few degrees of hypocrisy involved in existing and new nuclear powers who have never signed the NPT, the entire world community, committed as most nations are to the non-proliferation regime, is upset at Monday's explosion.

And as the International Court ruled over Libyan sanctions, Security Council decisions override any existing international law, so in the unlikely event of a strong resolution emerging, North Korea is in deep trouble.

The comrades in Pyongyang are certainly not the most cosmopolitan types, so one could almost forgive them for misreading signals. Israel has 200-plus nuclear warheads, and gets billions of dollars of free money, with the diplomatic equivalent of a Monopoly game "get out of jail free" card. Pakistan gets lots of support, even as its prime nuclear scientist is proved to have been disseminating bomb kits in the Muslim world. India explodes a bomb, and Washington subsequently rewards it with an offer of civilian nuclear technology. What conclusion is Kim supposed to reach from this?

For once, Bolton's unilateralist supporters who traditionally argue that the UN should not put obstacles in the way of US diplomacy are right, at least in the cases of North Korea and Iran. This is not really the UN's business. Both regimes are trying to get the US to talk to them, and the UN, the six-party talks and similar devices are simply fig leaves to cover up the United States' refusal to engage in diplomacy. It cannot bring itself to say publicly that it has no intention of making war on them.

One could admire the principles, if they were consistently applied. However, welcoming President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan as a visiting anti-terrorist hero, while maintaining relations with Uzbekistan, suggests that there is more than a little wiggle room in the Bush administration's principles.

Former US ambassador to China James Lilly has a constructive suggestion that would appease the arcane sensibilities on both sides. He suggests that Washington should send an envoy to Pyongyang to persuade them to restart the six-party talks.

I can cap it with my own modest proposal. Washington should send Oliver North of Contra-scandal fame to Iran and North Korea, with or without a Bible and key-shaped cake, and talk seriously to them about matters of mutual interest, such as making sure that weapons go to US-licensed freedom fighters. The Israelis can provide airlift and service agreements as they did for Irangate, and that will hush any objectors in the US Congress.

If this seems a little far-fetched, one has to consider the alternatives. Perhaps the only thing worse than an overtly nuclear North Korea is the consequences of letting the Bush administration provoke Pyongyang with a naval blockade or other attacks on sovereignty.

It is in everyone's interest to let the North Korean regime have a soft landing rather than take actions to confirm its paranoia. In any contest between the approach of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and the Ban-China approach, the latter wins hands down.

Note
1. Electing the Next United Nations Secretary General Is an Opportunity to Press for UN Reform, Heritage Foundation, July 25.

Will Bolton Still Love Him Tomorrow?

Low-Key Leader for High-Anxiety Times

by IAN WILLIAMS

October 3, 2006
The Nation

Short of major catastrophes, the next UN Secretary General will be South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon. On Monday, at the first UN Security Council straw poll that revealed the vetoes hitherto held up the delegates' sleeves, Ban had fourteen votes to encourage his candidacy, and only one "no opinion."

The Council agreed that the official vote would be taken October 9. A separate vote by the General Assembly--strictly a formality--is expected to follow shortly.

US Ambassador John Bolton was wearing an uncharacteristic smile when he came to the microphone outside the Council chamber to give his spin on the almost certain confirmation of Ban. Some observers saw joy at the election of Bolton's favored candidate, others the smile of an assassin wiping his blade and contemplating his handiwork, scuppering other candidates with a discreet and anonymous veto.

But Bolton's smile may be premature. Short of illegal and/or unprecedented maneuverings by the Bush Administration, Bolton's influence at the UN will soon be over. His temporary "recess appointment" expires at the end of this year, and prospects are dim for a Senate hearing to confirm his appointment.

It may also be premature to regard Ban as a puppet who would dance to strings pulled by Washington. Much was made in the UN about his statement at a recent Asia Society event, that the United States was the "most important member" of the United Nations. But this was surely just a statement of the obvious. The Secretary General's key relationship is with Washington--and under George W. Bush's direction this demands almost as much psychotherapy as it does diplomacy. Kofi Annan has been mutually supportive with Powell and Rice, and while one may argue about how far he should have gone, those relationships have certainly have had some pragmatic benefits for the world.

Washington, as Bolton has said, has long wanted a UN leader who is "more Secretary than General." But the more lucid members of the US establishment know that the UN's power is its prestige--its "unique legitimacy," as Annan puts it--and that cannot happen with a leader who is merely a clerk. If the organization is to have global legitimacy, the Secretary General must have moral authority--and the role has developed over the years to the point where it has become almost a secular papacy.

In the early days of the UN, the Secretary General mediated between power blocs in the absence of any effective opposition to the United States; his job today is clearly to mediate between the United States and the rest of the world. It is a job that Annan, in the absence of visible support from the Bush Administration, has been undertaking quite successfully for his two terms: reminding Washington of basic principles without going out of his way to antagonize incumbent office-holders there.

When asked about the handling of such relationships, Ban has referred to South Korea's exposed geopolitical position between Russia, China, the United States, North Korea and Japan. In fact, South Korea's Social Democratic government has indeed performed a noteworthy tightrope walk: It cannot do without the United States, in case North Korea does go over the top, but it has distanced itself from the wilder talk in Washington about possible solutions while doing the minimum necessary to keep the United States engaged.

South Korea has maintained good relations with China and Russia, while engaging as constructively as possible with its northern neighbor, which now and again hints that it is prepared to nuke its way to unity. And South Koreans are actually grateful to the UN, which delivered for them, albeit with the usual caveats that accompany any extension of the UN franchise to the US military. Ban comes to the job, in fact, with impressive references.

Most of the world's countries do not want a grandstanding, evangelical multilateralist at the UN's helm. They would actually prefer someone who is quiet, laid-back and principled--but not noisily so--because otherwise his position would have no moral authority.

Ban's speeches keep stressing "harmony," and that seems to be just what the world wants in a Secretary General: someone who can turn down the volume and the heat in bellicose situations. His challenge will be to hang on to basic principles in the face of pressure not only from the United States but also from China, which is similarly idiosyncratic in its view of multilateral norms and the UN Charter.

Over the years, devout US Republicans have often been appointed to head UN agencies and within months or years have come out sounding like Swedish Social Democrats. In the case of Ban, one suspects that he will fill the position in a similar way, expanding to fill the role--but he will not have to change his stripes to do so.

In his campaign for the post, Ban has expressed strong and unequivocal support for the International Criminal Court, and for the "Responsibility to Protect," the concept of humanitarian intervention accepted in principle at the 2005 Heads of State Summit. John Bolton has spearheaded the Bush Administration's drive to eviscerate the ICC for the last five years.

Ban has given no indication of abandoning basic international principles, whether to be elected or to keep Washington happy. His quiet approach may well be the last laugh over the stentorian Bolton and the American UN knockers--who may not be in office in five years when his reappointment is due.

Even so, looking at his low-key campaign for the seat, one hopes that Ban's public profile and oratory have hidden depths waiting to be displayed. Even a secular pope has to know how to preach.

UNsuitable Candidates for US

Playing for time at the UN
By Ian Williams

Updated version of Friday's post, looking at the candidates..appeared in Asia Times

NEW YORK - There was a chance - albeit a very remote one bearing in mind the stately progress of United Nations Security Council deliberations - that by Monday evening New York time the council would be able to declare a new secretary general. For the first time, however, the council was to conduct a realistic straw poll, in which the veto-holders would have different-colored ballots.

Even at this late stage, the only assured result is that Kofi Annan's successor will be an Asian - even if there is some
uncertainty about which Asian it is. There is an increasing
likelihood that South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon will be the council's choice, but it is far from certain.

Ban ended up leading the pack, but with fewer votes than he earned in the previous straw vote on September 14. One delegate who once supported Ban has now lost interest and in effect abstained, while another voted to "discourage" his candidacy. But none of the other candidates could muster enough support to match Ban's 13 "encouragements". And none of the fearless delegations would actually admit to being one of the two nay-sayers.

But was that "discourage" vote a tactical offer to negotiate, or a flat-out veto? Was the loss of interest an invitation to try harder? Some delegations hinted darkly that the British and French were negotiating to overturn Annan's recent decision that removed their previous duopoly over peacekeeping and political affairs.

Or were delegates playing for time in the hope that former Thai deputy prime minister Surakiart Sathirathai, battered by a coup at home and a poor straw-vote showing, would pull out? Would that clear the way for another candidate from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), where Singapore, always productive of potential candidates, has two or three in hand?

In previous years, the Security Council would solemnly consider even self-nominations to the post. This time the council decided that countries had to nominate candidates. In some ways, this is antithetical to a core principle of the UN, since the secretary general is an international civil servant, above country.

The overt national sponsorship has led to what is almost a caste hierarchy for candidates, who have benefited from their governments' support for their campaigns. Rivals are already scrutinizing recent deals among India, South Korea and other voting powers for signs of undue influence reminiscent of a US election.

And perhaps to everyone's relief, it spared them considering voting against Aung San Suu Kyi of Myamnar, unlikely to get the generals' nomination and unlikely to get past ASEAN consensus.

Surakiart, Thailand's candidate, handicapped by the coup, was kept in the running by the military government's enthusiastic support for his campaign - which of course may actually backfire with some delegations and certainly must cause some chagrin to other ASEAN wanna-bes.

The second runner-up hitherto has been Shashi Tharoor, the Indian candidate currently heading the UN's Department of Public Information - and incidentally a prime mover behind Annan's original candidacy. He is clever and articulate - which in this race may well work against him - and, most damning to some, a UN insider.

But just as the sub-Saharans never really regarded former secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian, as a genuine African, the concept of a secretary general from Asia was sorely tested by the candidacy of Prince Zeid of Jordan. He did surprisingly badly in the straw poll, perhaps because of fears of what the apocalyptic Christian right would make of a descendent of the Prophet sitting in the world's most prominent seat. But his poor showing had more to do with the fact that East Asians and South Asians don't really regard Arabs as Asians.

Jayantha Dhanapala, Sri Lanka's veteran disarmament diplomat, did surprisingly badly in the straw polls too, unless you consider that successful advocacy of disarmament does not always sit well with a select group that includes the world's leading arms merchants. Anyway, he took the hint and dropped out, just as two new candidates popped up - whom the British, French, and thus presumably behind the scenes the Americans seem to want to make space for. Ashraf Ghani, finance minister of Afghanistan, is articulate and opinionated (good opinions too!) to the extent of being Shashi Tharoor with a bonus calculator.

With Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, perhaps the only real question is whether the Russians or the Chinese would veto her first, but while she has an argument - gender balance suggests it is more imperative for a woman's "turn" rather than an Asian's - enough delegations are committed to Asia to scupper her chances.

The biggest objection to Ban Ki-moon, who allegedly has support from both China and the United States, is his perceived lack of charisma and his emphasis on harmony. US commentators seem to regard him as reliable, which means, from their point of view, pliable.

However, hearing him speak, one is struck by the resemblances to Kofi Annan at the start of his tenure. No one who only judged the public appearance of Annan would have suspected the way he expanded to fill the office. Being soft-spoken is not inconsistent with having firm principles.

As Ban evokes it in his stump speeches, being foreign minister of South Korea requires serious tightrope-walking skills, among the US, China, Japan and the North, but no one looking at Seoul's recent foreign-policy stances would see him as an enthusiastic cat's paw for the US administration, while many governments would prefer a pragmatic diplomat to a preachy secular pope.

However, that does not preclude, indeed rather requires, the moral stature gained from having what the late British foreign secretary Robin Cook termed an "ethical dimension" to the job.

For example, Ban expresses strong support for the International Criminal Court and for the Responsibility to Protect - the doctrine of humanitarian intervention adopted in principle at least year's World Summit. Neither China nor the United States is totally ecstatic about either concept, but both are perceptive enough to realize the slimness of the chances of any candidate who opposes bedrock UN decisions.

In fact, the US would be hard put to find any candidate even remotely morally, intellectually or politically acceptable to the rest of the world who would accept Washington's views on multilateralism.

UNaccountable? UN elections

posted September 29, 2006 in the Nation

Looking East for a New UN Leader
Ian Williams
Ban Ki-Moon, South Korea's foreign minister, emerged as frontrunner Thursday in an anonymous straw poll to choose the next UN Secretary General. But was it a "discourage" vote, a tactical offer to negotiate, a "No way, Jose" or a flat-out veto?
Such are the cryptic signals sent by diplomats on the Security Council and other UN members that the rest of the world is now trying to decipher.
The South Korean ended up leading the pack with fewer votes than he earned in the last straw vote. One delegate who once supported Ban has now lost interest and effectively abstained, while another voted to "discourage" his candidacy. But none of the other candidates could muster enough support to match his thirteen "encouragements."
But was that discouragement a veto or was it a ploy, as member states exacted promises from Ban about positions their nationals would fill? Or were delegates playing for time in the hope that Thai Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai, battered by a coup at home and a poor straw vote showing, would pull out? Would that clear the way for another candidate from ASEAN (the Association of South East Asian Nations), where Singapore, always productive of potential candidates, has two or three in hand?
And when it comes to a public vote, would the delegate who slipped a dagger in the dark into the back of a candidate be prepared to do the same in public?
If this sounds like a papal election with a Medici candidate, it's really not. In fact, this election campaign is possibly the most transparent in the UN's history. But while the campaign itself is transparent, the election itself is as murkily duplicitous as ever.
Every five or ten years, the world is amazed at the opacity of the process for choosing the UN Secretary General. According to the Charter, the Security Council, currently fifteen members strong, recommends a candidate to the General Assembly, which could technically reject the recommendation.
To complicate matters, after the anonymous straw polls, when the Security Council publicly votes and comes to a formal adoption, a candidate could win with only nine votes--or lose with fourteen--if the one holdout is a permanent member and votes against the frontrunner--as happened in 1996, when US Ambassador Madeleine Albright vetoed Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
In the heady aftermath of the cold war, impending Secretary General elections have concentrated minds, bringing regular calls for making the process more transparent and democratic. Each election has effectively ignored those calls, and the world has immediately forgotten the fuss, heaving a sigh of relief once the drawn-out process ends.
This time, with plenty of notice, there were calls for the Security Council to nominate two or more candidates so the General Assembly could decide. Confident that the Assembly would not be able to get its act together and reject a Security Council candidate, the Council members tacitly ignored the idea.
So there is no provision in the Charter for the Secretary Generalship to rotate around the regions of the world (indeed, the first two both came from Scandinavia). But there is now a consensus that geographic proportionality is important. The United States and Britain both repudiate that principle but bow to its application, not least since China has made it plain this time around that it would veto any non-Asian candidate.
The second runner-up hitherto has been Shashi Tharoor, the Indian candidate and currently heading the UN's Department of Public Information--and incidentally a prime mover behind Kofi Annan's original candidacy. He is clever and articulate--which in this race may well work against him--and, most damning to some, a UN insider.
But just as the sub-Saharans never really regarded Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian, as a genuine African, the concept of a Secretary General from Asia was sorely tested by the candidacy of Prince Zeid of Jordan. He did surprisingly badly in the straw poll, perhaps because of fears of what the apocalyptic Christian right would make of a descendent of the Prophet sitting in the world's most prominent seat. But his poor showing had more to do with the fact that East Asians and South Asians don't really regard Arabs as Asians, especially one who has shown a most un-Confucian concern for human rights.
In previous years the Security Council would solemnly consider even self-nominations to the post. This time the Council decided that countries had to nominate candidates. In some ways, this is antithetical to a core principle of the UN, since the Secretary General is an international civil servant, above country.
Beginning under Boutros-Ghali and accentuated under Annan, nongovernmental organizations have increased their importance and visibility inside the UN system. This time, candidates have been approached with checklists for their views, in particular on human rights issues. They have been speaking about their candidacies at venues ranging from the Asia Society to the International Peace Academy, while touring the world talking to governments in support of their case. The Center for UN Reform Education has actually interviewed most of the candidates and put their results in the public domain.
It would be difficult for governments to support someone who was dismissive of these tests, for fear of public reaction. On the other hand, candidates have to behave like American presidential primary contenders, signaling one way for the masses while steering the other for the conservatives--or vice versa. Interestingly, Ban Ki-moon, who allegedly has support from both China and the United States, expresses strong support for the International Criminal Court and for the Responsibility to Protect--the doctrine of humanitarian intervention adopted in principle at least year's Summit.
Neither China nor the United States is ecstatic about either concept, but both are perceptive enough to realize the slimness of the chances of any candidate who opposes bedrock UN decisions. But with the process clearly trending toward blandness and compromise, it is surprising that most of the successful candidates have been as good as they have been. For example, Trygve Lie, the first Secretary General, complained that Dag Hammarskjold, his Swedish successor, was a disastrously boring civil servant. Hammarskjold grew to become the very model of a modern Secretary General. There is something about the post, being the focus of so much concentrated world attention and expectation, that does that to a man, and would perhaps even to a woman if the Council had been bold enough to appoint one.

Siege Perilous

Back to my roots
In the days of yore Liverpool University had Lord Salisbury (after whose dad Harare was then named) as its Chancellor, and most of its investments in South Africa. It also had me as a student. In 1970, I was on the committee that led an occupation of the Senate House in protest about the investments. After three weeks of occupation, we marched out, and a little later the University gave us the bum's rush. So it was rejuvenescent pleasure to be invited to write for the South African Mail and Guardian, and the first small fruits are here.
The Siege Perilous was a specially reserved seat at the Round Table for the knight who was destined to search for and return with the Holy Grail. It was so strictly reserved that it was fatal to anyone else who sat in it. A bit like a temporary seat on the Security Council for countries with principles.


Ian Williams says: SA's arms in for a twisting

23 September 2006

Mail and Guardian, South Africa

South Africa's temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council is likely to be a mixed blessing.

Since the end of the Cold War, members have had to weigh the cost of their principles as the United States has twisted elbows to get its way.

An American diplomat famously told Yemen during the first Gulf War that its council vote against Desert Storm was the most expensive it had ever cast. The US followed up by cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, while Saudi Arabia deported hundreds of thousands of Yemenis.

But a recent study showed that developing countries on the council benefit from the resulting attention and prominence and that they receive more aid during their tenure.

And while much of the focus is on the permanent five -- the US, Britain, France, China and Russia -- temporary members have a strong record of making themselves heard. In recent years, while Paris and Moscow grandstanded about their opposition to the Iraq invasion, much of the real resistance came from principled smaller powers such as Ireland, Jamaica and Chile, who highlighted the importance of international law and the UN Charter.

Executive director of the Security Council Report, Colin Keating, ambassador for New Zealand during the Bosnian wars and the Iraqi sanctions, when his country played a similar role, remains up-beat about South African membership.

"It's a really important opportunity, not just to talk the talk, but to walk the walk, with contributions to diplomacy and peacekeeping efforts in Africa."

However, Keating cautioned against parochialism. "It also involves being interested and actively involved in issues outside the region. The value of the Security Council is that it brings a global perspective; it's not just about neighbourly and regional issues."

He believes a country of South Africa's size need not worry too much about being in the front line of opposition to the US. "There are bigger pitfalls in terms of relations with small and medium powers in Africa. If you put too much energy and thought into dealing with the big guys, you may neglect the smaller ones.

"Larger countries like Nigeria and South Africa are respected, but also feared by their friends and neighbours, so it would help to talk to them, listen to them, rather than talking down."

Among the issues on the Security Council's immediate agenda are Darfur, Iran and perennial Middle Eastern questions. South Africa will undoubtedly diverge from the West on these issues, but will escape some of the heat because it will almost certainly be joined by Venezuela on the council -- despite the Bush administration's success in persuading Guatemala to contend for the seat and deny President Hugo Chávez a pulpit from which to preach his anti-imperialist sermon.

Venezuela is tipped to win, not only because it has so much declared support but also because the secret ballot gives delegates a risk-free opportunity to give a discreet middle finger to Washington, whose bullying tactics are widely resented.

In a much-applauded speech on Tuesday, Chávez played to the UN General Assembly gallery, repeatedly referring to George Bush as the devil and mocking the speech he had given the day before. The US delegation was pointedly absent, leaving, according to US Ambassador John Bolton, "a junior note-taker" in the US seat.

The US will not have this luxury in the 15-member Security Council, where it has to listen to the other members. This is one of its attractions for smaller countries, as compared with being one voice among 190 in the Assembly.

However, South Africa's temporary berth is not likely to advance its ambitions for a permanent seat on an enlarged council. The Americans oppose expansion and the project has been hopelessly stalled by divisions in the developing world over the shape of reform, and who should get permanent seats.

Swift-Boats on the Slipways for McCain

David Cameron, the new Conservative Party leader in Britain, has invited John McCain to his party conference to show that his is chummy with a moderate Republican successor, unlike Blair's partnership with the diabolically right wing Bush.
Here in this week's Tribune, I try to explain the pitfalls for all concerned.


Swift Boat to Washington

Although his choice of partner shows much more taste and principle than Tony Blair has shown with his transatlantic buddies, if David Cameron is hoping that his invitation to Senator John McCain for the Conservative Party Conference will be the beginning of a beautiful Bush/Blair style power couple, he is likely to be disappointed, even if McCain sees him as the heir of Blair--whom he admires.

John McCain is a person of principles, but essentially he will have to lose some of them to win the Republican nomination in the presidential primaries. Cameron would have done better to invite Hillary Clinton over if he wanted a soulmate. Her only principle is winning elections, so she will not have to eat too many words.

British politicians either do not understand American politics--which is worrying since both parties spend so much time anally osculating Washington--or even more frighteningly, they do, and they are trying to retrogress British politics to before the Great Reform Act.

In the eighteenth century the Whigs and Tories were essentially two juntas whose ambition was take over the Treasury and loot it for their supporters. American politics never really changed from that era. We can make allowances for Cameron with his recent elevation, but one cannot help suspecting that Tony Blair understands American politics only too well, and has made the reversion of political parties to cabals of self-appointed grandees the unspoken essence of New Labour.

American legislators work tirelessly and shamelessly to bring home the bacon for those who donated to their election campaign--and even occasionally to their constituents, but mostly their donors who provide the money to con the voters. One cannot help suspecting that any resemblance between that and New Labour's recent donor-driven politics is not just a coincidence, but was helped by Tony Blair's close examination of Bill Clinton's engagingly amoral fundraising. Both assumed that they could take for granted their core voters, the poor, the underprivileged and the principled since they had nowhere else to go.
The seventies saw the great flip, when the former Southern Democrats, who were on most issues far to the right of many Republicans, defected to them. Since then they have consolidated the race issue with a heavy dose of fundamentalist Protestantism allied with a Catholicism that ignores the Pope on the death penalty, but regards abortion as a killer issue for elections. With these seriously ugly and intolerant ideological, indeed theological, influences, mere conservative Republicans of the old school, like McCain, have been looking like endangered species.
In general, the Republicans have far fewer registered voters than the Democrats, so extremists can have a disproportionate effect on the choice of candidate and in effect make the party unelectable with the majority of less rabid voters. (Conversely, it makes it easier to buy a Republican nomination, since they have even less of an organized structure than the Democrats, which is why lifelong Democrat Bloomberg decided, in effect, to buy the Republican nomination as New York's mayor rather than get into the rough and tumble of Democratic precinct politics.)
Occasionally, there is a happy concatenation of principle and pragmatism, like last week when Senator Lincoln D Chafee of Rhode Island trounced a conservative challenger for the Republican candidacy in the primary. Chafee has opposed the right wing tax cuts, the war in Iraq and the nomination of conservative ideologues to the Supreme Court. He has even caviled at confirming John Bolton as US Ambassador to the UN. But Republican national leaders know that Chaffee was what his voters in Rhode Island want, and as long as he sticks with the party, and helps them control the Senate and thus the purse strings they can tolerate a lot of eccentricity.
But that was a local election. So where does this play into the Presidential election in two years? Essentially, to win his primary elections George W. Bush (apart from fixing Florida and the Supreme Court) had to talk moderately enough not to frighten off the Chafee-style Republicans, but had to assure the increasingly influential evangelical and loony-right of the party that he was really on their side, so they would support him in the primaries.
Bush, Rove and Cheney successfully convinced the evangelicals and the loony right that he was on their side, but had to sail under false colours to win, and one must admit, was far better at keeping his promises to them than most politicians are. Since then however, the manifest failure of the war, the shameful incompetence over Operation Katrina, and the series of legal scandals afflicting the Republican Party, have led to the belated beginnings of a palace revolt
McCain, one of the few national figures in the Republican Party known for integrity rather than scandal, is no peacenik and no liberal. But he does have principles Interestingly, this week he co-authored an op-ed with former Senator Dole, calling for stronger action on Darfur.
McCain, along with fellow-Republicans Senator John Warner and Colin Powell, has denounced Bush's plans for unilaterally rewriting the Geneva Conventions. All of them have military records, which puts them on a different planet from the callow "chicken-hawks" around the White House, epitomized by Bush, who drank his way through the South in the National Guard while McCain was a POW in South Vietnam.
Either McCain or Powell could have run on a Democratic vice-presidential ticket – and were certainly no more belligerent or conservative than Senator Joe Lieberman, who was the candidate with Kerry.
McCain had a good excuse. In addition to their contempt for armchair torturers and inquisitors, McCain has a deep personal grudge against Bush. When he ran against Bush in the primaries, anonymous "pollsters" called voters across the South asking them if they would vote for him if they heard that he had fathered an illegitimate black child. He had not – he had adopted a Bangladeshi orphan, but the double whammy of miscegenation and sexual misconduct pulled levers with Southern Republicans – and fingers pointed to Karl Rove for this "swiftboating."
For a precursor of the fate of McCain's candidacy, one should look at Senator Bob Dole's abortive bid for the presidency, where his lurch to the right to win the primary lost him liberal support in the actual election, while the right simply did not believe his conversion – and many supported Ross Perot. Bush and his gang may have promised him an easy ride in return for not defecting in the last election. But one cannot help thinking that somewhere along the Mississippi, the swift-boats are on the slipway, waiting to launch against him as they did against Kerry.

Reality Checked at the UN door

Selective Reality
Ian Williams
(The Nation 19 September)

Just before he spoke today to the United Nations General Assembly, George W. Bush sent a discreet message to both the United Nations and the US Congress by quietly withholding payments, for the fifth consecutive year, to the United Nations Fund for Population Activities. The health of hundreds of thousands of women and children will be impaired--and many lives lost--as a result of his pandering to the most prejudiced elements of his conservative constituency.

Missing from this year's speech was some of the snide innuendo and challenge of Bush's previous comments on the United Nations, perhaps reflecting some injection of reality into his unilateral worldview. This time around, the President also refrained from making ultimatums to the assembled delegations threatening action if they did not go along with his Administration's ideas of what was good for them.

Bush's message was mainly addressed to the ostensible silent majority of moderates in the Middle East. But his words were as cushioned from the cruelty of the real world as one would expect from an Administration that is making Panglossianism a state religion.

Up to a point, the President was in harmony with Secretary General Kofi Annan's address to the General Assembly, in that both dwelt on the Middle East. But while Annan identified the core of many of the problems in the Middle East, Bush's simplistic assessment of "the bright future in the broader Middle East" was such a caricature as to leave some listeners chuckling. Neither the elections in Egypt, nor the municipal elections in Saudi Arabia that he trumpeted, offer any conclusive evidence of the march of democracy.

"Some have argued that the democratic changes we're seeing in the Middle East are destabilizing the region. This argument rests on a false assumption, that the Middle East was stable to begin with," he said. In fact, his argument is against himself: Most of his critics will adduce that the actual and threatened military intervention of the United States and Israel are not infusions of democracy but destabilizing forces in and of themselves.

But Annan had a firmer grip on the truth in his address to the Assembly that preceded the President's. "As long as the Security Council is unable to end this [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict, and the now nearly forty-year-old occupation, by bringing both sides to accept and implement its resolutions, so long will our impartiality be questioned," he said. "So long will our best efforts to resolve other conflicts be resisted, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Bush's invocation of the envoys of Iraq and Afghanistan seated in the General Assembly as representing elected governments, compared to when he spoke five years ago, may be accurate. But he was silent on the powerlessness of those governments to actually govern. The Lebanese in particular are unlikely to recognize his depiction of their "homes and communities...caught in the crossfire"--in light of the Bush-supported blitz that was actually mounted against their country. "We see your suffering," the President said, but he failed to explain why he did nothing to stop it for a long month of bombing and shelling from Israel.

His remarks on Iran were also remarkable for a selective view of reality. "Iran must abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions. Despite what the regime tells you, we have no objection to Iran's pursuit of a truly peaceful nuclear power program. We're working toward a diplomatic solution to this crisis," Bush noted, without explaining why the UN's nuclear watchdog last week reprimanded the Administration for gross exaggeration of the very slender evidence of an actual weapons program. (After the speech, Bush was spared close confrontation with reality in the form of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because the latter skipped the heads of state lunch, since wine was being served there. Reformed imbiber Bush suffered in silence.)

The one redeeming aspect of Bush's cartoonish tour of the Middle East was that he lowered the "terrorist" word count and more often replaced it by his latest buzzword, "extremism." But if this speech was addressed to the people of the region, it is certainly one of the most inept ever.

His invocation of a Palestinian state that has "territorial integrity" raises many questions, not least concerning his previous green light for Israeli annexation of settlement blocs and acquiescence in building the wall. Although some UN observers looked hopefully for signs of a realization that economic sanctions against the democratically elected Palestinian Authority has been counterproductive, they were not, in fact, very visible.

Hanan Ashrawi, mentioned as possible foreign minister of a new coalition Palestinian Authority, criticized Bush's "very simplified view of the Middle East." Ashrawi summed up the American President's speech, describing it as "more of the same. It contained no concrete proposals to deal with crucial issues, the boundaries, the settlement.... Right now Kofi is speaking out on the issues. I wish he had done it earlier."

"A broken record," was the similar description from one UN official. In fact, Annan, in yet another oblique, nuanced and hence unrecognized critique of the Bush Administration, identified another very tangible reason why the President's invocations of democracy may generate so much skepticism at the UN.

"Even the necessary and legitimate struggle around the world against terrorism is used as a pretext to abridge or abrogate fundamental human rights, thereby ceding moral ground to the terrorists and helping them find new recruits," Annan said.

Bush was on firmer ground on Darfur, announcing the appointment of former USAID administrator Andrew Natsios as presidential special envoy to Sudan, "to lead America's efforts to resolve the outstanding disputes and help bring peace to your land." But he pinned the strategy on the UN peacekeeping troops going in, warning, "If the Sudanese government does not approve this peacekeeping force quickly, the United Nations must act."

It will be interesting to see what size of stick Natsios is issued for his negotiations, or what form of diplomacy the White House can use to persuade China to go along with a more robust UN involvement. And if one were cynical, one would wonder whether the interest in Darfur would outlast Bush's need to mobilize conservative Christians, for whom Darfur is a defining issue, to vote for Republican candidates in the midterm elections.

Taiwan -Out of This World?

Ira Stoll of the New York Sun, the neocon vanity press house journal, asked the Taiwanese president at the press conference I mention below, "The scandals and corruption and failures of the UN are so vast that increasing numbers of the Americans think the United States should leave the UN-perhaps to be more like Taiwan, a free, democratic, economically successful country that's not a member of the UN. Why are you so determined for Taiwan to join an organization that's so flawed and troubled?" It provoked an immediate thought "because Taiwan is on this planet - and the Sun isn't."

Taiwan -Out of This World?

Taiwan's fourteenth attempt to get into the UN predictably failed on Tuesday when the General Assembly's General Committee refused to allow the issue even to get onto the agenda.

As in previous years the very modest resolution merely asked the Assembly to study the question of Taiwanese association with the world body, and this year Taiwan and its allies added a new resolution suggesting that the issue be examined in the light of peace and security in the region, since that is, after all, what the UN is supposed to be about. The delegates just refused to discuss the issue, which says Ambassador Stuart Beck of Palau, is totally contrary to the UN's own rules of procedure, which say that any delegation can inscribe any issue it wants on the agenda.

It is also true that Beijing has bullied the UN Secretariat and many of the delegations into accepting that uniquely among all General Assembly decisions, resolution 2758 which seated the PRC on the Security Council can not be questioned or raised ever again. One only has to think of the overturning of the "Zionism is Racism" resolution, a product of the same era, to see that no UN decision is ever set in stone.

Exasperated with the attitude of the PRC, in a video-conference on Wednesday morning with diplomats and academics and the media in New York, Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian speaking from Taipei ratcheted up the stakes a notch more. Describing Taiwan's previous approaches as "reasonable and moderate," and Beijing's response as "barbaric oppression against Taiwan," he announced that in future the bid would not be in the name of Republic of China, but of Taiwan.

He also detailed the ways that the Taiwanese government had been prepared to bend to accommodate Beijing's obsessions-trying to join the WHO as a "health entity," joining the WTO as a "customs territory," and the Olympics as "Chinese Taipei."

When I questioned him about whether Beijing might not see this as provocatively close to declaring independence, he says that "China will react very strongly, and perhaps crudely," and went a step further and said "Maybe we should consider a referendum on this issue."

He cited recent polls showing 79% support for this, but allowed that it would be considerably less popular among the leadership in Beijing. But when asked if Taiwan would consider following others down the attention-seeking path with the nuclear option, he declared "We are not North Korea," and "we will never resort to nuclear weapons to be a 'squeaky wheel.'"

Li Weiyi, spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the PRC predictably declared that Taiwan's latest application for UN membership is a "new and dangerous" step taken by Chen along the secessionist path. "It further exposes his sinister motive to speed up secessionist activities."

One could of course argue that wanting a democratic referendum on Taiwan is somewhat less sinister than pointing 800 missiles at the "Taiwanese compatriots," for having secessionist thoughts.
Chen's moves will certainly lend some point to the abortive pro-Taiwanese resolution invoking the UN's mandate to promote peace and security, especially in the Straits.


There is something inherently irrational about the situation, and the acquiescence of most of GA delegates has a lot more to do with pandering to the Chinese gorilla than any niceties of international law.

The bedrock principles for many of the non-aligned are the inviolability of colonial boundaries, and the right of self determination of the territories. For example, thirty years after, few countries, and certainly not the UN, recognize Morocco's annexation of Western Sahara, on exactly those grounds. Taiwan certainly has strong claims on both those grounds, but the Chinese attitude is out of step with modern history: Montenegro, for example, would not have been allowed to secede on the whim of the electorate, and the members of the Scottish Nationalist Party would find themselves in prison, or worse, as "secessionists," which several Chinese envoys have tried to equate outright with terrorism.

Certainly it should be puzzling to other delegates, if they sat to think it through, that Beijing actually prefers a government in Taipei that claims to be a government-in-exile for the whole of China, to one that claims only to represent Taiwan. Chen, inheriting such residual claims from the former KMT regime is happy to renounce claims to represent China but Beijing, bizarrely, has declared that to be an occasion for war.

The UN is a very flexible organization. There are former Pacific Trust territories, such as Palau and Micronesia, whose budget is entirely dependent on Washington, and whose defence is entirely committed to the US. For almost half a century, Byelorussia and Ukraine, constituent republics of the USSR, which at the time had less independence than the average American village, were full voting members of the United Nations. Queen Elizabeth is represented by some eighteen countries, whose diplomats technically submit their credentials in her name.
There are even precedents for member states, such as the two Yemens or Germany, to reunify after decades of separate representation, so Taiwanese membership need not be irrevocable.

One can understand that when Chiang Kai Shek ruled Taiwan under martial law as an offshore island waiting to regain the mainland, many delegations would have reservations, but those days are gone. It is clear that most Taiwanese would much rather go their own way, and if they could be assured that they would not be nuked for doing so, an overwhelming majority of them would.

The PRC's failure to live up to the spirit of the Hong Kong SAR agreements, and the bellicose threats against the people of Taiwan, have strengthened the Taiwan independence movement, but one presumes that they are not really aimed at Taiwanese hearts and minds, but rather a domestic mainland constituency, indeed probably an inner party one.
The Chinese Communist Party's effective abandonment of its former claimed socialism, leaves only nationalism with which to score points inside the party. Ironically, there are probably more "Socialist" provisions, in terms of social welfare, healthcare etc, in Taiwan than in the former land of the iron ricebowl, but that probably exacerbates the comrades' ire.

It could rationally be asked, why has Taiwan become so obsessive about membership of the United Nations? Apart from the symbolic value, that membership has become synonymous with acceptance as an independent nation, the most tangible benefit is security. The Taiwanese want assurances that they will not be attacked.

The US and Japan, in their own way, as irrational as the PRC, do not recognize Taiwan, but recently re-pledged their military support for what is presumably a "defence entity" for the purpose. However the situation is indeed, as the thwarted Taiwanese resolution says, a threat to peace and security.

Far from pressuring the PRC diplomatically to pledge a nonviolent solution, the major powers prefer to kow tow, or at least to humour Beijing. One notes with mild amusement the silence of former Taiwan lobbyist John Bolton on the issue. But there are precedents which suggest that Beijing's bluff can be called. For example, when the Chinese delegation was about to veto UN peacekeepers for Haiti because of the Caribbean republic's recognition of Taiwan, Latin American ambassadors firmly but politely told them that they would blow their credibility in the region and in the broader non-aligned. China backed down, and now actually has peacekeepers in Haiti – which still has ties with Taiwan!

One can understand other governments pandering to a nine hundred pound gorilla, but there is a very real danger fermenting across the straits, and some such hard, not necessarily hostile, talk is overdue to remove the threat of war spinning out of control in the region.

9-11+5 = Bin Laden beats Bush

When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, the bang interrupted the article I was writing on the impending downfall of the US dollar. I was living in downtown Manhattan and not only did I report from close to the burning stumps of the twin towers all day I lived by tithe smoldering gate of Hell for months afterwards.

Some hours afterwards I was one block away from the WTC, where the streets were cloaked in several feet of ash, through which snaked the hoses from the Hudson River to the fire trucks. The firemen had crowbarred a convenience store open and were treating it as a supply depot. One of them came out, caked in dust and sweat voraciously stuffing a banana into his mouth in between gulps of water.

He looked around with a sort of pugnacious puzzlement at ash, the debris, the mud, and the smoke. "Can you believe it?" he asked me, "I'm looking for a fucking garbage can!" He threw the banana peel defiantly into the white ashen fallout in the street as if he were having a one-man demonstration against the lack of civilization in the neighborhood.

On the weary back home walking round the tip of Manhattan, I got a foretaste of police powers and the fate of the freedom of press in the new era. A gang of thuggish NYPD detectives refused to let me carry on, and offered me the choice of climbing on a tugboat to New Jersey - or being thrown onto it. And when, many weary hours later that night we trudged back to downtown Manhattan, it was in time to watch from the apartment window as army convoys trundled down the East River Drive. It was a sign of things to come: the response to the tragedy was going to be military, no matter how inappropriate.

"Foreign Policy" was something the US had inflicted on other nations, and for the first few days, I began to see a possible silver lining to the smelly dark cloud at the end of Fulton Street. This was the first time foreign policy had happened to the American homeland since Admiral Cochrane had burnt the White House two centuries before. Would it make them take more notice of what their nation was doing to others? I watched carefully for any admission that American ways of waging proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan had been responsible for nurturing Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and their allies in Pakistan. But instead, the airwaves of America increasingly relayed the administration's war drums beating up fervor about Iraq.

Only last week, it was still considered news in the US that a Senate Committee could find not find any trace of links between Saddam Hussein and Iraq even though to the rest of the world this was about as novel as news of the Pope's Catholicism. And even that did not stop Condoleezza Rice invoking the "War on Terror" in Iraq as making the US safer from repeat attacks.

In fact, in retrospect, the carnage on September 11 was a spectacularly successful terrorist attack. In so far as indiscriminate mass murder can be rational, its logic is that it provokes a foolish and unequal reaction from the powers the terrorists are struggling to overthrow, provoking support for their ideology.

If Bin Laden had indeed had such rationality behind his eschatological visions, he was indeed vindicated in his planning. Just like the fireman, but with much less excuse, the Bush administration has decided that the normal rules no longer apply. Bush’s and Blair's attack on Iraq, their uncritical support for Israel, their threats against Iran, combined with their wholesale abandonment of constitutional and international legal protections for suspects at home and abroad, have all put truth in the rumors that Osama Bin Laden was spreading about a Western anti-Muslim crusade.

Within a day of September 11, the UN Security Council had unanimously declared support for the US, and implicitly authorized the attack against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Did Bin Laden know that the Bush administration would blow it all within two years and move to a position of almost complete diplomatic isolation - apart, of course, from the unwavering support of Tony "Yo" Blair, who is now paying the price for it?

Ironically, while Bin Laden may delight in how effectively Bush and Blair are propagating his creed, he should have some regrets. Some of his worst enemies, from the Iranians to the Iraqi and Syrian Ba'athists, have stolen the spotlight from him and cheated him of the martyrdom he preaches. Five years after September 11, the US has effectively pulled out of oil-less Afghanistan and left it to NATO, and last week it was that reported that it has been over two years since the US snatch squad detailed to catch him has had any credible intelligence leads about him.

Meantime, thousands of Muslims, or people of Muslim origin, from cab drivers to professors, have been deported from the US for reasons as various and vacuous as donating to Palestinian causes down to traveling while being called Mohammed. So desperate is the FBI for terrorists against whom to wage a war that they pay agents to start "plots" that they can then "foil."

And then the UK jumps on the bandwagon, trying to sell us a hi-jacking plot in which the principals appeared to have no passports or airline tickets -- but may have helped launch an assisted take-off for the political ambitions of the Home Secretary.

Five years on I think of that fireman with his banana, and also of one of his colleagues, who with less nuance had told me, in the literal furnace-heat of the moment, "I don’t want to offend anyone, but we just gotta go in and nuke the whole fucking Middle East now."

Without his apologetic nuance, he seems to have had an apocalyptic hotline into the White House - thou hast conquered, Bin Laden.

Blairing the party lines

Below is the statement made by Tony Blair earlier today, which shows severe signs of detachment from reality. Note that he has apologized "on behalf of the Labour Party for the last week."
He is "apologizing" for the fact that his best friends, nay even some of his most grovelling Toadies, in the party have called for him to go. And then invokes "the interests of the country" to change the subject.

He is impervious to the opinion polls that show that the "country" thinks he should take a hike, as well as most of his party members. The attitudes of the latter can easily be explained by his arch dismissal of the Labour Party Conference, and the Trade Union Conference. "The next TUC will be my last TUC, probably to the relief of both of us." There is not the slightest hint of acknowledgment that, following the failure of his Clintonesque schemes to sell influence and honours to millionaires, it is only the unions that stand between the Labour Party and total bankrupcy.

"We've got the blockade on the Lebanon lifted today," he announces proudly,overlooking his part in frustrating the ceasefire for a month of slaughter and demolition, and taking credit for the diplomatic efforts of others like Kofi Annan. Blair himself has, as hundreds of Palestinian intellectuals pointed out in a letter to greet his mediation efforts, no credibility whatsoever because of his slavish following of Bush and Olmert.

The he adds "we can't treat the public as irrelevant bystanders in a subject as important as who is their PM," Indeed. He should listen to the opinion polls, as well as the Labour Party members, and go immediately, and the insouciant arrogance of his statement contains an adequate explanation of just why he lost their support.


Blair's Statement.

"The first thing I'd like to do is to apologise actually on behalf of the Labour Party for the last week, which with everything that's going on back here and in the world has not been our finest hour to be frank. But, I think what is important now is that we understand that it's the interests of the country that come first and we move on.

"Now, as for my timing and date of departure, I would have preferred to do this in my own my way but has been pretty obvious from what many of my Cabinet colleagues have said, earlier in the week, the next party conference in a couple of weeks will be my last party conference as party leader. The next TUC will be my last TUC, probably to the relief of both of us. But I'm not going to set a precise date now. I don't think that's right. I will do that at a future date and I'll do it in the interests of country and depending on the circumstances of the time. Now that doesn't in any way take away from fact it's my last conference but I think the precise timetable has to be left up to me and to be done in a proper way.

"Now, I also say one other thing after the last week. I think it's important for the Labour Party to understand and I think the majority of people in the party do understand, that it's the public that comes first and it's the country that matters and we can't treat the public as irrelevant bystanders in a subject as important as who is their PM. So we should just bear that in mind in the way we conduct ourselves in the time to come. And in the meantime I think it's important that we get on with the business. I mean I was in a primary school earlier. Fantastic new buildings, great new IT suite. School results improving. I'm here at this school that just in the last few years has come on by leaps and bounds doing fantastically well. We've got the blockade on the Lebanon lifted today. You know, there are important things going on in the world. I think I speak for all my Cabinet colleagues when I say that we would prefer to get on with those things because those are the things that really matter to the country. So, as I say, it's been a somewhat difficult week but I think it's time now to move on and I think we will."